Unfamiliar Fishes II

 I ended up reading the 2nd half of Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell. There's so much information in the book and so much "I gotta research that". And the names .... names I grew up hearing from all the Hawaiian ones of course to names like Castle and Blaisdell and Wilcox. 

I spent some time looking at rents back home, of course it's not cheery. Some places as low as $450 or $500 but a ton of them up around a thousand. I know Social Security will give me a thousand, and I can sign up for food stamps too, but I'm kind of counting on my monthly check to keep me living under a roof, and busking money or other things I do to keep me fed. 

I worked over my letter to my older sister's husband, the lawyer. Going to go over it another time or two then mail it. I like to think I'm a more reasonable person than I was 20 years ago and that they are, too. I like to think that 20 years apart from each other has been a long enough "time out" and that I can correspond with my older sis again. 

Having someone there comes with a whole network and Hawaii is all about networks. For all I know the apartment in Makiki might still be in the family, although they'd not live in that little thing, they've got a big house to live in. 

I need to network with my Buddhist sangha too. I've spilled the beans to Rinban that I plan to go back to Hawaii in a couple of years. I have to whisper a word here and there ... 

I got to sleep at something like 7AM or so, and am not sure it was anything like actual sleep. I had 15 things packed so I found another 16 things to pack, put everything in big plastic bags, one with FedEx stuff and two with Post Office stuff, and by the time it got around to 3 in the afternoon I called Ken. 

"Hey, I'm just calling, you're coming over to pick up the packages right?" "Yeah I can do that!" "When will you be over? I'm gonna need an afternoon nap and I want to be sure to be awake when you come by" "Oh, about an hour". 

So Ken did, in fact, come by in about an hour. I'm sure he forgot our plans we'd made for him to come over, so I'm glad I called - he was probably still at the house because he doesn't often show up at his day job until something like 4. 

I was happy to tell him that the post office has given up on the chute, and they're back to using those big cloth bins to just dump the packages into. "You can just dump 'em in", I explained.  I also told him that tomorrow will be rainy but I'll just stay in and pack things and then Wednesday will be clear and I can ship the packages out then. 

I ate some cheese with a mustard/Kewpie mix and a bit later some peanuts and chocolate, very little of each but at least that's something. And tea, Ty-Phoo to start the day and jasmine after that. I think my headaches were due to a combination of not drinking enough fluids and by drinking coffee, somehow. 

So I will see how it goes, not drinking alcohol and also not drinking coffee. As I explained to Ken, I was in the market one day and thought if I got a couple tall cans of light beer it might make my headache go away. And it did, and I thought if I just kept things limited to 5% or so of alcohol, things would be OK. And, I concluded, they were not. "Because you start needing more and more to get the same effect", Ken said. 

Soon after Ken left, I got my bedding down from the loft and tried to sleep for 2 hours and kind of did, woke up at 6, and went back to bed and slept for about another two hours. I think that was more like real sleep, as it featured some interesting dreams. This is kind of like guard duty over in good old Korea, 4 on and 4 off. 

A big story right now is Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, has gone full idiot. I was reading Dilbert from the very beginning, thanks to a programmer friend whose house I lived in, and being a programmer, he loved Dilbert. 

Now, Scott Adams was always a complainer from the beginning. He kept his identity a secret while he worked (for AT&T I believe) and his bitch at the time was that he "had" to start a comic because he "didn't have the height or the hair" to get into Management. He took one of those mail-order art classes and worked out a simple style for himself, and the thing practically wrote itself because he had people sending him anecdotes from their workplaces from early on. 

For a while there, there was compilations of comics, books by Adams that were actual books with a few strips, etc. I remember mints sold at 7-11 a "Manage-mints" and "Achieve-mints" and so on. I loved Ben & Jerry's "Totally Nuts!" Dilbert ice cream, a nice vanilla with off-grade nuts, and the off-grade ones are much more flavorful. There was also a Dilbert TV show and I bought a little color handheld LCD TV at Radio Shack just so I could watch it. When I got a Prius I discovered that electric cars have a lot of torque and seriously considered getting a Dilbert "Still pumped from using the mouse" sticker for it. It had Dilbert doing that hand-on-bicep thing. I'd probably have had to get some vinyl and cut it myself.

Scott Adams has apparently said the Dilbert TV show was dropped because Adams is white. Uhh, no, the truth is, it was pretty niche. Real nerds found it hilarious but real nerds are actually pretty rare. Even here in Silicon Valley, the biggest/richest employers are things like Safeway and Kaiser Health and so on. In fact, a Dilbert style show about medical workers would do better just because of a larger viewer base and relatability. And in fact such shows have, from Dr. Kildare to Scrubs. 

But now the guy's really gone off the edge. Saying all whites need to get away from all blacks. And a bunch of other crazy stuff. Back when I was a real asshole in my early 20s I made some comment at work and a co-worker said, "Why don't you move to Russia? They're all white there". So, Adams, pack your bags. 

I got a few things packed and had what I guess is my first real meal since last Thursday night. I made beef vegetable soup. It was shabu-shabu beef that I cut up and freeze in 4-oz. packages, onion, carrot, broccoli, and the soup from a ramen packet - this one was different than the last one, lighter and a bit more "chickeny". I guess if I'm going to use soup packets I'd better start labeling them. 

The soup base I come up with when I just "wing it" end up too salty. I'm actually OK with buying packs of Sapporo Ichiban ramen and giving the noodles to the birds (or bums maybe) and even at $1.20 or so a packet, it's worth it to me. Then I'll have soup that has no noodles but has veggies. It's just so easy to prepare. The trouble with ramen is not only the carbs in the noodles but while the seasoning packet might have 1000g of sodium, the noodles will have another 1000g.