Immediate improvement

 I got 15 things ready to list last night but since it involved some time sorting and counting things out etc. I didn't actually list them. 

But most importantly, I took the propane tank - which does indeed leak, I could smell it  - and put it out for someone to take. Someone eventually did, who came up in a small sports car and somehow got it in and drove off. 

The improvement amazed me. I felt OK, with no need to take aspirin before bed. I was able to practice without feeling like the deep breathing would make me doze off, but stayed alert right up until it was time for bed. (Then alert in bed but meditation techniques had me asleep in no time, as usual.) 

In the morning, no headache! And no need to take aspirin. I felt really good. I woke up at 2 in the afternoon instead of sleeping in, feeling lousy, until I absolutely had to get up. I was able to pack things while I drank my iced coffee (made the night before) and a Lipovitan. 

Of course it then rained for a while, so I cooked up some bacon and eggs. Last night at Whole Foods I was looking over the meat case and there were a few strips of sugar-free bacon there that looked lonely so I bought them - $2.50 for 4 oz. I cooked 2 oz. with a couple of eggs. The flavor of this bacon is less intense but then it's bacon not candy. I could get to like it. 

I packed things up and took off at a quarter after 5. I went by the veggie dumpster and fished out a large bag of salad mix, the nice stuff with the "wild" looking varieties of lettuce leaves, and a dozen limes. I stopped by Tom's to drop that stuff off and knocked on his door but he didn't answer so I went on. 

I dropped off one small box at FedEx and by then it was raining again. I put one Whole Foods bag on top of the stuff in the other Whole Foods bag so the packages would stay dry-ish, and got over to the post office and dropped those off. Duty done. 

I went over to 99 Ranch and looked around, just buying a little bottle of Tapatio hot sauce and some pork rinds, and some cooked chicken legs. I had the good fortune to be behind a crazy lady at the checkout. Said lady was engaging in some complicated financial whizz-jiggery that seemed to involve stamps and coins and bills and who knows what else. It was OK, I was not in a hurry, and took the time to examine the label of some bags of Vietnamese coffee by the checkout. 

The crazy lady kept going on and on with whatever it was she was doing, and the checker, being a 99 Ranch checker and thus always on the ball, actually did my transaction somehow in parallel with that of Ms. Crazy. Ms. C. had already managed to try moving her cart'O'stuff making some mysterious stamps fall out, which she just had to back it up and get, and in place of the stamps leaving a single pineapple leaf on the floor. I didn't see a pineapple on her cart. Next it was a lemon that fell out, which a guy picked up and returned to her. It must be a complicated life she leads.

So the checker and I got our stuff done, and Ms. Crazy was finally done and left, and I said softly to the checker that the last customer was a little bit ... (made a swizzing whistling sound with my mouth while twirling a finger in circles by the side of my head) and that got a laugh. I laughed too, and said you have to laugh in your job, and we wished each other a good weekend. The crazy lady was still there, only having progressed maybe 15 feet in her perilous journey from the checkout counter to ... wherever her mission took her next. Oops. Still funny though.

I was going to go up to Dai Thanh after this, but it was raining pretty hard out there so I got a can of Boss coffee and some chestnuts on sale and sat at a table outside the boba place that had a guy in a safety vest already sitting at one chair, intent on some show in Spanish on his phone. One guy in a safety vest, two guys in safety vests, who's counting? I took the other chair and had my coffee and chestnuts and watched the rain. 

It did not look like it was going to stop so I decided to just head back. I stopped at H Mart for a few things also, then the computer place's dumpster to pick up bubble wrap and some nice plastic bags and such things, and did some neatening up too, then headed back to Tom's. 

He was there and we talked for a while about various things. A bit too long a while, it turned out, because I said I should get going and just then it started raining more seriously. So I got a bit wet coming back here. I got back here at 8:30, the equivalent of rolling in at 11:30 in the before times.