I got 10 things listed last night, practiced a bit, it made the headache come on a bit but it went better than the night before (not that that's saying much).
I woke up in time to pack 9 things, and took off for the post office. The drop offs went fine, and at least I was able to do these things although my headache had been pretty bad when I woke up.
I was tootling along, and thinking about cars vs. how I get around. A bicycle rider will typically expend about 250 watts. I'm sure cars use a lot more than energy than that, so when I got back I looked up the average horsepower of American passenger vehicles and got 180.
So, multiplying that by 746, the number of watts in one horsepower, I get 1.34MW. That's right, megawatts. However, that's peak power capability, so let's assume most of the time cars aren't using that much to get along and divide by 4, getting 33.6kW. Dividing by the 250W a bicyclist might expend, I get 134 bicyclists' worth of energy for the average car to tootle down the road at, most of the time, the same speed I do.
And people pay $1000 a month for this! I've long said that owning a car is like having a girlfriend who has to be taken out to a steak dinner every night.
I did some shopping at H Mart on my way back (and had had a couple of tea eggs at 99 Ranch) and got back here, put things away, and got out the bike trailer. We'd been food-bombed again and I boxed up the jars of peanut butter, cans of beans, and bags of brown rice and took them over to the tiny bit of sidewalk on Crack Alley where the crackheads would be sure to find the stuff.
Then I took other junk that was out there, and took it around to the medical dumpster. I fished out some foam for packing and a wireless mouse that may or may not work, and a zombess in a dark SUV with a zombie dog with her came by.
What portion of zombies are verbal, are not very verbal at all, and it's not exactly the upper-class who are electing to follow a "life" of zombiedom. So between the lower-class mushmouth dialect and the damn thing's undead dog barking, all I could make out was the zombess repeatedly saying what sounded like "Take off!". I tossed the boxes of stuff I'd brought to throw in there, into the dumpster and was ready to indeed take off in a moment, and tried saying to it, "Are you saying 'Take off'?" but got no reply. As I said, zombies are creatures of few words. I got on the bike and rode off, in a direction such that the zombess would have to turn around to follow, and it probably took a few minutes for it to realize I had done this.
Zombie labor is a thing. Collectors of cans and of scrap metal are in fact zombie labor. Someone taught this zombess something like "People dig in dumpster bad." Fortunately, I thought, there's not much I could get out of there that's legal to sell now, and in a bit over a year it won't be my problem at all as I'll be gone.
I got back here and went around with a trash bag and picked up all sorts of bottles and junk that were lying around here. In the same way mice will stay out of a neatly swept and maintained space, zombies tend to be intimidated by places that are well kept.
My headache is almost absent (but always kind of there in the background) and I'm really beginning to get tired of this. I'm sure a lot of it is stress as I tend to worry a lot. This is where tianeptine would be useful to try, as it's used in Europe as an anti-anxiety drug. I've so far resisted trying kratom as I can't find any instances of it being used in any first-world country as an actual medicine. But tianeptine is a whole different ball of wax.
But this is where I have to give the Red states credit, because I can't find anything saying it's illegal here in California, I suspect it's something like bidis which are these super-strong Indian cigarettes. A while back, gas stations and such places were selling the dreadful bidis and what's worse, sometimes selling them to kids. The main thing, I think, was they were serious competition to good ol' American brands like Marlboro and Swisher Sweets. In any case, bidis were kind of down-low illegalized and that was that.
I even know the brand to look for, not of bidis but of tianeptine that being ZaZa Red and at least in the average smoke shop I'd probably get what I want across better using that name than the scientific one. At least in a less-closely-monitored state, I'd go in, get the stuff, try it, decide it's for me or not, and life goes on.
Hawaii's actually even worse - they're very anti-gambling and surprisingly anti-marijuana. It's the bluest of blue states, and as a young, foolish, National Review reader, I know that rather than the hippies, it's the conservatives who put the real muscle behind making pot more accepted. My theory is that conservatives being more wealthy, they live long enough to get cancer, and pot's really good for keeping cancer patients' appetite and mood up. Hawaii's not only super Blue but also practically an outpost of Japan and Japan is notoriously anti-pot.
Ken came by at the usual time if not the usual day. He's bought more stuff at auction and I helped him unload it as always. I served him up one of the bottles of diet 7-Up I'd bought at H Mart (I guess if I'm going to be nice to my kidneys I need to not really drink diet soda as well as regular soda, and I was pretty happy to see 560ml bottles of diet 7-Up for $1.65 or so, because I can always have a fresh one for Ken without having to finish a 2-liter bottle after Ken's gone).
Today's topic with Ken was nuclear reactor design, so yeah it was another fun bull session. That and we discussed health things too. I told him about my headaches and how I've decided on a plan of action: First to exercise the supreme act of will it takes to actually put fresh batteries in the blood pressure machine I have here, and check my blood pressure regularly. Next in order of priority is to try to get an A1C test. I *think* the pharmacy at Walmart might offer it, if not I'll try some other places.
Blood pressure and A1C can be changed for the better through diet, weight loss and moderate exercise. I need to find out if I'm diabetic or pre-diabetic. These things all feed into each other, the liver, the kidneys, blood pressure, the cardiopulmonary system... I found out more about this last night although from my reading up on all the nasty things alcohol does to you, I'm already pretty aware of all the nefarious shit that can go on.
One of the things I need to do that I haven't already never done (smoke) or have stopped (drinking) is to really curtail if not completely cut out eating red meat. In the context of the kidney diet, this actually includes pork and even chicken. It comes down to phosphorus, of which there's a lot in red meat. Maybe this is why Tom has "decided" to be a fish-eating vegetarian. He actually has access to medical care, having been smart and gotten a job that's both Government and Union. I'll have to talk with him about this when he's back.
So it's basically the keto diet but avoiding "red" meat. Apparently it helps to like fish a lot, which I do. In fact after buying things in H Mart I found myself with about $5.50 left and I went back in for some mackerel, a fish I really like. And they sell salmon galore in there, the key is to buy the "trim" that's skin pieces that I flense the meat off of, and package up for soup etc. With all the Asian markets around, I'm in seafood heaven.
One exception I'll make, though, is I'd bought some "pork belly" slices at Mega Mart and those are so much fat and so little, pale, meat that I figure, given that the phosphorus is in the meat part and that it's not smoked like bacon, it's probably OK so I made a soup with it tonight and it was really good. Better than the other types of pork I've bought actually, so I'm going to keep it on the menu with lots of fish and tofu and stuff in-between.
I've also decided that on the day I go to the bank, I might take that day to hop on a bus and go somewhere that's further away than I'd go on my bike. I've decided I'm going to join REI so I might bus it down there this week, join, and buy a thing or two.
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