Rained-in Thursday

 I finished the load of laundry I'd had soaking and had the place all cleaned up and waited for Ken to show up. And waited .... and waited.... 

I noticed I'd missed a call on my phone and it was from Ken's number so I assume he tried calling to let me know he'd not be by while I was upstairs hanging the laundry up or something. At least he tried. I tried calling back and of course no answer. 

I'm assuming there will be enough of a break in the rain for me to at least only get a bit wet, walking out to the light rail and taking some Post Office things in a large plastic bag to keep them dry to the downtown Post Office, doing my banking and perhaps stopping in Japantown for some shopping, then back here. I might get wet but the bike won't get all gunked up. Or I can take the bike but keep it really, really slow. 

Then I think Saturday's supposed to be somewhat dry and maybe Sunday. Those days can be used to take FedEx things to FedEx. 

This is why it's not a prime busking time here. My main job and the logistics of dodging rain storms makes it a very low priority. Meanwhile in New Orleans it's Mardi Gras time and a prime busking time and no doubt the actual musicians there are cashing in. And in Hawaii it's the time of the "Winter visitors" who are known to stay longer and spend more than the summer crowd. 

In today's news, apparently in Palo Alto which is one of the richest, whitest, areas here, the town council meeting was taken over and effectively ended by a mob of white, Christian, Hamas supporters/Holocaust deniers. In Palo Alto, ostensibly an educated place and a place with a large Jewish community center I'd love to live nearby because they have a gym and a bunch of neat stuff, and classes. I don't know why I'm surprised by this, since hating non-Christians and even Christians not of one's own narrow sect is central to Christianity and they especially hate Jews. 

I hope my Jewish friends are arming up, and in fact I now know how I'm going to pass on the guns and ammo I have, since Ken's pretty consistently said he's not up for buying anything "extra" besides paying my pay check, the last few times I've asked. I think I'd rather *give* my guns etc. to a Jewish cause than sell them to some random person. 

I'll have to step up the busking if I want to "fill in" the approximately $2k "hole" donating my arms will represent, but not this weekend; it'll be all I can do to get the packages sent and stay not-too-wet. 

It's only taken me 35 years to get back to making $20k a year. Back in Hawaii my official income at least, will go down to about $12k a year. Which is a lot of money, honestly. It's just far from what a lot of people *think* the average American with technical skills makes. 

The median income in China is just a bit under $5k but everything costs about 1/4 as much, putting them around $20k in buying power. And things are improving for the Chinese as quickly as they're getting worse for people here. 

Amazingly, around the middle of the day it cleared up and was sunny. I quickly packed the three things that had to go out, and rode to the post office to drop off the smaller ones, and then to FedEx to drop off the bigger one. It stayed dry all the time until I got to FedEx so I locked the bike at H Mart and spent a good ol' time poking around and buying weird stuff as well as routine stuff. 

It was still raining a little when I was done, and on the ride home it was sunny while I also got rained on a bit. My mid-day meal, I guess, had been a corn dog from one lunch truck on my way out, for the $2 in change I had on me, and then on the way back, there was a truck I stopped at to ask the lady what hours she's there, and said I was out of money so she said "Just get something and pay me later" so I got a thing that's basically a giant hot dog wrapped some kind of somewhat flaky wrapper. 

I got back here and ate the giant hot dog thing and had some other munchies, and watched it get grey and cloudy again. 

I've been eating some carb-y things lately just to play around with things, to see if my headaches would come back. But once I stopped eating chocolate, it seems to be really gone. It's not like I'd eat chocolate and 1/2-hour later, here comes the headache. It's more like whatever's in chocolate that was harming me would be there in my body, waiting to make a headache late at night, or overnight, or when I got up in the morning when I'd have some real whoppers. 

I've been looking very closely at snacks and things in the various markets I go to, and almost everything has chocolate in it. One display at Walmart had nothing that didn't have chocolate in it. Chocolate is a popular flavor but I never thought about how popular.