The blintzes were a hit. I'd made 36 of them or so, was hoping to make 50 but I ran out of time. I'd made signs too, saying they're macadamia nut blintzes and contain dairy, macadamia nut chunks, and egg. I got complimented on the signs. I put the two containers of them in the fridge in the kitchen, and we had the service, sang our cowboy music, etc.
Then there was about a 15-minute break, and a lot of people went home because they'd have nice Shabbat dinners waiting for them there. The cop was there, and I got out the stack of gun magazines Ken had given me, and gave them to him - he was overjoyed. I said I'm old enough to remember when The American Rifleman was like Scientific American but of course oriented around guns. Here's what cordite was. Here's a shot tower and how it works. The magazine is really lightweight now.
We got our food out and the dishes people had brought were pretty much sweets and salad-y things. I got a plate and put a blintz on it and took it out to the cop, who was probably happy to get something more substantial than the salad-y things he's usually given.
People stocked up on food and I saw my blintzes on a few plates. The rabbi wouldn't try one though, because he just plain doesn't like macadamia nuts. All in all, people only took a bit more than half of the blintzes, and that's after I ate one too. I finally had an idea and took what was left and put them in one of the cake pans and took them out to the cop, asking if he wanted them. "I'll give them to my shift buddies - they'll eat them up!" he said.
The dinner came with a discussion about the situation in Israel right now. The rabbit does *not* like Netanyahu. I don't know enough about Netanyahu to have a real opinion on him although I am inclined to like him at least for now. I kept pretty mum, but made a couple of points that were very well-received. I forget the first one right now but the second one was that the Right loves Russia because Russia is a very "white" country and it's seen as some kind of last stronghold for whites. And they've thought that for the last 20 years at least. This was a surprise to the rabbi and others, who had apparently not been reading right-wing sites like I had, years ago.
After that I ducked out to give the rest of the blintzes to the cop and we ended up talking long enough that the rest of the discussion group started filing out (and I'd made like I had to leave early for some time-constraint reason, oops) and one of the ladies said she liked the blintzes very much and knew they're a lot of work "Just making the 'skins' takes hours".
So all in all they were a hit, as they should be as I spent north of $50 on the things. I think they will be my specialty, though. I can make some with a different kind of nut, for instance.
I rode home feeling pretty good, and stopped in at TAK Market for a cheap bottle of wine. That used up my "folding money" but I wanted to drink a bit more then the less-cheap bottle of wine I had waiting for me. So I did that, got home, and really didn't have an appetite. So the long and short of it is I drank the cheap wine and one glass of the less-cheap wine, and went to bed.
I woke up around 10, and about 10 minutes after getting up the guys next door started in with their pressure washer. They usually go a few hours with the thing, and for some reason I had a bit of a headache.
So I went upstairs and got a good load of books sorted out and took off around noon with them. I still had a bunch of change, $7 or almost $8. I rode to Whole Foods first thinking I'll get a couple of hard-boiled eggs, get some soy sauce from the sushi area (my way of getting around the Whole Foods dictum that if you salt your food, you'll excite "animal spirits" and get covid) and that should be affordable. But there were no eggs so I got a dollop of hummus, cheese, some olives, and thought that's pretty light (food's charged by weight) but that and a bottle of water cost me all but about 89c of my money.
I sat and ate, slowly, as the heat was already annoying. Then I rode over to the used book store and turned in my books. I wandered around, deciding which books I might get. I was offered something in cash or $24 in trade which is pretty good. So I got the most beat-up and therefore cheapest, copy of "Survival In Auschwitz" by Primo Levi, and a Tanakh that is of really nice quality and was only $20. It came to more like $25 and the owner said my trade credit and the less than a dollar of trade credit I had on a card was enough.
Next I rode over to the Teen Challenge thrift store and gave them the books the book store didn't want. They were happy to get them and I looked around a bit - I'll have to try to have some money on hand when I go there.
Now the ride home. I realized too late that I could have simply gone away from downtown, to Hedding or I think it's called Naglee there, and gone home that way. I decided to ride for Whole Foods to get another bottle of water and home from there.
I rode past the St. Leo The Great church where there was a wedding or something going on, with a mariachi band so I stopped to listen to / watch the trumpeters. They play short phrases but put a LOT of expression/vibrato into the shortest of notes, at the end of a phrase. And there are a lot of breaks in their playing so they can keep having a great tone. I was given a nasty look by the only white person there, some kind of limo driver with a Rolls Royce "silver cloud" so I went and sat on the wall in the only patch of shade there was and no one could say boo. This is pretty nice, I thought, as I drank the last of my water.
I rode to Whole Foods and got another bottle of water which was great because it was icy cold. Then I rode the back way, past "Microscopic Italy" and right to St. James Park where there were a bunch of tents set up and music playing so I checked that out. "Batman", the guy who dresses as Batman and hands out supplies to the homeless, was there and I said Hi, I'd played the Batman theme for him years ago and he remembered. I drank a little cup of coffee given out by a guy who was promoting coffee, and looked at the other booths.
How strange it is, to have thought of myself as being a leftist, to see so many leftist people who genuinely want me dead if they see me as Jewish. The most ridiculous one was one that equated Leonard Peltier, an American Indian activist who'd in the clink for shooting a guy, with the "Palestinians". I guess it's equating a scumbag with scumbags. If you shoot a guy, you generally go to prison. If you shoot a guy for political reasons, you tend to go to prison for longer. And if you shoot a guy for political reasons and the guy's an officer of the law, well, Leonard's not getting out any time soon. But of course to the Left he's a hero. (I just did a quick read of the Wikipedia, and it was two FBI agents, who were already incapacitated by gunshot wounds, and were "finished off "with close-range shots to their heads.)
I found a few books on the rest of the way home and got back in here. At least it was cool inside here and I had my fan and could drink ice water. I took another look at the Tanakh and interestingly, it was printed in 2016 in the UK. The UK doesn't have different denominations of Judaism like the US does, it's pretty much all Orthodox with a head rabbi. It's in Hebrew and English.
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