A lot of STUFF

 That was so much hustling around yesterday, I guess I was tired. I was sweating a lot and shaking a bit as I wrestled with that thing to get two of the motors and the cables I could reach off. But yesterday I drank a lot less of those 50ml wine in 400-500ml other stuff with ice, drinks I've been making. 

At bed time though I had 700ml of wine. Maybe tonight I'll have 500ml and then the next night 350ml which is getting back to just having one of those Tetra Paks but I hope to be all tapered down before this 3l box I have now it used up. The expense of drinking wine daily is just one of the things I hate about it. 

I got the 15 things listed but today I think I'll put things away, do some re-arranging of things, and packing and shipping of course. 

This is the nice thing about this job. I'm pretty much on my own as long as I do my best to keep the numbers good. I keep reading on Reddit or seeing on YouTube videos (saw a great one by a guy named Ooba something in the UK where he totally pranked and spied on Amazon) where if you work the kind of work a homeless or at least nearly homeless and car-less person can get and it's really grim. 

Mostly it's physical work and I can't do the heavy physical work I did in my 20s any more. This comes down to skill. This is why I was thinking of setting up the loft as a sign-painting studio when we moved into this place. The idea being, if I could acquire good sign-painting skills, I could get going on my own. I'd go around to restaurants and do menus for them, car dealerships and do signs and things for them, do funny signs to sell on the sidewalk, etc. Ultimately I'd rent a place downtown preferably with a big window so people walking by could watch me do my lettering - being trained from childhood to be comfortable with people watching me do art, I'd not mind a bit. 

But it comes down to, Can this be done if I live in a pup tent? Any kind of art beyond the old sketchpad on knee and cheap markers caricatures / portraits seems to take a lot of STUFF. And a lot of traveling around and a lot of time and schedules have got to match those of the car dealership or restaurant etc. 

That's hard to do if one is living in a pup tent or more likely sleeping in a military surplus bivvy bag and using a storage unit as HQ. Whereas even in a rather small storage unit I could have 6 cornets/trumpets and a flugelhorn just because, my personal stuff, and given that the smallest ones are generally all rented out and I'd have one more towards being medium, a bike or two. 

And as I've experienced, competent playing can pay around $50 an hour if I choose the right hours. 

And I enjoy it. If I enjoyed sign-painting so much, I'd have done a million signs just for the shop here. Goodness knows we need them. It's taken me years to start to sound competent on the trumpet and yet I've put in the years. Add in teaching and I could do fine, with almost zero overhead. 

That's what's killing this business here. The landlord keeps raising the rent, and the drawback of an Ebay Store is it's really hard to "age" things. I looked it up and it's really hard, beyond my skills really, to sort our things by oldest because I'd like to discount the oldest things like hell and get those out of here. So we have all these things sitting here, costing us a nickel a month which has fooled Ken into thinking it's cheap to keep them but it's not. 

Songs don't get old. I don't have to pay a "carrying charge" on musical notes. I saw this difference back before the crash of '08, when I knew Aric Leavitt, the banjoist. I thought, here I am paying over a thousand a month for my apartment, paying for my (actually necessary) car, paying for stuff to resell, etc. If I didn't bring in $6000 a month I was in trouble. Meanwhile, what's a bad day for Aric? A broken string? 

I figured it was probably easier and certainly a lot less effortful and time-consuming for Aric to bring in $50 a day than for me to bring in $200 a day. I thought about that life, if I suddenly had Aric's skills. I'd rent a room (at the time $400-$500 was a reasonable budget) get around by bus or bike, and actually only work a couple of hours a day. I'd have $1000 a month to spend on everything else after paying $500 rent. Being a musician I'd have actual friends and a network of people I know. 

This is why it was such a relief when the crash of 2008, which actually happened for me in 2007, happened. I was even starting to prepare for it. I'd signed up for violin lessons and gotten my teacher, young enough to be my kid haha, into busking. Of course when the crash happened it happened fast and I had to clear out and there was no refund on the $800 I'd ponied up for a semester of lessons. Oh, well. Even the violin was a rental and had to go back. 

So this is why I'm extremely skeptical of taking up any occupation that requires a lot of STUFF. 

I just used one of the covid test kits I got yesterday and I'm a solid negative. 

I packed 6 things, one of them minutes after it sold, and rode up to the post office to drop them off, then over to 99 Ranch and got two tea eggs and some other things, including the Scott toilet paper I use which for some reason they have the best price on. What was annoying is, while I eating my tea eggs this black zombie came wandering along and stood in front of the notice board outside 99 Ranch, not all that far from my bike, and started coughing and hacking and spitting. It was awful. I hurried up to get out of there and luckily the zombie wandered off to disgust other people in the strip mall there, but I wanted outta there. And zombies wonder why no one likes them...

Then I rode over to Lowe's and got some N95 masks and paper towels. I had the greatest talk with the young guy working in Paint, who's just moved back up here from Southern California. So we knew a lot of places in common, and I started telling him about H Mart and other good things around here. So he was really charged up to go check them out and told me "Come back soon!". 

One of the things I'd bought at 99 Ranch was a bag of peanuts which at $1.99 a pound came to $2.49. I rode over to Tom's. He was there and I told him I'm covid-negative so no need to worry and gave him the peanuts, telling him the price. He's paying something like $6 for a similar bag at Sprouts. I told him Asian stores generally have raw peanuts because they're used in various things. 

We talked a bit, and he offered me chicken soup but I said I'd just eaten and rode back here.