A quiet Sunday night

 If the illegal night club set up on Sunday night, they weren't noisy enough to wake me up. They may not have set up at all. I'm happy not to know. 

Today I packed a few things that had to go out, and since I was awake at 8 in the morning, was easily able to get out of here early enough to take the things to the downtown post office. 

My aim in going down there was to check out this one Vietnamese market for brown packing tape. They had it, and I got it and a few other things. 

All good but I got a bit wet coming back, and what's worse is I had my cell phone in my front jacket pocket, where there was a sort of scoop effect so it was in one of the wettest parts of a rather wet jacket. 

The phone's been spontaneously setting its volume to zero all night and doing weird things like that. I'm leaving it open and had it in front of a fan heater for a bit.  It should dry out, and will behave better tomorrow but I have a feeling I may be looking for a new phone. I've had this one for, I figure, about 7 years at least and it was already starting to do odd things. 

(After about 6.5 hours of sleep...) 

I woke up at 8AM because I guess I'm set to wake up that time now. My phone is really not acting much better, and one of my errands today will be to get a new one. The big Verizon place is at the most notorious intersection for crime in this city because of course it is. What it probably really means is that pale people are not the majority there and there's a big shopping mall. What's nice is the #22 bus goes right there so I can park the bike at Whole Foods, walk across the street, and hop on the bus which on the return end will drop me off right in front. That's hard to beat because for the price of a fare I can avoid some dangerous riding. 

The thing is, there are three things I kind of have to have functional: My phone, my bank card, and my driver's license. Having my passport card saves me on the ID for now since a passport supersedes a Real ID. But I needed my phone to activate my bank card, and I need my bank card to pay for my phone, plus I need the phone to call Ken and call the cops, which I do a fair amount of around here. Plus Ken needs to reach me at times. 

So after some breakfast I washed my hair w/o soap to get it ready for a haircut, went around and found things that had to be shipped out, did the haircut and a shave, packed the things, and was out the door around noon. After dropping off trash I stopped at Nijiya and had a bowl of chashu ramen which was a HUGE meal; I'm not doing that again unless I'm really hungry. 

Then I dropped off the packages at the post office, and went to Whole Foods to lock the bike up, and walked across the street to the bus stop. The #22 came along and I was off on my ride to parts of its route that I'd not been on yet. 

The notorious intersection of Story and King is fine, it's just that the area is just about 100% Hispanic. The phone store there has nice people who are very helpful and it's probably the best experience with a phone store for me, ever. $275 later I have a new "super durable" phone of the type I actually wanted one of, before, and for some reason or another didn't get.  

I thought I'd have to order the phone and come back a day or three later to pick it up, so it was nice they had one in stock.  My old phone was acting better but when the guy tried to send me a text that was going to have a code number, my old phone went into reset mode and the guy was like, "Oh, never mind" and took the phone, popped off the back and got some number from there. What's funny is, when he popped off the back, a chip of the back came off. Yeah, it was new phone time. 

The ride home was OK, I stopped at the Amazon place for bubble mailers and Nijiya for a couple of things, and got back here. And was glad to be back in because the wind was cold!