I was up early yesterday, something like 7:30 in the morning. The guys next door were making some noise but since I'd gone to be at midnight I'd had enough sleep and besides, I reasoned to myself, these guys get up early for Mass on weekends probably, and are out cleaning people's houses.
I got the idea to check out the Berryessa flea market, if nothing else to get a new safety vest. So I packed up the one thing that had sold and took it to FedEx, and rode over to the flea market. I looked around and it was OK for what it was. Due to the rain forecast it was very slow, and I saw it's a great place for, well, Mexican stuff. The people are very friendly, and I had a nice talk with a gal who was 100% native speaking in English and Spanish (somehow I can tell, even though I don't know more than a little Spanish, by accent and how smoothly they speak, when they're fluent in it).
What a neat gift to have in life. I'd love to be a native speaker in English and Japanese. I can learn some Japanese, and may find I have time to put some work into it once I'm back in Hawaii. But I'll never be native at it. The only 2nd language I can say I might be a native speaker of, is the local slang or "pidgin" (although it's actually, linguistically speaking, a creole) that's spoken at least by the old-timers in Hawaii.
I did get my new safety vest, so that's good. None of the other things I was hoping for appeared, and I realized I had time to go downtown and do stuff. So I did that, started out with Nijiya market where I got some chow mein with pork and cabbage and a can of coffee.
I locked the bike at Whole Foods and rode the bus over to Santa Clara where I picked up things, and in the end only got sprinkled on, rain-wise. I rode the bus back and picked up the bike, picked up bubble mailers, and got back here.
I ate the bento I'd picked up at Nijiya on my way back, and fiddled around organizing things, and watched YouTube, and went to bed at 1AM. Fair enough, I'd wake up at 9AM and since it was due to rain (it had started raining steadily) it would all work out great.
Except I woke up a bit past 2AM because the bozos were starting to show up for the illegal night club. And not just a few; a regular-ish crowd was building up. When the constant car alarm started up I'd had enough and got up, filed my little report online, and then called up the non-emergency line to the police to give them the heads-up.
Except due to changing my card number, my phone needed a payment and I had to do that, then do a bit more to get it on auto-pay. OK now I could call, and did. The operator was a good one and it was a cheerful call, despite the subject matter. I waited to see if the cops would show up and they did in not too much time and they rousted the nightclub out, and then it was quiet.
By then I'd found "The Wind Rises" on YouTube and I had a good chunk of seared tuna sashimi in the fridge, and I'd only watched the first half of the movie before, so I settled in to watch that. The movie starts out great but kind of loses its way and doesn't mention that much about WWII - kind of paints Japan as the victim. Kinda like real life! I'm glad I didn't pay for it on DVD.
I went to bed after that and slept in until about 1 in the afternoon.
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