More practice

 More practice last night (very early this morning!) and I'm a few more pages in, in the book and learned two more notes, a higher A and a lower B. I put in well over an hour. This is the thing, and it's a thing in flute also, that one can play for hours more easily than on trumpet.

Am I hitting the Christmas carols this year? I think .... not. I just have too much else to do. It doesn't matter as much, though. Not drinking any more has done wonders for my finances. 

In a year's time it would be neat to be where I'm putting all of each paycheck into the bank and living off of $200 or so a week from busking.  

My new clarinet is a Yamaha "Advantage" 200AD which apparently, and I sure researched, is the same as the YCL255, in a bit nicer case. I guess the '255 comes in a soft case? The 2000AD's are sold to music stores for their "rental fleets" and come with these nice, small, durable, stacking, cases. I could easily carry my "horn" in a bike bag or by putting the case into my messenger bag and carrying that on my back. 

So it's a good choice not only for learning but for busking. 

Since I was up past 6AM I didn't wake up until 2 this afternoon. I caught up with Ebay stuff and thought about what I could accomplish today. I decided to follow up on a hint of something from my prowl though the antique stores, and went back to the biggest one where one of the booths near the back has some silver US coins. The upshot of that is I got nine silver quarters for $70, and the "melt value" of those is something like $11.50 right now. 

Silver's going crazy in price right now and I want to get into it, a little bit. I've just found this one guy who has coins he inherited or something and is willing to make deals. So the plan is to buy some here and there until his little stash is gone, then sell the coins for, hopefully,  a profit before I leave for back home. 

So that's what I did today. I dashed over there and the antique store was very busy, but the guy was there and I was able to do my little deal and get out of there. He's got half-dollars too but I don't know how many and I figure it's a fun little thing to do until his stash runs out then just sit on these coins and have a "dog in the fight" watching the price of silver. 

"Do you want a bag for those?" I was asked. "Nope, they've done fine in other people's pockets and they'll do fine in mine!" I said, putting them in my pocket where they could float around with my other change. Silver coins *jingle* more, though, which sort of brought back a memory of my father's change jingling in his pockets when he'd come home from work and it was a happy sound because we were always happy when Dad came home. This would be maybe 1966, so there were still a lot of silver in people's pockets. 

Next I went to the big Goodwill on San Carlos, but didn't find anything I wanted, other than a book, "Nothing To Envy" about North Korea, which I've wanted to read for a while. That was $2.50 except I might want to subtract about 70c, the value of the crispy and really neat-looking 5 Yuan note that was tucked in it. I now have the coolest bookmark ever.  

I stopped at Nijiya for some things, and the guys there were still talking about my telling them that the little portrait of the guy with a pipe in his mouth on BOSS coffee products is actually William Faulkner. "You know, 'As I Lay Dying'" one guy said. It's a kind of cool thing to know.