Practice and a bit of study

 Yesterday's whole afternoon was spent finding the things for, packing, and processing something like 15 refunds for (because it has to be done in little slices), ONE order. It was relief putting that ONE box on the bike trailer and taking off for FedEx with it. 

I then ate a beef on rice thing from H Mart, sans most of the rice of course, and rode up to 99 Ranch for a couple of things, and studied a bit at the Baguette. 

It's not the best study environment but beats none, as when I got back I got all involved finding more things, as I still had 20-odd to ship. I finally gave up on packing anything last night and did a practice session which was a good one. I learned there's a little key, between the middle and ring finger on the right hand, that changes B to Bb or is it the other way around? In any case, it's clumsy to do it otherwise, which is why that little key is a thing. Cool. 

And at least before I got more tired, I had a good vibrato. There are three kinds of vibrato; breath vibrato, jaw vibrato, and hand vibrato. At least in trumpet, breath vibrato was very much discourages. "Makes you sound like a bleating goat" was the opinion. I believe flute uses breath vibrato as the other two are impractical. On trumpet, "hand" vibrato simply involves using the hand to "vibrate" the trumpet against the lips. 

I never cared for hand vibrato, even though no less than Louis Armstrong and Maurice Andre' used it. And in old clips of classic jazz/swing bands, you can look down the row of trumpeters and see about half of them are using it. 

The other half are using jaw vibrato and that was my method. Why use my hand to shove the trumpet against my face in any form, when I'm trying to use less mouthpiece pressure, the enemy of good relaxed trumpet playing? And for better or worse, it's my go-to on clarinet. 

Since my goal is not the lofty one of becoming a classical clarinet player, I'm not going to worry about it. It's nice to see that even as a beginner I'm on the way to a sound the public will like. 

 

i drank a Guinness

 Yesterday I left here around 3:30 in the afternoon. I went to Nijiya and bought a can of coffee, since the bottles of coffee at Whole Foods are like 2X as much. Then I checked the little free library on 3rd and this loaf of home-made bread and a handful of candy canes were still there, so I took 'em. 

I got over to St. James Park and stopped where there were some geese, and got the bread out. Canada geese love bread, it turns out. So it was fun tossing pieces of bread to them. I parked the bike at the post office and mailed the packages I had, and left the candy canes on top of the trash can there, where some bum will be glad to find them no doubt. 

Then I went to the bank and deposited my pay check and my number and the bank's agreed to the penny I could tell, because this week it was a really easy to memorize number. 

Then I went to Whole Foods and got some chicken and onions and cabbage, and here's where the bad decision came in. I decided, since I'd been craving the flavor, and it's been such cold weather, to get a pint bottle of Guinness. I drank it all too because why waste? 

It *was* fairly good, but out the window went my plan to go to the big Goodwill on San Carlos, and it was all I could do to swing by the Amazon place for some bubble mailers and get back here. 

I got 25 things ready to photo and watched things on YouTube and went to bed at midnight. 

 

Up to "The Little Fish"

 I have one huge order, like 28 things, to pack and ship for one guy, but yesterday I packed all the other things and that was a dozen or so, maybe more. It was a decent load. Since I've spent my "allowance" I didn't buy anything anywhere. 

I might owe my life to a leaf, though. I was leaving the post office parking lot, to cut across Oakland Road. It was dark, traffic was stopped at the light  up on the corner so I was clear to go but wanted to make haste to make sure. I heard something run over a crunchy leaf to my right, and that alerted me that something/someone was coming on the bike lane coming the wrong way so I swerved just in time to let a guy on an e-bike, lights off, come by and he was hauling ass too. People have been killed in collisions with regular bikes, much less these heavy battery-powered monsters that are more like small motorcycles. If the leaf hadn't been there I don't know if I'd have sensed the thing coming, or sensed it in time. 

I picked up some bubble wrap and a couple of boxes, and stopped at Tom's to catch up on things because I haven't for a couple weeks. I told him about the leaf incident, and he nagged me again about not wearing a helmet. A don't think a helmet would have protected me from a side hit, and there's a reason "side impact air bags" were such a big thing in cars because the human body is a bit more vulnerable from that direction. I'll just have to watch out more carefully, especially because that guy might be a regular commuter alone that route and I'm pretty regular coming out of there at that time. 

I got back here and futzed around here doing I don't know what, and got a good amount of practice in. I swear I've not practiced for a week! I went through the book up to the page with "The Little Fish", which is as far as I went before I apparently took a week off. Things are sounding more smooth, I'm making less mistakes, and come to think of it I didn't make one inadvertent squeak. 

I need to practice every day, because I want to get out there busking ASAP. For the money? Not necessarily, because the money's taking care of itself although more money is always handy. For instance, the French class I'm taking cost me $435. That's the class, the books, and a year's membership in Alliance Francaise. That's a month's busking anyway.

The main thing is busking provides some very good practice, and with the clarinet I should be free of the rather restrictive limitations I had on trumpet. I need to come up with a list of 10 songs that I really want to busk with, such as "Summertime" and "My Favorite Things" and even good old "Autumn Leaves". 

 

Alphabet Francaise

 Haha I'm so happy with myself that I seem to have the French pronunciations down pat, of the alphabet. I need to learn numbers, too, and repeat them daily like I'm doing with the alphabet. 

I also need to study ahead; we've done Unit 0 and next Monday night will be Unit 1, and I need to study up on that so in class I won't be going in "cold". 

One thing I love about this French business is, at different levels you can take tests, so you're certified for level A2 or B1 or whatever. Apparently getting to B2 makes a big difference in things since this seems to be what people strive for. 

I'm really hoping I can get to the point where I'm able to read books and watch movies/TV in French, because then I should be off and running. Along with being signed up for the present lesson I'm also a member of Alliance Francaise for a year, and they have a big library of books. I can hardly wait to at least try out Ferdinand The Bull, Babar, and such things. Then French translations of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway stories would be neat to be able to read. Then on to things like Jules Verne in the original. 

My friends back in Hawaii are useless. Sure, the guy in Honolulu, the guy with two houses and a condo and all that, is into Qanon nonsense and thinks Mango Mussolini hung the sun and the moon, but now I'm getting crazy stuff from the guy on the Big Island. If you ask him he'd say he's a "liberal" and he doesn't know how truly he's speaking because he really *is* one, it appears.

As in, he's a vegetarian and very self-righteous about it, yet keeps a few cats to kill native birds and to feed the same amount of meat a person would eat, or even a bit more. And said meat shipped in from 1000s of miles away. And he *must* have a car, and he *must* have the gov't pay for him to fly back and forth to Oahu for doctor's visits for his mystery illness that keeps him from working. And his girlfriend can't work either.... 

In other words, he's a textbook example of every haole hippy Hawaii was cursed with in the 70s. I grew up seeing these losers up close. I grew up a hungry kid but by Hippy God hippies never went hungry, and if you were a kid and went without, well it was your fault for being smaller and weaker. 

A hero of mine, cartoonist Robert Crumb, hated the hippies. Crumb came from actual working-class poverty, his father a hard-boiled WWII vet. He worked his way up, and lived super cheap and deprived himself to save up money (I think he put money into stocks) to not be dependent on any system. That's the key to live. Save your money, live modestly, even radically modestly. Crumb started in with a big greeting-card company and in a role that traditionally one was locked in for one's entire career. But not Crumb! He started an in-house comic strip and got himself noticed and got going. 

I'm certain the biggest mental block I have against doing art is it takes "stuff" and I resent any way of making a living that requires more living space than a pup tent. But Crumb had the good judgement to stick to pen and ink which takes the least amount of "stuff". I prefer music because it takes the least "stuff" of all as long as one sticks to a small, non-amplified instrument. But pen-and-ink is close. And Crumb's a huge music lover with a vast collection of blues records. And he escaped the US to France. My hero! 

Yesterday I checked the hours of the Nichi Bei store in Japantown and they were supposed to close at 4:30. I packed one thing that had to go out, and got the bunch of Japanese language books I had, and took them over there to donate to them, along with a huge, thick, cartoon biography of Osamu Tezuka which I figured I'd never get around to reading; I've only started on it. Well, they were not open, and I got there a bit before 4. 

So I took the books over to the Little Free Library and put them in there, keeping the Tezuka one. Maybe I *will* get around to reading it. And, the Little Free Library had a copy of "In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts" by Gabor Mate' so I took that one. 

Then I went to Walmart to get some things. I had $7 cash and $9 or so in quarters, and left with my things and $2 in quarters. I'm back to following the plan of putting each pay check into the bank and taking out half. 

I got back here and listed the 25 things I had lined up and photographed, cleaned the place up, and Ken came by and I got my pay check and we talked for a while as usual. When he left it was half after midnight. 

 

There are transcripts

 Last night along with getting 25 things camera-ready for listing on Ebay, I dug into what I'll call the smartphone problem. 

In the French book we're using in the class, Edito A1 + the Cahier de Activites, or workbook, you'll supposed to have a smart phone in your hand at all times, and not only use the QR code on each page, but actually "take a photo" of each page, the access that page's audio files. 

I can see why they do this; it's to make sure people have bought the actual books. The "photo" of each page probably has to be in color, so you'd have to have a color printout of each page .... cheaper to buy the books! 

This is all well and fine, since most people have a smart phone welded to one hand already. But I'm a holdout, and I looked around quite a bit for the 2nd edition audio files to no avail. But then I remembered something I'd noticed when I first got the books which is that there's a written transcript of each audio file, page by page, in the back of the book. 

It's like having a math book with all the answers in the back. But of course in math the correct answer is almost coincidental, it's all about learning to apply the correct process. Likewise, the answers are all written out for me but since there's audio to learn the sound and pronunciation of French, this means I'll be doing things a bit differently. 

Instead of just listening, I'll be first choosing the right answer (hopefully) and then referring to the transcript and reading it in my mind or even out loud, in the proper French accent/pronunciation. In a way, I'll learn those bits better than a student who just listens and guesses the right answer and moves on. 

Plus there's a ton of material on YouTube, not on Edito 2nd Edition of course, but tons of stuff on each but on learning French. Plus tons of helpful stuff on avoiding "studentisms" like stop saying "je m'appelle" so damn much.  "Je suis" is better most of the time, apparently. 

 

RIP Erich Von Daniken

 Well, it's a sad day, as beloved writer of utter horseshit Erich Von Daniken has left us. His books were complete nonsense, but they were *interesting* nonsense, and were very popular when I was a teen. 

Oh yeah and the Dilbert guy died. Anyway, I took some powdered Parmesan cheese and combined that with butter to make a sort of spread, and had that on crackers for dinner last night. It was surprisingly good. 

 

First class session

 I was up at 8:30 in the morning which is about right, since I went to bed "around" 1AM. 

I packed things to ship, and let here at about a quarter to 3. Lasts night I'd bought a couple of shirts and a new pair of sweat pants at Ross,  and everything fit OK. So I was layered up nicely for the cold. I dropped off the packages at the downtown post office, and rode over to Diridon Station, which has been re-done with new paint on a bunch of things and new "graphics" on the shelters etc. That's kind of nice. 

I got down there with plenty of time to spare, and rode around the shopping center the class is in, and found the bike rack which is good because with some of these shopping centers, they don't like bikes parked randomly around. 

I used up some time looking through my books, sitting on a planter in front of the Purple Onion, and will have to try to remember to bring some nuts for the little birds there next time.

When it was class time we students gradually filtered in. It's 8 students, 4 gals and 4 guys. And it's quite a mix, a regular United Nations. I've got a Russian or Ukrainian, not sure which yet, guy named Vladimir on my right, a guy from the island of Dominica to my left whose brother lives in Switzerland, and there's an Indian guy on the other side of him. The gals are a mix too. 

Our teacher is a wonderful Irani lady, and the class went well. We learned some very basic things and the French pronunciation of the alphabet. The funniest one is "y", which is called something like igrik, pronounced ee-greek, or the ee sound as used by the Greeks, at least that's what we were told. 

The only possible hitch is that the book and workbook are set up assuming you have a smart phone in your hand and that's how you access the audio files, which it looks like we're going to use a lot. You scan a QR code for each page. I'll have to see if I can use my laptop. 

When class was done it was good and cold out, but I was OK due to my dressing for it. The light rail on the way back had plenty of bums, but no one acting crazy so that was good. I rode it up to Karina Station so I just had the short ride back here. That station's had a make-over too and interestingly the trash cans have been changed to a type with transparent sides and look pretty easy to get into too. I think the idea is that if the trash pickers can see exactly what's in there, they can see if it's worth it at all to dig in a particular can, and if they do dig, they can go right to the stuff they want, and make less of a mess. 

 

Sunday and pardon my French

 Just in the last couple of days I've switched over to going to bed at midnight on the dot, and ideally waking up at 8AM on the dot. In reality I've been waking up sooner for some reason, but I'm sure I'll get it ironed out. 

I've been spending too much time too tired to do much but stubbornly staying awake even while starting to fall asleep in my chair, and decided to stop fighting it. The kind of night-owl schedule Ken follows may be natural for him but I've been both an early riser and a late one, and I think it's come to, at my age, being a regular daytime person will be best. 

Let's see, I deposited my pay check on Friday and my number and the bank's only differed by a few cents so that's good. 

Saturday was the big adventure if it can be called that. I've signed up to take a French class from a place called Alliance Francaise, which seems to have offices all over the US even back in Hawaii but most importantly for now, here. Where "here" is a mere 20 miles away or so, considered a tiny distance here in the Sprawl, in Los Gatos. 

Since the weekly class starts this Monday night, but the office is open 10-noon on Saturdays, I went over there to make sure they've got me on their roster and to pick up the text book and work book. The books are funny in that they're $50 or so online but $25 or so directly from the school. 

It had gone down to the mid-30s overnight and really only got up to 40 or so when I left, so it was a cold day to be out riding a bike. So, I just rode over to the light rail station and took the green train down to Winchester station. The trouble with taking the light rail at 9 or 10 in the morning on a Saturday is, almost no one's on it but bums. So yeah, there were bums. Oh well I was among plenty of bums taking the light rail to and from the last class I took, and they just do bummy stuff but so far have left me alone. 

The place is easy to get to; just go South on Winchester from the Winchester station, turn into the Vasona Station strip mall and it's right there. I popped in, the lady there with a couple of students looked me up and for some reason while there was a stack of text books with students' names on them there wasn't a set for me but she went in another room and got a set for me and that was that.

After that cold bike ride I really wanted something to eat and there's a small cafe called the Purple Onion there, where I had a bacon and egg and cheese sandwich and some coffee. It was really good and less than $20 with the tip which is doing well these days. I guess the place is popular with runners because a table nearby was full of 40 or 50 something gals talking about their last marathon and their next marathon and so on. And some fit older guys going in and out of the place. 

After all the bums on the light rail, and it having warmed up a bit and being a nice sunny day, I decided to just ride back. That was OK but it's amazing how much riding the train replaces. It was a long ride. 

I stopped at the big Goodwill on San Carlos and didn't find anything, and checked out the chef store and they're all out of plastic "thank you" bags except some overpriced, thin, green-tinted  "biodegradable" ones. I opted to get a roll of pretty nice "vegetable" bags, just as many for half the price. 

Plastic bags are becoming only a memory. I think I might set up something to support a "vegetable" bag and use that for organic/wet trash, and put dry stuff into the regular trash can, lined with a proper bag, and that way it can be emptied into a paper bag to get rid of the stuff. 

After getting back here I listed 25 things on Ebay and called it a day. 

Today I packed things (which sounds easy but some of the things can take a lot of time to find) and sent them off via FedEx. After returning from that trip I dropped off the trailer and headed back out again. I went to Dai Thanh and got 6 cans of pate' which last time, they charged me $7 for, a real mistake. This time I was charged $21 which is the proper price. 

I got a couple of shirts and a pair of sweat pants at Ross, and got back here. 

OK so pardon my French but why the fuck do I want to learn French? Well, part of it is what I call escaping the Anglosphere. With various cultures come basic assumptions about things, and the Anglo, or English-speaking, culture seems to be almost uniquely hyper-individualistic and, well, nasty and mean. 

My getting sucked into the self-promoted bubble about that particular ethno-state in the Middle East started in high school when I wrote a paper on Albert Einstein. The book I read about him stated at one point that "It was a custom for wealthy Jews to invite a poor Jewish student to their Friday night dinner, the most sumptuous meal of the week" and reading that almost made me fall off of my chair. In the Anglo, WASP culture I was used to, rich or even moderately wealthy, or hell, even "doing OK" people don't want anyone poor within miles of them, even if they're family. It's just assumed that in that culture that a poor person, even if a sibling, is as welcome as the smallpox virus. 

So I was shocked, amazed, in a good way. But it turns out that in any normal culture, people help each other out. Anglo, Protestant culture is, like the culture of the Iks, an outlier. 

(And it turns out that Jewish culture is not as lovely as it would like people to think it is. Not by a long shot.) 

So, just being able to read news in a different language, of a different culture, would be really interesting. Spanish doesn't interest me as it seems to be an even dumber culture than white American culture. I started, but dropped, a German class decades ago in community college, not because it was too difficult but because I felt I had too much else to deal with. And German's not found that many other places in the world that are not Germany. 

But French is found everywhere. Viet Nam and French Polynesia and Canada and a lot of countries in Africa and even, despite the US's efforts to stamp it out, in New Orleans (where French was banned in schools in the 1920s and may still be banned now). 

 

Thursday

 Imaginative title, I know. 

There's not been much going on. I got things sent off yesterday, came back and cleaned the place up and finished a load of laundry, and almost thought Ken wasn't coming over, but he did. I got my check so that's good. 

Ken also wanted to finally get this big heavy gas compressor thing out of the back of his truck, which he'd had in there for months on end. Maybe something like a year. The thing is, with his style of driving, which involved doing stupid things and increasing the collection of dents on his truck, this compressor, all 300 lbs or so of it, was being bounced around and denting his truck bed from the *inside*. 

So we got that out of there, and after he'd gone and after I'd found and packed a bunch of things, I took the compressor apart and got a bunch of electrical parts off of it, and finally, at around 7AM, put the scraps and the main part with the compressor itself and a bunch of pipes, out for the scroungers. And sure enough, someone came by surprisingly soon and picked it up. 

I might be wrong on the time I put the parts out, because it took some real hours to take that thing apart, and I might have put the parts out at 8 or 9. When it's dark and gloomy and rainy, which it was, it might have felt like 7. 

I'm glad I set my alarm clock because I was really tired, didn't practice, and went to bed. I was very glad to be woken by the alarm at 5 in the afternoon because due to the alarm, I was able to have some coffee and breakfast, and got out of here at 6, with the things I'd packed to go to the post office and Fedex. 

When I got back here I saw something interesting. It seems that the electric company sent someone around to do something with the building next door, the one where the illegal night club operates. It's been pretty quiet there and maybe they've stopped paying their bill. 

 

More practice

 I got more practice in last night, and experimented with the "double lip" embouchure, which gives a better sound but it's tiring on ... the lips. 

I've been starting to listen to some good clarinet music before bed. Somewhere I'd read about how Artie Shaw's first piece that got any notice was "Streamliner" so I listened to that and it must have really been something at the time. I can't find anywhere that says Shaw ever took lessons, too. 

The main thing is to practice every day. I figure I've got a year and 9 months to get good. Because after that stretch of time I'm moving back to Hawaii or ... going somewhere. In any case it's when I plan to stop working for Ken.  

I was up through the night, practicing and watching the movie "Seabiscuit" which sounds like a Spongebob cuss word haha. Pretty decent movie, and everyone raves about the book it's based on so I'll have to look for that. 

I had a lot of small things all ready to go to the post office so when I got up, around 4:30 in the afternoon, all I had to do was have my "morning" coffee and some nuts and seeds and take off. It had dried up pretty well although now it's cold. 

I dropped things off at the post office and it was dead. There was one guy doing something and his little kid, who kept staring at me as I brought stuff in, in a big green plastic tub, and figured out that the kid, before he turned his attention to me, had been fiddling with the inner one of the two automatic doors, which wasn't working. It was pushed partway open, and I pushed it the rest of the way open to make it easier for the next person coming in. 

I went over to 99 Ranch and it was dead. I just got a couple of things, some dish soap and a new type of ramen to try. 

Done there, I went straight back here and put things away and left the trailer here, and took off again. I locked the bike at H Mart, went in and got ... just a small bag of potato chips it turns out, although I also got a free bag of these fish cake chips which were their freebee for today. 

I walked over to Sprouts, which was ... dead. Everyone's just done with the weekend and the rain, and other than the traffic which was quite heavy, stores were all very quiet. I got two T-shirts and a package of underwear at Ross, and even Ross isn't giving out plastic bags any more. Instead of a huge Ross plastic bag I got a huge Ross paper bag. 

I then went to Sprouts and got some vitamins and the gal at checkout had me enter my phone number for "The discount, this is the last day". I'm sure I don't have my number filed with them so I used good old 8675309 but I messed up by not putting the local area code first, but the gal didn't feel like correcting it and just gave me the discount so I saved $5 which is kind of cool. 

I walked back over to H Mart and made sure to check next to the closed store next to the Starbucks, expecting to see the pallet of protein drinks long gone. Instead half of 'em are still there, and also an interesting framework for dispensing drinks or something. And a guy I'm gonna call D.L.

D.L. of course for Diabetes Legs, or Leg, anyway, as one of his looks about ready to rot off. Probably both, but since he gets around by bike he keeps his pants leg rolled up on just one side and that's bad enough to look at. 

We talked about stuff, the protein drinks still being here, and what kind of pumps might be in the motor/pump units on the rack thing, and how late Sprouts is open. The guy was worried they close at nine, but I called after him as he rode off that they close at 10. He has a sleeping bag and some extra clothes tied down on his bike because it has been getting cold at night but he's so overweight the cold is probably a relief. 

I got back here and put things away part 2. I put on one of the T-shirts right away, the heavy plain grey one, and the lighter one will be nice in the summer.  The lighter one's got a Jurassic Park design on it, in the real world that was filmed in the Kualoa Valley, the very same valley I used to go past all the time on the bus when we lived in Waikane, a valley that was a no-go area in the 70s. I guess one can take tours there now and if I get back there I'll have to take a tour. 

At least I got to go to Sacred Falls several times as a kid, and it's really a no-go now since a rock fall killed 8 people and while it was a forbidden place to go in the 70s it wasn't really enforced. It is now. Of course I've done the Haiku Stairs, and between that paddling out to Chinaman's Hat and bugging the fairy terns I guess I've done the requisite amount of illegal things back home. 

 

 

Basic Cultural Assumptions

 I listed some things last night and eventually got around to some practicing. Apparently I'm not supposed to play one reed more than an hour, so I played one for almost and hour then switched to another one. Fortunately the little reed holder I have holds two reeds so it's easy to play one, then clean it and put it away and get out the other. 

This is the time of year when everyone withdraws and gets through the dark, rainy weather on their own, and might see each other again in April. I've got a bunch of things ready to pack and ship but there's a big rain storm parked over this area according to the radar map and it may or may not have moved on in time for me to go to the post office etc. 

Of course cold/wet weather is only one of many reasons for people to withdraw from each other. I've mentioned that this area, the San Francisco Bay Area, is one of those "You're not here to make friends; you're here to work" places. That's the standard mantra of any US work site, and here it applies to all 24 hours of the day. 

Since the US is a Calvinist country, the basic assumptions are far different than most places. And by "most places" I mean not only the "West" but places all over, Asia, Africa, hell even among the Eskimos. 

Since according to Calvinism, everyone's on their own as to whether they get to Christian Heaven, and even then, it's up to their God and not anything the individual has any power over, helping anyone else is foolish and wasteful. You're one of the Elect or you're not. How do you tell who's one of the Elect? That's easy - they're rich. And the cursed? They're poor, of course. 

So the basic cultural assumption whether you're an African cattle herder or an Eskimo fisherman or a French person whose family's been Catholic since the Roman Empire, is that if a family member could use a hand, you help them. The family member in need, will get back on their feet and if your positions are reversed, will be able to help you. 

This is not so in the US. Kids are thrown out of the house by age 18, and in most cases there's no college or trade school fund and in most cases the kid who's been thrown out may have to do shitty work no one else wants to do, like clean animal kennels, and live in a tiny room but they are already living better because their pay check is their own and they can eat food, as much as they want, every day. (Yes this was my situation.) 

If anyone, family or close friend (this last a stretch since Americanism pretty largely prevents having close friends) is in need, you tell them to go fuck themselves as the Americanism goes, and if you can you make their situation worse. It's good for them, is the reasoning. 

This is why, as I kept saying to Ken and his family years ago, well before 2016, that I wish I'd known what I know now and when I was young and able to do a lot of work, I'd gone to France as a "wetback" and put in my time picking grapes or whatever, behaved myself, and become a French citizen. Because Calvinism never got far in France, they actually give a shit for each other, and this is why when American style class warfare is tried against the common people there, they fight back. 

Now Americans, being good Calvinists, don't know they're Calvinists. Their hyper-individualism and psychopathy is baked into the culture. It's like those unspoken rules that being unspoken, are more rigidly followed than rules that are spelled out. It's considered natural here that everyone's in a mutual "Fuck You" to everyone else. 

The only way out of this is to escape the Anglosphere because the UK, Australia and New Zealand, Canada are a little better but not much better. It's only from reading a lot online that I know that the UK is considered sort of the Florida of Europe. New Zealand is more car-centric and has more cars per capita than the US does and that has to have taken some real effort to accomplish. "Only slightly less America" is not a goal to strive for. 

It *is* a shade less impersonal and psychopathic back in Hawaii, if only because it's about 2/3rds Asian. It's still part of the USA but might be a more survivable part.  

Got the flute

 Yesterday, I stayed up all night again, packed things to take to FedEx (their Economy service just hands the packages off to the post office, and occasionally is actually a little bit cheaper) then headed right over to Goodwill and yep, the flute was still there. The North Face fleece wasn't so I can't win 'em all, but the flute was and for $33 it was mine. 

It's in one of those hideous Bundy cases so I'll buy a modern case for it or I could keep it in the Yamaha case I have, put the Yamaha flute in the awful case, and sell the Yamaha telling the customer "sorry I don't have the original case" haha. I can "flip" the Yamaha for several times what the Bundy cost, and I love the look of the Bundy, with its nice thick silver plating, which backs up the story of "It's my old high school flute". 

In fact I need to sell off a lot of flute stuff, to get money back out of it and also as part of simplifying my possessions. If I have to "grab and go" now, it will come down to throwing everything into many boxes and taking them over to the storage place, then staying in a hotel while I sort things, sell everything off I can, and arrange a plane ticket back to Hawaii or a place to rent here. 

Yes, moving back to Hawaii is not guaranteed. Yes I miss the place. But I also know that I might well go fishing once, shell-picking once, go around and see all the places I lived growing up and as a young adult, and decide that's enough. Moving back to Hawaii to devote myself to the shakuhachi makes a lot of sense, but since I'm not going to bother with that any more, Hawaii has no advantages over anywhere else, and quite a few disadvantages.  So I'd say it's 50/50 right now if I'm to go back there. 

 

 

My solution

 My solution to the shipping + getting to the bank situation was, since it was going to start raining again in the afternoon, to stay up all night, pack everything and I mean everything, even a last-minute sale of some capacitors, and take things to the post office and FedEx right after they opened. 

It was 28 things, although about 10 of them were all in one package. So it was a good healthy load of things and this is why I wanted to get them out so much; not only did some things have to go out and still might be chalked up as late in my Ebay stats, but I like to have everything go out before the weekend.

I got back here and cleaned up and headed out again for the bank. I stopped at Nijiya and treated myself to one of my favorite bento, grilled pieces of salmon belly skin and all, with salmon eggs, on rice. Yum! 

I went to the bank and their math and my math agreed to the penny so that's nice. I had a nice talk with the guy there too. He's working for the bank because .... something like his wife is going to school in this area and they commute from kind of far away so he goes along too and works a job, this job, at the bank. At least that's my understanding. 

I went over to Whole Foods and got some macadamia nuts (1 oz. is part of my breakfast with coffee) and then rode over to the big Goodwill on San Carlos. I didn't buy anything but maybe should have bought this one North Face fleece. They had a nice Bundy, I think, flute for $33 that might be something that could be resold for a profit but I have flutes here I want to sell. 

Now the main part of my plan: I walked down to the restaurant supply place and bought a box of 200 plastic bags of the type the stores up until very recently *were* supplying with one's groceries, but now everyone's going over to paper bags. Even Nijiya and Walmart. So for less than $20 I got 200 bags, and it's only because the box was so heavy that I didn't buy two boxes. I was able to carry the box in one of the Whole Foods cloth bags I keep on the bike, so it was no problem. 

I need to go by there more often, not only to stock up on those bags (ideally I want two more boxes, giving me enough to get through the next year and a half, the time I anticipate I'll here working for Ken before I leave) and also to check the musical instruments there at Goodwill. I'm thinking I really should have bought that Bundy flute, because I looked it over and either the silver plating was *very* thick, or maybe it had silver plating over "German silver" which is how Yamaha student flutes are made, or it was actually one of the solid silver models. 

In any case it was a good use of the half-day that's not rainy and on my way back after picking up a handful of bubble mailers at the Amazon place and picking up a chashu don bowl for later, I got back here. 

I got the side-eye from one of the guys, a new guy probably, as I went in here with the bike. I'm smart enough - usually - to not leave anything out there and that was reinforced by, a couple of weeks ago, seeing a guy from next door who has a nice car, looking at my bike and trailer out front as I was bringing things in, like he'd like to abscond with it. "If I only had a van, I could make this disappear" I could almost hear him thinking. Because he has a nice car - actual poor people will steal but not nearly as often as the more wealthy, who got to be more wealthy by stealing in various forms. 

I went right to sleep and woke up at 11PM. It had been 3 in the afternoon so that makes sense. 

I turned on the radio like I do every time when I wake up, and apparently we're committing our Guernica, in Venezuela. We're bombing Caracas, which is in anyone's book an act of war. Thank goodness for the BBC which they play on NPR, because I doubt our own news sources would report on it. 

 

New Year's Day

 I got some good practice in last night and went ahead one more page in the band book. Using a number 2 reed is a HUGE difference from the 1.5's and I probably could have gone with 2's right from the start. After all, my trumpet experience has to factor in somehow. Awareness of what my mouth cavity is doing, for instance. 

I'll be ready for busking when I've got, say, ten good songs under my belt. And not junk like Amazing Grace but fairly good ones like Summertime and jazzy things like that.  

It actually wasn't *too* rainy today in that when I woke up around 4 in the afternoon, it wasn't raining. And it's set to be clear the rest of the night but of course it's the 1st of the new year so nothing's open. 

My beloved Asian markets might be open on Christmas Day but New Year's is a whole different thing. New Year's is much more important and some places ONLY close on this day. Interestingly, here on the mainland, there's not just "American New Year" and "Chinese New Year" but also Tet, which is... Vietnamese New Year I guess. 

Chinese New Year was always the best one back home, with some streets having actual drifts of red paper confetti from all the firecrackers and the air still smelling of black powder.  People today complain about fireworks in Hawaii but .... they're wimps. If it weren't rainy and since I'm not ready for clarinet busking yet, I'd probably have gone over to Century Center Plaza I think it's called, over in the Vietnamese part of town, just to see what's going on. Hopefully tons of firecrackers. 

 

New Year's Eve

 Surprise surprise Ken came by at about 8:30 tonight, hung out a bit, and wrote out my check for this week and last week. So I can deposit it in the bank on Friday if I want to. 

 It's raining, has been raining for a day now, and is predicted to be raining right through the weekend. Partially due to the rain, I'd slept through the day until something like 5 or 7 or something. 

Tomorrow's New Year's Day so of course nothing at all will be going on, with the rain. I have packages that *have* to go out on Friday, the 2nd, though.  So I'm thinking my game plan will be to take them to the big post office because it's closest to me, then if it's raining much I could continue on to Capitol and get on the light rail and take that to St. James where I can take a short ride to the bank, to deposit my check.