Technical Difficulties

But first, another fitful sleepless night.

Spook was very fascinated with the shower after I got out:

Did not really have to be anywhere, but did need to have my nails done. I went at about 11, waited, but the were way busy, and asked me to come back at 1:30. Instead of going back to the mobile home park and checking out the flea market, I went to Baylands park, sat at a picnic table and read. A little chilly from the breeze, but a nice day to be outside.

Back to the nails place, they were even busier. I said I'd come back tomorrow and headed to Target. On the shopping list was pomade (decided to let my hair grow, but not with an Einstein do), a small spray bottle for cooking oil, and cat treat sticks. Lactose free milk if they had any.

Got three pomades: Murray's (my dad's name, and it was invented when he was 2), Axe and Old Spice (mild and matte versions for both).
Home, tried them all, Murray's is thick and way too solid. Old Spice & Axe are about the same, creamy white almost a liquid. I tried Old Spice first, will do Axe tomorrow. After a day, the verdict is I need to use a wee bit more.

The spray bottle was sand hannitizer, 2 oz., easy to wash out and fill with peanut oil. Nice wide spray for when I need to oil bamboo steamers and omelet pans.

The lactose free 2% was there, but at $3.75 I only got one half gallon. The Starbucks in Target was closed, sign says they will be renovating the place for a few months.

Drove a few blocks to the underground garage, parked, went upstairs and played Ingress. One of the portals is the plaque on the front of the post office declaring its opening date & officials, but the metal plate is now missing! Ingress still thinks it's a portal, and the PO is a separate one. Walked around, pretty much my usual route when I go to Starbucks, but not stopping there. Instead bought a couple of chocolate covered cream puffs at Prolific Oven.

Home, in the mailbox was an envelope with my new passport card and another larger one with my old passport, punched with holes through the code line at the bottom. Added those to the collection, and while I was in that fireproof box I unrolled the wad of Thai currency, uncurled each bill, put them in order (there mostly were already) and put them in an envelope. > 5k Baht! I think I have more in another box. And wrapped inside them was 10 100-Yuan bills from China. I'm not sure which China. There was a foreign exchange receipt, but it's all in Chinese.

Did a load of whites today, including my favorite bath towel, which somehow had acquired small streaks of blood. Sometimes Spook scratches me in my sleep, and I don't feel it. Or it could have been from weeding the roses.

Speaking of which, the roses are blooming way better than expected, so are the poppies. Those and the BFs are attracting all kinds of bees, so my work is a success. The carport garden also has several bee-friendly plants. This all amazes me because before now, any plant I bought would shrivel up and die as soon as I touched it. In the kitchen nook I have basil and tiny milkweed saplings - still too small to plant outside.



Sunnyvale is doing Fiddler again, it was the first show I did with them, in '94. It is being directed by the guy who music directed Little Shop of Horrors, who did a lot to help me with that part when the director and choreagrivator failed. There's a serious WTF, the show plays during Jewish New Years (Kol Nidre night is dark, but not Rosh Hashana). It took 20 minutes to full out the application, which includes three signatures in a writing box, impossible to do anything legible without a touch screen.

I managed to get a slot on the first night at 9 pm, a Monday. They are holding auditions at the worst rehearsal space in the Bay Area, it's a warehouse space off 101 in San Jose. We rehearsed there for Anything Goes which performed in Saratoga, a long way away. It's also a long way from Sunnyvale. Apparently Sunnyvale theater is being renovated. But the city has lots of other spaces which would have been more convenient. Oh well.

My Helsinki trip is early enough in the rehearsal process that I don't think it will be an issue.

So as I was printing the second page of my theater resume, which is all black text, the printer refused to continue because it was out of yellow, magenta and cyan. It had 3/4 of a tank of black. I will be writing Epson a nastygram. Had to drive to Fry's to get new ones. I bought two, one official and one "green" brand which said it would not void the Epson warranty. Put the green ones in, and had to tell the printer and the software that yes, I want to risk using non-Epson ink. Gag me. 

There's a meme going around the FB theater community, which too many people have taken as a point of contention, instead of just a personal opinion, not to be argued with. This is mine:
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No lunch, made do with Korean BBQ flavored beef jerkey from Target. Dinner was Marie C chicken.

Plans for tomorrow:
Print out the recipe for Khao Mook Gai and at least try to mix and grind the dry spices.
Before coffee with Janice, go to my old nail place in MV

A Day Not As Wasted As It Could Have Been

Went to sleep about 2 am, woke up a couple of times before 7:30, then slept till 9:30. Spook crawled over me then jumped off the bed, a hint she wanted treats. Breakfast was begun by biting the head off a Lind hollow dark chocolate bunny. I shot up extra "rapid" insulin for that, and because I had forgotten to take my bedtime meds, including the "regular" insulin and my Hgl was 240.

My main plan for the day was to make Kao Mook Gai, and at least get the spice mixture done
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before meeting Janice for coffee. But I got distracted by Dreamwidth's counterintuitive settings for seeing friends' posts in my reading pane. And there were a lot of comments to make on Facebook. Over there I am annoyed that people who are otherwise rational choose to demonize a politician, hating everything he/she/it does or says. And almost as annoying is doing the opposite to a politician/public figure who does something they liked.

Today's case in point is a meme showing that Trump visited golf courses a lot early in his term, while Obama, Bush II and Clinton did not. The numbers are true, but the other three didn't own golf courses. Bush II was famous for the number of vacation days he took prior to 9/11. Obama's vacations to Hawaii were vastly more expensive. Clinton took 174 vacation days during his time in office, including his family's four-day vacation to the Caribbean in 1997 during which he played golf. And he preferred to play at other things.

Plan A was delayed again when I went OCD and built a spreadsheet to list all the ingredients needed for Kao Mok Gai and calculating double, triple and quadruple amounts, because I wanted to make 4x as much of the spice mix and 2 servings of the marinated chicken:
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That was a good thing, I was able to make a quadruple dose of the spice mix before 3 pm

Plan A included getting a manicure at Capri Nail Spa, my old haunt, in Mountain View at around 3. I arrived there at 3:15, but it was closed for some obscure cult ceremony. Too much hassle to drive all the way back home, when coffee date was about a mile away, so I went to Starbucks, which was a zoo. Three separate Asian groups had stripped most of the chairs from the long tables and piled them around the two small tables in the back and a couple of tiny tables in the front. I found a chair to move to one of the abandoned tables and parked there. That was about 3:30. By the time Janice arrived at 5, the place was almost empty, and I had snagged one of the small tables for us 15 minutes before.

Not a lot of news, except the price of a mud bath in Calistoga has become too high to justify.

Home, OCD set in, and I made a double batch of the marinade. It needed both the food processor and blender, because my mortar is too small, and there was a bit of waste because I couldn't find my regular or small spatulas, the big one I did find couldn't get into the nooks and crannies in the blender. And I made another 4x batch of the spice mix, this time roasting the spices per the recipe. The kitchen smells amazing.

While dinner was microwaving, I found snap closures for all the spices, except for the ones which needed to be in ziplock bags. Put those all away. Put the spice mix in a storage tub in the freezer and the marinade paste in a larger tub in the fridge. I had planned on marinating the chicken overnight, but decided the packets of dark meat I'd defrosted wouldn't work as well as the leg&thigh parts still in the freezer. Those need to defrost overnight.

And I also need more shallots and probably more rice. And while I can use chicken bullion, it's very salty so I also need salt-free chicken stock:
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Dinner was Boston Market beef & noodles with the second cream puff for dessert.

Delivered in the morning was another distraction, the blood glucose meter which has bluetooth and pairs with the cell phone app. The app also connects online with the readings from the plug-in meter.

Delivered before coffee time was some USB-C stuff. Chargers with C-to-C cables and a car charger with a built in C cable and a slot for an A connector. The new Huawei phone has a C connector.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Check email - I may need to drive over to the big building for my next assignment, and parking is a mess after 9:30.
Stop in at Grocery Outlet for the missing ingredients
Marinate the chicken
Maybe go to BASFA after traffic has died down.