You Gotta Hand It To Me

• New Schedule Working?
• $22 Saturday Working 2 Hours

I am blogging in the morning in my tye dyed shirt which I had handed to me by a young lady while busking about 3 weeks ago, now.

I played last night and took home 22 bucks after having waited out a heavy rainstorm and only gotten on the trolley thinking that I would, at the minimum, be in the area of Rouses Market when my food stamp card loaded up at midnight; and, at the most, running into a bit of weed and making some money busking.

The days leading up to the charging day had flown by. I had kind of been fasting on juice based drinks or very little food, with meals few and far between.

I really don't have the stomach for food when playing, plus it gums up a harmonica pretty fast, a chunk of hamburg, but there have been a couple of occasions when I came back to earth after jamming away to see that someone had put a Styrofoam container upon my guitar case. These I always put in my backpack, knowing that hunger can come with a vengeance, especially when marijuana is involved.

The last, more notable one was about a week ago. I let the Styrofoam container sit there for about my last hour of playing, and then opened it, after I had packed my stuff up.

I had probably subsisted on a diet of coffee and Arizona Energy drinks the whole 24 hours leading up to the mystery person leaving the food; and I opened it to espy one large piece of pork attached to a bone which seemed the shape of a pork "chop," but was very much larger; either from a jumbo pig, or a different cut than I am familiar with. I am not very familiar with pork because I almost never get it, as I have just never liked the taste of it, compared to something like lamb, and that is a darned shame, because it is a cheap meat; in the chicken class.

This piece of pork, however, was in a white Styrofoam and was thus most likely from Irene's Restaurant, which is famous and is probably the only white Styrofoam using restaurant within a half mile of the Lilly Pad, being just about a block away.

Pork Sleuth, I

Plus, if the person who handed it to me had left whatever restaurant she dined at with the intention of giving it to some needy looking perhaps person, then she would have given it away long before getting to me if she had been at one of the more distant establishments that use white Styrofoam containers.
If she had eaten at one of them and then had carried what turned out to be pork the whole half mile or so to the Lilly Pad without having given it away to any of the 26 needy looking people that she surely would have crossed paths with, then that would indicate that she wanted to keep it and eat it later, and in that case, she probably would have thrown me a couple dollars in lieu of the food; unless she was broke.

So, I think it came from the famous multi star restaurant. I took one bite to chew on as I made my way back to the trolley. Irene's had managed to make a food that I don't really like taste pretty good. There was a kind of sauce in the container, which was greenish brown and had a heavenly flavor with cumin being well represented in the mix.

After I got home, I ate the rest of it, which fell easily off the bone. Harold the cat even ate the bits that I gave him.

The next day, I really felt great. I felt like the tin man after he has gotten oiled.

Last night, my delinquency came back to bite me; but I bit back.

I broke a string, and realized that I had no spares. During the boom days of the Jazzfest, I was changing strings so frequently that they hadn't been breaking.

Now, in these lean times I went out with 7 day old strings without having had the foresight to pack some of my extra used ones in my pack.

I continued to play, minus the string and had minimal trouble sounding good, and got one 10 dollar tip after a particularly ripping solo.

Mohamad Ali's recent death came to mind after I had started playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," when I noticed that I had chosen an appropriate song for the occasion.

In my mind, I was actually intending it to be a tribute (for lack of a better word) to him; and, it helped me to play a pretty ripping harmonica solo. On the harmonica with a plugged up reed. Mohamad Ali was very headstrong in his beliefs; and I had to believe that I could sound good with a missing string and a plugged up harmonica.

I'm going to have to play with that rig at least one more time, as I don't have enough money for a new harmonica and I am not willing to dip into my 17.5% jar which is a saving fund for a new laptop.

Back To Drawing Board On Drawing Baths

The water in my apartment comes out of the bath faucet scalding hot, unless its dial is positioned about 95% of the way towards "cold." There is a sweet spot there where little more than a trickle of water of a "perfect" temperature comes out that will fill the tub in about 23 minutes.

That is a long time to be standing around watching a tub fill. So, I set my microwave timer and busy myself with other things while it is filling.

This is still not a reliable method because sometimes the hot water starts to "run out" during the filling, and the result is a bath that is too cold. [See "Goldilocks And The Three Bears," for more on that.]

So, tonight, I tried freezing a gallon jug of water, to be used as a temperature attenuator. I then filled the tub with scalding hot water in just 9 minutes by setting the dial half way between "hot" and "cold." I added the frozen jug of water, which floated.

10 minutes later, after all the ice in the jug had melted, there was hardly a perceptible difference in the temperature of the water. I couldn't figure it out.

I know that, for the ice to have melted that x amount of energy had to have been required to change its state from solid to liquid, but I had expected that such a big chunk of ice would only take a few minutes to cool the water to a point where I could get in it without screaming.

It's back to the drawing board on drawing baths. I might get a thermometer that registers in that range and use it to manually make the water 103 or 104 degrees...(fahrenheit)