4 Days Gone

Time To Clean, Organize, Simplify

Here it is Tuesday morning, and I finally woke up as the sun was rising, let Harold the cat in, and am starting my day.

The extra few hours that Harold had to wait made him at least hungry enough to eat some of the $1.79 Whole Foods organic, grain free, grass fed cat food that I often bought just so I could get cash back off my card.

Harold has become extra finicky about eating; turning his nose up at foods that used to be his favorites. I might have spoiled him with the 90 cent Fancy Feast cans that I started to get him.

I am especially annoyed by how he will meow at his dish until I put some food in it, but then will immediately want to go outside, without eating any of it. It's like he wants to know that there will be food waiting for him here, for when he comes back in. He also likes to use his litter box right before going outside; which I also don't understand.

The new bike, an Electra Cruiser is just too slow in its top end. 

Yesterday I took a fairly long ride on it, and found myself wanting to shift up to a higher gear, which isn't there. I wound up going about 12 miles per hour so that the pedals wouldn't be flying too fast. 

I need to see if I can work something out with the bike shop where I could give them the Electra back, and maybe they could sell it as a "slightly used" one, and I could ride off on a State brand one, after maybe giving them another 200 bucks.

I fell off the wagon, or whatever the phrase is, after posting last Friday about how well I was doing. Pride coming before the fall, again.

I spent 4 days over which I still had alcohol left from the night before, when I woke up in the mornings, and wound up picking up where I had left off. This led to some questionable food choices, and at least one box of toaster pastries were consumed in the middle of one of the nights. This, by a guy who didn't eat any sugar for something like 40 years.

The straw that broke the camels back, if that's the phrase, was when I toted a hamper full of clothes to the laundry room and then realized that I forgot to bring detergent and ammonia. No problem, I started the machine and figured I would be right back before the tub was full and would add the soap and clothes. But, I got back to the apartment and got distracted by something on the computer, and the bottle of 1800 tequila next to it, and forgot all about the laundry.

So, the machine ran its cycle empty. Then, after I returned with the soap and took more money off my laundry card to run it; this left me without enough balance to dry the clothes. I would have had to go to a store and get a 5 dollar bill -the smallest that the laundry card machine takes. I was just too drunk and lazy at that point, so I sat the wet clothes in the hamper back in my apartment, thinking that I would get to them before they got mildew-y.

That didn't work out, because the next day, I went out on a ride that started with a stop at the Shell, for a home made margarita, made with Minute Maid lemonade, spiked with 1800 tequila. Then I rode to the grocery store, where I did remember to break a 20 so I could use the laundry machine, but after riding back towards home and running into a guy selling weed, I spent the 5 dollar bill, not thinking of the laundry.

So, today, the cleanup starts all over. I just put the same mildew-y smelling clothes back in the wash, and have gotten back to cleaning the apartment out; simplifying things, by throwing away things that have sat untouched for a long time. I'm putting all my CD's onto USB sticks so that I can donate them to the recreation room, where there are also book shelves that will take all the books that I have already read, or have read all I am going to, out of them.

I hear recordings of groups that might have only had an acoustic guitar and a set of bongos and maybe some kind of bass ukulele and a tambourine, and it makes me feel like I have too many instruments and digital effects at my disposal; and makes me want to work on recordings that are much more basic.

The time that has elapsed since the Snowball microphone crapped out on me, I intended to use to put together a library of beats, done using the digital instruments that come with the Musescore application that I have. There is every instrument of the standard orchestra available in that app, plus a bunch of "ethnic" instruments, which would now probably have to be re-labeled "world" instruments, so as to not be racist.

Part of me wishes that I had just the turntable and one album, which I would play every morning, maybe even synchronizing some chores to them; washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen during side one, and then after flipping the record over, maybe cleaning Harold's area up, type of thing.

And then learning its songs on the guitar so I could do another thing, once I start busking again, which would be to play an album all the way through, in its entirety, type of thing. I even thought about making little placards with the picture of the front of the album and a "now playing" thing on it. Something like "After The Gold Rush," by Neil Young would be a good candidate for this; and as the only album owned by a guy who has just a turntable and one album, one could do worse...

I donated the jigsaw puzzles that I will never put together to the recreation room yesterday. They are the cheaper quality ones that I was buying before I discovered Ravensburger quality puzzles, that might be 24 dollars (compared to $3.99) but have thick solid pieces that snap together definitively.

It is raining cats and dogs outside right now...