2004-03-22-0229Z
Kept nodding out at Kinko's as it got towards morning today, so about 7 or so
I went out and looked for a place nearby to catch a few Z's. There was a
mist falling, as there had been for the past few mornings, so I opted for
a bus stop bench that had a roof over it; not long afterwards, or so it
seemed, a cop was waking me up. This was a nice cop, as cops go; actually
I've been pretty lucky with them the past few days. Her name is Michelle;
blonde, pretty, told me these people in the half-million-dollar condos
behind me complain about people sitting in their bus shelters. So after the
usual questions and radio in to check my record, I was on my way. I felt
pretty well rested anyway, after probably an hour at most of sleep. And, some
10 hours later, I'm still hanging in there, but that might not last much
longer.
Well, after my little date with Michelle, I went to Starbucks and got my
first dose of caffeine. Those beers at Yard House last night were a mistake;
my stomach was acidic, and the coffee and scone just made it worse. I knew
right then I had to get back on the Neanderthin diet for a while. Went to
the grocery store and got some lamb (beef and lamb cost about the same here,
so why not?) and tried my solar cooker for the first time. By about 4PM
today, I figured the cloud cover was bad enough that I wasn't going to get
it cooked any better, and ate what I could of the almost-raw meat. I had
a couple of largeish Serrano peppers with it, but I'm still in danger of
parasites and bacteria; I really overloaded my immune system. It doesn't
mean the solar oven is a bad design, just that there wasn't enough sun for
enough hours today. I'll give it another chance someday soon probably.
If I survive today's experiment. Went from Mission Valley to Old
Town by the Hotel Circle route, after crossing on one of the footpaths
under overpasses from Hazard Center to Fashion Valley Mall. There were
a couple of barberry bushes and some nopal; sliced off and dethorned
a node of the latter, and ate it on the way to this Starbucks on Sports Arena
Boulevard. The sun just went down, my stomach is still pretty bad, and I
didn't make a whole lot of progress programming today; but yesterday I solved
the major remaining problem with the program, by adding an event handler
for mouse events to the table. What's left to do is mostly cosmetic. Hope
my customer will be happy with it, my momentum is running out.
The Kinko's this afternoon didn't seem to have any more network access, or
maybe the port on my laptop is hosed. They have a sign that the laptop
workstations there do not have network access, so the fact that it
worked for the past two days or so was an anomaly. Anyway, no point in staying
there tonight without net access unless I think I can stay awake programming,
which I doubt. So I'll probably spend the night wandering instead. I want
to head up the coast to the Bank of Internet office tomorrow, to deposit some
of this big brick of $20's in my pocket. This is the money I got
from the anticipated sale of the house. I didn't consider myself entitled
to any of that, but she did, so I wasn't going to fight it. Anyway, my pocket
is probably the safest place for it, but I'm going to put some online for
purchases of items on the web.
I have a strange sense of ethics (or lack thereof) when deciding whether or
not to use publicly-available resources. I call it the Bill Gates test.
You may have heard of Gates, he's arguably one of the richest men in history.
Well, anyway, the test is: if Bill Gates would be entitled to it, so am I.
Anything that's only available to poor people, or certified crazy people,
or disabled people, is not for me.
Now when it comes to picking fruit off people's trees: if it's reachable from
the sidewalk, I don't have many qualms about it. If I have to go on their
land to get it, I think twice. I won't jump a fence or disrespect a No
Trespassing sign though. Not yet anyway. And if anybody's watching, I tend
to pass it up. As I said, it's a strange sense of ethics, partly based on
principles, and partly based on fear.
Well, let's see if I can finish these silly widgets for this java program
before I get too sleepy...
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