Did I mention that I burned the top knuckle of my finger? It was quite an accident. I was reading in bed, and I got drowsy, reached back to shut the light and pressed my knuckle against the lightbulb. Normally that would just hurt, but this was a high intensity bulb, so I sizzled off my skin against it. So that hurt.

Almost every morning I pass the same older Chinese lady, out for her morning constitutional. Then I pass a park, where there is a parade of people, mostly Chinese, maybe twelve of them in a row all walking in formation. It is some kind of excercise class, and everyone is quietly saying "hut-hut-hut" over and over, lifting up their arms and snapping their wrists upsidown, like a military walk where you check your watch, if your watch was on the underside of your arm. Which is kind of amusing to watch, even though I'm sure they pity me for my slouchy posture as they are probably doing some high level esoteric martial practice.

The other day I had a juice smoothy, which is a big business around here. There isn't much actual juice in it, its mostly ice, but they put all kinds of stuff in, like bee pollen, ginseng, protien, vitamin boost, antioxidents, chromium picolonate, cartenoids and on and on. Most of which I'm pretty sure you are better off getting from regular food, and lord only knows what people are doing to their livers and kidneys dosing on that stuff. But I had one, and it caused me to lay awake in bed for several hours, twitching.

Speaking of laying awake, we had a power outage last night, which surprised me. Specifically what surprised me was that my alarm clock, which is brand new, had a twelve volt battery in it, designed specifically to back up the main power in case of a blackout, but it didn't work. So I woke up in the dark, and the alarm clock was out, as was the radio. I wondered briefly if the North Koreans, or someone, had sent over a missle and WWIII had begun and this is what it was like. I looked out the window, but no one was on the street, and of course my phone was dead, since it's cordless. So I decided to take a shower, since I figured even if I was about to start the symptoms of radiation sickness, I might as well use up whatever hot water was left in the tank. As it turned out, the mystery was solved as soon as I went outside. There was think white smoke coming out of a manhole cover with some public service workers panicking. So some electrical fire must have knocked out service. Even the traffic lights were out. So there were cops out with road flares, directing traffic.