Delivering the drawings III
I went over to the other side of the channel on Friday morning. He had said he would not be back until the 18th but it was worth a check. He was in. There were a lot of people waiting to see him. I grabbed a seat figuring to give him a chance to tell me what he expected of me or when I should come and see him. He kinda wheeled on me and said he couldn’t talk now as though I was being a pest or something. I don’t know. I cannot read his mind and I did leave him a phone number in a note under the door when he was ill so I guess he can ring me. I think I would be foolish to expect the drawings to be hung.
The Halekulani library was open so I went over and grabbed some books, Then I went to St Vinnies and grabbed a second-hand book as well. It is in good condition and I will offer it to the library for others to read when I have finished it. I cannot remember if they take books on that basis. I keep forgetting to do everything I need to do up the street in one sweep and it is tiring making more trips. There was one for the pharmacist and another to the supermarket for some things. By midday I was too weary to do much more and feeling very uncomfortable. I had intended to work on a new shell drawing but I must have lay my head down as I woke several hours later. Exhaustion is becoming a factor in every day now and there has not been a day lately when I have not just drifted into sleep or spent hours in a state of disconnect. My body desperately wants to sleep for hours in the morning and I guess I have to give in as much as I can. This is the beginning of the slide into chronic-fatigue and general collapse that makes me so fearful of the outcome if I have to include a move to a new address or even onto the street. There is a lot of depression and loneliness now. I wasn’t actually feeling lonely before. The solitude was nice but now that things have gone to hell I seem to need someone to talk to. I enjoy chatting with Brendan and Dave. They are a couple of locals but I guess that is not much when the world feels this kinda heavy. Both of those guys have told me they would do what they could to help me if I ended up on the streets. Nice of them and it makes a difference to hear that.
My community worker and I went over to pick up the drawings I was having framed but the little line border on the mat-board around the image was too thick and it had to go back. They are really good at the shop and insisted I let them fix the mistake. It was not an unusual mistake to make. Very few people want the thinner borders and it would not be normal for them to look for it in the instructions. I gave them another picture from that series to frame. They did a good job and I was disappointed about the border. I almost accepted it but it is one of three and I really want the thinner border to give a feeling of air around the ink marks. I am hoping they did not make the border thicker because I am wrong and it will look like shit in its thin configuration. I am disappointed to see that after a month that has totally tested my body and health I have not had one outcome that advanced me a millimetre yet. There was just the stay of execution at the tribunal.
I am still working on building a “storm box”. That is a box of emergency stuff I can just chuck into the backpack if I wake up one night and find the place has flooded. The floods came up almost this far during the Pasha Bulker episode and we were cut off from shops and electricity for several days. The same kind of thing has happened during a couple of bushfire events. There are other things like boxes of candles for power outages but the box is important in its own way.
The “storm box” is about the size of one of those large loaves of bread and the lid clips shut. I have built up to about six days worth of almost all of the meds. I think that is about as much as I can justify taking out of the normal usage patterns. I have just sent away for another folding knife with a sheath. The one I have is quite a good brand but the blade is very thick and I can imagine there are some jobs it will not do. If the new one sharpens up alright it should be a better choice for an emergency blade. I eschewed a simple sheath knife knife of the hunting kind as during an emergency there are possibly police everywhere and they like to charge people for carrying stuff like sheath knives. There are batteries and I am struggling to get enough to keep the torches running for the six days. It will happen, it is just expensive. There is a small radio and there were two torches but one was a generator unit I bought from Coles supermarket and it died the first time I used it. The other is just a little AA one and I need some better even to keep around the house. There is also some emergency paperwork like birth certificates and things. My computer is backed up onto a tiny external hard-drive every month and that is then wrapped back into waterproof layers and placed in the box as well. It is also the thing to grab in a house fire. That and the wallet. I do not think it is paranoid to have something like this around. So far since I came here we have had a bunch of blackouts and I am regretting not buying a better radio and some kind of battery television video. My computer is a desktop as well so this house is quiet during blackouts. Anyway. The “storm box” is just a little project I work on when I think of it. If you need meds or have someone you look after who needs them it is probably a good idea to have some kind of fall back in case of natural disasters. Not having medicationss, of all things, can cause a simple local event to become fatal.