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Yesterday afternoon, I did about five hours’ worth of errands:

• Before setting forth, I made a couple of phone calls to see if I could find a South Bay store that sells fresh (not canned) rambutan. All of the places I called said they didn’t have it; it wasn’t clear to me whether they meant that they don’t carry it at all, or that they were temporarily out of stock, or that it’s out of season or something. (I asked one of them and got an ambiguous answer.) Do any of you happen to know of someplace in the general Mountain View area that sells rambutan? I’m sure I’ve seen it in stores here, but not recently.
• Went to USPS to ask whether mail to a PO box will be delivered if it doesn’t have a name on it, only a box number. I had called USPS a couple days earlier to ask this, but the person I spoke with was friendly but clearly knew nothing about the topic. They looked up a regulation, read it aloud to me, and then described it as saying the opposite of what it had seemed to me to say. (I also asked what if mail is addressed to a name that isn’t the name on the box; they didn’t know the answer to that either.) Then they said to talk to my local post office. So yesterday I went and stood in line at USPS and talked with someone who brusquely informed me that all they look at is the box number, they don’t care whether there’s a name.
• Went to Amigos de Guadalupe in San José to pick up yellow Rapid Response cards and red Know Your Rights cards. I only got a couple dozen of each, to hand out myself; if I had thought it through ahead of time, I might have picked up more and distributed them to other Mountain View Rapid Response people so others wouldn’t have to visit San José in person to pick them up. The folks at Amigos de Guadalupe were very friendly and helpful.

• Went to the clock-repair place in Los Gatos. A few months ago, they repaired two clocks that I had received as gifts; but as soon as I got the clocks home, the pendulum fell out of the bottom of the very heavy mantel clock. When I tried to put the pendulum back in (which seemed like a very simple thing to do), a tiny piece of metal got twisted and fell off. At that point, I decided I had better take it back to the repair place, but I was embarrassed about it and didn’t want to deal with it, so the broken clock has been sitting on my couch for the past couple months. (I assume that it’s been right twice a day.) Meanwhile, the wall clock has been working fine, except that it loses about two minutes a day. (I’ve looked under the couch cushions, but haven’t found anything.) I wasn’t sure whether that was fixable—with an old watch that lost time, I was once told by a repair person that there’s only so accurate you can make these things—but figured it was worth a try. So yesterday I finally took both clocks back.

  (Before I left home, I had called the repair place to find out whether it was OK to bring them in, and to check on their hours and such. I had gotten so anxious about this that I wrote myself a script before I called, but it turned out that after I said the first part (that clocks I had had repaired there had some problems), they told me to bring them in and that they were open until 6 today, so I didn’t need to go through the rest of the script explaining what the problems were.)

  The wall clock turned out to be an easy fix that I could have done at home! Turns out there’s a screw at the end of the pendulum, and you can turn that screw to slightly raise or lower the weight, thus making the pendulum longer or shorter, which adjusts how fast or slow the clock goes. Super cool! (I wish the repair person had told me that at the time of repair, but maybe they figured this was something everyone knows.)

  The mantel clock turned out to need a replacement for the tiny metal part, which the repair person said they could get in about a week. They referred to it as the “mainspring,” which I’m pretty sure it’s not—it’s a thin flexible piece of metal about 1/4" across, part of where the pendulum attaches to the rest of the clock—but I’m assuming they just used the wrong word.

• Stopped by a friend’s place to say a quick hello because I was in the neighborhood.

• Went grocery shopping. By this point, it was around 6 pm and I was once again Shopping While Hungry, but I limited myself to only two or three new-to-me interesting-looking items. (Including fresh red currants; I’ve only ever had dried ones.)

  And on my way home, I stopped by Safeway to pick up some auxiliary items. There were three food items that I bought on a whim a while ago but didn’t record where I bought them; I liked them all, so I’ve been looking for them ever since (including at my local Safeway), but haven’t found them. Yesterday, before I left on the errands expedition, I looked up those items online, and found that they were in fact all available at my local Safeway (which is presumably where I had bought them before). So I figured I would stop by the store and ask a staff person where to find the items, showing them pictures on the Safeway website. (I was not looking forward to this process; in my past experience, Safeway employees have not been very helpful with this kind of thing, and they don’t seem to have a centralized computer system where they can look up the locations of items and find out whether they have them in stock.) But I decided to look again for them on my own, in areas of the store where I hadn’t thought to look before, and this time I found all three of them!

  (…I also found a different food item, in a refrigerated section, that was marked KEEP FROZEN. There were half a dozen of this item, and they all looked a little waterlogged, with ice inside the packaging having presumably melted from not being kept frozen. I tried to bring this to the attention of a worker behind the deli counter, but they nodded and smiled in a way that I took to mean that they didn’t understand what I was saying. I tried to bring it to the attention of the customer service desk, but nobody was there, and nobody showed up during the several minutes that I waited. Eventually I wrote them a note and left.)

And then I came home, and I was exhausted. That was a lot of erranding, and an unusual-for-me amount of driving for one day, and a lot of decisionmaking and figuring things out and interacting with people (several of whom were kinda brusque, though none of them were actively unpleasant). It was a super productive day, in that I got multiple things done that I’ve been meaning to do for weeks or months, and found some food items that I’ve been looking for for months; and it was lovely to get a chat with a friend (and hugs) in the middle. But it sure took a lot of social energy.