The Vienna Fingers I would have as a sandwich for supper. They tasted bland and odd at the same time! Still, I made do with it.
     Too much of the choices are based on sugar. Of course like I wrote they had no idea how to handle a homeless client. Filling out the application they had a problem with putting “none” in the address. Come to think about it so did I! They were much more comfortable and used to dealing with poor but housed families.
     Ever eat a package of Ramen noodles uncooked for supper? I have.
     Later when I had the use of the microwave oven in the office I could make better use of the items needing cooking or heating. I could fill a soda bottle with water and plunk a tea bag in it and leave it to “sun brew” in the car but the mixing hot cocoa with cold water in same and shaking it up was not a success. It was dreadful to be polite about it! As much as possible I avoided sugar because although it has much needed calories I felt that what I was able to get was often loaded with it and could only become a further health problem.
     When I had money I would buy bread and cheap cans of tuna or mackerel that is even cheaper by the ounce. A can of mackerel costing the same as two small tuna cans holds more ounces. Of course it helps to like fish like I do!
     Later I found another food pantry run out of a Seventh-day Adventist church on Fridays. I went there a couple of times. They gave me a small bag of laundry soap which I made use of as treasured. While they tended to have items needing cooking they would try to get me breakfast cereals like Cheerios and such which I could at least eat by hand. Though when I had a couple of small packs of apple juice I couple eat them out of a bowl using that instead of milk. I was never too sure what to do with the squash or some other items. Most of the people who showed up there were elderly, many of who were church members.
     A list of what I got there one Friday:
· 1 package oven ready Hungry Jack Biscuits
· 4 zucchini
· 3 small squash
· 1, 1 lb 12 oz Ortega Enchilada Sauce
· 1 Ortega Burrito Dinner
· 1 Sunrise Breakfast Cereal
· 1 lb Ronzoni Spaghetti
· 3 oz Cherry Gelatin mix
· 8 oz tomato sauce
· 1, 14 ½ oz can mixed vegetables
· 2, 1 ¼ oz packs Frito’s
· 1. 2.8 oz French’s Onion Rings
· 1 Snackwell’s Caramel Nut Cluster Bar
· 1 each Top Ramen Noodle Soup (beef and chicken)
· 1 dozen packs of honey
· 2 Carnation Instant Breakfast
· 1 Lunchable’s brand Waffles (This is food? And marketed towards kids! Some people have no conscience or taste!)
· 1 container cottage cheese with pineapple
    Some of this like the spaghetti I couldn’t use. That and the squash and zucchini I traded, some that I couldn’t use I gave away. Most of it I made good use of.
As unbalanced a diet this is it allowed me to spend money on bus passes and making phone calls about jobs and getting interviews. The fact that none of them were panning out is almost immaterial.
     Now depending on the time I could maybe get to fill out a job application. The easiest and I hoped the most likely to succeed was to go back to someplace I had gone for an interview hoping to make them see me as a motivated worker and hire me. Mostly I would go to businesses that were within walking distance of a couple of miles.
    Afterwards I would go to back to the library where I could browse the books and magazines. For a time I volunteered my services there. Mostly just straightening shelves and putting books back in order according to the Dewey Decimal System. I could also go online I found. The librarian could switch to a limited browser. It was a Telnet connection using a lynx browser. All text no graphics but so what! It was a whole new world for me. While it couldn’t handle JavaScript indeed some sites with all those bells and whistles could make the connection fail! I couldn’t access most email as it wouldn’t enable cookies but I found ways around that. Virtual Bear Gram would let me send free post cards of incredible length and there was one company with free e-mail called flashmail I could access to receive and send mail. Every couple of weeks I would go into Riverside especially to check my Yahoo and Excite mail accounts.
    Also there is a kiosk where I can check an email account free at the library and also check for job openings in the city and county.
    I found so much to read on the Internet! It was another library within the library.
    Many days I went back to the library early. Sometimes because I had no place to be and just hanging out at park gets old fast, other times it was my refuge. Other than my car I had no place to be alone. I had no room of my own but reading a book, magazine, newspaper or the Internet I could be alone in my head. I could tune out and separate myself from the world when I needed to.
    I would make plans such as where to go first to apply for work, who to get back to. A lot of people advise that I just simply keep bugging people for work till they hired me to get me out of their face. I would have said till they decided that seeing my determination they would give me a chance to put that to the job. Either way it wasn’t working. There are a lot of people looking for work and truthfully it often seems that many prospective employers just don’t seem interested.
    In any case back to where I was. After picking up my box I would go to a nearby bus stop or just to the side of the street and put what I had gotten into my knapsack. Sometimes I would then head back to the library or take it with me to the car where I would put the foodstuff into one of my boxes – the closest thing I had to a pantry. Often there were also half a dozen peppermint candies; these I would put in my shirt pocket to save, usually sharing a couple with a friend.
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