Covid deaths.

The other week at the resthome, the one desk clerk asked me if I had heard about what had been happening with the nuns from my great aunt's order back in the state that I'm from.

He said that workers had brought Covid into the motherhouse, and that there had been a lot of deaths.

. . .

(His partner is an organist for that order here in the city, and that's how he had heard everything.)

Major urban library trip.

The other week, I finally gave in and went to go get some books at the main branch of the major urban library in the city that I live in.

There were signs up on the door about reduced capacity and having to wear masks and how no staffer could talk to you for more than ten minutes, and outside there was tape on the ground marking for where people could stand 6 feet apart from one another while they were waiting to get in, if a line formed while library attendance was at capacity.

Just inside the door, a lady was stationed who directed you where to go, and she sent me up to the third floor, where there was a guy behind Plexiglass who could take my book orders.

You could no longer access the stacks on the upper floors!

And, the Plexiglass had been installed above the counter where you could normally talk to a staffer, so it formed a big clear wall up above the normal standard counter area.

Then, you went to a separate area to wait for people to bring you your books, and there were chairs sitting out where you could wait at some distance from other people.

At the checkout area on the first floor, they had Plexiglass above the desk again, and the person behind it didn't take your books anymore, instead they directed you how to place them under a barcode scanner that had been set up, after you ran your library card under it.

 "Just go out with them, the alarm will beep but it doesn't matter," the lady at the desk was like.

Final update on my one resthome coworker's new book.

So, like a week after I loaned that escaped Mormon polygamist wife memoir to my one (Mexican) coworker at the resthome, I came into work, and she was like, "I have your book," and she pulled it out from a cupboard in our office to give it to me.

"What did you think about it?", I was like.

"It's something to talk about it," she was like, and then she strolled off, since it seemed like she had something to do.

Later when we saw each other again when it was time to go deliver meals to all of the residents, I asked her again what she thought about it.

In so many words, she said that she liked it, but that she simply couldn't believe how people followed the prophet.

"But did you like the book?", I was like.

"What do you think?", she was like. "I read it in one week!" ("read" as present tense like reed, not "read" like past tense like red).

I then offered to loan her a classic biography of Jim Jones, but she was strangely resistant, and was like, "Maybe later."

"Okay, that's fine, I'll bring it in for you, and that way if you want it, you'll have it," I was like.

"No," she was like, "Give me time.  If I have a book like that, I read and read and read, all I want to do is read."

"But that's good," I was like.

"No," she was like, "I have things to do."

Job notebook pleasantness.

The other month in the notebook where I enter my hours worked at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, her (lesbian) sister had doodled by one certain date and written "PAUL MCCARTNEY'S BIRTHDAY," drawing a musical note next to it.

. . .

(She's a huge Beatles fan.)

A major urban public library pleasure.

I love being part of a major urban public library.

One of my favorite things is to see how many other people have things on hold, when I go to put in a request for a book.

It makes you feel so connected to pockets of what's going on across the city, if there's a lot of other people waiting!

I also went recently to put in a request for an interesting-sounding novel by the guy who wrote True Grit, since I had seen a mention of his other books in his obituary and one in particular caught my eye, and there was like 6 or 7 people in line for this book that came out in the 80s.

How cool is that?

I'll probably never know who they are, but they're out there.

Tidbits from a (Russian) linguist friend.

Last month I got together with a (Russian) linguist friend to catch up and to ask him some questions on my Egyptian research, and it was a trip.

He's such a nice and affable person, with the odd combination of being both sharp and incredibly humble, in a really sincere and authentic way.

At one point, he said that in his research he finds a lot that past scholars just erect these giant "edifices" on very little evidence, and that when you go back to the evidence, there's very little there at all, even though everyone else just keeps repeating and accepting the findings endlessly.

After we had been drinking some - I had brought mead, and we sat outside on a park bench at an appropriate distance apart as we talked - I kind of gave him this crazy idea I had about how hieroglyphics maybe work based on what I'd seen in later stages of the language, and I was like, "Isn't that kind of f*cked up?", and he just kind of was like "meh" and was like, "Writing systems are imperfect."

Later, too, I told him about this book that came out this year from a major university press by a major scholar who's given a recent keynote address at a linguistics convention, and that the book keeps mixing up historical change with phonology when it lays out the stages of the language.

"That's not good," he was like, but in a really simple and direct way, without being mean-spirited.

Update on my resthome coworker's new book.

The other week after I first checked in to see how my one (Mexican) coworker at the resthome was enjoying the cult memoir of an escaped polygamist wife that I had loaned her, I had a shift with her again, and I asked her again how the memoir was, to see if she was still enjoying it.

"I'm two-thirds done," she was like. "I read and I read, and I can't put it down, because everything that he says, they do."

Then, she was like, "All my life, Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, they take and show me, and they say believe, but I say no, show me, then I will believe, and these are educated people, they have a lot of education, and they believe it."

Then, she shrugged and was like, "I don't know," just dismissing it all, and she went to go do something else.