3 curries on one day, almost:

1) I reheat some leftover vegetable korma from the resthome, for a second round of breakfast after my usual lentils and toast that I've been having recently.

2) After a late afternoon and early evening of catching up with my one animation professor friend from the art school where I used to work, I get home and make up some jasmine rice and reheat the last of some pea-and-potato curry that I had pulled out of the freezer earlier that week.

3) That night, I make up a big pot of potato-and-cauliflower curry for the next week or so, only, I don't feel like eating any by the time that it's ready, so instead I have some cold potato slices from some leftover chicken and potatoes that I had gotten from a special treat meal that a kitchen manager at the resthome had bought for her staff and then distributed leftovers to everyone from.

An odd manifestation on my body.

The other week I removed a band-aid from under my right thigh, which I had put over a scratched-off patch of skin where I had scratched off a mosquito bite so that the itching and swelling would end instead of just going on and on like it always tends to do with me.

It had been on that spot for like a week or two, and I had never peeled it back or touched it at all.

The scab was over the size of a dime, and oddly flat, and it had the thin and crunchy consistency like if a Jolly Rancher had melted on a table and then gotten hard again, and it was only attached to the skin a little bit at one point, otherwise it was just kind of sticking out all flat like the big wing of a coffee table or something.

I had simply never seen anything like it before.

I'm guessing it formed because the place of the scab meant that juices from me oozed out in that scab place all day on and off when I was going around and walking, and that that somehow fed the scab into a different consistency and type than usual, though who really knows.

Sometimes life means that you have to live with mysteries.

Signs of academic degradation.

It's striking to me how many scholars I know or who I see talking on social media, who simply don't have that much time to do scholarship anymore.

Earlier this fall I wrote a(n Australian) scholar who I've met at conferences to ask him about something he wrote in a book of his and to check on the status of a project he'd announced several years ago, and he followed up really collegially and sent me a pdf and gave me some good leads, but he also mentioned that he was finding it hard to find time to work on any of his projects nowadays.

It's all very sad, this guy is world class and decently recognized as such, and yet he can't even find time to work on his backlog of important projects.

What sense does that make?

He's a talented specialist who does work that's important and gets read, and yet he can't even further his specialty, even though he's in a position where it looks like he could and it looks like he's "made it."

It's just sad.

Comeback of a (Tibetan) coworker.

The other week, my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor helped me out by doing something, so I thanked her in (Tibetan) over the walkie-talkie, and she said the equivalent of "You're welcome" over the walkie-talkie in reply.

And, since I was in the staff office when I was saying this and my one (blocky-built) (Tibetan) coworker was sitting at our staff table eating her dinner, I was like, "How do I say 'You're wonderful' in Tibetan?", since I was hoping that she could tell me quickly and I could follow up over the walkie-talkie with that.

But, she didn't understand what I was asking for at first, and the moment passed, so I didn't end up pulling that joke.

Then, later, all 3 of us were in the office together, and my one (blocky-buiilt) (Tibetan) coworker asked me out loud if I wanted to marry my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor.

I didn't quite get what she was getting at at first, so I gave her a quizzical look, and then she was like, "Because you think that she is wonderful."

"Oh," I was like, and then I put on a voice and really loudly was like, "Of course I want to marry [name of our coworker], she is wonderful."

At that point, she was wiping down a counter, and without even looking up or missing a beat she was like, "No, I don't need you, I need money."

Confession of my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker.

Like last month when I came into work at the resthome, my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker was sitting at the table in our staff office, and after we had gotten through initial greeting formalities, she told me that this one resident who I rarely worked with and who had been on hospice had died.

"I feel so bad," she was like.

"But she was in a lot of pain," I was like.  "It was time."

"I was up all night, I was very upset," she was like.

She then told me that she had died like a half hour after she had gotten off of shift, and that during all that shift she had worked with her.

She would walk into the room, she said, and there she'd be, lying on the bed and hardly breathing, one eye open and one eye not, and not seeing anything if you went up to her.

Two bits of my life:

1) Before I leave my shift the other week, my one assisted living client with disabilities said I should grab a small Halloween candy bar from the bag of them on the counter that her (lesbian) sister had had dropped off earlier that day.

2) On my way home after my resthome shift last week, it was raining, and lightning got worse right when I got home, so after I sterilized my doorknobs I found that I had to kill time until I could take a shower and settle in, and so I did stuff like unpack my bag and then pack my other bag for the next day and then even like this ten-minute full-body toning pandemic workout that I've doing, till the lightning let up enough that I could squeeze in a quick shower and get clean and hygienically wash all of my exposed body area, and then live my life like normal and have dinner and settle in for a bit before going in to bed for the night.

Coworker magazine prank.

So, a few months ago I had asked my one (Mexican) coworker who's extremely skeptical about everything if she wanted to take the issues of the one skeptic magazine that I had begun subscribing to this year, after I had gotten done reading them.

She said yes, so, for the very first issue when I had gotten done with it, I took a little piece of paper and wrote her name on it, and on the title page where it says -

SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

The Magazine for Science & Reason

- I overlaid the phrase "Science & Reason" with the piece of paper with her name on it, so it looks like it says -

SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

The Magazine for [name of my one (Mexican) coworker]

- and then I gave the magazine issue to her that way.

And, I covered it up with my thumb, and then when I flipped through the different articles to show them to her and she seemed interested, I gave it to her, and I told her something like, "Oh yeah, and I forgot, I noticed this," and I walked her through the title, and when I got to the subtitle I removed my thumb to show her her name.

She didn't seem either amused or not amused, but when I went to go peel off the piece of paper to go throw it away, she was like, "No, leave it," to me.

I wonder if she's going to show it like that to her husband.