A sign of increasing local post-office problems…

…with stolen and washed checks, above and beyond this conversation I overheard at the restaurant earlier this summer, where a(n early 50s) (white woman) (nurse?) was telling her two coworkers about how someone had gotten hold of a check that she had written and dropped off in a curbside mailbox by a well-trafficked local minimall, and she had to go through all of this trouble with the bank to try to straighten it out:

The local public radio station now has a preprinted note on the back of its donation envelope that they send you during their fund-drive, stipulating that the preprinted return address where you send your checks goes to a safe lock-box in another city, and that they’ll be sending your donation receipts from a different local address, after they receive and process any check you send them.

Two local animals:

1) Like last month I’m taking a minute in the afternoon to pull up invasive tree seedlings from the yard by my cottage, and when I’m over by the lilac bush in the back corner of the yard, something moves, and it’s a (slim) (dark brown) (adolescent) rabbit that’s not only trying to stand still, but is actually quivering from nerves, all like three or four feet from me – perhaps the too-trusting bunny from earlier this summer?

2) Several times this past month, I’ve seen a distinctive grey squirrel out by a curbside tree just to the west of my cottage, just a normal-to-scrawny one, only its tail is mangled, and it has no hair on it all the way up to this clump on the end, just like a long rat-like tail, ending in this puff of grey fur.

Beet greens.

I’m not really sure why I make myself buy beets at the farmer’s market, since I don’t really ever cook the beets, but rather cut them up raw and put them in my salad, which isn’t as good as cooking them.

I guess it’s because they’re healthy, and because I also get all the beet greens along with them, which is a deal, only the beet greens kind of leave this bitter aftertaste in my mouth when I put them in my salads, so I don’t particularly like those, either.

I almost feel like I’m more into the idea of beets and beet greens, than the actual things.

What I think whenever I see a picture of Kamala Harris's mother:

"I wonder how she tipped."

. . .

(I told this to my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker and my one [older] [Thai] coworker who's a whiz at the phones, and they both laughed deeply and with appreciation, and with a knowing look in their eyes.)

Addendum.

 One more annoying thing (this said by my mother):

"You always change, and start talking about everything so big."

(That is, that I always start talking about structural stuff when I start talking about employment and profession -- but how can you *not* talk about structural stuff, when your face is just rubbed in it again and again in so many unexpected ways...  It's like my one [half British] [half Sudanese] friend [the brother of the brother-sister pair] said when I mentioned that comment to him, having the luxury to *not* think about stuff like that comes from a very certain place of economic certainty and stability, that was in place generationally, but is no longer.)

Annoying takes on my dalliance in eldercare...

...that I encountered over the years, in various conversations:

"But those jobs have always been badly paid."

(In response to my mentioning wage-scale collapse -- and in fact that's not true, many jobs are comparable with payscales with jobs like being a high school teacher or being in lower-level higher ed admin or what you can find in a lot of non-profits, only you can hop around a little more between different roles, once you get established, and these jobs are everywhere, so why not opt for a sector with more mobility, especially if you like it.)

"Healthcare has been hanging by a thread for a long time."

(In response to my shaking my head about the short-staffing at the last job that I had in that sector right before I quit -- which short-staffing was shocking since there's definitely a known dynamic of bad for-profit places versus "the better ones," but this was at a place with a great reputation that had let itself slide, to just a shocking degree.)

"These are human beings we're talking about."

(When I was talking with an old [academic] colleague and I was detailing the short-staffing and how you don't want to put yourself in a workplace with that with the tension and the liability, since everything just starts to smell like lawsuits -- um, that kind of treatment of human beings is already "baked in the cake" and known to happen a ton at the bad for-profit places, I just kind of accept that and take that for granted in any conversation about the sector that I ever have, here I'm talking about my specific decision to be/stay involved or not at one specific workplace, though I guess if you feel that strongly about it, *you* go work there or a place like that, if you can't find another cross to go throw yourself on.)

"Can't you find another kind of job with that?"

(Yes I could in the area -- but it's become a fact even acknowledged in the local papers that it's a strange hole that's developed in a 45-min radius or so, so even if I moved into something like "power of attorney" for people -- something I'd considered in the past as a possible path into a higher paygrade! -- I wouldn't be directly involved per se, but you'd have to tell people and families that there are truly no good options, and why would you put yourself through that? Alternately, do you expect me to pick up stakes and move again, to a whole 'nother area, especially when restaurant work is increasingly kind of equivalent to what I'd get in that "profession," due to wage inflation?)

. . .

Overall, after I decided to move from the city that I had lived in because of safety and financial reasons and public transportation reliability, too, I'd scoped out the market, found a good local employer, and secured a job there, only to discover they'd recently, quickly changed for the worse, and at that point, what can you do? It's a smaller town compared to a city, and in some ways, that makes you kind of stuck. And, because the pandemic kind of put everything on hold for the span of a few years just when I'd started to look around at moving up professionally within eldercare but had not yet done so, and then I moved and had to reconfigure (again), it's just so many years wasted, again, with nothing professionally to show for it. Really, at some point I feel like I just have to chalk up ever having a profession -- too many wasted years in directions that didn't pay off, and if I haven't had anything through investment of time and effort by this point, it won't happen now through my own effort, it'll be very random and through luck instead, and you'd be silly to keep wasting all that energy trying to make something work (again).

Part of me almost feels like I'm those rats who will no longer push a lever for a treat, it's like I have learned helplessness with "the job market," but on the other hand, the marked decline of any number of interlinked and even separate employment sectors just seems to be a *fact*, not something in my head, there's multiple news stories about this concrete stuff I've seen, and, that said, I do keep my eyes open and talk to people, I just can't figure out anything where it seems decently pleasant enough and I'd have a decent chance enough of securing it through a reasonable amount of effort.

Just an endless, eternal frustration, going on for over a decade now.

"Oh, you found the bread stand."

The other week at the farmer's market in the one (college) town where I live now, I bumped into the one (young) (a bit Goth-y) (white) ex-bartender from the local brewery, and she was there with a stroller and her now-walking baby, and we caught up a bit, and she was just telling me about her promotion at work -- she got into group homes for the disabled, and she loves it -- when two (white) (early 40s and mid 50s) (adults) with (developmental disabilities) came up and started telling her about some place with great stuff they had found, and she was like, "Oh, you found the bread stand," and then she introduced us all to each other.

It really was like a glimpse of my life that could have been -- that kind of work is so awesome, and I had envisioned something like that for myself with the elderly, perhaps with people with early-stage dementia, since that's a population that I discovered that I really vibe with, and there's all sorts of really interesting thinking and work being done right now about communal living and stuff like that for maximal quality of life for people facing those kinds of life situations.

But, how could you ever do that?

With the population that she works with, most don't have medications, probably, and even if they did, if supporting care-giving roles were shortstaffed, maybe you have mildly delayed meds at most, so it's really no biggie, there's medication windows and usually stuff like that isn't a problem, at all.

With the elderly, though, you start getting into falls and people wandering off and all sorts of horrible things like that, and you're better off just not getting involved in workplaces that have "gotten to that point," which are more and more because of the stagnant wage levels and wage inflation everywhere else.

Sigh.

It just never ceases to amaze me how many times the past 10-15 years I've gotten into stuff that turned out to be completely different from what I had scoped it out to be, or how it changed while I was in the midst of it.

It really is like a form of bad luck.