Winter workout clothes.

Since my clothes that worked in fall weren't cutting it, I went to the local mall back in December and got a bunch of winter workout clothes, for jogging in the afternoon when the weather is in the 30s.

That was like a white turtleneck t-shirt to keep my throat warm, and tight thermal tights and a looser thermal top, and then like jogging pants, all of which I could combine with my regular socks and sneakers and sweatshirt and cap and thin gloves.

The first time I used them, I was pretty shocked how warm it kept me, all through the jog.

Rather amazing, in fact.

No wonder people buy that sh*t.

Reflections on butternut squash...

...after I bought one to start cooking with, as an experiment in autumnal soups:

1) The name "butternut" is kind of endearing.

2) Everyone says online that it's so hard to cut and peel them, and it is a little harder than normal, but it's not really all that bad, the knife went through no problem, and my standard home potato peeler worked just fine.

3) The smell when you cut it open is a bit like watermelon, and the look and texture is very much like super unripe cantaloupe.

. . .

(You can totally see the genetic relationship, of melons and squashes.)

White Lotus, Season Three.

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is very excited for the third season of the White Lotus, because her favorite K-pop star Lisa is going to have her first acting role in it.

She is adamant that Lisa earned it, and even though the person Lisa is dating is somehow related to the show, she said that she had to work for it and go through casting, just like everyone else, and people just don't want to believe in her talent.

After binge-watching the first two seasons, too, she said she's also interested to see what happens with the setting in (Thailand)...  The second season was set in (Italy), she said, and there were a lot of local actors and people speaking (Italian) in the background, and there was even (Italian) music used as part of the show's soundtrack, so she's wondering what equivalent stuff will happen with (Thailand).

COVID booster side effects.

When I got the COVID booster this season, I ended up having some side effects at night, again.

Like, I woke up at 4am and I was chilled to the bone, especially in my hands and feet and extremities, and I couldn't get them warm, even by placing my hands underneath my armpits or anything.

And, it wasn't like the temp had majorly dropped that night or anything; my covers should have been sufficient to keep me warm as I slept.

So, I decided to get up and put on a sweatshirt and shorts and socks to wear underneath the covers, but it took me a minute to be able to decide to finally go and do that, because for one I was groggy, and because for another I kept thinking that I would warm up, so I kept delaying getting up to do that.

Anyhow, when I finally got out of bed and went to walk to get the stuff out of my closet, my entire lower body from the waist down was just crazily intensely sore, like nothing in recent memory, like not even after jogging or a high intensity workout, my muscles were just that achy.

The next day, however, everything was gone, and I was back to normal again, apart from feeling off because of disrupted sleep.

I think I had chills last year, as well, or was that two years ago?

You still want the booster, of course; better those side effects as a consequence of gaining immunity than getting the actual sickness, especially since the sickness can bring on long COVID in some.

Still, though, it's interesting. I wonder if my body is particularly sensitive to this?

Three (younger) (female) (undergraduate-age) (South Asian-American) customers...

...who came into the one (Thai) restaurant where I work at, last year:

1) It's very very busy with an almost-full restaurant and we are running around helping tables in the order seated, and when we get to them, actually relatively quickly, they order one pad kee mao beef, which incidentally reveals them to be (Pakistani-American) or perhaps (Bangladeshi-American), but which they also insist is enough for the three of them, when I ask if perhaps they'd like another dish or two, too, for their meals.

2) Their food gets delivered, and as they're sitting there eating it and talking vivaciously and laughing and I'm still running around helping all the other tables, they energetically call me over as I'm walking by and interrupt what I'm doing, and  they tell me they'd like a second pad kee mao beef, and so I squeeze that in right then and there and go send their order to the kitchen right away.

3) Like twenty minutes later, they call me over and say they changed their minds and don't want it, and I say that that's probably no longer possible, and as I go back in the kitchen to check, there it is coming off the stove, and so I ferry it out and deliver it.

4) Out of the corner of my eye like two minutes later, I see them call over my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and say something to her, and she immediately goes and brings them takeout stuff, presumably for the second pad kee mao beef that they decided they didn't want, since that's like the only food on the table, they hadn't ordered anything else.

5) They then sit there and eat all of the 2nd pad kee mao beef, not even using the takeout containers that they had specifically called someone over for, to have that brought out to them.

. . 

(That's a lot of immediate demands and course-changes -- an urgent second order, then an attempted cancellation, then a demand for takeout boxes, and then not using the takeout boxes and deciding to continue to eat there. That's actually like 4 different demands and course-changes, many of them doubling back on what they just demanded minutes earlier, and that's also a lot of energy for a single table that's buying just 2 dishes for 3 people and doesn't even care about wasting overhead for the restaurant by demanding unnecessary takeout boxes that they don't end up using. When I pointed out the full set of interactions to my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker, she just shook her head, since she had only brought them over the takeout boxes, and wasn't fully aware of what was going on.)

A kitchen-mystery, solved...

...at my one back-alley cottage, in the (college) town that I now live in:

For a bit this summer when I'd open the door to my refrigerator, there'd be this loud THUNK sound that would like go through the wall standing right next to it, that it's tucked up against.

But, this would only happen sometimes.

Finally, I figured out what it was -- since the refrigerator door opened up to the right, right up against the wall and the window there, if I had the Venetian blind there pulled down so that the bar thing at the end of it was just even with the window sill, the outer corner of the refrigerator door as it opened would increasingly press it against the window sill until the plastic in it shifted and it popped up a bit, the resulting compression and decompression making a loud THUNK sound that reverberated through the entire wall.

So, I started making sure that whenever I pulled that Venetian blind thing down, I didn't leave the end of it at the same level as the bottom window-sill.

And, since then, it's never happened again.

Coming and goings:

1) One day in late summer, my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker came up to me, and told me that she was moving in 2 weeks to a different state, to be with family there and to work there, as a house-painter.

Afterwards, for those 2 short weeks, every time I was working with her, I would say something like, "[Her name], sabes que voy llorar tan mucho sin te" ("[Her name], you know that I am going to cry so much without you"), or, "Sin te, voy llorar cado dia" ("Without you, I'm going to cry everyday").

The last day we worked together, she gave me a hug.

2) Around town in the (college) town that I now live in, someone came up to me when I was sitting down at the local brewery and having a beer and doing some research work, and it turned out to be one of my old writing students from years ago, one of the last undergraduate cohorts if not the very last undergraduate cohort that I taught.

As it turns out, she graduated right when the pandemic hit, and was lucky to find work as a nanny for several years to ride it out, and now she's in grad school for an area where she has an in and might have a chance for upward mobility.

Interestingly, although people from her graduation year really struggled with graduating into the pandemic and finding work, she said, she was surprised that her money as a nanny wasn't really that much different from the allegedly more-professional jobs that other people she knew ended up finding (i.e., she observed the same wage compression that I've been noticing in my own life; in so many ways, I professionally pattern like or at least can identify with younger generations, because of my need to start over professionally at several points in my recent life).