Two bits:

1) It was striking this fall, how one day at the restaurant I noticed just a very few leaves blowing across the street, and then two days later I already had to start sweeping them out of the doorway every day, so many had started to come down and were always starting to blow inside.

2) Also very memorable this fall was a (shorter) (edgy-looking) (later middle-aged) (quiet-voiced) (South Asian) woman who comes in with a (designer-looking) purse and sits down, and demands order service quickly, and she wants her fish without green beans, and also she wants an order to go and we figure it out so it can be warm for her, and then at the end of the meal she suddenly wants to pick up her to-go order since she needs to catch a bus, and the meal isn't quite ready yet though thankfully it comes out two minutes later, and though the bill had been sitting on her table forever and we said we'd take it up for her, she then shows up at the back counter to pay with her credit card, and as it prints out and she signs, she doesn't leave a tip, she just signs at the bottom, and so I do the spiel and ask her if everything was okay with the food and the service, because the owner will see that and wonder if something is wrong, and so she picks up the pen again, and she puts it down on the receipt and across the entire receipt she draws --

X

-- and then she goes back to her table to pick up her takeout which she had left there, and she grabs it and goes out the door to leave.

"She's always like that, she never tips," says my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones.

But, everyone was astonished that, when challenged, she simply drew an X across the entire receipt.

They'd never seen that one, before.

Messed-up food rehabilitation.

So, my last big batch of home-fermented sauerkraut came out tasting fine but with a very unappealing mushy texture, which according to what I read online can happen if you don't put quite enough salt into it, although it's usually fine to eat, the bad sign with that is horrible taste or slimy texture.

Their suggestion was that you can always use sauerkraut like that for adding to soups, so I bought some potatoes and turnips, and I went and dumped the sauerkraut in a big pot and added more water, and then when that was boiling with some whole peppercorns in it, I remembered a sauerkraut-and-apples dish that I had once tried at a friend's house, and so I cut up some (poorer quality) gala apples that I had in the fridge alongside dicing one nice granny smith, and I put that in before I finally added in the cubed potatoes and turnips.

All in all, it turned out very, very fine.

In general, I need to learn how to cook more fall soups, like with squash and parsnips and pumpkin and stuff.

British humor.

The other week I was emailing my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), and he made this comment in an email going off of something that I had said –

I heard an artist on the radio saying something similar: the best music is produced in the early years.

-- to which I replied --

But what about Mozart and Beethoven?

-- to which he replied --

I don’t know enough about their musical biographies to comment. they did produce music in a different time (way back when) so maybe things were different then.

-- to which I replied--

Are you saying the world is getting worse?

-- to which he replied--

not qualitatively but quantitatively, yes.

-- which I interpreted to be not so much a continuation of the conversation or an actual response, but rather an opportunistic joke, meaning that people are just as good or just as bad as they’ve always been, but there’s just more of them, now.

. . .

British humor can be so odd.

Addendum.

That same afternoon on the Sunday lunch shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that the cook made a special spicy fish salad and there's some for me, too, and I say I'm not sure if I'll like it and what do I do if I don't like it, and she says try some, and she'll have the rest if I don't like it, and it's sitting out on the kitchen service counter in a dish with a plate on top of it, and there'll be two of them there, and one is for her and the other is for me.

So, I go and I find it and I try it, and it's absolutely fantastic.

It's cut-up onions and green onions and a few cherry tomatoes and cilantro, and this fish thing that's the texture and consistency of a Vietnamese pork meatball, that she says is called "fish-line" and is made up of super-finely ground fish that's shaped into like a log and breaded and then cooked somehow and sliced up, and anyhow it's that in the salad, with a light spicy dressing like with soy sauce or fish sauce in it or whatever, just all of that put together, and chilled.

And, the fish is super-light, and she's not sure what kind it is, but in those little like cutlet pieces, almost, it almost takes like chicken.

Just superb off-menu (Thai) food -- yet another perk of working where I do.

She says when she asked our one (newer) (older) (female) (Chinese-Thai) coworker, she said the name as something in (Chinese) and so she can't remember what that name is, but that she would call it Yum Pla Sen ("fish-line salad," or perhaps, better, "fish-log salad").

Day - Evening - Day...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, like a month ago:

1) I come in to open up the restaurant for a Saturday lunch shift, and the door of the back alley is closed and locked, the first time that that's ever happened to me.

So, I knock, and after like ten secconds, it swings open, and it's my one (Guatemalan) coworker who we started the diablo joke about, and I can see the kitchen full of people behind him, getting food ready for the day.

"What?", I was like, "You don't want me to come inside?".

"No," he was like.

2) At the beginning of that dinner shift, there's **two** separate app delivery drivers up by our back counter waiting for their orders to come out, and **both** are loudly talking on speakerphone while they wait.

3) The next morning on the Sunday lunch shift, this (shorter) (tattooed) (white) woman and her (taller) (schlubby) (white) guy (boyfriend?) come in and order over a $100 of food to go, tipping nicely, too, and they also get some beers to drink while they wait -- "I'll have what he's having," she says -- and in the middle of all of this, the guy just stops and looks at me for some reason, and then he's like, "Well, you've been here a while."

Later, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker for some reason has two soft-boiled eggs sitting in a bowl with a plate on top, on top of the ice machine where we eat, and every time you walk by, you're looking them at eye-level, and they look like a pair of testicles.

So, I tell her that, and I tell that I support feminism, but not like that, and she just glares at me in a good-hearted way and says something in (Thai), and when I ask her what it means, she says it's, "[my first name], you're no good."

A local homeless person from this fall...

...who came into the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, several times:

A (young) (pretty tall) (very skinny) (very dark-skinned black) guy with (dreads) and a (well-trimmed beard), who once came into the foyer and stood there looking at the rotating electronic menu board that's to your right immediately when you enter, and who spoke softly and almost inaudibly when we asked him if he needed any help, and he just said he needed to stand there a minute, and he was there staring at the wall for like 5-6 minutes before he finally turned back and went out the door and left, and who another time at late afternoon on a weekend came in with some big cardboard box and a white plastic bag, and put the box on a table just inside the entrance, and pulled some food out of the bag and sat there and ate the food that he brought in for a bit, until he finally got up and left.

(. . .)

A reflection on paths not taken:

Looking back, if I had pursued a union job (i.e. a job at a parent union), I might have been miserable...

All the locals where I had connections went "woke" and started trying to tie Palestine shit into everything, which would have been very miserable for me, to try to mouth those lines and force that line onto state and local politics and onto contract battles.

I mean, with every job you have to do that to some degree, but that's just a high degree of nonsense to be repeating for the sake of a job, especially when you really don't believe in the approach and it would just be making you miserable the entire time.

Who knows, maybe I would have ended up shifting places and getting into something a little more progressive and a little more commonsense like at some of the building trades, but that's not where I had my connections, and who knows if a lateral shift like that would have actually panned out, if I was still in that world.

So many leftist issues are to polarize and get people hyped, and it's funny to be on the other side of that, where it's like, "I agree with you to a point, but nah..." They really make you not fit in -- they're the ones doing it! -- and it's all on them, it's all coming from them where they suddenly want you to toe this shifting line 100%, and if you're 85% but not all there with them on anything, suddenly you're the problem.

Who needs that in their life.