Addendum.

Several months after this when I’m calling my parents on a Sunday, my mother tells me to be careful, I'm projected to be getting severe weather… on Tuesday.

. . .

(. . .)

Worrying of my mother…

…when I call my parents and I say that after I hang up I’m going to run a few errands in the rain before the impending front of thunderstorms moves in in like an hour or so:

“Don’t use an umbrella, it will attract the lightning.”

. . .

(. . .)

One of the last snaps of winter this year:

1) I go to vote in the local primary, and as I turn up the side-street to the municipal building, the wind is so strong and it’s so bitterly cold and it’s blowing so directly in my face, that it actually takes my breath away, and I have to turn my back to it and kind of angle-shuffle backwards up like a third of a block till I can turn in and walk in front of the building and be out of the wind and start walking normally again, but for just that little bit there, it was so horrendous, the wind was actually forcing itself down your throat and displacing your breath and like you actually couldn’t breathe at all, as your eyes watered too in these just great long freezing gusts that were happening constantly.

2) The new (pixie cut) (arts management) renter in the front house is out of town and I can’t put a package for her behind her front storm door like I usually do when I come across one – it’s too big and it leaves the door ajar and the wind catches it and rips it open and the package tips out from where I positioned it on top of the door-jamb – and so I just take it and put it in the corner of the front porch where no-one can see it from the street, and I hope that that’s enough until she gets home, although I keep wondering to myself if I should take it inside my apartment and just keep it there until she returns from wherever she is, even though she didn’t ask me to do that like she had once before when she was out of town.

3) The old (transgender) (FTM) renter in the front house leaves a houseplant outside in the warm spell preceding the cold snap, and then during the cold snap I suddenly see that it’s still sitting there on a table in the backyard, now covered in snow and withered and dead, however.

Story of an out-of-control city, with crime.

The daughter of the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender who I know from the local brewery works out on the West Coast in a decently liberal city there, and she goes out there to visit her quite often.

And, after one visit this past winter, she was just shaking her head at how permissive it can be with crime out there.

Like, her daughter’s crazy drinking friend has expired tags on his car and he hasn’t replaced them for years, but he doesn’t worry because he knows that they won’t do anything about that in the city, but he also won’t drive over into an adjacent suburb because they have actual enforcement there and he knows that as soon as he does that he’ll get busted and he'll have to pay for new tags and for a fine too or whatever they do to you when you have expired tags on your car and you're caught driving around like that by the cops.

Some (Brazilian) news (2 of 2): Finances.

Because he had some trouble arranging his finances to get together his first month's rent due to the exchange rate and scholarship disbursement dates and whatnot, I ended up loaning the one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) that money as a favor to our one mutual (Afro-Brazilian) friend from his same lab, and since that time he did manage to pay me back quite a lot of that amount bit by bit here and there, only he was still a few hundred dollars short as his departure date neared.

And, I had gotten some good weightlifting equipment from him and taken that off the amount he owed me, and he tried to do the same thing with his flatscreen TV that he had actually gotten free as a cast-off from the one (vivacious) and (warm) (Brazilian) wife of the (older) couple around town, but I didn’t need or want that.

“Don’t worry,” he was then like, explaining that if he had to, he’d just skip out paying on his last month of rent, in order to have enough money to pay me back.

(Very instrumental of him.)

Some (Brazilian) news (1 of 2): Whoring.

The one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) was saying that before he left (Brazil) for his exchange program here he went through some (Afro-Brazilian) purification ceremony, and as part of that he is supposed to keep himself chaste, only he hasn’t.

“I’ve been baaaad…”, he was like.

He was also saying that he won’t sleep with (Indians), though, because they’re “stinky.”

A sight in my kitchen this winter:

On the kitchen counter among some popcorn kernel husks that had fallen off the head of the air-popper and also just a few bread crumbs that had somehow gotten away from the toaster, a small black beetle-like bug, like just smaller than a pencil’s eraser end or so, and with elegant little antennae neatly curved back from its head, as it briskly moved in broad curves among all that food detritus.