Home maintenance:

1) I'm standing by my kitchen counter doing something and a mosquito buzzes by my ear, but when I go to kill it, it's too late and it's gone.

Then, just a very little while later, it's directly in front of me, so I kill it.

2) I go outside and I air out my woven fiber rug from my living room, and I spray it down with vinegar to kill any residual mildew on its underside, only I use the spray bottle that I had put essential oils like peppermint in eons ago as a non-toxic anti-ant solution that didn't really work, and it's only after I catch a whiff of the like vingear-and-peppermint smell a few times that's emanating off the rug and that seems familiar to me that I realize what it is, it's like kombucha, the smell is almost exactly like kombucha.

A day at work...

...a few weeks ago, at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I now work at:

*) Before work I'm off the bus and dawdling around the back of the building talking with my parents on the phone because I only start work in like ten or twelve minutes, and I look across the (busy) street and there's a squirrel crawling on the top of the front tire of a parked truck, like moving back and forth and looking upwards like it's looking for a place to ascend more, but it can't find any, so it finally scampers down the side of the tire and off towards the sidewalk somewhere.

1) I brought in my potter-made ceramic mug from home to put through the barside dishwasher along with my portable coffee mug, since they're so stained inside and I don't have a dishwasher at home and they really need to be cleaned.

And, they came out slightly better, but with still a lot of black gunk inside.

So, imagine all of that inside of me.

2) The one (quiet) (Asian-American) guy who does hosting came up to me and said he'd watched Blue Velvet, since we were talking TV the previous week and I had asked him if he'd ever watched Twin Peaks.

And, after that conversation, I realized that I should have told him to go and watch Blue Velvet, and what happened, but lo and behold, he found his way to it anyways somehow.

"Fuck Heineken," he was like. 

And, I asked him where he grew up and it was in a rather large city in the state, but not the largest.

"Because small towns are all like that," I was like, referring to Blue Velvet.

3) The one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager is there but not managing, so she's in a logoed old black t-shirt from the restaurant, instead of her simple and elegant black trousers and like soft knit sweaters and stuff that she usually wears.

And, the one (young) (taller) (macho) (Guatemalan) cook popped in after getting back from his vacation to Mexico, and he was sitting at the bar in his civvies eating a burger and having a soda and what appeared to be a glass of red wine.

"What is happening here?!", I was like, referring to them both being in non-normal clothes. "I feel so disoriented!"

4) As we're almost closing and I'm spot-sweeping, the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner calls me over to a table where she's sitting with a couple regulars, and she asks me to get her a glass of rose, since she's drinking what they're drinking.

"Should I put it on your tab?", I was like.

"Yeah, put it on my tab," she says, raising her eyebrows theatrically.

And, after I get the wine from my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), I ask him if I should tell her that he reminded her that if she doesn't close out her tab by the end of the night, we're taking it out of her paycheck.

"Yeah, go for it," he's like, and I do.

(That's a semi-regular reminder from her, when people aren't paying their tabs.)

5) When it's almost close, I get the broccoli, cheese, and mushroom soup and I put it in a new container to cool down, but the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook sees me doing that and says I did it right, only we're throwing that soup out tonight, we're not saving it, and he apologizes to me for my doing that extra work.

"Then wait," I was like, moving towards the door to go get a to-go cup to dump some soup into, "If we're doing that, I'll grab some to go."

And, he's immediately like, "I would do that at your own risk, it's a week old and the broccoli was already starting to go when we made it...", so I'm like, "Never mind," and I give up on that food in a way that's quite unlike me. 

6) At that same table of regulars after the owner leaves, I ask the (shrunken) (old) (white) lady who's a regular and who always leisurely downs a bottle of wine or two with a friend for hours if she wants to use "tap to pay," and automatically she's just like, "What do I have to do, dance?!"

(She was joking. And, great pun.) 

*) I get home and I crack open a (small) (orange-fleshed) heirloom watermelon that I had in my fridge from the farmer's market, only to discover that it appeared to be going bad, like a slight hiss escaped when I cut it open, and it seemed inside almost like it had been frozen and then thawed out again, like from sitting too close to the back wall of my refrigerator when the temperature went wonky.

Cat behavior.

The aging cat of the one (lesbian) sister of my one former (assisted living) client with (disabilities) has cancer, and his medications have been making him act all off, to the point where they even found him using the kitchen sink as a toilet and they had to put some tin foil in it to keep him from using it.

"Like number one or number two?", I asked her.

"Both," she was like.

"Was there like a lot of dirty dishes and food and stuff in there that he tried to use to cover it?", I was like.

. . .

(At the vet's appointment that I took her to, I recognized the [short] [young] [blonde] [female] receptionist, since she sometimes comes into the one [Thai] restaurant that I used to work at. You can't go anywhere...)

Past workplaces.

The girlfriend of the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living) client with (disabilities) is involved with some sort of departmental climate review at a higher ed school where she's a grad and has a regular event staffing position, and a few weeks ago when we were all catching up over coffee I asked her how that was going, since she had just gotten back from a trip there for that.

And, she started telling me about the report that she was writing and she began outlining problems about a professor with bad boundaries and two grads who went on to teach there but a dean kept them in check, and now that that dean is gone their behavior has devolved, and besides the institution has a habit of hiring grads and has a culture that's very hard to break, etc. etc. etc., and we talked about this kind of stuff for like fifteen or twenty minutes while the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living) client with (disabilities) was sitting there quietly, just listening, so then towards the end of the conversation, I took a verbal step back and was like, "Higher ed workplaces are not like normal workplaces, in what other workplace do you have to spend so much godawful time trying to figure out convoluted personal dynamics and work around people who don't do their jobs and who don't necessarily seem to want to," and I then added that it's just this unnecessary massive timesuck and that that whole kind of thing is just a bad fit for me because I have too much common sense and I just want to show up to my job and do the work.

It really was like this massive blast from the past.

I mean, there's some personality dynamics at the one (Irish-y) burger joint on the first floor of a historic hotel where I work now, but I could spend maybe 5 minutes discussing them, tops?

Higher ed is just exponentially different, and worse.

And they always invest so much time writing up these reports that no-one reads or does much about, and oftentimes it's just an underlying personnel or staffing problem.

It's like my one lawyer friend from (Missouri) observed years ago from her having quite a few people she knows involved in higher ed, that sector seems to involve a lot of "busy work" (i.e., work that doesn't seem to do or produce anything.)

Amen.

Well said, sister. 

Cleaning (2 of 2): Resthome farewell.

During that same cleaning, I also threw out a little mini backpack that I got at the resthome as logoed "swag" but whose zipper and front pouch got messed up when I put it in the drier once, and I think that when I swap out clothes for fall, I'm also going to get rid of a lot of stuff, including maybe a logoed jacket and scrubs from them that I have packed in at the back of my closet.

Farewell to the resthome, where I last worked 5 years ago, now. 

Cleaning (1 of 2): Hand-weights.

A few weeks ago, I really cleaned out my cottage to get organized and mentally level again after finishing a couple of huge writing projects, and during that process I remembered that I had some hand-weights in a kitchen drawer for a workout that I never do anymore, since I've now started using resistance bands instead.

So, I took them out and washed them down -- a few had spots of mildew on them, presumably from the hand-sweat that got absorbed into them, and then the high humidity in my apartment this summer -- and then I wrote out on a piece of paper the big word FREE and something about taking them in pairs, and I went and put them out by the sidewalk by the front of the front house, for whoever wanted them to take.

And, a couple of hours later, I happen to go out there again, and they were gone.

And then, a little while after that, I go to walk to the post office to mail some stuff, and there my hand-weights are, sitting out on the grass next to the "little free food pantry" out in front of a neighboring church like half a block away from me, where sometimes some people leave other stuff for others to take.

It seems that someone had transported all 6 of them there -- a big endeavor, since they're heavy and cumbersome and I had to do 2 trips to get them out to the curb --  perhaps because they thought that they'd go faster there?

It really doesn't make sense to me. 

A dream.

A few weeks ago I dreamnt -

I'm staring at a a radio and there's nondescript highly modernist classical music coming out of it, and a voice to my left says that I must identify which (Hungarian) composer it is, Ligeti or Kodály, and I say Bartók, you can't forget Bartók, and then amidst modest affirmation off to left, I think to myself, how the hell am I going to tell the difference between all their music.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(. . .)