Two developments with home-goods:

1) The oil in my scent diffuser is not only getting lower bit by bit – something fun to watch, as I’ve never had one before – but the color of the oil inside is also gradually becoming a dark pinkish-purple, probably because the diffuser sticks are touching here and there some of the plastic flowers that are there among them to make it look like a decorative flower arrangement, and the dye there is probably being conveyed back down through those black porous sticks all the way into that glass-bosom reservoir holding all of the oil, and marking it.

2) I put water into an off-brand dijon mustard container, to shake it and create mustard-y water using all of the last mustard in the squeeze-tube, and then I put that into my lentil soup, which it makes super-tasty to an astonishingly surprising degree, to the point that I want to now do this with all my lentil soups in the future.

A gift from my mother that unexpectedly arrived in the mail:

A 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that’s a picture of the Trevi fountain.

“I thought it would be fun for you because it’s smaller than normal,” she was like.

. . .

(The puzzle was the dimensions of an ordinary puzzle that size, and the box was squarish and somewhat smaller than normal, but it gave no other indications of containing a jigsaw puzzle of a smaller size than is typical for those types of puzzles.)

Post-quitting feelings.

After quitting my job, I was catching up with my uncle on the phone, that's my dad’s younger brother, and, like many times as an adult, I’ve been amazed at his insights into people.

Like, when I told him very briefly the situation, right away he said that the problem was my one (Thai) boss’s “inadequacy.”

He had been in the corporate world a long time before his retirement, so I can only suspect that a lot of those insights come from his experiences there.

Overall, though, the aftermath of my quitting felt very good, like I made the right decision, although I was walking across the street on a Monday and I glanced out of the corner-of-my-eyes into the window, there, and there was my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, working in the restaurant on what should have been her day off.

On astrology.

The New York Times recently had an article about a museum exhibit about the history of astrology that had this interesting comparison:

Alexander Boxer, the author of “A Scheme of Heaven,” about the history and science of astrology, argues that horoscopes during antiquity have more in common with modern algorithms than with the esoteric predictions of many contemporary horoscope writers.

“It was a very technological and math-heavy field,” Boxer said in an interview. He compared people’s views of ancient astrology to our modern relationship with artificial intelligence, which he said… also “offers advice via opaque data-driven algorithms that you, the end user, are expected to trust but not to understand.”

Just a very, very incisive comparison.

Additionally, when I sent that article to my one (Mormon) colleague who I do a summer book-club with, he texted back:

Thanks for the article. Quote: “According to Allied Market Research, a consulting firm, spending on astrology-related products and services is projected to increase from $12.8 billion in 2021 to $22.8 billion in 2031.”

How do we get in on that?

. . .

(. . .) 

A (Brazilian) insight on (English).

Several times I heard the one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) remark to (Brazilian) friends that people say the word "cute" in (English) about grown people who they find attractive.

"Cute?", he was like, "Cute is a baby! I am hot." 

An Easter conversation with my mother.

She says that she went to the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher, back on an around-the-world trip that she did with two other girls, back when she worked as a stewardess.

And, they had to wait for some people to come out so that they could go in, but it wasn't like the crowds that you see on TV, now. 

"I'm glad, I really wanted to tell you," she was like.

She also said that it's nothing that my father didn't remember that it was Easter Sunday, since they weren't doing anything special to celebrate and plus she only mentioned it to him once that day, in the morning.

It was also nothing that he forgot that my restaurant is always closed on Sundays, and that the previous day he had asked me if I was going to the big sports tournament game, which was held in another city and which would have been a major trip for me and which I had never said anything about at all, about going to it, instead I had just been saying that I had bought a sports-team t-shirt to wear at work for the game since we were encouraged to do that and it seemed like fun.

He just gets tired at the end of the day a lot, my mom says. 

Scholarly annoyance.

The big scanner just off the circulation desk room at the local university library is great for taking quick scans of huge oversize books... 

It has like this big moving arm up on top, that somehow swings out into the air over the book that you lay out below for it to capture, so you don't have to flip the book upside down onto a glass plate or anything like that.

But, if you have a book with glossy pages, all too often there's this line of brightness across the image that eradicates any of the text that was underneath, and it's hard to adjust the book so that doesn't happen, or so that it at least happens at a manageable level.

So, beware!

For this, books published by Brill particularly suck.