Time-sink.

Studying that one notoriously hard language for dual citizenship purposes is such an incredible time-sink for me, right now.

I do DuoLingo for like fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day to practice paradigms, but the big thing is just memorizing a shit-ton of vocabulary, since it’s not related to anything you would ever know and there’s not really all that much borrowed vocabulary from common languages with international impact.

And, that’s like forty-five or fifty minutes of time a day, though it’s growing increasingly less as the vocabulary settles in, per the algorithms on the flashcard app that a programmer friend who’s into languages helped me set up on my laptop and on my smartphone.

I can see progress – like, I read a sample sentence from a newspaper article that I tried to get through months ago, and now I know a lot of the vocab there – but, still, it’s just so time-consuming.

By the time I have breakfast and get ready and then turn to language study, it turns out being like a two-hour chunk of my time every day, since I have to have breaks in between different sections of study, like between DuoLingo and flashcards and then between memorizing new vocab and practicing old vocab.

I’ve heard that it’s more effective to study languages in small doses, like it’s better to study twice for fifteen minutes than once for forty minutes, but, it’s hard to schedule my day and get that regular study in without doing it all upfront.

Like, the few times that I got interrupted and I had to do some at night after work, my recall rates were truly horrible.

Just such a time-suck, though, when I have so many other projects that I could be focusing on.

Sigh.

But, there should be only a few more months of memorizing base vocab, fortunately.

Why did I buy those cabbages?

After a short trip in July, I got back early and ran to the grocery store before work, to get some watermelon and also to restock on avocados for my morning avocado toast that I have every morning.

And, an eighty-nine cents a pound sale led me to get two cabbages, too, for making meals or for sauerkraut.

Only, the next morning at the farmer's market, larger and nicer cabbages were in season everywhere, so I immediately wondered why I hadn't thought of that before I got the ones at the supermarket.

And, I also realized that it was a mere ten days before I left for a two-week vacation to go visit my parents, and so it's not like I'd be able to cook up the cabbages into anything before then anyhow, and so they'd just take up room in my refrigerator for like almost a month. 

At the farmer's market, too, I circled back around and got carrots with nice big long carrot-greens from the one (classic rock vibe) (Harley Davidson-ish) (older) (white) guy who does organic gardening, and I told him that his carrots were tempting me too much and so I had to come back for them and buy something from him a second time that day, and I added that my one major addiction was to buy too much at the farmer's market every week.

"In terms of addictions, it's not a bad one to have," I was like.

"And we like it!", he was like. 

Light fixture and roofing problems.

On a day when there’s tornado sirens in the morning and then again in the evening as a second line of storms push through, I come back up from the basement of the front house and turn on my overhead lamp inside my cottage, and automatically it’s a bit dim, and you can see water at the bottom of the fixture.

And, I had the light on earlier that day, but nothing like that happened, only after the second, stronger storm system with the high winds.

And, the landlord passes all that on to the (older) (white) (townie) roofer, who comes by a day or two later and who I see walking around in the yard, and so I come out and he says that wind from certain directions can push rain up into cap shingles that run down the roofline, and that’s probably what happened there because the roofline is right over where the lamp is on the inside and look, you can see the gap from here, it’s those places where you can almost stick a pencil up in it, and he doesn’t like to seal that with silicone, but that’s what you’re going to have to do, with this one, and then everything should probably be all right.

And, he adds, LED lights “don’t give hardly no heat,” and if you get water in a bulb like that, older bulbs would dry that up, but not these ones.

Two odd customers…

…in one night, at the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I work now:

1) A (somewhat hairy) (college-age) (autistic?) (lesbian?) is in with two (Chinese from China) students and this other (white) girl she holds hands with under the table, and she wants “soda tonic,” so I ask her if she wants soda water or tonic water and she asks what’s the difference, and I say that I honestly don’t know, and the (Chinese) girl says tonic water is more bitter, and so she says, “Okay, tonic,” and then when I repeat their beverage order back to them, she says, “I said soda water,” and a bit later she also wants to know what kind of cheese is in the cheese curds and so I go find out and tell her white cheddar, and she says in a flat but also kind of perky tone of voice “We’re good!” and so I ask her if that means that she wants them or doesn’t want them, and she says no, she doesn’t want them, and later with her huge grilled chicken sandwich she asks can she have more bread since it’s too much meat and not enough bread and I go get her a toasted hamburger bun, and later she has very very specific questions on the desserts, too, everything is just like informational and oddly miscalibrated, interpersonally.

(Tip was in the 15-18% range.)

2) A (dressed-up) (slightly cowed) (African) man and a (fatter) (African-American) woman who must give him pussy come in and the woman pushes to sit at a big table in the window even though it’s just the two of them and I relent after she asks again when I say it’s usually kept for larger parties, and they go back and forth over appetizers, adding and then taking off stuff and skipping around from medium-rare to well-done to rare on the tuna, and they ask about some substitution on the special sandwich, and finally when it comes out she’s like, “It’s fried, and he wanted grilled chicken,” and so I bring the menu out and show them how it says grilled chicken right in the description portion where they had questions about substitutions, and the guy says to keep it and not throw it out, it’s fine, when I offer to replace it if they want me to.

(And, she totally wanted to send something back in the restaurant because that is how you behave at a restaurant in her mind, I knew that she would try something like that as soon as she pushed for the bigger table in the window and was pushing into all of the parameters of everything in the order, some [lower-class] customers are like that, it’s like it’s primadonna time and they get a sense of self-worth from it.)

Addendum.

People at this new job of mine at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel certainly can get snippy with one another, a lot more overall than at my last workplace, the one (male) (Thai) owner excluded.

And apart from the behavior of the one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) (goateed) bartender with (mental health problems), it’s in the bounds of normality, but it still is unpleasant to be around, nonetheless.

I think I’ve gotten an apology from someone and once when I was snippy I apologized, too, so I guess that’s just how it is there, and people do tend to work as a team and help each other out, so it’s just one of those workplace personality things that are like momentary blips and downsides.

Still a hell of a lot better than toxic behavior from the one (husband) owner of the (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at, though.

I think a big difference is that this is behavior among peer employees, versus top-down from someone above you in the management chain.

At this new place, too, the owners and all of the managers are all pretty nice, and if a mistake happens or something they’ll teach you the right way to do it without blame or judgment.

The clique-ish behavior is also a little offputting, but that’s only really like after work and not during the workday, and several people from it are leaving soon, so that’s vaguely unpleasant but it doesn’t really bother me and it will also probably be shifting soon, when some of the more self-uncomfortable people finish their academic programs at the local university and move on.

Some moments from the biggest sales day ever…

...at the current location of the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I now work, on this parents-day weekend thing at the local university:

1) The one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) turns the corner by "dish" with a big spoon covered in buffalo chickenwing sauce in his hands, and he turns into my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manager) coworker and gets some on her, leading her to exclaim in surprise and me to be like, “And just when I thought [her first name] couldn’t get any hotter!”

2) Later, since I am a “floater,” I am passing through a room and see two ladies starting their full-size dinner-portion salads and so I check if everything is all right and if they need anything else as I pass through because it’s something else that I can take care of right then, and my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manger) coworker sees me and outside the room is like, “I just checked with them! We’re overserving,” and she says it in a brusque tone of voice.

3) When I go to get water glasses from by the bar dishwasher because we’re running out of water glasses, I ask my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military) if there’s any ready, and he says there’s half a rack, so I’m like, “Half a rack is better than none,” and then I hear what I say and I pause and I say to him, “That’s what you tell yourself when your wife gets a mastectomy,” and later I repeat that joke to my one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress coworker, and she loves it.

4) When the bar is full and I go to put glasses on the edge of the bar where we keep them when the tray-rack below is full but not put in the dishwasher yet, the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) instructs me a bit snippily to put them on the bar mats on the bar island, since we always do that “when customers are present.”

5) When I take a tub of dishes to "dish" and am sorting them out, the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner asks people to start running food out to a gigantic table because it’s all coming out and there’s no room on the island, and I ask my one (white) (young) (gay-ish) (ponytailed) coworker who’s temporarily on dish if I can leave the tub there and come back to it, and he says yes and so I do and go help with food, and I come back like five minutes later and he’s like, “Please don’t ever do that again,” and he says that he didn’t hear what I said and I kind of politely shrug and say I asked, and he’s like,”Don’t ever do that again,” because I guess other people came back and started putting dishes down there too and leaving them or whatever.

6) As we cut down shift, my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker comes out with a big bin of silverware that he’d folded, and I go to break it up into the staging baskets that we keep at various locations throughout the restaurant, and then I point to the half-empty bin and put on a voice like I’m f*cking with him and am like, “Excuse me, sir, but this is not full.”

“Yeah it is,” he’s like, seemingly seriously. “It’s beauti-FULL.”

7) At the very end of the night, I see the one (older) (white) (tatted) (free-thinking) (female) cook step out from the grill, and I’m like, “Holy fuck, you’ve been here all night?”, and she said that she had noticed my name coming in on tickets but had never seen me, either.

8) After a lot of parents leave and it’s the end of the night and the restaurant is quieting down and there's really no diners there, there’s a big group of “those white lady” businesswomen in and they migrate from the bar where they’ve been drinking to a table that we set up for them, and then without asking one of them pulls another table to put it on the end and it blocks the aisle over there, and I check if everything is okay and they say that someone else is coming to join them, and one of them puts stuff at another table and another one puts a menu she doesn’t need anymore on yet another table, so that’s one moved table and two more tables they’re just throwing stuff on, and later other people join them and they’re at another nearby table with chairs splayed out blocking everything, and as I pre-bus stuff one tosses her head back and actually hits my hand as I’m walking by her.

9) As we’re going to clock out one by one, they announce the owner is buying everyone a free cocktail after work, and so I give my order and then go down to get my stuff from the breakroom, and when I come back up, it’s like this clique of four people – my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), the one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) bartender with (mental health problems), my one (blonde) (make-upped) (college-age) coworker, and my one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress coworker – and it’s like me and my one (short) (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker standing around the edges, and it seems like everything is breaking up and the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) is mixing shots and so I linger but nope, they’re for the clique and they're drinking them in front of us, and there’s mention of going to a bar but neither me nor my one (short) (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker are really included, and so I kind of down my drink and excuse myself and go to go home, because some people are like that.

Preempted snippiness…

…from the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I work, now:

At the end of the night, I put the soup on the back kitchen counter and turn to go get the container that you dump it into, and he’s like, “Hey, don’t leave that there…!”, and at that I say truthfully but hyper-innocently that I was just going to get the container to take care of it, and he catches himself, and he says that he just wanted to let me know that you can put the lid on askew so it looks like a Star of David, that’s the best way to put the soup in the refrigerator to cool.