You came back to me.

When I went to do laundry last week, my crusty brown washcloth was sitting out to the right of the communal dryer, somewhere by the overflowing lint-bucket.

I had only been using my yellow one for like weeks. 

. . .

(Very oddly enough, the very same day that that one came back to me, the yellow one disappeared in the wash.) 

Odd smell.

Whenever I cook black beans for black beans and rice, I do a quick soak on the dried beans and boil them intensely in salted water for like 30 minutes, and then I let them sit for a few hours before I start cooking them in earnest.

I saw this recommendation years ago online and I’ve been doing it for a while because it works -- if you don't, the beans cook weird and hard -- but lately I’ve noticed that whenever I come back to my apartment when they’ve been intensely boiled and are still sitting, the entire apartment smells like burnt plastic, somehow, like that’s the smell from the beans, as like this subtle addition onto their normal smell.

Like, it just hits you, but if you pause and stop and mentally process the smell, it starts registering just as the normal bean smell, but only after you’ve put some thought into it.

Just very strange.

Outside perspective on my life…

…from an old (linguist) friend who wanted to phone-conference with me about something with the one ancient language that I’ve been studying for the past number of years and have made myself into quite the expert in, when we end up talking relatively late one evening when I’m at the local brewery having beer and reading through this strange ancient body of texts:

“Reading an old text corpus for fun? Sounds great!” – and, he then added that maybe he’s weird, but he really does wish he had more time for that, but his teaching commitments just don't allow for it.

Odds and ends:

1) The one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) said that his roommates told him that he had lost weight after a short trip this winter to the city that I used to live in, where he tagged along with me on a trip that I was making and I really took him around and showed him stuff, although he complained a lot the entire time about how much we were walking.

2) One night when I'm taking a shower a few months ago, a lot of stuff happens in my shower at once like my dwindling shampoo bar drops and then the thin plastic cover of the shower-knob pops off like it does sometimes, and I have to shift the drain-cover to get the dwindling shampoo bar off the floor where it’s stuck to it amidst the surface tension of the rushing water, only as I do that, the drain is open to the world, and the thin plastic cover of the shower-knob suddenly slides down into that and goes right down the drain, somewhere far below, never able to be retrieved again, easily.

A small sign of widened horizons:

The candy bowl at my local bank is nothing but Dum Dums, which product line apparently now includes a dragon fruit flavor.

Years ago, you never would have seen that.

Tastes have globalized.

A life reflection…

…from the (vivacious) and (warm) (Brazilian) wife of the one (older) couple who’ve lived around town for years:

In a college town, people come and go, which is sad, but otherwise you never would have had a chance to meet them.

. . .

(. . .)

Tidbits:

1) The one (older) (white) (townie) bartender at the local brewery was saying that with this one college sport that people love, long-time locals love this one radio commentator so much, and he really is the best, that they often mute their TVs and turn the radio on, so they can hear him describe the game instead of whatever the TV commentators are saying.

2) My cheap generic razor blades that dull quickly heap up in a corner of my open bathroom shelf in the corner of my bathroom, since I’m saving them there to use to strip balled-up fuzzies off my sweaters, in one last act of use before I finally am forced to throw them out.