Two out-of-place animals...

...back in later June:

1) One afternoon a gold finch flits into some tiger lilies and sits on the stalk of one of them, creating a clash of colors against the blossoms.

2) Another afternoon on a long strip of campus business-district sidewalk where the buildings come up flush against the sidewalk and even the little barren plant beds by the curb are fenced in with small little fences on top of the large blocks of the raised beds, a thin brown juvenile rabbit tentatively hops down the sidewalk even in the face of occasional pedestrians, as it stops now and then to cower against the small running wall of the concrete of the raised plant beds.

A conversation with my mother on her 80th birthday.

After seeing mention of them in the news, she tells me about once seeing the caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were found, although they didn’t get up close, they just saw them from afar.

She also says that 80 isn’t just a big birthday in terms of a nice big round number, she’s also glad to have just made it this far, and she says that when my great-grandmother turned 80 I wasn’t quite born yet but she traveled downstate to be with her, and they brought her a cake to her house, probably store-bought.

Three neighborhood happenings…

…this spring:

1) Looking out my cottage window, something catches my eye in the yard, and it’s a squirrel turning himself around over and over again in the dust in the bare space beneath the outdoor table that sits out in the middle of the front house’s backyard, and there’s like grooves in the ground there where he’s doing it, perhaps from so many dust-baths, or perhaps from some natural phenomenon conducive to creating grooves in the ground in which a squirrel can take a dust-bath.

2) As I leave the one local brewery with a plate of like three cupcakes left over from a birthday party there, I see from afar some people gathered outside the local music bar to smoke and gather before leaving in a group or whatnot, so I cross the street to go offer food to them, and the group by the curb is like six-to-eight (dressed up for a night out) (college-age) females who are out celebrating one’s twenty-first birthday – “I just had my first legal drink!”, the (white) (blonde) birthday celebrant is like, over-exuberantly – and anyhow they are stoked to take the cupcakes that I offer, and when they ask and I explain to them where they came from, the one (Asian-American) one just smiles and nods her head in satisfaction and is like, “I love that,” and she then explains that they’re all in this environmental-focused major, so it’s great, they all hate food waste, and like two of them who seem decently drunk are already grabbing the cupcakes and unwrapping the paper from around their bases in order to devour them when their Uber arrives, and they continue to do that as they all start stepping into the Uber, like both unwrapping the cupcakes and trying to step into a car at the same time, all while in short skirts and wearing high heels.

3) In the yard of the new-ish neighbors on the corner who turned their backyard into an open-air kennel where they keep up to 3 dogs at a time who are sometimes barking nuisances to the point where I’ve kept records and truthfully reported them to animal control twice over the course of one year for noise violations, there’s now like heavy black plastic tarps covering most of the wire fence, so that the animals cannot easily see passer-bys or other dogs as they pass by, so they bark less.

Some odd customers all in one day…

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

1) When I deliver a salad to a(n older) (white) couple, the lady looks at her salad and immediately asks me to bring out a side of ranch dressing, after saying dryly but somehow in-your-face, “There’s not much ranch on the salad.”

2) At a three-top of two (white) moms and their (developmentally disabled kid), the one mom requests more ice for her drink, and then adds, “This drink isn’t cold,” and later they ask me for two to-go boxes but don’t use the one, and when I give my spiel about how we can’t reuse it so do they want to take it with them or do they want me to throw it out, she’s like, “Oh, just throw it out.”

3) From these four (late 20s) (white) women sitting in the lounge area, including one in short short jean shorts and a t-shirt that’s too tight on her, one of them wants to know if we have this one cocktail with crème de menthe like she once had somewhere, only she can’t remember what it was, and so she asks me if I could get the bartender to put together those ingredients, and when I go to ask that of my one (middle-aged) (white) (remarried) mom coworker who’s the bartender on duty that night, she’s just bluntly like, “No,” and then she explains and says, “Because that would taste like toothpaste.”

Work…

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

1) At a big chaotic table of (white) women and their (white) daughters, my one (white) (young) (gay-ish) (ponytailed) coworker steps in to help them when they need to-go boxes, and he asks them how many, and the one (mom) says “Oh, just bring a stack,” and so he brings a stack of 6 for the like 8-10 of them at the table, and they end up using just one.

So, when I clear the table, I’m asking them if I can clear food, and when it’s clear that they’re not taking any more food with them, I’m like, “Because these were on the table, we can’t reuse them now. Would you like to take them with you, or would you like me to throw them out?”

(Some people... That was at least a few bucks worth of stuff, which really cuts into the profit margin from the table, besides being so wasteful.)

2) At  a small chaotic table of like four people, the one (Asian-American) girlfriend who picks up the tab slips a giftcard behind her credit card without telling me when she hands me the bill, and so I run the bill on the credit card and it’s only then that I see the giftcard, so I have to go get a manager to void the transaction so I can re-run the bill with the giftcard.

And, when I bring it to the table along with the receipt showing the voided transaction, she says she knows, since credit card transactions show up on her space-age internetted watch and she got notices for both times that I ran it, and she says this a little bit suspiciuosly, like wondering why I wasn’t on top of my job to see that giftcard there in the first place.

3) Everyone is kind of mopey at work from how the local university lost in the big recent athletic tournament, so I’m like, “You know, we should really call it March Sadness,” and multiple coworkers comment to me that that’s a joke like my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker would make, and he does in fact love that joke when I get around to telling it to him.

A recent-ish dream:

A number of months ago I dreamnt –

I’m opening this container of leftover aglio-et-olio spaghetti or whatever the f*ck you call it, some that I’d kept in a glass container for serving and then for keeping in my fridge for reheating later, and as I wash out the stray pieces of spaghetti from the side of the container, it becomes clear that there’s entire layers of spoiled spaghetti still left at the bottom, somehow, and it’s like spaghetti that had stuck together in the pot during boiling since I didn’t stir it up enough or add enough oil to the water or whatever when I boiled it, and as I go to get it out it becomes clear that there’s more and more of it just there at the bottom of the container, just wasted, and somehow I never knew that that much of it had gone bad.

 . . .

(. . .)

A problem worker…

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

Digging through my work bag, I find a menu that had been given to me so I could look through and memorize it somewhat, as well as some tax withholding paperwork in the center of it that I had filled out and never returned.

So, the next time that I work, I ask about the paperwork and they tell me to duck into the office where liquor is kept and put it on the desk of the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager, and then I hand over the menu to the one (introverted) (white) (tattooed) manager since the menu by now is slightly different in the salads section and needs a new sheet, and she just sighs and gets this exasperated look on her face and is like, “Ugghhh, I already swapped out eighty of these!”