Neighborhood tamale vendor.

Outside the entrance of my local grocery store, there's always a card table set up with a pre-printed banner in English and Spanish, and two coolers full of pork and chicken tamales packed 6 to a plastic bag, and this (middle aged) (golden brown skinned) (round faced )(I think Mexican) woman, who dresses in a winter coat and looks cold when the temp is very low, though she sometimes pops into the foyer behind the sliding door to warm up and comes out every once in a while to see if she has customers, when it's that cold out.

The other week, it was that cold out, and as I left, I decided on impulse to get a bag of tamales, so I found her in the foyer and asked her to buy a pack of pork tamales.

When she came back from outside with the tamales, I gave her a couple bucks extra as a tip, and thanked her and told her to stay warm.

When I see people like her, it really burns me that people say that immigrants are lazy, she probably works more and harder than anyone else I know, and she deserves better.

Bar blackout!

The other week I was at the student bar after working a twelve hour day and the gym and was just settling into a crossword and a nightcap, when suddenly the lights went out.

Fortunately, the emergency lights kicked in, but it was still pretty dark.

"I feel like I'm in the back room!", I could hear the owner crack from down the bar.

(The bar has three main rooms, the back one of which is pretty dark.)

The bartenders ended up bringing out small votive candles and setting them out in large metal bowls so that everyone could continue to drink, and somehow they got the registers open and set out the different denominations of bills in small red plastic food baskets so that you could make change quickly.

And, every time that you ordered a drink, they warned that if the emergency lights went out, they'd have to close up the bar pretty quick, so be warned.

I gave them a couple extra bucks for tip, and pointed it out to them and said that that was for perseverance in the face of adversity.

Honestly, I've never seen anything like that at a bar before, where the lights went out like that.

When I went to get a second beer and a whiskey on the rocks, they warned that the emergency lights were dimming, but I got it anyway and caught up on news on my smartphone because it was too dark to do a crossword, and then went to chug when the small votive candles started burning out and they went around telling everyone that they were closing soon.

Unexpectedly rewarding bar mistake!:

The other week, I was new barhopping in the city's restaurant district, and the last bar of the night was this expensive cocktailed hipster bar, and like always, I browsed the menu, but went for the beer.

After a sample of a beer I didn't like, though, as I continued browsing the menu, I saw that they had a selection of drinks called "nightcaps", which I really liked, since I often say that my last drink of the night is a nightcap, sometimes saying that at repeated "last" new bars so that bartenders will humor my booziness and sell me something, though that expensive cocktailed hipster bar was really my planned last bar of the night.

Furthermore, the drinks were really boozy, and only like $2.

So, I asked the bartender about one whose description caught my eye, and after she said it was very herbal, I was sold and got it.

As it turns out, it was very herby and had a floating plaintain chip, and I loved it.

But, when I got the bill, it was actually $13.

That "2" by the list was actually the page number, and the drinks didn't have a clearly listed price.

Fucking hipsters.

Bar job updates, again:

1) Pretty much all the servers are on a continuous group conversation using this one smartphone app that I downloaded, under the group name "[CHAIN BAR NAME] THUGS".

It's kind of fun.

2) I forgot, New Year's Eve the Moroccan was in as a customer with a few other workers, and after midnight when he saw me and hugged me to wish me a happy near year, he went in for a deep neck kiss.

3) The (young) (black) (male) bartender who had gotten fired from a bunch of other jobs and tried to sell me coke when we went out as a group after one training day, stormed off the job the other week for no reason early on a pretty dead shift.

It's unclear whether he was edgy from being on something, or tired of a slow restaurant where no-one makes money.

Though, the few times I've been in, they've been busy, so maybe it was some drugs he was on?

On that note, a (recent college grad) (Latina) coworker who I text with and convinced me to download the group chat app said that she's surprised how many people there do drugs beyond pot.

Double yolk mystery solved?

So, I made another omelette the other day, and again all 3 eggs were all double-yolked.

I realized that maybe it's because I whack the eggs hard against the edge of the pan, and if the pan edge digs deep enough, it causes the yolk to split into 2 as it falls into the pan.

Maybe.

But then, if that was the case, wouldn't the yolks be broken, and they'd bleed everywhere?

The yolks really are double yolks, each discrete and unbleeding.

The other alternative, though, is that I had 2 really freaky coincidental omelettes made of double-yolked eggs in a row.

Which could be linked to industrial farming or some shit, though I get free range eggs?

Who the eff knows any more.

Nightmare of teaching:

The other night, I dreamt that I start up 2nd semester of teaching writing, and instead of 95% returnees and a handful of new people, it's like three fifths new kids, and when I ask them what they covered the previous term, it turns out to be not much of what I had covered, and so I realize that I'll have to make all new lesson plans, which will help them somewhat but will make my carry-over kids mad b/c of repetitiveness.

Then, I realize that something is not quite right, so I quiz them some more, and it turns out that they really didn't know what they were talking about, and so their information is undependable, which is even worse.

Then, I wake up.

. . .

What a lame nightmare.

Insurance worries.

I'm surprised on Facebook by how many posts I've seen worrying about health insurance - cancelled and changed plans, unaffordable employer plans, and the like.

I ended up okay so far, but who knows how far my current insurance really goes, the cost structures are so opaque that you never really know how much you'll pay ahead of time.

It's also weird for me b/c I'm in the window where I get subsidies, but if I try to up my income through part-time jobs, it becomes unclear how much subsidy I'll be getting and so if my living cost estimates will be off by a thousand dollars or two (=a big amount for me).

Obamacare needs tweaks, but who knows how long that will be until that happens.

Sigh.