Chit-chat with a drugstore employee.

There's a few drugstore employees I know from the one drugstore near my house, including this one (mid-20s) (black) woman who at the most recent visit I noticed had tattoos up and down her arms, she had her sleeves pushed up.

"How are you doing?", I was like.

"Okay," she was like, "Just getting ready to go back to school this fall."

"Really?", I was like.  "Like what are you taking? What are you going for?".

"A lot of biology," she was like, "I want to do mortuary science."

"No way," I was like, and then I started telling her about how my one neighbor growing up was a mortician.

"Corpses are supposed to move when you go to cut them open," she was like.

"Is that true?", I was like.

"I don't know," she was like, "But I want to find out."

"Damn," I was like, "That's some serious serial killer shit."

At that, she laughed, quizzically, and I said good night.

Ability / Disability.

The other week I had to switch a ton of my addresses (magazines, health insurance, gas and electric, etc.), and when I was punching in my account or policy number for one of those, this one time I kept hitting the wrong numbers accidentally on the screen of my smartphone.

At that, I paused, and I thought how frustrating it must be to have something like Parkinson's or the shakes from getting older, and how close we all are to disability.

Pleasant bus driver.

The other week, I headed up to a store to get a ton of seal-tight plastic bins to put my stuff in prior to my move.

I used bikeshare to get up there, but on the way back home I took the bus west, and then waited for another bus south.

As I got on that bus loaded up with tons of nestled bins in my arms and some lids sticking up out of the top, this (thin) (late middle-aged) (African-American) (female) bus driver looks at me as I round the corner in the bus, and is like, "For meeee?".

I was like, "You like containers to organize stuff?".

"Yes!", she was like.

Laundromat woman's life.

So, the other day when I was doing a lot of laundry in preparation for my move, this one woman who works at the laundromat, who's some kind of Americanized hispanic, got talking about infestations because I was talking about bedbugs, but instead of bedbugs, she started talking about lice.

"I told my daughter I'm gonna whoop her ass if her kids come home with lice one more time," she was like.  "I told her, you got to bathe them, you got to use that comb three times a day, and you got to stop hanging around with the boys on the corner and leaving them at your nasty-ass in-laws."

I sympathized.

Polling place fears in an age of Trump.

I'm kind of worried about doing election day volunteering in an age of Trump.

In the swing state that I go to, a lot of people have guns, and the economy's been bad.

All it takes is one nut job to go after someone going door-to-door, or to show up at the campaign office, or to even come to the election results viewing party.

I'll have to keep my pulse on things when I'm out campaigning the next few weekends, and I'll have to see how much Trump keeps up the "rigged election, watch polling places!" rhetoric between now and the election.

Trivia from my one neighbor from New Orleans:

At LSU, cheering from the football stadium is so loud, it registers on the Richter scale at the geology building across the way.

Moving apartments, and I hope to escape bed bugs.

Big news:

I got a new lease at a different place, but now I have to figure out how to move without taking bed bugs with me.

From what I've learned online, I'll wash and garbage bag all my clothing, and my other stuff I'll put in plastic bins and keep sealed up till I can rotate it in and out of my home freezer, which at the lowest setting goes below zero Fahrenheit, which kills bugs and eggs after stuff is kept in there for 4 days.

Otherwise, I'm throwing out my mattress and box spring, and buying large amounts of rubbing alcohol to just dowse all my furniture and carpet and bedframe...

I'm also buying bed bug interceptors pronto to put around the legs of my furniture, to see if any bugs are coming off them.

If they are, I'll throw the furniture out, and if not, I'll spray and keep it.