I dropped a knife in my kitchen the other day.

It was a small carving knife that I had set down and then accidentally knocked off the side of the counter, and when I looked down, it was standing upright tip-down, stuck in the floor.

I wonder if that's bad luck.

Observation of a (Tibetan) coworker who's going back to India to see her mom and sister...

...for the first time in the 6 years since she immigrated:

"Yes, the food is better there, it's tasty, here the chickens are frozen, but there they are fresh."

Tales of the resthome: Other languages.

One guy at the resthome is over a 100 and originally from Vienna, and originally he spoke German and maybe Yiddish.

Lately, he's been switching back to them, occasionally.

The other day when he was having a coffee, he lifted it up to me and was like, "Lechiam!".

Then, when I said "Lechiam!" back with my cup of tea and toasted him, he looked at me quite seriously, and was like, "Du verstehst 'lechaim'?".

Lately, too, he's also been calling me my first name with the "-el" dimunitive, which I think is either Yiddish or German.

It's so weird, since for as long as I've known him, he's been speaking English.

The brain is so funny.

Some stories in my neighborhood...

...besides the illegal drag racing, the (Chinese) whorehouse  that got busted on a quiet side street, and this one guy who went around his block selling cigarettes illegally so people didn't have to pay the taxes on them:

1) This one corner store with a lot of cell phones got raided by the DEA and shut down for running drugs and guns.

2) Some (Chinese) people keep vegetable gardens on public right-of-ways, and late at night you can see them come out from their houses with buckets of their own shit to go and fertilize it.

3) This one guy said his upstairs neighbors were gypsies and never paid rent and then just up and left, and the husband was in some construction business but the wife stayed home and they kept their kid out of school and she was always in the parking lot of the local grocery store selling candy to people as they got in and out of their cars.

And, she was ten but looked twelve, "though I didn't ask."

When I asked if they were really gypsies, he was like, "Yeah, they were gypsies, they didn't pay rent, that's honest-to-god gypsies right there, what else are they."

A bathroom oddity at my apartment.

Late at night I see something black and scurrying over the roll of toilet paper, and so I swivel it around a few times, and suddenly I see one of those small long thin black bugs that I very occasionally see scurrying across the floor tiles late at night, when my apartment's dark and I come into the bathroom and turn the light on.

I think to myself that it must have somehow crawled out onto there through the toilet paper roll holder, but then it couldn't find its way back onto the metal and so it's now just stuck on the roll, maybe inside the cardboard, maybe between the sheets.

Like a day later, as I go to get my toothbrush, I see a small long thin black bug go into a space in the wood trimwork, on the inset shelving where I keep a lot of my toiletries.

An email from my mother:

Hi [diminuitive version of my first name].......miss you  much!

Today's date is a palindrome....   8-18-18.   Actually, so was were the past few days.

Hope the campaigning is going well.   XXXXXXOOOOOO  Mom

. . .

A joke with a resthome resident.

The one retired doctor who's 83 loves to say the word "mother f*ck*r" a lot.

So, the other day after I assisted him with a shower, I was like, "Okay [his first name], all clean, except for your motherf*ck*ng mouth."

. . .

He loved it.