A neighborhood problem: Rats.

One of my volunteers couldn't help out, because of a rat problem.  Rats were in the foundation of her house, and her and her husband have a basement apartment!

Someone told me, too, that the local dollar store closed for renovations recently because of a rat problem, because someone moved something and a rat was just sitting there on the shelf.

I later told that story to someone when I was out campaigning, and they had heard it too, only they said someone pulled a bag of dog food off the shelf, and the rat came out and ran up their hand.

A resthome antic: A dementia impression.

The other week after assisting the one retired psychiatrist with a shower at the resthome, he was in his living room watching TV, and I was cleaning up his bathroom.

Then, when I passed him on my way out of his room with his dirty towels all wrapped up in a bundle in another towel, he turned to me and mugged a blank face and was like, "Why did you make a baby, and where are you taking it?".

Then, he chuckled to himself, and went back to watching TV.

A very weird and rare occurrence...

My lips are chapped!

My lips like absolutely never get chapped.

The other night they were mildly chapped, and I was eating a big salad with oil and a bit too much vinegar on it, and my lips stung a lot, and then after that they got hugely chapped.

I don't have any chapstick or anything, so I rub them occasionally, and now I'm trying to dab a bit of olive oil on them, that I keep out in a spoon that I can dip my finger into.

I think that'd work?

I really don't know the philosophy of how a person keeps their lips moist, with what works.

Two people on the subway, on successive days:

1) A (tall) (young) (blonde) girl with shorter shorts and wide hips, talking very loudly in her high-pitched voice about musical theater with some other young person, and saying how in high school she was always the "musical theater kid" who knew all the cast members on all the albums, but since she got to college, other people's knowledge has put her to shame, and that's okay.

2) A(n older) (black) man with a moustache and a soul patch, in a porkpie hat and a short-sleeved shirt and khaki dress pants, who every once in a while makes a loud smacking sound, about every ten to thirty seconds or so...

I think he's gone, but then many stops later other people who had sat down on the subway bench in between us get up and leave, and out of the corner of my ear I hear that sound again, and I glance up from my book, and he's still there.

A dog and an owner I met while out canvassing:

This young golden retriever that lay on the grass and licked my feet while I spoke with his owner, a (late middle-aged) (Chinese-American) woman.

I laughed and told her that that was the first time a dog ever licked my feet like that while I was out talking with voters, and she laughed and said that he licks everything.

I then joked that she should start a cleaning business, where if people drop food on the floor, she could rent the dog out to the people to go and lick the floor clean for them.

At that, she laughed again.

"Only five dollars, reasonable prices, not too much!", she was like, riffing on the joke.

A sight the other day when I was out canvassing:

a (younger middle-aged) (white) woman sitting out on the low slab of cement that led up to her front door like a stoop, while a big fat mostly black-haired pig was standing out in the fenced-in cement yard wolfing down a third of a watermelon and pushing it around the sidewalk as it tried to eat, the juice bleeding out like water and staining the walk.

He was five years old and named "Banjo," and had a few long thin black hairs coming out off the end of his tail.

A wonderful compliment by a constituent the other day.

The other day when I was finishing up canvassing, I was walking past this one stretch of street that I had been down by earlier, and I saw this (Chinese-American) husband who I had talked to out in this park opposite his house with his kids, and this similarly aged (Chinese-American) woman sitting on the steps of the house in a pink sweatshirt.

Since I assumed that she was his wife, I went up to her and introduced myself and explained that I had met her husband earlier, and we chatted a bit.

She had a *ton* of policy questions for me, and we talked a while, and then she dug into my professional background a bit more.

After all of that, she was like, "You're very brave," and thanked me for running, and said that she has the same beliefs but simply wouldn't go and take the risk like that.

Wasn't that amazing?

No-one's ever told me that before, and I thanked her very warmly; it really is a lot of time and energy and risk, and very few people seem to see it.

It's nice to see that that's appreciated.