A story of a corner of my district (1 of 2): Condo resident.

A few weeks ago when I was out canvassing, I was by this gentrifying neighborhood off the freeway, and a cool as all hell condo owner answered the door and we ended up chit-chatting for a bit.

She had lived there in that particular building for ten years and in the city for years before that, and she said that break-ins were getting bad, where someone in the middle of the day had thrown something through her front door and was trying to get in, and another time at night people tried to get in off the side emergency staircase.

"When I first moved here me and a girlfriend lived in a hotel on [now a major street that's been cleaned up], we were the only white people there, we don't scare easily," she was like.  "But, this is just too much."

She also said that this summer she was coming home, and this homeless couple who live in the nearby encampment were just out in the open on the concrete in the middle of the day, fucking.

Cream cheese taquitos.

With my one client with disabilities, we tried a cooking experiment where I made her some homemade quesadillas, which she really really liked, especially how I burned them a little bit and made the cheese crunchy on the edges where it had oozed out and the oil or the liquid shit in the cheese or whatever had sizzled out on the frying pan and just evaporated away.

After that, we were talking about recipes for leftover tortillas, so I googled "leftover tortillas quick recipes" and found a good recipe for cream cheese and chicken taquitos, as well as just making simple quick tortilla chips.

So, we talked some and decided to adapt the recipe a bit for another night, and try a range of taquitos: one just cream cheese, another cream cheese with chopped up chicken lunchmeat, a third cream cheese with chopped up ham, a fourth with cheddar slivers, and one last one with bacon bits that I fried up in the tortilla warming pan last of all, so that the other taquitos wouldn't have a bacon grease flavor on them.

I also did one "foldover" baked quesadilla of cream cheese, and one tortilla I brushed with olive oil to see how good homemade tortilla chips were.

The chicken and cream cheese taquito was a hit, and so was the homemade tortilla chip - I can't believe how good that is, my client was like! - and we planned out trying next time a cheddar cheese taquito and a cheddar cheese and ham taquito, as two other possible good combinations.

Honestly, what a fun job.  I get to cook homemade food for a client, and even learn how to warm tortillas and roll taquitos on the job.

You just can't beat that!

Addendum.

Back when I was feeling shitty, I was also reading Seth Abramson's "Proof of Collusion" book about Trump-Russia through right before the midterm elections.

So, not only would I suck up news on Twitter all day, but I'd also face an extended narrative of ugly corruption at night where I'd be trying to read a thirty or forty page chunk of that book at a time, so I could get through that book fast since there was still a decently long waiting list down at the library and I needed to finish it all fast and return it for other people.

That didn't help my mood either, of course.

I think one of my goals for this year is to get a self-limiting app for my smartphone, so I don't spend so much time in the froth of current news, and can focus more on projects and re-engage the real world again or separate from it, apart from the mechanism of a screen.

Everyone got sick at once this month.

It seems like this month everyone I know got sick at once.

A friend from the neighborhood slipped on the ice and fell and chose to stay home and rest up a few days, a grad school friend posted on Facebook that he was just feeling worn down and tired, and I was feeling that way, too, and that's apart from people at the rest home who I know who weren't feeling well, since a bunch of residents there all weren't feeling so hot all at once.

My one friend who slipped and fell on the ice said that the general shitty mood everyone was feeling was to be expected.

"The weather's awful and days are short and people's biological rhythms are off," she was like. "Of course people aren't feeling great."

Like a week-and-a-half after that, the sun was out, even though it was cold, and everything just felt different and more optimistic.

It really was sun, chasing away the winter wear.

A story of an Italian Jew.

As part of my (modern) (Italian) literature kick that I've been on for a while, I read Giorgio Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," which depicts Italian Jews in Ferrara on the eve of WWII.

And, as it turned out, a new resident of the resthome was a(n old) (Jewish) guy from Italy.

So, I mentioned the book to him one evening when I was assisting him, and it turns out that he and his family had fled to Switzerland when shit got bad, and that's where they waited out the war.

I then asked him if he knew any Jews from his town who were fascists (there's characters like that in the Bassani).

As it turns out, his uncle was a lawyer who had become a fascist in order to grease the wheels and more easily join corporate boards, and when his family was fleeing, everyone told him that he should go, but he kept insisting that he would stay and be protected.

"You are a fool!," he said that they told him.

"But," the guy told me, "He was protected, they hid him."

They don't know where, but some of his business connections hid him and kept him safe, and he waited out the war in Italy where he had always lived.

A story of the resthome: Greeting.

The one retired psychiatrist wasn't feeling too well, last time I was in at work.

I encouraged him to "stay strong, motherf*cker."

Another dream, during my campaign.

A few weeks ago I dreamnt -

I'm tossing and turning in bed, and suddenly I know that I wasn't careful enough taking care of an insect infestation.

While I'm still lying there in bed with my eyes closed, my mental vision zooms out and refocuses on an old mattress casing that I had pulled off and carelessly thrown aside against the wall so that it had fallen in a clump higher up on the wall and a bit against my current covers, and then my vision zooms in and I see a few insects that are shiny slivers of white that are crawling all over the casing, and then my vision clicks into place and I see that the mattress cover is full of a complete swarm of them, all rapidly running over it, to the point where you can't even see the casing, except in a few places.

And then, I'm there with a spray bottle full of rubbing alcohol spraying it directly onto the insects to kill them, but I'm also lying in bed at the same time.

And then, I wake up.

. . .