Am I getting old?

I look at young people with face tattoos, and I'm like, "What the f*ck?".

Dreams (2 of 2): A friend's.

The other week my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) dreamnt -

She's leaving work, and she sees her baby daughter lying out on the street in traffic and this (British) black cab is speeding right at her and it looks like it hit her but it turns out that its tires just missed her, so she runs out into the street and scoops her up and holds her and takes her to safety.

. . .

(She had this dream the week that she returned to work from maternity leave.)

Dreams (1 of 2): Mine.

The other week I dreamnt-

I'm looking at my beard in the mirror, and I hadn't been paying attention and I had cut too close or I'd put the beard trimmer on too short a setting or something and then I had started shaving, and there's a big chunk out up near my right sideburn, so it looks super short in comparison to the rest of my rather full beard.

I look at it and then I wonder how I had ever done that, and I realize that I'll just have to shave it all down and start again from much less, but I don't feel too bad, since it's fixable.

. . .

Then, I wake up.

Jigsaw Puzzles (3 of 3): At the resthome.

The other week when I was at work right after I'd delivered those donation jigsaw puzzles from my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair), I stopped through the reading room after dinner and chitchatted with the one resident who really likes to do puzzles and is really good at them, since her and her friend were sitting around and chit-chatting at the jigsaw puzzle table while she was doing them.

Since there had been a little tension over workers doing some of the puzzles, I reminded her that I'd donated some and that I had just donated two thousand pieces more, so that should be good for me to work on it for a bit.

"You can do a couple," she was like.

"Just a couple?!", I was like, "That's like one piece per thousand, that's not fair."

After I had worked on the puzzle for a minute or two, I got called off to work, and then I came back twenty minutes later after I'd finished up with that, since it was a slow part of the night where I didn't have many duties to do quite yet.

As it turns out, right before I got back, her friend had accidentally knocked a small paper plate with a bunch of puzzle pieces onto the floor, so she asked me to go pick them up for her.

I did, and then when I had flipped them all right-side up on the small paper plate, the one resthome resident who's really good at doing puzzles was like, "You missed one," and she said that without even turning or really looking at the floor, and then when I looked down sure enough there was a piece with a picture of dappled leaves, and it was sitting out on a spotted piece of carpet so that it was super hard to see.

"Sheesh," I was like, "You wonder why she's so much better at this than us, and then she can see that piece out on the floor like that from far away, when it's camouflaged like a tiger or a zebra or something."

"Yes I did," she was like.

Then, she was like, "Don't worry, I have more years doing this than you do."

Jigsaw Puzzles (2 of 3): As gifts.

The other week when I was picking up a couple jigsaw puzzles to donate to my one resthome workplace from my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair), I was thinking that if I ever need to get her a gift, I should get her a jigsaw puzzle, and a souvenir one from a place, too, to make sure it's one that she likely hasn't boughten and done before.

Then after that, we were texting, and it turns out that when her mom came to visit, she brought her a couple puzzles from her brother and her aunt, and each one was from someplace in England that they'd been to.

In retrospect, I guess the idea was obvious, meh.  

Jigsaw Puzzles (1 of 3): At libraries.

The other week when I was downtown and I was at the city's main library branch and then at that private law library, what got me was that each one had a jigsaw puzzle out for random patrons to do.

At the law library, too, the jigsaw puzzle's picture was of a library, so the theme was "of a piece."

When I told my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend that (the sister of the brother-sister pair, the one who's donated jigsaw puzzles for use at the one resthome that I work at), she was like, "Oh, I think we did that one!", and then when I described the picture in a bit more detail, she was certain of it.

That particular one was one of the brands she buys, too.

Addendum, on Lack of Academic Library Access.

I'm trying to adjust to not having an academic library, and so far it's going pretty well.

My city's public library can ILL articles, and from the two test cases that I sent through, they got me electronic copies of stuff that didn't cost me or them anything at all, and they got them pretty quickly, too.

We'll see how it goes with books from university presses.  I've bought for myself used copies of major stuff that I know I'll need long-term, and as for other books, my city's public library actually already had a hard copy of one that I needed to read from a bit.

Right now I'm thinking that I can ILL or buy what I need, or I can find hard copies in area university libraries that I can go in to and read at during public access hours.

My own school that I graduated from and taught at has alumni borrowing privileges that I could buy, but $250 a year is too much for me right now, and plus what with all the money I gave them from tuition and working at low wages, why would I do that.