Neighborhood changes.

Like three different long-term places are suddenly closing down in my neighborhood, a bakery and a restaurant and a pharmacy, and that's after a long-time liquor store and grill closed down a few months ago, too.

I think two if not three of the places are run by older people who've run their businesses for decades and have decided that it's time, but still, it's kind of sad.

I'm really sad since I liked a couple of the specialties from the bakery, and I would try to get all my pharmacy stuff from that pharmacy.

Sigh.

Changes.

Vinegar Stories (2 of 2): Potato salad.

The other week at the resthome, my one (new) (Iraqi) coworker gave me the potato salad from her staff meal plate.

"Here, you have it," she was like, and then she mock shuddered and was like, "Ugh, too much vinegar."

I think it was a German-style potato salad, and I didn't half-mind it.

I sure ate it all, in any case.

As I like to say, my favorite kind of food is 'free.'

Vinegar Stories (1 of 2): Eraser.

The other week, I was sitting at my kitchen table in my apartment and I had just finished eating a big bowl of salad, and when I went to go pick up a big rubber eraser for some reason, it ended up falling into the bowl and it got vinegar all over it.

So, I dried it off right away on my jeans, but there was still moist spots all over it, and so I left it out on the edge of my kitchen table to dry.

It was dry by the next day, but I still haven't tried to use it again yet, to see if it will still erase things, or if it will just smear the pencil marks all around and create big black smudges on the page wherever I try to erase.

How bad people are doing, financially.

My one (male) (Tibetan) coworker had stopped working at the resthome because of problems with the childcare schedule for his new baby and his wife has a better job, but he found new jobs with better hours and now works the desk at some hotel somewhere, and drives rideshare besides in his random spare hours.

So, as soon as I found out about it, I texted him the website for an app that pays you to play certain music while you drive rideshare.  It's like three cents a minute or something like that while a passenger is in your car, but three cents is three cents, and that could be up to like maybe another $1.80 an hour, which can really help with combatting depreciation on your car and can maybe get you more towards a living wage, so why not do it, especially if you have someone in your car anyways.

Imagine that, that's how thin the edge is on making it, where you try to help out someone you know like that, so they can maybe get another buck an hour on average, occasionally.

And, people will do it.

A dream of decay: Print.

The other week I dreamnt:

I'm outside a house where I live, and it's snowy but the snow is melting and dripping dirty snow from the roof, and all of the melting snow water falls into lines under the eaves and kicks up dirty drops from there, and some of the drops are flying inwards and spattering the siding on the house.

And, propped up on a chair outside the house is a print that was given to me by the one resthome resident who wants to die, and I look, and even though it's kind of roughly thrown in between sheets of paper that look like crumply sides of a paperbag, I pull it out and there's black smears across the front of the print, and I know that I can't remove it and I can't fix it, and that the print is ruined forever.

My father is there, and I show the print to him, and he asks what did I expect to happen with my leaving the print outside the house on a chair, and I say I didn't expect it to snow so soon.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

My worktrip preparation for Germany has included...

...double-checking the Lufthansa site for carry-on baggage measurement , because you know that if any airline is going to get all strict about that, it's the German one.

It was funny, too, because they said that if you didn't check your bag at the appropriate point and tried to carry it on and it was too large and they had to check it later, they'd charge you more, because you knew.

How German!

Baby reconnaissance.

The other week, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) was telling me that her nine month old got bit a few times at daycare by some other kid.

She said the second time that it happened, there was four little tooth marks on her arm, so the next time that she picked her up from daycare, she found herself looking into all of the other kids' mouths to see if she could see who had four teeth in a similar position, to see if she could figure out who did it.