Used the wrong button on the remote control.

Sometimes when I do cooking and cleaning at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, I turn on the TV, if she's in her room resting.

A long time ago, she or her (lesbian) sister had told me to use the one power button on the top of the remote control but not the other one, and I guess at some point I had gotten mixed up about them.

So, when I went in to work the other week, on the list of stuff to do and to know about was a reminder note about which button on the remote control was the right one to use.

"Sorry about that," I was like.

"No worries," my one assisted living client with disabilities was like. "The beatings will come later."

Baking experiment: Bacon-grease covered potatoes.

For like a year or more, I've been rubbing baked potatoes in olive oil before you bake them, to make sure that the skin gets all nice and moist when they finish baking.  Although it's such a small thing to do, when you're done, the skin comes out tender and nice and tasy, and not tough like shoe leather at all.

Anyhow, the other month when I was googling baking times and temperatures for potatoes since I'd forgotten them, I saw a reference somewhere on some online recipe to covering the potatoes with bacon grease instead of olive oil, so I put that idea away in my head for future reference, especially since the pieces of bacon fat I'd kept in my freezer had run out like right before that, as it turned out.

So, like a few weeks ago, I got some more bacon at the local supermarket when I was doing my weekly shopping there, and on a snowy day I tried the bacon fat thing, when the snow was just falling outside and you were inside and it was nice and warm and all you wanted to do was cook things and eat.  So, I fried up like half of a piece of bacon cut into chunks, and then I rolled each raw potato in the melting fat and spread the fat all around all over it with my fingers as it cooled.  And, with two of them, I experimented by putting some bacon inside of it for as it baked; with one of them, I cut open a wedge on top of it, put some bacon under it, and then put the wedge back on, and for the other one, I cut a slit, and then I used the blunt side of a knife to cram some bacon fat in, as I tried to hold the slit open a bit with my fingers.

Overall, they turned out pretty good.  The potatoes had the barest little hint of bacon taste, almost like a mildly flavored bacon potato chip, and most of the potatoes had this crazy good crispy skin, especially the ones I'd left in the oven longer (I took out a couple small potatoes twenty minutes early, since they were done and I was super hungry; with those ones, the skin wasn't as crisp).  A couple of them had had the grease pool at the bottom, too, since maybe I had put more grease on those ones and it had run down during the baking.  With the ones I put the bacon into, the insides of the potato tasted a bit like bacon, too, especially the one where I had put the bacon into a slit.

The next time I experiment, I think I'm going to do more slit potatoes, and I'm going to try to get as much as like a quarter-to-a-third of a piece of bacon crammed inside of it.

I think that that will make the best bacon flavored potato, in terms of the potato insides, and I'll just keep doing the outsides the same as I did, since the outsides have been turning out pretty well so far, so long as I keep the potatoes in the oven for at least a full hour.

An (old) (black) lady on the subway the other day.

The other week on the subway, this (old) (short) (black) lady in a tasteful coat gets on, pushing a black metal cart with something big in a black garbage bag inside of it, and a white plastic grocery bag on top of that.

At first she doesn't sit down even though there's a free seat right by her across the aisle from me, then a guy next to me gets up and offers her his seat and she takes it, and suddenly I notice that there's a damp stain towards the back of the seat on the seat across the aisle from us, and that's why she probably hadn't satten down there in the first place.

After a while, too, her elbow elbows me, and I noticed that she had taken out a classic blue tin of Danish butter cookies from her white plastic grocery bag, and for like a minute or two she used her one long fingernail to try to pick off the hard plastic seal around the edge of the lid, then she finally got it off, opened it up, and got herself out a butter cookie, and then she put the tin back in the white plastic grocery bag and tied it up and put it back on top of her stuff.

After a minute, she had finished her butter cookie.

So, like after another minute, she unwrapped the bag and got out the tin and got another cookie again, only to close it back up and put back the tin and wrap it up again, and then she set to eating her cookie.

That process repeated itself like three or four times.

Banter with my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor.

I'm kind of stoked to be trying to get dual citizenship with an EU country through my dad, so I've been sharing that news with everyone, or at least with everyone who I know well enough to the point where I know that it wouldn't come off the wrong way with them.

So, the other week I was chit-chatting with some of my coworkers at the resthome and I mentioned that to them, and then to give a hard time to my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor, I was like, "Hey [her first name], if we live in Europe, will you marry me?".

"I will marry you now," she was like, in a totally facetious tone of voice, as she had a very obviously fake smile just plastered across her face.

Chocolate craze at work.

This holiday season at the resthome, a lot of residents got chocolates, and a lot of residents would share them with you whenever you stopped by their room to go and assist them.

The one retired nurse had Frango mints, and this one (gentle) (Israeli) guy had these really nice dark chocolate truffles, and this one (genteel) centenarian had some See's candies in a box by the table by her door, and she'd open it up for you and let you pick whichever one you wanted, whenever you stopped by.

Honestly, some shifts I'd get like 2-3 chocolates a shift.

How great is that?

Freaky Egyptian reading text.

The other week, I was finishing up the exercises in my one Ancient Egyptian language textbook, and the last text in the unit turned out to be this super freaky spell for the protection of a baby from spirits who want to come in and kill it.

The spell addressed one nameless male spirit and one nameless female spirit, and it talked about how they sneak in at night with their head turned aside, and then it says shit like, "Do you want to kiss this child? I will not let you kiss him!".

Overall you can kind of see how it's like an old Egyptian remedy for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or whatever, but the language of it is super freaky, and it's even freakier to think of yourself as a person living in this world where you think that there's these malevolent demon spirits out there, who want to come into your house at night and kiss your child and kill it, and you have to try your best to stop them.

Comedy, via a work absence misunderstanding.

The other week at work, someone was asking why this one LPN hadn't come in to work that day.

"She's at a seminar," someone was like.

"Who died?", my one (older) (Tibetan) coworker was like.

. . .

After she realized that she was confusing "seminar" with "cemetery," my one (older) (Tibetan) coworker laughed, too.