Coworker's grandmother's cat backstory.

My one (cool) (Ethiopian) coworker who's (Muslim) likes cats, so I made sure to show her a picture of my friend the Spanish instructor's (newish) cat, the time after I had hung out with her and met her cat for the first time.

"That is nice," she was like, as I scrolled through the couple of pictures on my smartphone, showing them to her.

She then told me about her grandmother's cat back in Addis Ababa.

The cat really loved her grandmother, and one time her grandmother was away on a trip for three days and the cat wouldn't eat at all, and it just lied in her bed a lot, since it missed her so much. Then, when her grandmother got home, the cat was by her all the time for all that day, since it had missed her so much.

"Is the cat still alive?", I was like.

"No," she was like, "It ate mouse that ate poison."

I then asked her if she had a cat, and she said no, and then I asked her if she wanted one, and she said yes, if she lived in a house, not an apartment.

We talked some more, then, and she said that a cat needs more room than an apartment, and she held to that point even when I was saying that cats live in apartments all the time, and if her apartment is enough room for her and her husband, it's enough room for a cat, since a cat is so much smaller than them.

But, she kept insisting otherwise.

Coworker backstory.

The other week I was in the main dining room at my resthome job having my staff meal, and the one dining hall worker from Togo was going around cleaning tables.

So, I asked her what was happy and new in her life, and she couldn't think of anything because her life was the same as always, she said, so I mentioned how I had seen a very nice section of a big park in the city that I hadn't seen before, when I had met up to socialize with a friend the day before.

And, I described to her where that was, and she was like, "Oh, I know that," since had taken her kids to a site nearby when they were little, and then had gone and walked in the park afterwards.

I then asked about her children.  She has five, two of which are under 18, and the one who's in high school is in a high school that you have to test into.

"Congratulations," I was like, "That's hard to do, there's so much competition."

"Thank you," she was like.

She then said that all her children are smart, but you can't tell from her, because she moved here as an adult and speaks poorly.

"What do your parents do for work in Togo?", I was like.

She then said that they have a shop and a farm outside of the capital Lome, and I soon found out from talking with her that their farm is actually so big, that they have people work there for them, and that they have trucks that go back and forth and take produce into the city, from the more-rural area outside of the city where their farm is set up.

I quizzed her about foods, too, and they grow stuff like corn, yams, okra, and tomatoes, and the animals there include chickens, cows, and goats.

She couldn't remember the word "cows" at first, and she just kept looking a tad confused and trying out stuff like "coh" and "cah" until I could break in and prompt her.

"Thank you," she was like.

My mother on coronavirus...

...and its possible permanent neurological effects:

"But at my age, I wonder how you could tell if there's permanent neurological effects."

Conversational Hausa.

The other month I was talking with the one (broad-built) (Ghanaian) kitchen manager about learning new languages, and he told me that he was wanting to learn Spanish.

I then asked him what languages he knew, and he said English and some French, and then when I asked him about African languages, he said Twi, Ga, and Hausa.

I hadn't heard of Ga before, but he assured me that it was indeed a language.

"And isn't Hausa more like northern Nigeria?", I was like.

"Yes," he was like, "But it's also in the north of Ghana."

Like the next time I saw him, I asked him some more about Hausa, and I mentioned that one of our (Nigerian) coworkers had learned some since he had studied in the north of Nigeria.

"So why did you learn Hausa?", I was like.

"I was on a soccer team in Accra with some guys who speak Hausa," he was like.

Peacock tail brush.

Last month, I met my one friend who's a (Spanish) language instructor for a walk near her house, with both of us wearing masks and standing quite a bit apart as we walked, of course.

As we passed one waste bin that the local park service had put out for people to put their trash into, I saw a peacock tail feather sticking out of it, and then like a second later I realized that it was an old slim pushbroom-type broom with the broom side up but like set in the same direction as the handle and not perpendicular to it, and that I had been looking directly into its bristles.

Bedtime routine joke.

There's this one really chill but fairly non-communicative resident at the resthome where I work, and whenever I assist her, I always ask her if she would like some lotion on her legs before bed.

(A lot of residents like that, especially if they have dry skin, since I assume that because of a bad back and worse posture and whatnot they can't bend over and put some lotion on their lower legs like they used to be able to do.)

"No thank you," she's always like, "I'll slide out of bed."

The other week, I clarified with her that this was a joke, and she confirmed that it was, and added that she gets lotion on her legs in the mornings, though one time she did indeed have me put lotion on her legs at night.

I'm thinking that I'll probably keep asking her anyways, so long as it doesn't seem to annoy her; it's good to give older folks choices like that, one of my trainings said that it keeps them engaged and gives them a greater feeling of control over the world, despite their living in an assisted living facility and having people assist them all the time.

A dream of a friend travelling.

The other week I dreamnt -

I'm looking on Facebook, and my one library manager friend has posts up from all of these different countries that she's visiting in Europe.

For each post, there's a standard graphic with the outline of a country filled in with like this bright puce color, with the countries around it in a drab medium gray, and I don't automatically recognize the one country's outline that I'm looking at since it's way too tall and thin, but somehow I know that that outlined and brightly colored country is Germany.

I also know that she's visiting a ton of countries on a very short trip, and she's doing it since she has her cousin along with her.

. . .

(That friend of mine loves to post on Facebook wherever she is, even just around the city, and she had a trip to Europe I think like this past year...  She does that posting thing since she says she's leaving a record of daily life for her family after her when she's dead, if they ever do genealogy or research.)