A pleasant day of resthome interactions:

1) The one resident who's a retired nurse and I were talking about the presidential debate, and I asked her what she thought of Joe Biden saying n'shallah, and she said that she hadn't caught that and wasn't aware of the phrase, so I had to explain it to her, and then I also said that I had read that people were impressed because he had used it in this particularly appropriate sarcastic way that you hear, like if you're growing up and you ask your (Arab-American) mom when the family is going to Disney World.

"Oh, like 'in your dreams'?", she was like.

She also had ordered a bin of specialty popcorn to distribute to all of the different staff in all of the different departments, since she doesn't like to do Christmas presents, but does Halloween presents instead.

But, she ordered some candy corn-flavored popcorn just to try it, and she saved it to open up with me so we could both try it at the same time.

2) The one (black) kitchen manager said she can't wait for the Kamala Harris - Mike Pence debate.

"She is going to eat him alive!", she kept saying.

Later, I bumped into her having the same conversation with this one (cool) (black) private aide who I regularly chit-chat with about politics.

"She is going to eat him alive!", the one kitchen manger was telling her.

"And you know that she's going to go after Trump, too," the one personal aide was like.

"Yes, she'll eat them both alive!", the one kitchen manager was like.

3) As I was clocking out and going to use the desktop computers in the library like they let me do now, the one (older) (gay) (Polish-American) front desk worker was like, "Isn't this a great place to work? Other places probably wouldn't let you do that."

"Yes," I was like, and I told him too how after dinner that night the one (super nice) (Togolese) kitchen worker wrapped up for me a piece of vegetable lasagna and some beet salad that was leftover from the staff meal and would have been tossed out into the trash.

"Yeah, other places, they probably wouldn't let you do that," he was like.

"Yeah," I was like, "It gets into too many problems of people overcooking and putting it aside for themselves and stealing from the place," though I made sure to say that that wasn't what was happening here, because it wasn't, it was people not eating their staff meal and those plates would have been thrown out if they hadn't've been given to me.

"Or they're worried that you'll get food poisoning and sue," he was like.

He then said that he used to work for a mobile home construction firm and they used to let people take home scraps, until one day a bunch of new two-by-fours "accidentally" ended up in the dumpster.

High holidays at the resthome.

High holidays at the resthome this year made it feel like everything is kind of getting back to normal after the peak of the Covid crisis.

Depending on the resident I was talking to, I recycled a joke that one guy had told me a while ago, "What did the rabbi say to the pope?", the punchline being, "Good yontiff, pontiff!".

For services at Yom Kippur, it was hybrid and precleared through the one mega-important nurse who works upstairs in some office, where the services were held in the main activities hall and everyone wore masks and sat like 12 feet apart from one another, and doors were open and windows were cracked to keep airflow up.

There was spots for like 10 people and everyone else was watching remotely, but a few people dropped out from coming, so the leader of the services had to ask over Zoom if anyone wanted to come down, so they could get a minyan together and sing the Kaddish.

More on the midget-owned bar.

Like a month ago, the one receptionist at the resthome who used to own a bar told me that her and her husband were driving and they happened to pass the one bar in the city that's owned by a midget, and she mentioned to him that just the other day me and her were talking about it.

"I'll never go in that bar again!", her husband was like, to her.

"I had no idea," she was like, and she said that it turns out that years ago, he was in the bar having a drink, and the midget owner who lives upstairs had been watching everything on her cameras, and she saw that his car had a bumper sticker on it for his own bar, so she called down and said he shouldn't advertise his bar in her bar.

"Which is ridiculous," my coworker is like, "The bars are in completely different parts of town!  How could he steal her customers?"

But, she said, he pushed his drink back, said he would never drink in there again, and left.

She also added that a guy who owned a nearby bar that had a much later closing time would come in every once in a while and buy drinks for people and pass out ads in their bar, but that was different, those type of bars usually don't get much business till later at night, so they're not really competing and it's perfectly fine if their customers went there afterwards.

"But she actually thought he was there stealing her customers!", she was like.

Bits of two dreams from the same night:

1) I'm by my one friend the (Spanish) language instructor's house, and I walk up past the Burger King to the north of her, and its front windows are open, and there's just masses of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder in there, and it all makes me cringe inside, to see such crowding.

Next, I'm in a taqueria buffet banquet hall just north of that, and I'm walking one of those bikes that you can check out in the city through there and through all its chains of rooms with off white color walls and dull blue carpeting and dull sunlight leaking in the occasional dirty windows looking out at nothing in particular, before you get to the main buffet room, which looks a lot like that too, only it's bigger and has a big metal buffet cart thing with a peaked plexiglass roof so that you can look at the food as you reach in, but you can't sneeze on it. On the way there and back, I see many people, and although many are 3-4 feet apart, I think that they're too close together, especially on my way back through the smaller rooms where the tables are all crammed in.

2) I'm at an older super market with my mother since I came along with her to pick up things before a family party, and I see handwritten signs about sales from the ceiling, including one about a cheap sale on Edy's ice cream (like $2.39 for a big tub).

Later, I see a small sales display with lemons and limes from Israel, and there's a small box opened up, and inside the cover that's leaned open it says something like -

MOVE TO ISRAEL!

- and I know somehow from a talk with the workers there that that's a company that the owner patronizes through family ties.

. . .

(Links to my present life include neurosis about Covid-19; a few trips like the past 3 months to go visit that one friend who does indeed have a Burger King near her apartment; the brand "Edy's" appearing twice in crosswords I've done recently; and probably memories of etrogs bouncing around in my brain from seeing them during Sukkot at one of my places of employment.)

My one (Mexican) Coworker's Verdict on "The Lovely Bones."

The other week, I was asking my one (Mexican) coworker what she was reading, and she said she had finally finished reading "The Lovely Bones," which she had gotten a copy of somewhere and had been reading on and off for a while.

"I saw the movie, but I never read the book," I was like. "How was it? Any good?".

"Oh, it was okay," she was like. "It's not true, it's fiction, people come back and help people after they are gone. It's nice if it's true, but it's not," and at that she made a face.

"Wishful thinking," she was like after a beat, and then she went off to go do something.

3 bug problems last month:

1) Biting flies at the beach, when I went there.

2)  A giant silverfish scurrying by my backdoor in my closed-in back porch when I went out late at night to go get my sheets from the dryer downstairs, and another giant silverfish scurrying around the window sill of my living room when I was sitting in my armchair and reading late one night later that same week.

3) Itchy raised bumps all over my side and buttocks now and then, though sometimes appearing late in the day, and possibly being bedbug bites, though possibly also being raised welts from sensitive skin from taking showers so much because of the coronavirus and sweating a lot from the very hot weather, since no bedbug droppings were apparent in my bed.

Sweet mutuality, at one job.

 Last month, the one (lesbian) sister of my one assisted living client with disabilities texted me and asked me if I wanted some banana bread with chocolate chips in it, since she was in a social situation where she felt compelled to accept it as a gift, but neither her, her partner, or my client wanted any of it.

Of course I did, and I ate it all in like 3 days, some the first day when I picked it up, both at my client's apartment and then at my own apartment later that night, and then I had some for breakfast on like the 2nd and 3rd days and I polished it all off.

The next week, it was super hot out and the little super market near my client's house had ice cream on sale for $3 a carton, so I picked up a carton of Neapolitan for all of us...  It was a good price, and I really wanted some, and I figured Neapolitan would cover all of the bases in terms of flavors that they potentially liked.

It did.