Carbon footprint.

So, I finally got around to calculating my yearly carbon footprint.

It's like 7 tons, though it's 10 tons if you add in the flight for my worktrip to Germany last year.

I calculated, too, that like 400 mature trees would compensate for that every year.

Thankfully, last year I got like 150 trees planted for my birthday.

I think I'm going to keep paying attention to this one reputable reforestation program that you can donate to, and the next time they have a "twofer" matching donations campaign, I'll order 125 trees and they'll match 125 trees, so my 400 trees will be out there growing and one day they'll take up the carbon that I emit every year.

Once I do that, too, who knows, maybe I'll throw some donation money to more trees every once in a while, too, so they're out there growing and I'm giving back to carbon capture above and beyond what's needed for just myself.

Two great things about my resthome job:

1) Back when the Trump tax exposes were coming out in the New York Times, I rustled up another resident's leftover papers to deliver to the one retired professor resident who I always talk politics with, since she only subscribes to the Sunday Times, and she was really into the story when it broke on TV.

And, I did that on the clock!

2) This one petite very nice resident who I sometimes deliver dinner to always has a little candy bowl out on her dining room table, featuring an array of small candy bars and peanut butter cups and Hershey's kisses and whatnot, and I've been in the habit of grabbing two and thanking her before I leave, after delivering dinner.

"Take more!", she says, every time.

A Dream of an Assisted Living Client: Vocabulary surprise.

Last month I dreamnt-

I'm lying on the floor with a number of people watching a nature special, and there's a picture on screen of a stony plateau abutting the sea, and a seal clambers up on top of it.

At that, I turn to my one assisted living client with disabilities, who's on the floor a few persons down from me, and I'm like, "Do you know what the German word for 'seal' is?".

"Uh, I don't know," she's like, "Maybe, uh, See... hund?".

"How did you know that?!", I'm like.

. . .

(The day of the night of that dream, my German vocab app taught me the word for 'seal,' which is Der Seehund, like the "sea-dog." I sometimes tell my client fun or funny-sounding German words I come across, and as soon as that came up as new vocabulary, I thought to myself, "I'm going to have to tell her this!".)

Addendum of two little bits:

1) At a doner place near the hotel, the (Turkish) guy who worked there heard my broken (German) and asked me if I was (Polish).

2) In one newspaper article, I found the word "die" three times in a row, like "die, die die," which was something like, "Those, which the..." (it works in Germany since the verb appears at the end of the sentence in a clause like that).

I found that quite endearing, in a language.

My worktrip to Germany (7 of 7): Red light district.

On one of the two days that I really had time off during my worktrip to Germany, I took a tram out to one side of the city to this big park, and I took a few hours and walked through that and by the major university and then back to city center.

And, I ended up passing through the several block red light district, which was like completely empty since it was like 7 or 8pm on a weeknight, and one sign I saw advertised Latina women at what seemed to be a place of prostitution, and another place looked like a club and had a sign above the door -

DAMEN & TRANSEN EINTRITT FREI

- which is like, "Ladies & trans*women - entrance free."

Then, when a few blocks later I was really down in the city center, it turned out that I was in the seedier immigrant part of town over to the west of the train station, the red light district blended into that and I hadn't quite realized it when I had been by there earlier.

My worktrip to Germany (6 of 7): Working-class Germans.

On my worktrip to Germany last year, it was interesting to get these glimpses of insight into the lives of everyday Germans.

Like, there was this tabloid article about a girl who got a tattoo of a ring of sausage on her thigh, and from the photo of her in the tabloid, she wore short shorts and you could tell that her thigh was just big and beefy and jiggly and you just got the vibe that she had short gross sex whenever she had it, and always probably drunk.

One tabloid article, too, had an article about an Advent calendar, where every day was some sex toy or erotic massage lotion or something.

Also, on my daytrip to see a historic site near the city where I was based, I stopped off into this small bar near the train station, where it was super tiny with just room for a bartender walled in by the bartops into the middle and then these narrow aisles and like a bench back in back that you could slide up into and sit up at the bar, and a dartboard near the end of one aisle next to the door, and it was locals stopping through, including this one guy who was getting off of shift from this home for the disabled and this (fat) (middle-aged) factory worker woman with crazy curly hair and a gruff voice, who was wedged into the bench at the back and who would greet everyone coming in, since they all knew each other, it seemed.

And, they all smoked.  

That was another thing about my trip to Germany, it was crazy how prevalent smoking was everywhere.

Sometimes there'd be a separate smoking area when you'd enter a place, but it'd be like in a foyer between pairs of sliding doors ( = the entrance to the hotel where I stayed), or in a supposedly separate roomlet poorly walled off from the main room with big glass panels, where you could still smell the smoke coming in from that area ( = a cafe near the hotel where I stayed).

My worktrip to Germany (5 of 7): Immigrants.

During my worktrip to Germany, it was very interesting to see how recent and older immigrants were woven into everyday life.

At the tram station near my hotel, a(n older) (Turkish) woman manned the little ticket booth / convenience store kiosk where I'd buy my daily tram tickets and a copy of Bild, the trashiest (German) tabloid that I could find.

I noticed that her store - or, rather, the store where she worked? - had a framed picture of Ataturk up on the wall.

Also, in the downtown of the major city near where I was, I noticed that this one edge of the downtown area off to the west of the train station started to blend into Turkish barber shops and Syrian restaurants and whatnot, and some (very dark) (presumably African) (illegal?) immigrants started to appear here and there among the passers-by.

Also also, on a daytrip I took to see a historic site to a much older and much smaller town near the city where I was, there was these like (sunglassed) (leather jacketed) (Turkish? Syrian?) (young) guys just standing outside the train station, smoking and lingering and seeming on edge, and every once in a while answering their cell phones.

It was like they were full of energy, but had nowhere to go.

All in all, just very turgid.