Odd kitchen sight the other day: Inadvertent gelatin.

Like a month ago, I had drained some pasta into a pan that I use for cooking rice, so I could reuse the water and get the nutrition and taste from that, as well as keep the residual heat in my house.

(Neurotic environmentalism is me, definitely!)

Then, like five or six hours later, I go to dump the rice into the pan, but the water's all set in there like some thin beige pudding; the starch in the used pasta water and the cold temperature in my apartment must have combined to make like a gelatin or whatever.

It was trippy, but a little bit of heat made the water all normal again, so the rice could cook in it.

An Achievement in Environmentalism.

A few months ago at my one resthome job, I went to go get my one takeout container out of the top of the cupboard in the staff office so I could go and take some leftovers home, but it wasn't there.

"You have to put your name on it," one of my coworkers was like, and they said that someone else had probably taken it.

So, I took a takeout container with the name of my one (Thai) coworker on it, and I made myself try to remember that I'd wash it out later and take it back right away, before she needed it and noticed that it was gone.

And, the next time I was home, I not only washed that container out, but I also took out all of these plastic salsa containers that I had that I was keeping around for some reason in my kitchen cupboard at home, and when I took her container back, I took those in, too, and I put them in the cupboard too, for whoever would need them whenever.

And, when I did that, I saw that my takeout container had already been returned, by whoever had taken it.

And, like two weeks later, when I went to go get a takeout container, I saw that a number of the salsa containers had disappeared, since I'm guessing that almost definitely people have been using them to take stuff home in.

What an achievement!

"Reduce, reuse, recycle."

Back porch step misperception.

Last month, a handful of times I came out of my apartment through my enclosed back porch to go to work since I keep my bike there, and as I went down the back steps I saw a smashed toad corpse sitting there on the last step, only to look again and realize that it was actually just a crushed empty peanut shell.

You simply have no idea how much this crushed empty peanut shell looked like a toad corpse, if you just glanced at it; its peanut shell top looked the mottled top of a toad, and the white insides visible around the edges kind of looked like four legs, if you just looked quickly.

Parking lot misperception.

A couple months ago when I was taking out the trash for my one assisted living client with disabilities, I was going through the parking lot to the dumpster, and like right there I suddenly see a small dirty greyish-pink mouse fetus all dingy and curled up on itself, sitting out there on the pavement.

Then, I realize that it's a squeezed lemon slice, from a very pale lemon.

Weird Hanukkah synchronicity.

Since I'm trying to live my best life now, I'm trying to read the whole Bible in translation in this nice academic study edition that I have, and rather than start at the beginning, I decided to start with the Prophets, since that seemed more interesting, at first.

And, the Minor Prophets were the best to start with, since a bunch of them are super short and it gives you a huge feeling of accomplishment to cross a lot of books off of the table of contents list like right away like right at first like right when you right begin.

Anyhow, I did that, then Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which are super long books and which took forever, and then since the order of the books in my study edition roughly follows the orders found in various pockets of Christianity, I started into Daniel, and it ended up that I got to the latter part of the book during Hanukkah, which meant that I was reading stuff about Antiochus IV who features in the Hanukkah story during a resonant part of the Jewish liturgical year.

How cool is that?

And it was a total coincidence!

Addendum.

I also asked my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker if I could compensate her somehow for helping me with my haircut, but she shook her head briefly and sharply and was like, "No."

I then said that I would have to take out a thank-you ad in the skeptic magazine that I give her my old issues of or in the newspaper, something like -

ALL ATHEISTS ARE NOT MONSTERS!

[her first and last name] IS LIVING PROOF

- and I was all mock-serious and swept my hand in front of me as I pronounced the wording, and then I laughed.

"You make up a situation, and then you laugh at your joke," she was like.

Self haircut (2 of 2): Trimming help.

With the haircut that I gave myself, there were some uneven places around the back and it looked particularly bad on a day when my hair stuck up, like the Friday that I came into work at the resthome and my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker gestured to my hair and was like, "No good!"

So, that shift I asked my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker if she could take five minutes and take some scissors and trim it up here and there, so she did that later that evening in the resthome laundry room, when it was quiet and we were between things to do and maybe probably because it was a time of day when no-one would come across us there, though if they did, I'm sure that there really wouldn't have been any problem.

I love my job; I live in a big city and know these random people from all over the world who are all pretty nice people, and I scamper up and down staircases around a resthome all day and help people, and there's fun random stuff like getting my hair cut on the sly in a laundry room.

What's not to like?

I'm like someone that you would find in a quirky non-fiction book for tweens.