The depths of my stretching out groceries.

Since I'm putting off doing errands like getting groceries until 2 weeks after getting the 1st Covid immunization dose - that's when your immunity starts going up, statistically, and why risk anything when you're so close to more safety? - I'm in a situation again where I'm stretching out my groceries for like 2 months between going to the store.

Back at the very beginning of Covid, my one assisted living client with disabilities was dying for coffee creamer and had asked me to pick some up at the store for her when I was there, but there was none, and so I got her 2 cans of canned cream instead, and I told her to keep them and use them and if she didn't, I'd buy them back off of her and use them myself at some point to cook something with, like maybe some rice pudding or something.

So, I bought the canned cream back off of her, and I used one can to put in with rice boiled with cinnamon sticks and cardamom and some sugar and I made up a rice pudding kind of thing, and I've now eaten it a few times since, along with a little bit of salt sprinkled on top of it.

And, my coffee also started running out and I had already used up all of my canned instant coffee back during the last time that I did this, so I finally turned to the bag of roasted (Ethiopian) coffee beans that my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker had gotten me on her last trip home, and so I opened it up and I figured out that I could use that big Christmas coffee mug that my landlord and his wife had gotten me for Christmas as like a mortar along with the top and thin neck of a reusable drink bottle from the resthome as like a pestle, and so I used them and I ground up a lot of the roasted coffee beans by hand to use to get me through until I can get to the grocery store again.

The coffee has that nice (Ethiopian) flavor and is a bit watery from the rough grind, but it works, so hey, I'm managing.

Banter at the resthome.

Like a month ago at the start of an afternoon shift at the resthome, my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker was moseying around the office doing this and that to get ready, and then she checked her walkie-talkie in her pocket and said out loud to no-one in particular, "No-one is calling me."

"Are you lonely?", I was like. "If you're lonely, I can find work for you and call you."

It took her a second to register what I had said, then she shook her head with this quick little sharp motion like she was waking herself up, then she batted her hand at me kind of dismissively but also kind of endearingly, and then she just walked right out of the office door, without saying one single word to me.

An odd dream of a musical.

Last month I dreamnt -

I'm watching something like real life but it's like a movie, and an actress playing Eva Peron with her hair wrapped up in something like a towel is walking around inside by the huge picture windows of a self-standing television store with heap of televisions heaped up in the middle among the beige walls and crisp lighting, and she's singing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" as people crowd up by the windows and I suddenly know that she's taken refuge there, and then I look at the people and I look back and now she's shirtless with a thin torso and very small, almost withered breasts, but she's still careening around inside the store by the windows.

. . .

Showertime oddity.

A while ago, I was taking an immediate post-commute shower to get myself all sterile like I always do nowadays, and the bar soap I was rubbing on my arm flew out of my hand, only I couldn't find it in the water on the bottom of the tub.

(In my environmental neuroticism, I usually stop up the drain at the beginning of my showers or midway through my showers that I take during the wintertime, so as to keep the water overnight and wring the last heat out of it so I don't have to use any more gas than I have to to heat up my apartment.)

After I finished my shower, something clicked, and I looked on the shower curtain, and there it was.

It was such a thin bar of soap, it didn't weigh very much, and what with the water on it it had stuck to the curtain!

Weird Xmas Eve sychronicity.

I had Christmas Eve off this year and so I sat home and was reading through an appendix of excerpts in the back of a grammar of an ancient language that I'm reviewing, and when I went to begin the next excerpt, it turned out to be from the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, with the star and where the three magi come to the infant Jesus, all in this non-Greek ancient language.

Two unexpected Xmas gifts this year:

1) That Xmas mug from my landlord and his family who live upstairs from me.

2) A bottle of wine from the son of my next door neighbors, that he delivered one evening when I was home on a day off, which he said was for the holidays and for the Joni Mitchell record (not CD!) that I had accidentally ordered and so handed off to him, since he's a musician and a music teacher and has a record player to boot, and I couldn't use it and I couldn't return it.

A Dream of Objects (2 of 2): Gift.

Last month I dreamnt -

I come home and propped up on my door knob within my back porch that I share with my landlord and his family upstairs is a DVD with ribbons on it and a post-it note that says "PLEASE RETURN," and I know that it's a little present from them, of a DVD that they watched and thought I'd enjoy.

. . .

(Last month I came home and set at the bottom of my door within my back porch that I share with my landlord and his family upstairs was a little wrapped up gift from them in wrapping paper and with ribbons, and it turned out to be a cute Christmas-themed mug that they seem to have gotten for me at Target, maybe because I got them chocolate and candy from Germany when I went last year.)