Feats of cleaning out my kitchen...

...before my move this past week:

- Using the last of the (Turkish) coffee from this tin that's been sitting in my refrigerator forever.

- Sloshing some water around in some old plastic mustard bottles and then adding that in to some barley soup that I was cooking.

- Cooking up eggs in bacon fat, and also cooking up scrambled eggs with onion and cabbage sauteed in sesame seed oil. 

- Putting a small pack of powdered sugar into milk that I was heating up to make oatmeal with.

All in all, it's amazing how much stuff like that really clears out your pantry shelves, and gets you down to "zero" for a clean slate before a move. I have so much less stuff to take with me now, from my pantry.

A question about the Tibetan language:

Does it make gender distinctions in 3rd person pronouns, or does it just lump he/she/it together?

A few weeks ago at the resthome, my one (blocky-built) (older) (Tibetan) coworker was like "Ask her" about maybe getting them Coca-Cola when a (bed-ridden) (male) resident sent an end-of-shift call down for me to come up for assistance, since that (man) likes Coca-Cola and sometimes wants sips of it at night.

I'm thinking that maybe my coworker's mistake in pronouns goes back to some distinction that they don't make in Tibetan, which is why she said "her" about someone who's obviously a man. For someone with gender distinctions in pronouns, that's a very unnatural mistake to make, and my hunch is that it may go back to something in her mother tongue.

A story of crime in the city...

...told to me by a (white) (retired police officer) who owns a hardware store in the city a few blocks away from my house.

Like around the beginning of last month, his wife was working alone in the store, and this agitated guy came in looking around at stuff in the aisles, and then he came up to the counter and asked her if they had pepper spray, and she didn't think so and said no, but the guy saw some up on a hook behind her and pointed it out to her and asked her to open it up for him, and at that point she knew that he was going to try to use it to rob her.

And, the (white) (retired police officer) happened to be at home and have a sixth sense around that time, so he called his wife at the store to check in on her, and she asked him to bring her a cup of coffee, and since she doesn't drink coffee, right away he knew that something was wrong, and he was like, "Don't worry, someone will be there right away," and he hung up and called some people he knew who were right there close by, and they immediately rushed on over.

And, they began to hang around and chat, and the guy kind of looked around and headed out, and they've never seen him before or since.

And, after that they closed the shop for 2 weeks, and they've decided that she'll never work alone again there.

He says he wants to move, maybe to Florida or Arizona or something, but his wife is a city girl, and she has family by them that she sees pretty much every day, so that doesn't seem like it will be happening, but still.

He says that they don't need money from the store but it's just something that they do in a property that they own, so it really doesn't hurt them to close for two weeks like that, but still.

A dream of something wrong: Bicycle and bus.

The other week about a month or so ago I dreamnt:

I'm bicycling by this early springtime town square that's in the northeast, and it's growing dark and I'm growing tired and I think I should hop on a bus soon and put my bike up front and use that to go home, and all of a sudden I see there's a bus a bit ahead and stopped at a bus stop, but as I try to speed towards it, the light changes and it takes off, and it does this several times along the last bit of road headed into the town square and along two sides of the town square, and then finally on this long road heading out of town. There, I finally think I'm about to catch it, on this stretch that borders a big hill coming down, at a time of day where it feels like early afternoon though I had not noticed any change in time, but then it shoots ahead and goes up a dogleg that starts to go up the hill, and I know that I've finally lost it for good.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Some thoughts on reading Chronicles.

So many names, of people who are long dead, and so often the only thing that we can know is their name.

So odd.

Also, it must be tough to have OCD and attempt to read the entire Bible, since your eyes probably glaze over during genealogies, and maybe you would always wonder if you had skipped something, even a single syllable or a single letter in an odd foreign name, and so maybe you would force yourself to read sections and even whole books back again from the beginning.

Also also, of several people I know who have claimed to read the entire Bible - including my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) - I need to ask them how they treated the long genealogy parts.  Like, did they really read all of that?  I'm not sure they did.

A fun alternative to a bottle of wine:

The other week when I had to go in to work and then afterwards I caught up with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) and my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri), instead of bringing each of them a bottle of wine like I usually do, instead I got them 2 rice balls and a selection of savory buns from the bakery that's on my way to work that I'm a huge fan of.

It cost around the same as a bottle of wine, but it was a little something different, and a lot more fun!

It also patronized a local business.

I had two little white cardboard boxes, each with an identical selection.

Both of my friends appreciated them, to tell the truth.

An odd resthome fact:

In the little free library that's out in front of the resthome, though all of my other weird and esoteric and scholarly books have regularly been taken from there relatively quickly, the one grammar of a rare-ish dead language that I studied in college has just sat there, for like a week.

No-one who walks by must want it!