New college town people, redux (1 of 1): Neighbor.

Around Christmastime, when I was coming back late from a long afternoon walk that I took to get myself out of the house on a very pleasant day, I saw this (scruffy) (young) (white) (vaguely dark ethnic) guy just out on the stoop next door, sitting cross-legged on the bare concrete and staring out at the dark-ish street. So, since I had to turn right in front of him and walk up the side path of the front house to get to my back cottage, I said happy holidays, and then introduced I myself as the new neighbor. He said his name, which was kind of indie-ish, and then I said how long I had lived there, and that I had heard drumming from the basement occasionally. "That was me," he was like, and he said that he's a drumming major, and that his roommates are all students, too. "Oh," I was like, "I wasn't sure who that was, I thought maybe it was a family next door with some kid in a band or something." "I'm in a band," he was like. And, he never actually said it, but his tone of voice when he talked made it sound like he would finish each sentence with the word "dude."

A bad packaging idea:

Putting a light blue cardboard top on a chocolate box. . . . (That was the packaging of some chocolates that my mother sent me for Christmas, light blue top and dark brown bottom, which looked nice when I opened up the mailing package that she shipped it to me in, but it got more and more smudged up with chocolate and imperceptibly dirty hands over the course of like half a week or so, over the course of my pulling it out of my refrigerator every so often and getting myself a few chocolates... The finger smudges on the box just made it kind of unappetizing, even though the chocolates themselves were quite good.)

Typo correction preparation.

In this one memoir of a gymnast that came out over a decade ago and that I found on my bookshelves when I moved and that I got more interested in because I had read up a bit on the Larry Nassar scandal, I've found a couple of typos, like when you go to insert a small word change all last minute and stuff, but you forget to take out the old word that you were replacing. But, since I didn't have a pencil with me when I found them, and since it's my own personal copy of the book, I folded down the top of the page in a special way, so that I can go back and mark the corrections in the book there, maybe marking out the variant words in parentheses or something, to show that they're alternate readings.

House peculiarity (2 of 2): Sandal crud.

After like 2 or 3 weeks in my new house, I noticed that there were these black pieces of crud that were appearing everywhere on the white tile, and I couldn't figure out where they were coming from, and then I started looking around and I ended up turning over my sandal and looking there and what do you know, there was like this mildly greasy black crud that had accumulated all up and down the sole of the sandal on each sandal. So, I washed them off, which left these kind of sodden wedges of like dustball and huge drops of blackened water in my bathroom sink, and that was that, although I couldn't figure out for the life of me where that crud came from, since it wasn't like my house sandals were outside or anything, and my house isn't that dirty, in fact it's rather clean and it's pretty easy to keep clean. Then, like a week later, I decide to turn my sandals over again, and there's some crud built up, not as much as the first time, but still, a noticeable amount! That got me checking more often, and now like every 3 days or so I wash the crud off of my sandals. As far as I can figure out, even though I regularly sweep the white tile that's everywhere in my house, there's something with this tile and these particular sandals that make the newly settled dust stick to the bottom of my sandals, and when I walk around, it must just accumulate and accumulate, even though there's not that much dust you can see on the white tile, even in the corners. It must be something with that particular rubber or the particular ceramic material of the white tiles or something, like something to do with static electricity, and science.

House peculiarity (1 of 2): Squirrels on the roof.

At my new house, I can hear the squirrels on the roof. Some mornings I'll be in bed, and I'll just hear this scurrying sound above me, like something racing right across the roof, and you can pretty much bet that it's a squirrel, especially since when I've had coffee on the front patio a lot, I've seen them run around on the trees nearby and sometimes hop onto my roof to go across it and get to another tree or somewhere like that that they're going.

Nergal the Plague God.

So, in my quest to read the entire Bible, I've been in Second Kings lately, and they had another list of deities that "the nations" were worshipping, and one of them was called Nergal, and the academic footnotes said he was a plague god. I know languages sound different when you're in them - years ago when I went for coffee at a (Dutch) professor's house, her daughter said that (Dutch) was a lovely language, and her mother kind of rolled her eyes and corrected her - but I mean, doesn't Nergal just sound like a bad god, like a god that you wouldn't want to get involved with? "Hey buddy, come worship Nergal with me. He's a plague god." I mean, that just sounds like a bad idea, right?

Surprising parental behavior.

So, it turns out that when my mom sent me a few small boxes of N95s that she had lying around the house, she kept none for herself, and later when she ordered me some online, she didn't order any for herself either, even though she didn't have any at home! I was very surprised when I heard that, since I had just assumed that she had some, and that's what she was using when she went grocery shopping or what my dad was using when he would stop through the local store in the morning for the paper. But, they weren't. So, I explained how upset I was, and I said that she should order some right away, and that's what they should be using when they go out now, since they're much more of a higher risk for bad Covid outcome than I am. She ended up doing that right after I got off the phone. I also explained that from what I've read about N95s, you can re-use them 2 or 3 times without degradation if you're using them for short periods and keep them nice, so I had done that, where I put one on for a few short errands, and then reused it the next day when I had a few short errands. I also said that I was putting a cloth mask over the top, since that pressed down and made a better fit around the nose, and they should be doing that too.