Two small recent dreams of mine...

...for when I'm more settled in (and when the pandemic finally dies down more?): 1) I join a gym or maybe some kind of PE-type class like boxing or whatever at some local place. 2) I start an ancient language reading group, where we use these nifty new-ish books that provide a text and any vocab and grammar that someone who's lower intermediate or below woudn't necessarily know, and we just meet at like a brewery or whatnot for an hour or an hour-and-a-half and cold-read flat, and that's it, no preparation needed or allowed.

Another feat of conservation...

...that I'm surprised never occurred to me earlier: I cut open the top of the toothpaste tube when I've squeezed the most that I can out of it, in order to get the last little bits of toothpaste that are stuck up in the edges out and onto my toothbrush. You get another few brushings that way, and you'd be throwing out the tube anyways, so it's not like by cutting it open that you're destroying it or anything. "Waste not want not."

Turkey (3 of 3): Aftermath.

After schlepping down my turkey on moving day, I put up my freezer thermostat to the absolute coldest temperature, to keep the turkey frozen solid so bacteria wouldn't spread and I wouldn't somehow get sick from it all. (I haven't.) Only, now I can't move the freezer switch back to something more normal -- it's stuck! I'll have to call my landlord about it. And the worst part is, he had just been over like 4 or 5 days earlier to caulk up that one area where ants were getting in.

Turkey (2 of 3): Joke.

A few days after I baked the turkey, my one former assisted living client with disabilities's (lesbian) sister came over to hang out and play board games outside by my cottage, and I sent her home with some turkey, and I also packed up a separate tupperware and sent some along to her sister as well. "You're like a tryptophan drug mule," I was like.

Turkey (1 of 3): Scraps.

So, a few weeks ago I made up the one turkey that the resthome got all the workers for Thanksgiving, as a thank-you for a(n unexpected) second year in a row, after they did that the first year as a one-off thing during the peak of the early Covid crisis... I had gotten that this fall before I moved, but since I had actually been working there on Thanksgiving I never made it up, and so I made sure to keep it hard frozen and then quickly schlep it all down to the new college town that I now live in on the day that I was moving, and I thought that I should make it up and use the residual oven heat to warm my apartment on a cold night, before the weather got warm and all that heat would go to waste. So, I did that, except I had to combine a day of thawing in the fridge with 5 30-minute cold water turkey baths, to get it thawed enough to bake it on the cold night that I wanted to. I also am saving the carcass to make broth, including the skin, and also this little piece of ligament that somehow showed up in the meat that I was eating the other day, and that I pulled out of my mouth and set on the edge of my bowl. The way I figure it, a ligament is collagen or something, and will flavor the broth as much as any other part of the carcass. "Waste not want not."

Typical boomer response: Misguided over-identification.

The other week I was talking with my mother, and I was commenting on how my general finances now look around the level that they did back in the mid-2000s, right when I had moved to the city that I used to live in, and I was refreshed by the rents there. "After the 2009 economic crisis, affordability just fell apart," I was like. "And though there were some improvements here and there with minimum wage, you'd get a little of that, and then other expenses would go up, and that would just happen over and over, and so you just never were able to get back to how things were back when I moved there." And, I commented on how my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker from my old resthome job and I had been talking about that a few times, and she totally thought that, too. "But that's been going on for decades," my mom was like. So, I then broke it down for her, how rents increased like 50-100% over around 12-15 years, and how you could get maybe a very cheap $575 1BR right when I had moved to the city, but that type of apartment would be around $900 right now. "That's a lot of money," my mom was like, saying something about what a "big difference" it was. So, I asked her then if she had ever seen that before in her adult life in prior years, where rents went up 50-100% over the course of 12-15 years while wages just never really kept up at anywhere near that level, and she had to admit that she hadn't. "So there are some similarities," I was like, "But come on, this kind of thing just isn't on a comparable level to what you've seen in the past." And, she had to admit that it wasn't. Honestly, I swear we repeat this conversation around every 4-6 months, on some different economic thing, where she always wants to automatically dismiss current-day concerns by saying that they're the same as the past, but then when you press her on the particulars, she has to admit that they're not the same, really. It's like she can't intuitively grasp magnitude and scale differences in budgets, somehow. And, the worst part is that she claims that she gets how bad the present generation has it, economically. She really thinks she gets it.

A feat of conservation:

The other week when I was pulling out my big room broom from the side of my closet in my cute little cottage apartment, I felt something snap, and I pulled the handle out, while the bottom of the broom stayed in the closet (a chair I had put in there by it must have accidentally wedged it in). But, luckily it was a plastic top-of-the-broomhead area with some holes in it, so I wound duct tape around through that and then around the base of the handle after I had inserted the handle back in, and now the broom is good enough to use again, though it wiggles a little bit more than it used to.