Sudden huff, at a pizza place.

The other week after going to pick up some books at the university library in the college town that I now live in, it was getting late, so I decided to pop into this one "slice of pizza" place that's on my way home and that I've stopped through one time before.

The one (masked) (younger middle-aged) (fat) (hispanic) (male) employee in the place was busy standing behind the pizza-making service table and was like, "Hey, it'll be a minute," so I just kind of stood around and chilled and looked at their menu and then at the toppings on their pizzas that they all had on display on those tall multi-tier pizza display rack things that places like that always have set up behind plexiglass.

Then, after a few minutes, while the one guy was still making pizzas, this (maskless) (fat) (middle-aged) (white) lady with (matte) (dirty blonde) hair steps out from somewhere in the back, comes up to the counter, coughs once into her (gloveless) hand, and is like, "What can I do for you?".

So, I just stood there a few seconds and then was like, "You just coughed into your hand and I'm uncomfortable with that sanitation, so I think I'm going to leave now," and I just turned around and walked out the door.

Reaction of an undergraduate academic library worker...

 ...when she asked me how I was doing, and I told her about how this one reputable file-sharing service online cut off my video without telling me and majorly interfered with an academic presentation that I had been working on for just months:

"Go find a review site and give them zero stars!"

Weird reading coincidence:

Like a month ago, I start reading a copy of "The Day of the Triffids" that I'd picked up off a display at my local library, and it involves a guy who wakes up in the hospital the day after the apocalypse...

And those dates align with the evening I'm on, into the next day, as I read the book around and past midnight.

Returning some jigsaw puzzles.

The other week I went up to the church resale shop near my house, to give them back 2 jigsaw puzzles that I had bought from them, so that they could sell them all over again and make some more money from them.

"You can set them on the stairs," the one (older) (white) lady was like, as she sat at the plexiglassed desk area at the front of the converted parsonage. "Do they have all the pieces?"

So, I explained that one did, and the other was a 2-puzzle set, and when I bought it the 1 had all the pieces and the other said 3 pieces were missing, but when I actually went and did the puzzle, it turned out that 4 pieces were missing, but the other one was completely okay just like it said.

"It's still good," I was like. "I mean, it's two puzzles, and one of them is completely good."

"Okay," she was like.

I then went to check out their current puzzle selection -- thousand piece puzzles are hard to find! - and I found a couple ones sitting out on the shelf, way at the end behind all the swathes of 500 piece ones.

So, I took them upfront to check out.

"How much are these?", she was like.

"I don't know," I was like, rotating the boxes in my hand.  "There's not any prices on them!"

"Go look at the shelf," she was like, "I think it says the prices there. I think the more pieces it has, it costs more, like two or three bucks, and not a dollar."

So, I went to the shelf to go look for the prices, and I didn't see anything, so she had to call another (old) (white) lady to come help me -- "Iris, can you come help him?" -- and this other lady comes and she did in fact help me; as it turned out, the sheet with the prices was posted way high up above the puzzle shelf, so high up that you thought it was something separate, and not something related to the puzzles.

"So those are the thousand piece puzzles and they cost more," the other lady was like.

Then, she was like, "Do they have all the pieces?", and we looked, and we couldn't figure it out, and I said it was okay anyhow, and I showed her the puzzles that I had returned, and I explained all of that, and I said it didn't bother me too much if a few pieces were missing.

"That happened to me," she was like.  "My little grandson says, 'Grandma, you're no good with puzzles!', and I had to explain to him it was because someone else lost the pieces!"

So, I then showed her how I had sketched a little picture of the one puzzle and indicated roughly where the pieces were missing and taped that inside of the one box of the puzzle that I had just given them to sell again, to help whoever bought it next.

"Oh, that will be a big help," she was like.

Vibe.

Here in the college town that I now live in, people sit out at bar patios and chat and talk and lounge, and it feels like the city that I moved to almost two decades ago.

It has a vibe that got lost there, after the economic crisis in the late 2000s.

I don't think I ever quite realized how much really changed, after that. Stuff never really returned to more normal, to the way that it had been, after that; the rents got higher and the ease disappeared and the atmosphere and the vibe just changed.

Also, no-one really looks at their phones here.  It's refreshing.

Relatively new acquisition:

A couple 3-pound weights, at a local estate sale that I stumbled across.

I have now disassembled my 1-pound bags of spaghetti that I'd carefully taped together in groups of 3 and 4, to create 3- and 4-pound weights to use in my coronavirus workout, that I began way back at the start of the pandemic.

And, I have already begun to eat that pasta.

Languages.

The other week when I was finalizing an academic presentation that I'm giving, it really struck me how many languages were involved - French and German, 2 stages of the language under scrutiny, another ancient language from which translations had been made, and, peripherally, yet another ancient language.

It really was a lot of languages, and it makes you realize how even in the contexts that I'm in, it really is a lot; I wonder how it appears to others, even apart from the fact that I don't hold a formal job in the area.

Years and years ago when I first began my masters, this one (august) (older) (German) professor had commented once that I should study more and I already had a lot of languages, and that was *then*.

Even fifteen years ago, I don't think I would have thought I'd have been at the point that I am now, linguistically, and that's really saying something; I really have turned into one of those people that I used to come across that work with a lot of languages, and I'd wonder how someone ever got that way.

That said, half the time I feel like I'm faking the French and the German, and I hope that I don't misinterpret and get nailed on scholarship.