A story of my father's birthday.

This month when my dad had his birthday, my mom got him this big cake with a nice raspberry jelly on top.

But, the night before his birthday, she really wanted a piece and he said she could have one, so she cut herself a nice piece and ate it, and then he went and ate two huge pieces of the cake.

So, the next day on his birthday my mom went and put candles on the half of the cake that they hadn't eaten yet, and sang Happy Birthday to him.

And, that was his birthday.

Addendum.

On an economic level, I think what's happening is that some kinds of mildly licensed jobs were always kind of crappy, but you went and did them anyways so you could get higher wages and a guaranteed number of hours a week, which you couldn't always get anymore elsewhere since the advent of the internet and because places like retailers have been hacking up jobs into part-time and forcing people into multiple jobs if you need a certain normal number of hours per week.

Only, now the minimum wage has been rising to almost spitting distance to those jobs while their wages haven't really risen, and with the staffing shortages everywhere the mildly licensed jobs have also really become sucky and the retailers etc. are comparatively less sucky and will finally give you enough hours, so why not check out of the mildly licensed jobs, since you can make around the same amount of money elsewhere, with less work and less stress?

It's like this interim period, where employers haven't caught on and still think they can keep base wages low and instead they burn out the staff they have and pay through the nose for emergency staffing agencies etc. in what they think is only a temporary stop-gap measure that longer-term will be the best decision for their budget, only that day of stabilization and return to normalcy doesn't seem to be coming and they don't seem to be realizing it yet.

In terms of me, when I got my one healthcare license over the winter, I wasn't realizing the omicron wave was changing the employment situation so much, and I was still locked into my way of thinking from the past like 4-5 years, where I had to keep doing what I've been doing in eldercare to ensure sufficient employment hours, when that really isn't the case anymore all of a sudden because of the changed situation in retail.

Like I've been telling people, "It's a pandemic, you have to be willing to change and go with the flow."

Economic chaos in the college town that I live in:

1) My one retirement village employer who's traditionally been the good employer in town can't get enough people now, to the point where they plopped me down without any training or advance notice to be an emergency fill-in primary worker at an understaffed nursing home unit like two shifts in a row.

2) A bar/restaurant on the main drag that's been open almost two decades announced its closing, since business has been up and down throughout the pandemic and now most recently they can't get enough staff to be open more than 4 days a week and to have longer hours when they are open, so they just couldn't get back to turning a profit like they had been, where it made the business all worthwhile.

3) The local paper had an article about how 3 nursing homes in the county were fined for a high level of violation, 1 where a staff member became verbally and physically abusive to a resident apparently because they snapped because of overwork, and 2 where there wasn't adequate supervision going on, with 1 of those resulting in someone's change in condition not getting noticed in time and them dying.

4) A few days after that, the local paper had an article about how there's never been enough pharmacy techs because of low wages, but now the situation is particularly bad because of understaffing and overwork, so like 2 chain drugstores were suddenly reducing hours and cutting weekend hours, suddenly shifting prescriptions and customers to elsewhere on short notice.

5) A few days after that on an early Friday evening, I'm at the local chain pharmacy in my college town, and suddenly people are speaking up in the pharmacy area and saying they've been waiting a long time and where is she going to cut off the line in the line of cars waiting, "I'm in the black SUV," and this (like late 30s) (chubby) (black) woman comes out and is like, "I am very sorry, but we are taking prescriptions as they come, and we are now closing for the weekend."

6) That very same time, I'm standing in a long line waiting to get rung up since there's a shortage of counterpeople too, and I start talking to the woman next to me in line, and it turns out she's a nurse at the local major hospital system, and she says they have a backlog of 5,000 people waiting for procedures, and the shortage of people with healthcare licenses like mine is so bad, they're actually shifting LPNs around departments and making them do the lower level work to cover the gaps.

. . .

(And she agreed on me quitting my job, she said it probably wasn't worth the liability.)

Overheard bar patio conversation.

This past weekend when I was set up on the bar patio at the sleek-ish brewery near my house and was doing some repetitive ancient language work while enjoying the evening and getting a slight buzz on, a couple of (bar trivia) patrons came outside between rounds for a smoke, and they started discussing evangelicals and the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade later this summer.

And, the (fatter) (younger) (bearded) (medium-to-dark brown-ish) (Latino) one was like, "Well, in their beliefs, God had Jesus killed, so he believes in abortion too, and through pretty late in life."

And, the other (German) (immigrant) one who tends to wear soccer shirts started saying how in his country it wasn't so politicized, it was more of a medical procedure that you went to the hospital to have done.

And, the (Latino) one mentioned that his landlord is actually an area abortionist, but he didn't know it when he moved in, it was only later that his neighbors told him and his girlfriend and they googled her and they found out that once someone had mailed pipebombs to her home and to her office.

Interesting surprise at my now-quit job.

At my one job at the retirement village where I have now just recently quit, one day I was in the parking lot and I see this guy who looks like my one (African) coworker from behind walking up to the staff door, but as I bicycle by him to go to the bikerack, I turn and nod to be friendly and acknowledge his presence, only to find out that this guy walking in who looks a lot like my coworker has this moustache and goatee, so I'm like, "Hunh," and then I pass by him and go lock up my bike and clock in etc., only to get on shift and realize he's there.

And then, I realize his moustache and goatee are perfectly trimmed to fit underneath a facemask, so all the times that I had worked with him, I had automatically visualized him with a clean-shaven face under there, when he had never had a clean-shaven face at all, and I only got to realize that when we overlapped outside the building and he didn't have to wear a facemask and so he wasn't wearing one and I saw him then.

Food innovation:

A few weeks ago since I was out of the standard medium grain rice that I cook up to mix with the big pot of black beans that's one of the recipes that I usually make, I decided to cook up some spaghetti noodles instead, and then I stirred in the black beans and poured some hot sauce on top of it.

I figure it's kind of like Cincinnati chili, though not really. 

Surprisingly, I didn't have a problem eating it.

Quirk of a resident squirrel who I see around my yard:

The very tip of its tail looks like it has major portions of fluff pulled out, so it's like the last fifth of its tail is all like these small short ragged mats that form a thick blunt point, all suddenly after the other four-fifths of its tail was all just like the normal bushy fluff that you see on the tails of squirrels everywhere.

And, the matted part is an uneven dirty grey, while the rest of the tail is that greyish-red mix that the squirrels and the rabbits alike both have around here as their coats.