Wonders of nature (1 of 2): Nighttime walk.

The summer nights are so hot here, that some very late evenings I take a stroll when it's dark out and it's starting to cool down, both to get out of the house a little bit and also to enjoy the night.

Like twice, I've gone south to this one big field park that's just south of me and that has these tall towering trees, and there I've walked around the edge of the park and then come straight back through the middle, and when you've walked around halfway through the park and are at the farthest point away from everything, it's pretty dark and very quiet, and there's just all these fireflies everywhere.

The last time that I walked through there, too, they were even high up off the ground up into the bottom of the trees, I could see.

I do make sure to carry my pepper spray with me, and have my "huge sound and flash" alarm ready to pull at any moment, just in case.  It doesn't seem risky to be there at night, but you really never do know.

Another incident in the local economy.

When I went to the one fingerprinting place on the far side of town to get my 2 new background checks rolling for my upcoming dual citizenship application, it turned out that the (youngish) (spacy) (mildly lighter skinned) (black) lady with a large but understated upper arm tattoo was a traveling nurse who was new to town, and the (older) (heavily make-upped) (white) lady with (flowing) (white and melon) pants whose pants she complimented to her -- "They look so nice, and the color matches your skin" -- was a head of nursing in a neighboring town like a half hour away, and I at that point self-identified as having a lower-level healthcare license, too, and so the nursing director tried to woo us both to come work for her, us three being all of the entire fingerprinting place clientele sitting there at that point.

 "I need nurses," she was like, and when I mentioned my license, she was like, "I need [license acronym]s, too." 

She also said that no-one wants to work, and that all of the nurses are becoming traveling nurses, since they can work when they want and make twice the money, and if they cancel a shift, there's no repercussions on them, since the agencies don't care.

And, the (older) (short-haired) (white) lady who was doing the fingerprinting said that she gets a lot of traveling nurses coming through now, for background checks.

"Come work for me," the one nursing director was like to the traveling nurse, "I just started so they're not looking at me too closely, and I can probably bump your starting wage up a bit."

Addendum.

After that watermelon incident, I texted my one professor friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature -

So a gigantic watermelon I bought on Friday was nicked and compromised and internally spoiling and I had to throw it out. How is your weekend going?

- to which she replied -  

I believe i [sic] may be that watermelon

. . .

Had to throw out a huge watermelon.

It was the second of the 2 I'd bought, $8 each on sale at the grocery store.

The first I'd opened up and it was chilling in my fridge, and the 2nd was sitting out on my counter, and then like the next day I noticed there was a small pool of clear liquid on the counter that I had to mop up, and the day after that, there was even more, and it had a sour watermelon smell.

So, I looked, and there was like this innocuous inch-and-a-half scratch at the bottom of the watermelon, and that must have been where the water was coming from, and how the bacteria entered.

I set it upside down in the fridge to deal with it later when I had time, and the next day I cut it open, and though there were some sections far away from the cut where the watermelon seemed okay, those parts were few and far between, and so I had to throw the whole thing out.

For that, I used a giant plastic burlap rice bag that I had saved and put into the one cupboard where I put my plastic bags to reuse as kitchen scrap bags; I basically slid the bag over the watermelon, carried it out upright, and just dumped it in the trash bin behind my cottage, and hoped it wouldn't rot and smell too much before the trashman picked it up in a few days.

I wonder now if somehow the watermelon pressed into a wire on my grocery cart from the weight of all of the groceries on top of it, and that's how the cut began.

I mean, if it had had the cut when I had bought it, I think I would have seen some liquid coming out of it and onto the big cardboard bin where it was resting when I picked it out.

Some reactions on Roe v. Wade being overturned.

The other evening I caught up by phone a little bit with my one lawyer friend from (Missouri).

She's very upset about Roe v. Wade being overturned, especially since she goes back to Missouri a lot and now for her that's a place where she's not allowed to control what happens inside her body once she crosses the state border, and that's a really disturbing thought for her.

"I knew they would do this," she was like, "But at the same time, you had this little doubt and you also really didn't think that they would do it, because you expect them to respect precedent."

She also said that she's trying not to think about it, but she will go back and read this new decision at some point when she's calmer, along with re-reading Roe v. Wade, which she hasn't read since law school.

With my parents, my mom doesn't have much to say and actually told me that she doesn't have anything to say beyond what's already being said by everyone, but she does think that they'll go after contraception next.

My father is actually very upset, and when I brought it up with him, he said that he didn't even want to talk about it, he was so upset, and then when I asked him more, he says that he thinks that these are just very personal decisions for women to make, and it's entirely out of line for men to go and insert themselves into that decision-making process and decide what women can and can't do with their bodies.

"That's entirely right," my one lawyer friend from college said, when I told her that reaction, when we caught up on the phone a few days later after I had had that conversation with my parents.

As for my one former assisted living client with disabilities's lesbian sister, she was very shaken but still pretty grounded, and she was retreating to her all-female online spirituality group, to be with them and process, especially for those there who might be devastated.

My one former assisted living client with disabilities made up a sign to post on the back of her wheelchair, so that people see it when she goes around in the assisted living apartment building that she now lives in.

Comment of a consulate staffer to me...

 ...when he informed me that my FBI background check was now expired for their purposes, and I needed to get a fresh one and update my address on my driver's license, in order to submit all of my other dual citizenship paperwork:

"Tell the FBI, please ignore the drinking, ignore the drugs, ignore the trouble that you did after the last background check."

Two moments from a neighborhood walk...

 ...with my one former assisted living client with disabilities's (lesbian) sister:

1) "That chicken's dead," she's like, as we walk past a free range chicken coop that some neighbors keep and see a (black) feathered chicken lying down like downward dog position with its head on the ground toward the wire fence, but then I'm like, "No, look, it's breathing," even as we notice that there's a ton of insects on its head, and so I decide to go knock at the door and let the residents know, and right away when I tell this (younger) (lanky) (mixed race) (like late high school or college-aged) girl that there's a problem with her one chicken, she's like, "They're free range," and I'm like, "No, it got hit by a car or something," and from behind me my friend is like, "Its breathing is labored," and then the girl runs out to check.

"I thought you'd want to know," I was like to her, as we left.

"I guess we know who's having chicken for dinner tonight," my one client's (lesbian) sister was then like just to me, as we walked away.

2) "Look at the honeysuckle," my one client's lesbian sister is like to me, pointing out a bush and instructing me to smell it.

"How did they get that flower to smell like that soap?", I was like, straightfacedly.