[got COVID]

Thankfully the symptoms are very mild, but I am exhausted, and I'm trying not to exert myself, since I hear that leads to huge long-term problems, when you begin to do stuff again too soon.

And just when I was starting to have days off again, and just when I have this huge lineup of decently time-sensitive projects that I need to start getting intense about and polishing off.

Like, I took a week off of work -- the owners's (high school senior-age) (Thai-American) daughter is on the schedule this week at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, even though she's starting her senior year of high school! -- but maybe I get an hour or two of desultory basic reading in during the day when I feel like it, but definitely no writing.

It's definitely not a vacation.

A schtick I do...

...at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, since at the end of the night when the one (young) (female) (Guatemalan) washes down the one refrigerator up towards the front of the kitchen where we always walk by it, the way she throws water on it makes it seem like someone has thrown up on it:

[If she's washing it, I walk up and I go, "Hunh-WEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHH," like the sound of someone vomiting, and I motion with big large motions my hands and arms from my mouth to where she's washing, to make it seems like the vomit is splashing there.]

. . .

[A few times I have also had a joke variant, where I'm like, "Donald Tromp" in a Spanish accent, and then I'm like "Hunh-WEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHH," and I do the whole mimicking vomiting thing.]

. . .

[She usually giggles, but not always.]

Three happenings at the (Thai) restaurant the other day:

1) The bill for a (younger) (not non-professional) (white) woman turned out to be $17.76, and she paid with a(n American flag) credit card.

2) The one (younger) (slightly-moustached) (husky-built) (late teens) (slightly Americanized) (Guatemalan) who sometimes works the kitchen but also sometimes works the front was working the front and he asked me if it was okay if he was the one to leave early that night, and I was like, "No, because I'll miss you," and he just thought that that was the sweetest thing, though he didn't say much, but he smiled and you could just tell.

3) The bill for a (thin) (odd-seeming) (shorts-and-T-shirted) (white) computer science guy who came in with 2 friends but just got the eggplant tempura appetizer turned out to be $6.66, after tax.

Pens and Pilates:

1) My one pen ran out of ink that I was using to take orders at the (Thai) restaurant, so I would use these standard major-brand blue plastic pens that we had in a box behind the counter, only, like once a shift I'd squat down to do something, and the pen would slightly flex in my back pocket, and it'd go to hell and wouldn't work, even though it was a new pen.

After wasting like four or five of these pens, I realized that something would have to change, and so the next time that I was at the local bank to deposit my tip money -- so much! do they think I'm a drug runner? -- I asked them for free pens, and they gave me 2 and I took a 3rd that was lying out on the counter, and these have nice ink and a good flow but also a hard shell casing, and so they don't self-destruct in my back pocket thanks to the strength of my flexing buttock, but instead they make it through with flying colors, no problem at all whatsoever.

2) A few weeks ago the schedule at the (Thai) restaurant said that we were going to be short-staffed for the Wednesday lunch shift and it looked initially like I'd be there alone, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones affirmed to me that she can never come in then, Wednesday afternoon is always her Pilates day.

Like, it's always scheduled off for her, because she has Pilates.

Addendum.

Very often when I leave the (Thai) restaurant late at night after the end of dinner shift, the sort-of-brutalist urban renewal building across the street has one light on, this very traditional living-room big-lamp-shade-type lamp, that you can see way up in the upper left corner of the building on like the fourth floor or whatever, in its chunky stacked-on-each other chunk floors that it has, between the sweeping gashes and off-angle pillars and continuous horizontal stripes of windows and all the stuff that comes together to make that urban renewal building the urban renewal building that it is.

And, it annoys me to no end, since the lamp just doesn't go with the building.

I mean, it should at least be mid-century modern.

A great sight the other very early evening...

...at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

A table towards the front of the restaurant has just this big sheet of sunlight on it even though it's like 5:30pm and the restaurant faces south, and I realize it's because the sort-of-brutalist-but-with-shiny-stone urban renewal building directly across the street has pillars put 90 degrees off how they'd usually be, and that diagonal slant was taking the sunlight from the setting sun and throwing it through the windows of our restaurant at this one particular time of day, or maybe even just at this one particular time of day just during this little window of the season of the year what with the changing seasons and all, kind of like a Stonehenge or something.

Another day at the (Thai) restaurant...

...where I work now:

1) The (Thai) owner with the tired face had to fiddle with an app delivery touchscreen to get it working again, and when I asked her how I could get it connected, she showed me, and it involved getting the wifi connected, which involved the fact that we have wifi, which I had no idea bout.

"But don't tell the customers," she was like. "If they use it, it slows the connection down."

And then, she was like, "So, lie. And give them the password next door."

2) Right after we opened, a (very fat) (old white) lady in a purple t-shirt waddled in with a (small) (brown-haired) (male) toddler, and said she wanted takeout and a rice right away for here for him. And, she couldn't remember the name of the dish, so we had to help her find that on the menu. And, right after she ordered, we brought out the bowl of rice for him, and they sat at a small table near the counter. And, rice got everywhere, and she came up and asked us for a napkin to clean it, and though she cleaned it off the floor and maybe the table, we still had to wipe the table when they left like we always do, and she left her chair just swung out to the side, where we had to go and push it back in.

(Zero tip, like not even a dollar.)

3) Four (older) (white) ladies come in and it turns out that they're celebrating the one's birthday, and they all have separate checks, including one for the birthday woman. After one confuses nickels for dimes with her bill and they dive in to help her -- "You need ten more cents, Janie" -- it suddenly becomes clear that she has early- to mid-stage dementia, and that's also why she had rested her water glass on the small hors d'oeuvre plate that we had set out on the table for their crab rangoons, people can start confusing textures and patterns and objects and she must have thought it was a coaster. 

She would also look up at me vacantly and smile when I approached the table to talk, like she was trying to act like she knew what was happening.

4) Like three minutes before close, we get an automated call from an app alerting us that a takeout order had come in from someone with a (South Asian) name, so we enter it in and call them right away, to let them know to be in within 5 minutes since we're closing for the afternoon, and the person answers and said they didn't know we were closing and they were driving and were fifteen minutes away, but they'd be there as soon as possible, and eventually they come in, this (very fat) (basketball-shaped) (mid-40s) (South Asian) woman in a big black shirt with white patches, whose head is like another basketball with (ashy) skin and (pulled-back) (frizzy) (oily) (black) hair on her basketball-shaped body, and it's like 25 minutes after we'd be gone and the cooks are out from the back eating their late lunch while the restaurant is closed for the afternoon, and the (fat) (South Asian) woman checks in the bag to make sure there's a fork and napkin and says there isn't one and makes me go to go get one until she realizes that there is one in there and she tells me not to go, and then she takes it and waddles to the door, and I follow her there and lock it behind her, as she goes to her (shiny) (silver) SUV by the curb and clambers up into it, which isn't all that easy for her, apparently, since she's carrying a takeout bag, for one thing, and for another she's shaped like a basketball and has a very low center of gravity.

(Zero tip on the initial bill, and zero tip afterwards, not even a dollar. This type of person, i.e. South Asian, so often thinks a compliment on the food or a "sorry" is equivalent to money. And she has all that gas money for the SUV.)