Two bits:

1) It was striking this fall, how one day at the restaurant I noticed just a very few leaves blowing across the street, and then two days later I already had to start sweeping them out of the doorway every day, so many had started to come down and were always starting to blow inside.

2) Also very memorable this fall was a (shorter) (edgy-looking) (later middle-aged) (quiet-voiced) (South Asian) woman who comes in with a (designer-looking) purse and sits down, and demands order service quickly, and she wants her fish without green beans, and also she wants an order to go and we figure it out so it can be warm for her, and then at the end of the meal she suddenly wants to pick up her to-go order since she needs to catch a bus, and the meal isn't quite ready yet though thankfully it comes out two minutes later, and though the bill had been sitting on her table forever and we said we'd take it up for her, she then shows up at the back counter to pay with her credit card, and as it prints out and she signs, she doesn't leave a tip, she just signs at the bottom, and so I do the spiel and ask her if everything was okay with the food and the service, because the owner will see that and wonder if something is wrong, and so she picks up the pen again, and she puts it down on the receipt and across the entire receipt she draws --

X

-- and then she goes back to her table to pick up her takeout which she had left there, and she grabs it and goes out the door to leave.

"She's always like that, she never tips," says my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones.

But, everyone was astonished that, when challenged, she simply drew an X across the entire receipt.

They'd never seen that one, before.