Peculiarity after a rainstorm late one night several weeks ago...

...in my one cottage in the (college) town that I now live in:

The power is off in my bathroom and with my electric stove, but my refrigerator still hums, and it's on everywhere else, and flipping the fuses on and off doesn't do anything.

And, I get a text from the electric company that there might be an outage affecting me, and they're aware of that outage and they're on it as soon as possible.

Then, mid-morning the next day when the weather is nice again, I wake up since my white noise machine cuts off, and I get up and go look around, and electricity is off everywhere in my cottage, and then I go back to sleep and a bit later it turns on again, and that wakes me up again and so I get up and go look around, and what do you know, everything is back on, and I get a text from the electric company that power has been restored.

My father said then, when I spoke with him on the phone, that somehow my cottage must have two different electrical feeds, and one was affected by the storm, and the other one wasn't.

Like an hour after he said that, too, I see my one (thin) (jumpy) front neighbor and I ask him if his apartment had any power outages after the storm, and he says yes, and it was weird, like one outlet in their living room wouldn't work, but the other would, but now everything is fine.

The next time I saw my landlord, too, I mention the whole thing to him, and he says that's what the people in the front house said, too, and he never knew about it, but somehow the house must be at the intersection of two different feeds.

A weight-loss craze...

...so I can maybe lose 5-6 pounds in 3 weeks and button my blazer for a wedding this month:

I commit myself to 10 jumping jacks for every sit-down customer who comes in while I work a shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, since it makes it a game but it also keeps your heart-rate up on shift, so you burn more calories.

(I also switched to ramrong with chicken and minimal white rice and peanut sauce as my go-to shift meal, and I drink like Whiteclaw shit if I have a patio drink now, and I also have cut out pretzels as a late-night snack, substituting in sugar-free jello, instead.)

Sometimes I do the jumping jacks by the counter, but the (husband) owner almost caught me once, so I now do them when I'm sure the owners are gone, or in the bathroom, or around by the edge of the front patio out of sight of the front windows, if I'm out there to do something and there's no customers sitting there.

One night, too, I was saying to my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones that I had like 90 left to do and I had done over 200 that day, and she told me in so many words that no I didn't, she didn't see me do them, so they don't count, she has to see me.

A bad habit of some (non-tipping) (takeout) customers...

...who are not always (South Asian), but sometimes (often?) are:

They ask for water to drink while they wait, and then they just leave the glass out at the table where they waited without even looking around to see if there's anywhere where they can bus it, and so we end up having to do extra work for them with getting the water and then cleaning up after them.

I mean, it's not much work, but still, just because you buy something from a restaurant doesn't make everyone who works there your servant.

I feel so often with (foreign-born) customers that it's like a part of their brain got left out, because they don't get the social function of tipping, like how even giving one single dollar or perhaps two lets you be able to ask for something like that, without any hard feelings...

On that note, a few weeks ago a (younger) (South Asian) couple parked curbside and walked in to pick up some medium-large takeout order for the both of them, and there was no tip, and after they left, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, "Look, they have an expensive car, and nothing for tip," which I hadn't really keyed into, since I never really notice cars.

A dream peculiarity.

There's been a few times where I've had repeated features in dreams.

Like, years ago I had this very vivid dream about a far neighborhood of a city that I used to live in, where there was sloping hills coming down to an intersection with a few stores and a bar, and beyond that a more-traditional neighborhood found on the other side of a stony tunnel, and before that some fields from where the city got low-density, with small clumps of trees and some stand-alone shack-like businesses, only there is no such place in that city, and I've dreamed the same geography several times in different dreams -- like once I dreamnt about the general neighborhood, and then in another dream I was on a long bike trip and I was bicycling past the intersection by the hills, and then in another dream I was passing the field, and each time I knew how it all fit together, geographically, in every dream that I was in, like I was building or discovering the geography across the dreams.

Anyhow, I had that same geography in a dream the other night, where I met a (vaguely hipster) (white) HS teacher who I knew in my dream but not in real life (?) for drinks at the business by the hills, and it was surprisingly hopping, and then we hopped a bus to go through the tunnel so he could get back to where he lives and I could catch the train from the nearby subway station, and some businesses that we passed on the way there were hopping, too, and as I walk him back towards where he lives before I split off, he mentions moving out there because of his girlfriend, who's lived there for a long time because she teaches at a nearby elite private high school, and that the area has a new influx of residents because of cheaper rents but they're going up, and he tells me, too, about some cooler stately old homes tucked away on a hillside even further towards the outskirts, and as I walk towards the subway station past railway tracks and highways, I think that while I was all the way out there, I maybe should have taken a half hour or an hour and gone for a walk and seen the homes that he was telling me about.

And then, I wake up.

All in all, very strange, especially the repeated landscape.

It would not surprise me a bit to one day be someplace, and find all of those places, in real life.

A restaurant joke...

...from the other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

I'm sweeping the floor everywhere as part of my closing tasks, and just as I'm sweeping in front of the small hallway that goes back into the kitchen, the one (younger) (Lao) cook is coming out to go get some water or something from the soda machine, so as he goes to go past my broom, I shift and start sweeping ahead of his path ahead of him as he walks, like I've seen (priests) do as part of ceremonies in front of people carrying (divine images) in like (Hindu) or (Buddhist) ceremonies or wherever, and it takes him a few seconds to catch on to what I'm doing, but when he does, he does a serious double-take and cracks a smile.

. . .

(He then confirms that yes, he's seen something like that in [Buddhist] rituals, too.]

A linguistic hunch seems correct.

So, some of my (Thai) coworkers confirmed my hunch about (Lao), with the one (younger) (Lao) guy who's a cook in back.

From everything I gather, Lao and Thai are related languages with like 70% mutual intelligibility, though my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker has said that all (Lao) people can understand (Thai) people but that (Thai) people can't understand (Lao) people.

Though, when I asked her if it was a media access thing because (Thailand) probably has a bigger population and so it has media reach into Laos, she seemed to agree that that was the case.

Anyhow, it's all very interesting when you ask them for phrases; some things between (Lao) and (Thai) are completely different, and others like your standard "Hello/Goodbye" and "Good night" are the same or have some obvious sound change, and then other things are just weird.

Like, in (Thai) you always throw this particle after greetings and you say one particle if you're male and another if you're female, and if you don't say your particle you sound rude, even if you know someone quite well, and I'd read somewhere that these particles historically come from words meaning "man" or "woman" or something like that -- like you self-identify as a servant to someone, like "Hello, [I am your] man," and then that politeness practice became generalized to everyone -- and, with that, when I was asking around about it, my (Thai) coworkers had told me once that yes, there's other words like that that sound like the particles and they do mean "man" and "woman," but they're different. 

But, the one (younger) (Lao) cook guy was like, "They always say 'boy' after everything, but that's a Thai thing, we don't say that."

Anyhow anyhow, I had told my (Thai) coworkers that I'd noticed that the two (Lao) people I know have used very distinctive (English) responses when I tell them news -- "Really?" and "For real?" from the lady at the farmer's market and the cook, respectively -- and that I've been suspecting there's a (Lao) phrase that they use in conversation a lot that they've found (English) equivalents for, but this phrase doesn't exist in (Thai) since I've never seen any of my (Thai) coworkers say anything ever like that, but the two (Lao) people have each used their equivalent phrase to me, multiple times.

So, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker talked a while with my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, and then she went in back to talk with the one (younger) (Lao) cook, and then she came out and talked some more with my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, and yes, it does turn out that there's some (Lao) phrase like that, and she told me what it was, though now I forget.

. . .

(This is totally comparable to some stuff that has emerged from Spanish into English in Miami, if it ever gains traction among [Lao]-American kids and becomes part of their dialect.)

A good problem to have:

Buying too much stuff at the local farmer's market, in the one (college) town that I now live in.

I get home, and I'm like, "Oh my god, I bought way too many cucumbers, and I forgot I got those beets! Guess I'll just have to eat a lot of huge salads now!

I'm kind of in with the (older) (Lao) woman at the farmer's market, too, who I've consistently bought from for the past few seasons.

The other week she was like, "Here, take one more," and she threw another bundle of kale at me, and she was like, explaining herself, "You are always so nice and buy from me."

I also save my leftover rubber bands for her; I bind them up with an old long twistie-tie left over from bread or the bulk-foods aisle at the local co-op, and then like once or twice a season I give her a big neatly-bound bundle of rubber bands.

She seems very appreciative.