Another coworker backstory (1 of 2): Other lives.

Like a month ago my one (newer) (Guatemalan) (indigenous-looking but monolingual Spanish) (female) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now asked me about a talk I was giving, and so I told her a little about it, and I said that I have a doctorate and am an expert on this one very famous dead language and when I'm not working I spend all my time reading and writing, but I don't work in a university because there's no permanent work and because many professors won't give you a permanent job if you are intelligent and competition, it's difficult like that.

And, she told me that back in Guatemala, she used to drywall houses.

Something new in jigsaw puzzles that I haven't seen before:

This one company prints a grid of letters on the backside of their jigsaw puzzles, so if you ever have an unclear fit and you go to flip the pieces over to check to see if the fit is right, you also have the match of the letter-grid to help you see that.

But, if it's not a fit, sometimes you see that the letters belong to a different section of the puzzle, or are oriented differently, which is like the piece telling you how it orients or where it goes.

To me, that additional information is almost like cheating.

Some surprisingly rewarding environmental neuroticism:

When you can't squeeze anymore out, I now take a pair of scissors and cut right across the middle of a quote-unquote "empty" tube of sunblock, so I can then poke my fingers deep inside it and wipe around the inside and scrape up every last possible bit of it that's left...

With my last tube of Neutrogena SPF 70, too, I was able to do that like 4-5 times -- which is quite a lot of sunblock left in that tube that you wouldn't otherwise use, when you think about it!

I also then gently fold the top part of the tube and set it inside the bottom, and depending on where I cut, sometimes the seam is so smooth and unobtrusive that you can't even tell it's a cut-open tube with the top half nestling inside the bottom, the re-ordered image and text parts matching so well, or at least looking that way when you glance at it.

Two jokes that I made the other week with one five-top table at work...

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

1) When it turns out that the (college-age) (alternative-looking) (white) girl of the party of five is there for her birthday with her (white) family, and I had already guided her away from one stir-fry and to one fried rice, when she had asked me for my recommendation:

"Man, I hope you like that entree, because I'd feel horrible if I ruined your birthday."

2) When they don't order dessert:

"Man, I wish I had known that earlier, because I would have put a birthday candle in your fried rice!"

. . .

Two forms of jigsaw puzzle neuroticism:

1) I now owe 5 jigsaw puzzles to the "Take One, Leave One" jigsaw puzzle table in the local public library's foyer, but I'm planning to give my more-attractive used jigsaw puzzles to the local charity resale shop so they can sell them, and use the other, worse-in-my-eyes ones for that table, to make up my obligations there.

2) I've decided to keep up a series of assembled jigsaw puzzles to see what they look like together, since they have thematics that kind of gel and the color schemes seem like they work -- one that's drawings of summer campers, and then one a two-puzzle set where one is a close-up of a wicker basket of bell peppers and the other one is a stack of bolts of bright Southwestern-style fabrics, and then two different ones where they're photos of sweeping canyon panoramas.

Force of habit:

For like a week now, every time I take a shower and get out of the shower, I turn to the nearby shelving to go and get a Q-tip, before I remember that they ran out like over a week ago.

A joke in (Spanish)...

... to my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker, when I go back into the kitchen and she's kneading this giant vat of crab rangoon filling, and it's full of just chunky clumps of cream cheese:

"Parece como mi gringo panzon" ('It looks like my white belly').

. . .