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.

Messed-up food rehabilitation.

So, my last big batch of home-fermented sauerkraut came out tasting fine but with a very unappealing mushy texture, which according to what I read online can happen if you don't put quite enough salt into it, although it's usually fine to eat, the bad sign with that is horrible taste or slimy texture.

Their suggestion was that you can always use sauerkraut like that for adding to soups, so I bought some potatoes and turnips, and I went and dumped the sauerkraut in a big pot and added more water, and then when that was boiling with some whole peppercorns in it, I remembered a sauerkraut-and-apples dish that I had once tried at a friend's house, and so I cut up some (poorer quality) gala apples that I had in the fridge alongside dicing one nice granny smith, and I put that in before I finally added in the cubed potatoes and turnips.

All in all, it turned out very, very fine.

In general, I need to learn how to cook more fall soups, like with squash and parsnips and pumpkin and stuff.

British humor.

The other week I was emailing my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), and he made this comment in an email going off of something that I had said –

I heard an artist on the radio saying something similar: the best music is produced in the early years.

-- to which I replied --

But what about Mozart and Beethoven?

-- to which he replied --

I don’t know enough about their musical biographies to comment. they did produce music in a different time (way back when) so maybe things were different then.

-- to which I replied--

Are you saying the world is getting worse?

-- to which he replied--

not qualitatively but quantitatively, yes.

-- which I interpreted to be not so much a continuation of the conversation or an actual response, but rather an opportunistic joke, meaning that people are just as good or just as bad as they’ve always been, but there’s just more of them, now.

. . .

British humor can be so odd.