Three recent-enough happenings...

...all from several months ago:

1) Turnips in my fridge don't get used for a week or two, and they get so small and shriveled that they become hard to peel when it's time to cook them, so instead you have to press them down and make the skin bulge out and then carefully trim it off with a knife, there on your cutting board.

2) At the (one) Thai restaurant where I work now, a(n old) (flannel-shirted) (gruff) (farmer-type) (white) guy comes in with a (younger) (white) woman and they're part of a party of six where the other four people haven't come in yet, and when I ask them if they want any appetizers or any beverages other than water while they wait, they each get a beer but no food, so I'm like, "Perfect! That's a great way to get a buzz on before dinner," at which the (gruff) (older) (farmer-type) guy just looks up at me and is quite serious and is all like, "By any chance, do you have a dispensary in back?"

Later, too, after the rest of the party has arrived and I check in on them to see how their appetizers were, his (similarly white) friend just points at an empty plate and says that the appetizers were good, the problem was the hole in the plate.

3) When the one (Brazilian) (STEM) guy who I know from around town emails me to ask about health insurance companies since he's returning soon on a (post-doc), I tell him my opinion, and then I reply again to the email with another response and write --

 P.S. If you have asked Luigi for advice about what to do with health insurance, don't listen to what he says.

-- to which he replied --

Hahahahahaha silly!!
Luigi now has a very good health insurance 

. . .

Precautions against local homelessness.

Like a month ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I had noticed out the front window like mid-way through dinner shift that this (very tall) (erratically-loping) (young) (dark black) man was across the street in a parking lot there, like cutting through a part of the parking lot that no-one ever goes through, and just moving kind of funny, before he rounded the corner of the building and then went down the sidewalk and disappeared heading out west from town-center.

And, that's that, and I don't see him again for the rest of the shift, out of sight, out of mind.

And then, that night when we close, I leave before my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker, and I cross the street and go on my way home, and as I'm like half a block away, who do I see but that same guy, rounding a curve on the opposite side of the street and walking up towards the restaurant.

So, I pause and turn and watch, and he goes past the entrance and is like half a block up past there, and then my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker steps out and steps to the curb and looks at her phone, just oblivious, and luckily the guy keeps going, and then a moment later my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones steps out and joins my other (Thai) coworker, and then they walk across the street together to the parking lot that's there, probably to the one's car since she's giving our older coworker a ride home.

And, I just paused and watched up the street even though those two had stepped out of sight behind the building that was there between me and the parking lot, to make sure that the guy didn't stop and loop back and cross the street and go towards them or go after them or anything like that.

And, as I was waiting, a (middle-aged) (pear-shaped) (black) woman with shaved head-sides and a dreaded top was walking up towards me on the sidewalk, and she looked quizzical at why I was standing there turned back and watching like that, and so I said that I had just got off work and was walking home and had noticed a strange guy, and I was waiting and watching to make sure that my coworkers got to their cars, and that she should be careful since he was up there somewhere walking ahead.

"Thanks," she was like, and kept going.

And, I waited just ten or twenty seconds more, at which point it was clear enough that the guy was way away from my coworkers and they had had more than enough time to get to their car.

So, I went home, but I promised myself to talk to both of them to let them know about that guy, the next time that I worked with them, about how something maybe could have happened, and how they should be more careful when they leave the restaurant at night.

A comment of my mother from a couple of months ago...

...as we are talking on the phone and some topic comes up and she wants to go look something up about it right away, and she says she's going to go on the internet and do it right then, even while I sit there on the phone and wait for her to do it:

"I know you don't like doing this, but you have to, because I'm your mother."

 . . .

A dream...

...that I dreamnt last month:

The front neighbor from the first floor of the front house is out doing gardening, and I am out in that same yard while she works, and I am inside my cottage again, and I am thinking of asking her to weed the bush-beds besides my cottage, and I look up, and tall sunflowers with small blossoms are suddenly there outside my windows, transplanted among freshly-weeded bush-beds, and I go out into the yard, and large plants that she's been growing inside all winter are put in here and there on the lawn, and then we're standing by the backsteps that go up to the backdoor to the front house that leads to her first-floor apartment, and she is very angry about the mud there at the foot of the steps and how it's a mess and how nothing will grow there, and I raise the possibility, gingerly, that I gather pebbles from the alley and put them there in the dirt-patch that's the mud, and that will fill the space there and make it less messy, and she seems genuinely appreciative of my idea and my offer and affirms it, and then I'm back inside my cottage, and I hear from my bedroom the sound of someone like knocking on the glass door of a patio-door, and I walk into my bedroom and there's a large door there in the wall by where my bed was and it leads out onto a large flat cement-block porch with a straight simple roof but no railings and it all looks out across some fields and towards a distant house, and somehow I sense it's Kentucky, and a woman is there and she's the neighbor and she says that she walked over and that she's glad that she finally caught me at home since there's some nesting raccoons there that will cause me some problems and she wants to show them to me so that I know how bad the problem is...

 ...and then something wakes me up, and I come to too much to go back to sleep and slip into the same dream, to find out where the raccoons are and how bad the problem is.

. . .

(. . .)

More signs of increasing local homelessness.

1) A(n old) (black) (homeless) guy comes in the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now and approaches one table and then turns away when they apparently refuse his request for money and then he starts walking down the aisle, and me and my (Thai) coworkers notice, and right away I go up to him to ask him if I can help him and he asks for water and I say that that's for customers only, so he leaves, nicely, and just after he does that the (male) owner comes out of the back since someone had run back and gotten him from the back office, since I guess this same guy had come in twice recently on recent shifts and on one of the times that he came in, he really really messed up the restroom, and, anyhow, the second time that he came in, the (male) owner had told him that if he ever came in there again, they would call the cops on him.

2) A (younger) (black) (homeless) guy slips in the front door of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now and sits down at a front-window table of a(n older) (white) woman whose husband had just gotten up at the end of the meal and gone to use the restroom, and he talks to her to ask her for money, which she apparently refuses, and when I go up as he gets up to go find another table, I ask him if I can help him, and he doesn't say much, and just heads out the front door.

3) At the one lake-park north of my house, as I jog one early evening when it's still light out, this (middle-aged) (light-skinned) (black) man wrapped up in a winter coat and wrapped up in a blanket on top of that is just sitting up on the fishing area of a bridge where a small platform flares out, sitting on the corner where two railings meet with his leg stuck up on the one railing, just staring off into space, while two (younger) (white) kids with fishing poles are creeping through some nearby woods trying to find a way down to a nearby creek that's there, since apparently the standard fishing space was taken up by this (homeless) guy.

A new workshoe strategy, and a problem that ensues.

I've now started rotating out workshoes between waiter shifts at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now -- taking one pair in for one shift and then another in for the next -- since I hear that that helps with the wear-and-tear, and that actually helps them to last longer, if they rest more in between usage, even though you think that that wouldn't matter all that much.

Only, I had been wearing the one pair constantly and keeping the second pair in reserve, so it's hard to get a sense of how they wear now, since the one was so worn when I first started doing this.

I'm not sure if I'll come out of this, knowing whether this really works or not.

Some random happenings, lately:

1) The one (local) (young) (white) (female) bartender at the local brewery, the one with the (knit) (pussy-hat) vibes, says that a lot of times when she's talking with people and the subject of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now comes up, people out of nowhere are all like, "And I love that guy...!", and they then go on to describe me, and apparently there's all these people who are fans of me, as a server, which she says in part is from how so many people who go in there are (white) and they don't know sh*t about (Thai) food, and how I always explain things to everyone and point new stuff out on the menu and explain it, and how people are genuinely appreciative of that, in addition to me always being so nice.

She also says that she tells them that I'm a regular at that local brewery, and come in there sometimes.

(I didn't ask her then, but I should have, if anyone had said that I was good-looking.)

2) My new neighbors from upstairs at the front house have adopted a new cat, since I guess one morning they came out into the backyard and they saw a cat on the roof of my cottage and they lured it down with food and they took it in and then they went on Facebook and were able to find out that the cat does indeed have an owner but that owner was thinking of re-homing it, anyways, so now they have this new cat, and it all started from that cat being on my cottage's roof one morning and them luring it down etc., all of which was happening as I was in that cottage, asleep, with no idea that all that was going on around me.

3) My (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now shows me a Facebook post where her one (neighbor) in (Guatemala) just turned 104, and then she shows me a livestream where that same neighbor is in a (tasteful) (black) cocktail dress with a banner over her chest like a homecoming queen, as she sits in the back of a truck and is being driven around the streets of that town there in (Guatemala) as a celebration, while someone follows in a car or truck and films it from the rear, for the livestream.