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...for the new Hunger Games prequel, when I found out about it a few months after release and I went to go put my name into the queue so I can get it and read it:
- 1182 on the waitlist for the audiobook.
- 1825 on the waitlist for the e-book.
- like 70 on the waitlist for the physical book (of which the library had boughten like 26 copies).
...this makes me wonder if the audiobook and the e-book haven't been released yet, and that's why there's such a back-up with those?...
I recently had used almost all of this off-shelf purportedly anti-Covid nasal spray that I use whenever I go out and don't mask, but there was a little bit left at the bottom of the bottle.
So, I unscrewed it, and I tipped the bottle over and nursed it with the next one, to use up every last bit!
I need to see if I can do that with my anti-allergy nasal spray, where there's still some left in the one bottle but it won't squirt anymore and I had to open up a new one.
I also recently took scissors and cut open a sunscreen tube, so that I could scoop my finger around the edges and poke them down into the cap, to scrape up and use every last little bit.
And, you know, there was like 2-3 full applications of sunscreen left in there, that I otherwise would have just thrown away.
...to the one "cauliflower - carrot - kale - curry" soup that I make at home:
I don't put the kale on top of the soup at the very end when everything is cooked and I turn off the heat, to let it sit there and steam and then mix it in once the soup cools. Instead, I just wash and cut it fresh and put it in the bottom of the bowl to pour the hot soup over, each time that I reheat the soup and go to eat a bowl.
The kale stays crispier that way, and that's just the way that I like it.
1) When I recently bumped into the one (gay) (Colombian) graduate student who I know from the neighborhood, I started speaking (Spanish) with him, and he responded back to my asking how he was by saying something about how he much he has been working lately, but the way he said "trabajo" ("I'm working"), it's like the b was barely articulated or maybe even absent, and what was left was a lot like a long vowel in a word that sounds a lot like traajo.
When I pointed this out to him, he said that that happens with the way he says words like nada ("nothing"), too, like they sound like naa, and that that particular pronunciation practice confuses and annoys his (Brazilian) boyfriend to no end, when they speak (Spanish) together and he pronounces a word like that.
He also said that this is much broader than a (Colombian) thing, but when I told him that I don't hear pronunciation like that from my (Mexican) and (Guatemalan) coworkers, he said maybe it's because they take pity on me and speak slowly and enunciate whenever they're talking with me.
(Personally, I think it's probably that he's just not quite keyed into this linguistic feature and who uses it from where. It's very distinctive... I also pointed out to him that oblivion is the end result of intervocalic lenition of these sounds, like how Latin cadere "to fall" had already become Spanish caer, only now it's happening more and more everywhere.)
2) A bit ago towards the end of one dinner shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (smiley) (Guatemalan) coworker came up to me out of nowhere and started saying to me in (English) "Have a good night," repeating it over and over again and just smiling at me in between every time he said it.
And, he was just smiling, not only because it was like he was messing with me in a good-natured way, but also because he knew something in (English), though he then went on to ask me what exactly it meant, what he was saying.
Interestingly, his pronunciation was pretty amazing, and he even substituted out the final "-t" of "night" and put in a glottal stop instead, just like speakers do in casual (English).
You could tell that a native speaker had practiced that phrase with him, or that he had absorbed that phrase from overhearing native speakers.
You could also tell that his (native) language must almost certainly contain a phonemic glottal stop, for him to recognize and remember that sound there, in a phrase using the sound system of (English). It would be a very weird thing for him to pick up on and repeat, if he didn't already know that sound from somewhere.
...on one aspect of the aftermath of a recent-ish icestorm in her area, in late winter and early spring:
"It was so beautiful, almost like a Disney thing, it was so beautiful."
. . .
(She was referring to the ice hanging off all of the branches of all of the trees.)
So, like a little more than a month ago, my landlord was checking out the entire property of the front house and cottage inclusive, to make sure everything was in compliance for some city property inspections that happen like every decade or so.
Like, he had to make sure there were screens on every window that's openable -- one had gone missing, from the previous tenant who had had an AC unit in that particular window -- and that no extension cords or outlet expanders were present.
As it turned out, after the inspection, there was one finding of non-compliance in my cottage:
The wall-outlets above my kitchen counter should have been of a different type that has these built-in circuit breakers if they get wet, since technically they're within 6 feet of the kitchen sink that's across the narrow aisleway that forms my kitchen.
So, he now has to replace them, and soon.
...on top of a plate that I had rested on top of a bowl of sugar-free jello, as a make-shift lid:
Among some small bits of kale leaves that had fallen down from higher refrigerator racks, a sharply quadrangular bright green beetle, its legs folded in from the cold, and when I throw it in the kitchen sink and start running the water to flush it away, its legs start creakily moving.
. . .
(I had bought two huge bundles of kale just that day or the day before, one for salads and one for a soup, and my suspicion is that the beetle was somewhere in there, in those big bundles of kale leaves, and the cold of my refrigerator had forced it to crawl out from within and then at some point the cold also made it lose control and drop down from whatever leaf where it had been resting on, there in the darkness of my refrigerator.)
