Insight into the family of another.

Since the eldest daughter of the (Thai) owners of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now began attending university in town here this year, I was saying to my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, that she should have made a reservation at the restaurant during that university's annual celebration of moms, and taken her family out to eat there.

(We get a lot of families with moms through the restaurant, that weekend.)

And, my coworker told me that she didn't think that she would do that, but when it was her dad's birthday this year, she ran home and picked up the dog and brought it in for when they brought out the cake to their dad in his office at the restaurant, so that the entire family could be there for that, dog included.

Some technology mishaps, and related occurrences:

1) Like I did a couple of years ago, I get this tasty local-ish sportsteam-branded special flavor ice cream at my local supermarket, only to discover that there's only like 2 small crunchy cookie bits in the entire quart, compared to umpteen of them the last time I had bought it.

So, I can only assume that the batch was poorly mixed, or mine skimmed off of the top of the batch after that industrial size vat of ice cream had been allowed to settle, some.

2) I go to put down the toast in my toaster one morning, and suddenly there's a flash of spark and a smell like burning rubber, and so I immediately unplug the toaster, never to use it again.

3) I purchase a replacement toaster at the supermarket like I had bought a glass dish there when I needed a permanent takeout container for work, since I have no car and my ability to go to someplace like a mall or a full-size Target is severely limited.

4) I notice my mid-century modern table-lamp has a frayed oddity at the base of the cord towards the plug when I go to unplug and remove its connected extension cord for the upcoming housing inspection, and I move it back and forth a little to look at it, and the next time I plug it in and turn it on, it doesn't go on, so I go and wiggle that section of the cord, and there's immediate bursts of sparks and a smell of burning rubber, and so I immediately unplug the extension cord and make plans to contact a lighting shop about rewiring that attractive lamp of mine.

I also am thankful that I always leave my appliances and some lamps unplugged, in between when I use them.

They are fire hazards, you know.

A very odd jigsaw puzzle experience...

...with a (Romania)-made jigsaw puzzle with an image of Pieter Brueghel the Younger's "The Payment of the Tithes":

 I get down to the last five pieces, and there's seven slots, but they don't seem to fit in anywhere...

Then, I realize that because of the poorly-fitting pieces, I must have accidentally put a few in the wrong place, and so I look incredibly closely at the fit and pattern in several ambiguous places adjacent to the empty slots, and I discover that I had misplaced 2 puzzle pieces, and once I remove those and try again, I can fit in the remaining pieces as well as the 2 that had been misplaced, although there are ultimately 2 other pieces missing, and those remaining gaps just can't be helped.

. . .

A comment at work.

A few months ago at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said it would be very easy to poison me; all you would have to do is just leave out some food.

(For a while now, I've been telling everyone at work that my three favorite kinds of food are HERE - NOW - and - FREE, since I do tend to graze on whatever people bring into work and leave out on the back counter for snacks.)

And, on that particular day she had brought in some Easter- and spring-themed animal-shaped sugar cookies that she had baked, ones cut into shapes like the faces of lambs and chicks and even a puppy and a lion, so, after a few I said that I must not have gotten to the cookie that's poisoned yet.

"It must be on the bottom," I was like.

"No, the poison is slow," she was like.

Later, too, I said that I could always only eat the food if she ate some first, like if she had half a cookie, I'd have the other half, but she said no, she could poison half of it and leave the other half unpoisoned, like the apple in Snow White.

At some point, too, I said that I would eat the bear cookie, since it was the most unappealing cookie cutter image, and thus the one least likely to contain poison.

"See, I am trying to figure out your strategy, and do the opposite," I was like.

I also said that's a great diet technique to cut down on snacking, if you know one of the items in the bag is poisoned. Something like that would really make you stop eating at some point.

A question I've had lately.

So, you know how there's nerd types who are all fat and pale and nasty and who love anime and who are all pretty socially isolated and who are all kind of autism spectrum-ish too and who sometimes start taking hormones and go trans?

Like, where were all those people 100, 200, 300, even 400 years ago?

Because, it's a definite type of person that's rooted in something innate and cross-cultural -- i.e., autism -- and so they must have been SOMEWHERE.

And, like, where did they get their morality, before the internet herd mentality?

They're all loony tech atheist now, but I think they would have been something theistic?

Like, where did they fit in, in the past?

Catching up with an old coworker.

Like a month ago, I go and open up the window off the living room of my cottage, and as I'm opening it up and looking out, who do I see across the alley but my one old (sound guy) coworker who used to work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

"Hey, what are you doing out there!", I shouted out at him in a mock-threatening voice.

And, he was outside the co-op where he lives now, and was standing between the cars as he walked his cat, who was off-leash and prowling around between the tires and onto the nearby grass.

So, I grabbed my coffee, and went to go join him and chat for a bit.

He has grown a thin straggly beard, and the coffee mug that he was holding was a light greyish-black and in the shape of a stylized skull.

And, he was saying that the club where he had been working kept him on lights even though they said they'd move him into sound, but they didn't, and they kept hiring sound people after him, so he went to talk with his boss, and, she was brusque and said something about how she herself needed the sound hours, even though she was just a waitress who had moved into sound, and anyways you don't say something like that to someone who you made promises to, so, that conversation ended with him losing his job, and now he works everyday out of his bedroom, doing low-wage outsourced internet data entry jobs, to cobble together his rent money while he tries to figure out what's next.

Like, he had some opportunities in a nearby city a few hours away, but the way sound works, it's all boom and bust, and there it's festival season work, but then you need a job during the winter, whereas in a big city like the city that I used to live in, there you can get work year-round, but there's a ton of people wanting those jobs, so you don't really want to move there counting on that unless you have something solid lined up first.

Three bits of recent dreams:

1) I'm lying down on the tile floor of a bathroom, trying to sleep and pull a big overcoat around me for warmth, and somehow it's also full of long stalks of kale, and some are getting crushed and broken at the stems, and it upsets me that I'm rolling around and doing that without meaning to, in my attempts to fall asleep while wrapped in that overcoat and lying on the floor of that cold, cold bathroom.

2) I'm standing on the left side of the cockpit of a plane and the man beside me is a completely inexperienced co-pilot, and for some reason the pilot is in the back, and somehow something is wrong and we need to fetch the pilot, but he's in the back for some reason, and I step forward and grab the steering wheel and pull it back, and the plane jerks out of its smooth flight and starts turning dramatically upwards, and suddenly I know that something is very very wrong, and irreversibly so, and still the pilot is nowhere to be found, and it's not even clear if he had known something was wrong and could have come, but in any case it doesn't really matter now, now it's too late.

3) I'm lying on a wooden bunk in a dark wood cabin that's very clean and sparse and on the roomier side, and I'm half-roused from sleep, and somehow I know that a disaster has happened outside, but I also know somehow that we are safe in there, but then suddenly water blasts through the door and certain front windows, and it's just vast fountains rushing at me, like a dark tsunami has burst through, and I can see this for barely a second and then it hits me, and I wake up.