Story of an attempted break-in, this summer.

It's mid-week in mid-summer and I'm sleeping in bed in my cottage with my typical summer set-up, where all the blinds and curtains are closed, except for the box-fan in one living-room window and then on the other end of the cottage a kitchen window slid open on both panes, to allow the air blown in from the fan to circulate through and blow out the warm stagnant air in the cottage.

And, it's like around 4am and I rouse because I hear a rattle like a storm door closing from off the alley, and it's a bit loud, but it doesn't register as anything unusual, since sometimes late at night a car-door will slam in the alley or something like that, because of a person leaving their friend's house late and being noisy.

Then, as I'm lying in bed, I hear another rattling of a storm door, and I rouse a bit, and then it rattles again, and I realize it sounds like my door, so I jolt up in bed, realize it **is** my cottage, and I immediately leap up (naked) and run to the front of the house (still naked), where as I test to make sure that the door-bolt is locked with my right hand (it is), I suddenly start pounding on the closed front door with my left and being like, "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE, WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING," etc. etc. etc., and as I keep pounding on the inside of my front door and shouting things I hear a scuttle by my storm door, and then nothing else.

(Later, the neighbor in the next house told me that my pounding was so sudden and so loud that it woke him up, since his bedroom is by the wall immediately by the yard-line that faces onto the backyard where my cottage is.) 

And, I stop and stand still, and I look out the cracked-open kitchen window for movement (nothing) and out through the box-fan for movement (nothing), and I just stand and listen for additional movement because I don't know if the person is gone (nothing), and then I remember that my door has a peep-hole and I quietly move up and look out through there (nothing).

Then, after those couple minutes go by and everything is still still and quiet, I go and get my smartphone and call 911, and I go back to bed, as I hear a car pull up and see flashlights move around the windows of my cottage.

Then, after a bit, the police knock on the door of my cottage, and I call out "Hello, who is it?" etc. until they say it's them, and then I ask them to wait as I put on some boxers, and then I go open the door and talk with them some, and as I'm groggily doing that, I notice that the storm door is open but neither is holding it, and I ask them if they did that, and they say no, they found it like that, and I suddenly realize that someone had actually propped open my storm door at like 4 in the morning, by opening it and sliding that little metal tab thing up next to the air-pump closer so that it stays open, probably as a prelude to trying to break open my locked front door.

And, the cops had been telling me that it was probably a homeless person looking for a place to stay, we're near the downtown area where they all hang out and there's been a lot of that happening lately, too, especially because a few run-down low-income housing complexes with out-of-state owners on different sides of town had been condemned and that put a lot of people out on the street, but as soon as I point out the door, the one cop is like, "Maybe it could have been an animal," and I had to tell him that that was pretty impossible, since I'd been living there for years and nothing like the wind etc. had ever blown open the storm door, nor had the metal tab ever slid up accidentally when you had the door open wide because you were pushing it open as you carried in groceries, etc.

Anyhow, right afterwards I wrote the front tenant and my landlord to let them know about what had happened, and then I stayed up texting my one (art school) colleague who wears (women's) clothes because I was so tense -- thankfully, he's a night owl -- and because of all that, I couldn't get to sleep until after like 5am, when it was already getting light out.

It was just that scary. 

Some doings on a visit with my parents:

1) I discover an invasive species that's taken hold towards the front of their lot and I go to pull it out, though I ask some neighbors who are sitting out on a porch-swing if I can come around through their yard for one section of that, because that's the easiest method of access to go and take it out.

"Of course," the one (old) (white) (lady) is like. "We won't shoot you."

2) After I've peeled and sliced a cucumber from the local farmer's market near my parents' house, I bring a slice over to my father, so he can taste how good it is.

And, he grabs that little round slice, and he gestures with it in a cross-form as he puts on a solemn face, intoning, "In nomine patro filio..."

(His Latin was wrong, but he got the joke across.)

Two forgotten bits of childhood:

1) I remember my mother making ice candles - you take like plastic Halloween treat buckets and fill them with water and take them in before they completely freeze, to empty out the water from the center and keep the rest of the ice as like a candle-holder.

Only, I don't remember that me and my brother used to like to kneel on chairs by the sink and chisel out the top from the ice, which my mother says we did.

2) I remember us buying cobs of corn from this one farm that was just north of the elementary school that I attended -- like, we knew the family, and they had a stand out by the road with corn that people could stop by and buy.

Only, I don't remember the time that we stopped by and wanted more corn than they had on hand, and so the wife from the family told us to just go out into the field and pick the rest for ourselves, which my mother says we did.

Three visit happenings:

1) After I re-gift some (Thai) baggy elephant pants to a (high school) friend who's a math teacher -- they were a post-vacation present from the owners of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now to all of their workers, except they were too tight in the thighs for me -- anyhow, those pants fit my friend great and he likes them, so he texts a picture of them to his girlfriend, who writes him back, "Now don't go leaving me for a crystals chick."

2) When my dad gets a double-scoop ice cream cone of this intriguing raspberry and chocolate flavor, I come over with a spoon and take a little bit out of the bottom scoop to try it, and am like, "I hope that didn't destabilize your ice cream cone, for you."

3) When I go to visit my one friend who's a hair stylist, I actually pull into her neighbor's house since it's right before hers and it's built the same as 1 of 3 identical houses in a row, and the guy is nice and everything and points me next door, and then she tells me that that actually happens a lot.

Some local conversations:

1) At the local bakery in the college town that I now live in, a (tatted) (schlubby) (late 30-something) (white) guy who's a customer strikes up a conversation with the (scrawny) (tatted) (mid 30-something) (white) guy who works the counter, and is like, "Nice corn tattoo," and then he bares his arm and is like, "Mine is wheat," and, as I leave, he says that if you didn't continuously selectively breed corn, it would revert to being simple grass, and completely disappear.

2) Some (white) (50-something) (female) customers talk with me about suspicious homeless people around town, and one says that there's that one (tall) (white) guy with the skateboard who you see around downtown, and she saw him way the f*ck out on the edge of town walking through the middle of the trailer park where she lives, and he didn't have any reason to be there, and he was walking around and looking at everything like he was casing the place.

"It's a small town," the other one was like, in response to our discussion of local attempts at breaking-and-entering. "Whoever's doing this is going to get caught pretty quickly." 

3) When I was asking my one (female) (Guatemalan) coworker about how her pregnancy was going, she said it was all going great, it's just like her other pregnancy from years ago, no nausea or anything.

"Pero yo, yo tengo nausea..." I was like ("But I, I have nausea..."), "...cuando miro el presidente" ("...when I look at the president"), and she and several other (Guatemalans) who overheard me got a chuckle out of that one.

4) After a (white) (foreign) (grad student type) doesn't leave an automatic tip, I do "that thing" at the table about poking around for a tip, only to suddenly notice a five dollar bill sitting out under a water glass, at which I'm immediately like, "Oh, I'm so sorry," and at which the woman says of course, she doesn't want to get us in trouble, etc.

"And now you learned to look at the table," my one (younger) (taller) (Thai) coworker tells me, when I update her on the tip situation and everything that happened.

Restaurant chaos, and a disclosure of past chaos.

A few months ago when I was working at the restaurant on like an early evening when it was still sunshine-y out, I was standing by a table helping them with my back to the door, when suddenly I hear a lot of loud voices rising, and at first I block it out because I just assume it's a table getting loud and rowdy, but then it got just a bit too loud, and I look and it's like (four) (black) (juveniles) in crisp white t-shirts, standing in the doorway and one has walked like ten feet into the restaurant, and a few of them are singing, and it seems like some big dare, and then they run out the door and I can see them outside by the one patio table that's out there, and three go around one side of the people sitting there, and one is kind of on their other side and passes around them that way, which is a very unnatural way to walk since it's a tight space between the restaurant's exterior-facing wall and its big window, and the chairs of the customers that they have pushed out.

And, I brush it off and keep working since it's fairly busy, and then like four or five minutes later I'm out on the patio to see the customers there, and like two storefronts down I see the same 4 kids leaving the staircase entry that goes up to an upstairs (Chinese karaoke lounge), and as they round the corner and go out of my sight, out from that staircase bursts a (shorter) (early 40s) (Asian) man in shorts and glasses, and he hustles out to the far edge of the sidewalk so he can see them, and he holds his phone up over his head to record them, and as he does that, I hear a metal reverberating sound, like someone struck the back of a street-sign hard, to make it reverberate.

So, I immediately pick up my phone and call 911, to let them know about this group of teens running into successive local businesses to pull shit, and I tell them what they look like, the direction of travel, etc., and as I do that, I see that the last chair in our patio section at a far unoccupied table is flipped over, and so I tell the 911 operator that they had toppled furniture on our patio, it seems.

And, after that I'm inside talking to my coworkers, and my one (Chinese from China) coworker says that he saw them when they were around the outside patio table with the four customers around it, and like one of them darted in and touched or grabbed something off the table.

"What the fuck," I was like, and I said that you just don't know what a group like that are doing and will do, and if they go into the liquor store down the way and are rowdy, one could accidentally topple a shelf and the owner could lose like hundreds of dollars of merchandise.

My (Chinese from China) coworker then said that this does happen rarely in the town, and that something similar happened a year or two ago when he was working for a nearby coffee shop, and that included kids saying they wanted charitable contributions and they took Venmo or Zell or whatever, and then when someone went to contribute, they snatched the phone and transferred like $2000 into their account.

"What the fuck," I was like, saying that I'd heard of stuff like that happening in big cities, but not where we live.

"They see it on TikTok," he was like. "They see it and imitate it."

Broken toaster, redux.

So, after years of having a toaster where the automatic hold-down thingie was broken and I'd have to stand there in the morning and manually hold it down so that my toast would toast while my coffee brewed, the whole thing finally went kaput a number of months ago, and I got a $30 "high tech" replacement toaster at the local grocery store chain.

(When you don't have a car, you tend to rely on the nearby supermarket for rando stuff like that that they carry, since it's easier time-wise to just pick it up there, rather than make a big special trip to somewhere way the heck out, just for one toaster.)

And, this toaster not only has an automatic hold-down thingie, but defrost and cancel and bagel settings as well, with these light-up-from-inside blue buttons that you press, on the side of the toaster.

(My previous toaster was a simple, classic metal-and-black-plastic toaster, with just the automatic hold-down thingie and a heat level adjustment knob, in addition to a simple black cord, of course.)

But, after only like two or three months, I noticed that my toast wasn't toasting all the way through, and that led me to look closer at my new toaster, and I realized that the interior toast-heating wiring had shorted out, so that my toaster would only be toasting one side of each slice of toast at a time.

So, now I have to toast my slices of toast on one side, and then flip it over and do it again on the other.

And, I mean, it takes longer, but at least that automatic hold-down thingie still works, so I can do other stuff while my toast is toasting for twice as long, with a quick return trip midway through the process to flip it and set it all again.

(I am wondering now if I could maybe set the heat on super high, and just have one round of toasting, where like one side would get super toasted, but enough heat would get through to dry the moisture out of the other side, to the point where that far side of the toast-slice wouldn't need its own whole toasting session sitting right there next to the remaining toast-heating wiring that's still working.)