A cold snap (1 of 2): One day.

1) I wake up early and shovel before going in to work a double shift, and by the time that I come back around to my cottage from the front of the house, there’s a thin layer of snow already back where I had begun.

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker calls in over the phone to order a duck soup and have it out and hot waiting for her so she can eat it before her shift starts, and I don’t recognize her voice over the phone, at first.

3) During my hourlong break, I want to go somewhere and get a hot coffee but it’s so cold, and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker who just got on shift says she’ll make me some good coffee with her various coffee contraptions that she’s brought into work, and so I just sit at a table at the side of the restaurant during my break and drink the coffee that she made me, without going outside at all.

4) The (new) (stoic-faced) (female) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker is coming back from the restroom and she pauses to look at these wrapped presents that we have up as like holiday decorations, and she pretends to take one for herself and walk away with it.

And, it’s the biggest one, so I remark on that in (Spanish), and she just smiles and is like, “Si” (“Yes”).

5) A very jovial (early 40s) (bearded) (South Asian) customer who’s visiting from out-of-town and eating out with his friend wants raw ginger with his tea, and so I say that we can do that for him but we request that he only put the ginger in his mug and not in the thermos, and I remind him of that again when I bring out the raw ginger, and he pretends to be confused and puts on a straight face and is like, “What, I need to put the ginger in the thermos?”, just to mess with me.

6) The one (smiley-faced) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker comes up to me and wants to know how you translate the phrase “Which one?” into (Spanish), and what it means.

7) By the end of shift, I’ve been at the restaurant all day, and I’d only been outside once, to take out the trash to the back alley dumpster as part of our end-of-shift duties.

8) At night in my cottage after I turn my lights off, I hear a loud crack from my nearby window like something could have snapped or possibly someone walked up outside and did something, and I leap up out of bed and go check that the front door is locked at 1:30am, including the outer screen door with its loose latch, and then I stay up a bit and look out through various windows and screens far away from the noise but from where I can obliquely see towards there, to make sure that everything is okay and that it’s not what I fear that it is.