One of the last snaps of winter this year:

1) I go to vote in the local primary, and as I turn up the side-street to the municipal building, the wind is so strong and it’s so bitterly cold and it’s blowing so directly in my face, that it actually takes my breath away, and I have to turn my back to it and kind of angle-shuffle backwards up like a third of a block till I can turn in and walk in front of the building and be out of the wind and start walking normally again, but for just that little bit there, it was so horrendous, the wind was actually forcing itself down your throat and displacing your breath and like you actually couldn’t breathe at all, as your eyes watered too in these just great long freezing gusts that were happening constantly.

2) The new (pixie cut) (arts management) renter in the front house is out of town and I can’t put a package for her behind her front storm door like I usually do when I come across one – it’s too big and it leaves the door ajar and the wind catches it and rips it open and the package tips out from where I positioned it on top of the door-jamb – and so I just take it and put it in the corner of the front porch where no-one can see it from the street, and I hope that that’s enough until she gets home, although I keep wondering to myself if I should take it inside my apartment and just keep it there until she returns from wherever she is, even though she didn’t ask me to do that like she had once before when she was out of town.

3) The old (transgender) (FTM) renter in the front house leaves a houseplant outside in the warm spell preceding the cold snap, and then during the cold snap I suddenly see that it’s still sitting there on a table in the backyard, now covered in snow and withered and dead, however.

Story of an out-of-control city, with crime.

The daughter of the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender who I know from the local brewery works out on the West Coast in a decently liberal city there, and she goes out there to visit her quite often.

And, after one visit this past winter, she was just shaking her head at how permissive it can be with crime out there.

Like, her daughter’s crazy drinking friend has expired tags on his car and he hasn’t replaced them for years, but he doesn’t worry because he knows that they won’t do anything about that in the city, but he also won’t drive over into an adjacent suburb because they have actual enforcement there and he knows that as soon as he does that he’ll get busted and he'll have to pay for new tags and for a fine too or whatever they do to you when you have expired tags on your car and you're caught driving around like that by the cops.

Some (Brazilian) news (2 of 2): Finances.

Because he had some trouble arranging his finances to get together his first month's rent due to the exchange rate and scholarship disbursement dates and whatnot, I ended up loaning the one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) that money as a favor to our one mutual (Afro-Brazilian) friend from his same lab, and since that time he did manage to pay me back quite a lot of that amount bit by bit here and there, only he was still a few hundred dollars short as his departure date neared.

And, I had gotten some good weightlifting equipment from him and taken that off the amount he owed me, and he tried to do the same thing with his flatscreen TV that he had actually gotten free as a cast-off from the one (vivacious) and (warm) (Brazilian) wife of the (older) couple around town, but I didn’t need or want that.

“Don’t worry,” he was then like, explaining that if he had to, he’d just skip out paying on his last month of rent, in order to have enough money to pay me back.

(Very instrumental of him.)

Some (Brazilian) news (1 of 2): Whoring.

The one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) was saying that before he left (Brazil) for his exchange program here he went through some (Afro-Brazilian) purification ceremony, and as part of that he is supposed to keep himself chaste, only he hasn’t.

“I’ve been baaaad…”, he was like.

He was also saying that he won’t sleep with (Indians), though, because they’re “stinky.”

A sight in my kitchen this winter:

On the kitchen counter among some popcorn kernel husks that had fallen off the head of the air-popper and also just a few bread crumbs that had somehow gotten away from the toaster, a small black beetle-like bug, like just smaller than a pencil’s eraser end or so, and with elegant little antennae neatly curved back from its head, as it briskly moved in broad curves among all that food detritus.

Another day at my new job…

…at that one (Irish-y) burger joint on the first floor of the historic hotel, where I now work at:

1) The (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner is saying that she had heard about the “no business that day” protest against ICE where people don’t go to school or work and also don’t do business or whatever, and she did consider closing down the restaurant for the day, but the protest method didn't make sense to her because it mostly just hurts the servers and staff by depriving them of income, and so she decided against it.

2) When a plate of nachos comes out across the kitchen service area and it’s for the owner, the one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress is like, “Is that for [the owner’s first name]?”, and when they say yes, she’s like, “Then I’m going to have one,” and she grabs a nacho chip off the plate and eats it, before she heads off to go ferry it outside to her.

An evening at my new job.

I get the duty of plugging some of the ambiance-creating table lamps in to charge, and so I have to take them back to this curtained-off storage space back by the back kitchen entrance, to this little silver catering pushcart positioned under a power outlet to which is attached a massive phone charger cord terminal thing into which you can plug like twenty or so cords, since the table lamps have phone-like connectors and that’s how you plug them in every few days or so so they juice up and get sufficient electricity stored.

And, the way the cords just hang off and are tangled in these dense black tangles of wires that even extend down to lamps sitting on the lower shelves of the catering cart, it reminds me of something out of a sci-fi movie, like maybe the ship in Alien or something.

The busride home is driven by this (fat) (upper middle-aged) (pleasant enough) (African-American) driver who rides the break a lot, and since I don’t notice that at first and pinch the pressure point in my wrist, I end up getting super car-sick on the way home and I have to rest for like 40 minutes until I can feel normal enough again to go visit the one (gay) (Colombian) grad student who I know from around town, since he’s completely cleaning his apartment out since he’s graduated and moving away for an industry job.

“This is for you,” he’s like, giving me boxes of nutrition bars, “since you are in your protein era.”

I also get several shopping bags of stuff like shampoo and body wash and skincare lotion, in addition to much other food like a small dingy rigid cellophane-ish bag of these small baked shelf-stable cheese rings that are a regional specialty from where he comes from in (Colombia), where they are common snacks, he says.