New apartment annoyance:

Sporadic chips in the large white ceramic tiles that are my entire flooring from my kitchen through my living room through my bedroom to my bathroom, where this brown shows up and it looks like a speck of dirt on the tile, but it's not, it's these chips out of the white tile where something had fallen on them. . . . (If I could change three things about my apartment, it would be better insulation, hardwood floors, and a full bathtub instead of one of those shower compartments... But, what can you do, price and location were right and it was a hard time of year to move and find anything.)

My trashy new snack:

Popcorn with hot sauce on it.

Reading Dune (2 of 2): Vocabulary in the wild.

Back when I worked at the resthome, the one resident who's a retired school nurse used to pass along these fun "word of a day" print-outs that this one retired engineer used to print out from some email list that he's been a long-time paid subscriber to. And, unlike a lot of vocabulary builder or novelty vocabulary calendars or whatever, these words were actually super obscure and interesting, and you'd never heard of most of them, though that also made them hard to retain, where there would be a really good and interesting batch of words for the week, but then an hour after you'd finished reading them, not a single one would stick with you. But, when I was reading Dune, this one phrase popped out a number of times, "distaff side," to mean someone on the mother's side of the family, as opposed to "spear side" for the father's side. It was like, at last, a sighting of one of those vocabulary items in the wild!

Reading Dune (1 of 2): Typos.

When I was reading Dune over the holidays, I came across one typo in the story, something that I can't remember now, where some word had left off its final letter and so another legitimate but inaccurate word was in its place, where the misspelled word was actually a word, but it wasn't the word that needed to appear in that place, you needed another letter for that. But, since I wasn't near a pencil right then, I didn't correct it by making a printer's mark there to insert that needed letter. Then, a few days later, I came across a misspelling of the protagonist's title in a foreign language of the book, where instead of reading "Muad'dib," it read "Maud'dib". So, since I was near a pencil at that time, I made sure to make the little printer's mark there, that shows that the two letters needed to be switched. And, like that day or the next, I also came across a place where they had "your" for "you're," so I marked that, too, since I also was near a pencil then. I remember back in I think middle school I was reading a lot of mystery stories in some series that I had gotten out of my local library that I think was branded with Alfred Hitchcock's name on it, and one of the volumes was super poorly edited and someone had neatly marked every single typo in it, so that you came across just all of these corrections while you were reading it. And, I thought that was the coolest thing, and since then, I've at times emulated it in my life.

A dream of a joke.

The other week I dreamnt- I was speaking with some people, and I made a joke in the style of my father, saying something like, "I don't call that a Bluetooth, I call that a Snaggletooth!". And then, I woke up. . . .

Omicron levity.

Right when omicron was hitting but people maybe weren't necessarily tuning in, I was going and reminding everyone and their brother to go get boosted and to go into lockdown.

So, as part of that, I texted my one lawyer friend from Missouri and her one bar manager friend from her neighborhood, to start being cautious and to maybe skip midnight mass this year because of the omicron variant.

(I specifically mentioned midnight mass because we had all gone together for a few years, before the pandemic, and they have this one specific church with good music that my one lawyer friend from Missouri likes to go to.)

Anyhow, like right away I get a text back from her one bar manager friend from the neighborhood saying -

Do you think the 7pm mass would be safer?

- followed by -

Jk ! ;)

- to which I texted back -

Funny not funny lol 

. . .

Solidarity in typos.

Right when I moved into my new apartment, I got a two-volume academic book set shipped in from abroad, and I noticed that although the invoice had everything spelled correctly, there was an extra "-t" at the end of my street name, which I couldn't quite figure out why it got there, and I chalked it up to a non-native speaker of English assembling the shipping label.

Then, later that month, I was changing my billing address on an online music-and-books site when I was going to order a CD, and I noticed that I had made the same exact typo in writing my own address, and I had to go back and correct it before I placed my order.

Oddly enough, no "t" appears in my street name, so there must be something in the way that you type that goes and makes you do that, although I can't quite figure out exactly what it is.