New recipes.

When I was tupperwaring up spices in my new kitchen – the kitchen in my new place doesn’t have a lot of cabinets; it has a lot of drawers and open shelving, so I bought larger see-through tupperware containers to store spices and pastas and stuff in – I came across some madras curry powder and some turmeric that I had boughten, in order to experiment with making vegetable curries.

I looked up some potato-pea curry recipes on the net, and tried out a simplified one at home, which turned out to be quite good.

I’d come home at night and have a bite out of the container of it in the fridge, it was so good!

Though, I let it boil just a little bit too long, and the sauce got too thickened up from evaporation and disintegrating potatoes, which is too bad, since it’s nice to have the curry sauce seep through the rice that you put it on.

De-sensitization.

Like last month I was texting a friend from college who's in public health about how when you're in a field for a while you get used to stuff that others find odd, and she texted back -

I once went to a lunch seminar at school on diarrheal disease, and it wasn't until halfway through that that I realized it was kind of wrong.

. . .

Horrendous fart.

The other month I was working at home all day, and had already taken 2 kind of liquidy shits.

After lunch, I was washing dishes at my counter, and all of a sudden I farted, but instead of a fart coming out, it was liquidy shit, so I squeezed my asscheeks together and kind of ran and hopped at the same time over to the bathroom, which is fortunately next to the kitchen in my new apt.

Then, I let it all loose, and then had to mop up the shitjuice from off my lower buttocks, where it had dripped as I shifted positions to sit down on the toilet.

Later, I texted my one friend the modern Czech literature professor that I had sharted, since she has a very juvenile and scatological sense of humor, and she texted back -

That's a housewarming for you!

. . .

New apartment quirks.

1) If you put the kitchen faucet on absolute full force, some water leaks out the back of the contraption onto the counter.

2) Some of the blinds on the very high windows are about 3-4 inches too short, and just hang above the sill.

3) The stove wobbles.

Bakery story.

At that party where my friend delivered a singing telegram, I was talking with this Palestinian - South African couple who ran a local Middle Eastern bakery.

"The people you meet are just insane," the (South African) wife said.

The most insane, it turns out, was one guy who called the cops on the combo storefront/bakery headquarters.

"The prices are too high!", he told them.  "It's simply criminal!".

"They're in charge of the prices, and they can charge as much as they want, and it's your choice whether to buy it or not," the cops replied, she said.

(I guess they know the cops and the cops later told them the story, or the person was actually in the store when they called the cops and she witnessed the whole thing?)

Singing telegram.

The night before I moved, I met my one friend who delivers singing telegrams for dinner at this really good Peruvian restaurant that we've been to before - we got fried strip steak served over fried rice-and-bean patties - and then she took me along to a party for some people she knows, and just right before we left the restaurant, she broke that she was going to be delivering a singing telegram for the people there, and she had left all her stuff at home.

"Let's find shit on the way," I was like.

"Good idea!", she was like, brightening.  "I love a challenge."

So, after a stop-off at a convenience store where she had me run in to scope out possible props and gifts, we ended up going around a grocery store on the way there at like 9pm at night, and ended up in the seasonal aisle, where we got most everything we needed...

To start the telegram, which was for one woman in a lesbian couple whose birthday it was, and who had recently celebrated their tenth anniversary, she took out a spiky snap bracelet, and had the birthday girl hold out her arm, and she slapped the bracelet on, and was like, "That's to celebrate ten years!".

("And also for sexual pleasure," one guest remarked, loudly.)

Then, my one friend who delivers singing telegrams burst out into song, and towards the end, removed rubber mice from her bosom and flung them at the couple.

"That's because I couldn't find yellowjackets," she said as an aside between verses.

As it turns out, for their 10th anniversary trip, the lesbian couple had been in Tennessee and had been horrendously attacked by yellowjackets.

"Always personalize," my one friend who delivers singing telegrams told me on the drive home.  "That's what people remember."

Moving Day.

When I told the (younger) (African-American) (female) counterperson at the UHaul place that I had worked at a moving company for a few summers, as a fill-in person for a moving company ran by people my dad knew, she said that her boyfriend had worked for a moving company for a while, and had just started up his own.

His first job was this place where all of a sudden they picked up a mattress, and bedbugs scurried out, and these winged ants started flying around everywhere, and all of a sudden, the guy they were moving came up very nonchalantly and was like, "Yes, yes, as you see, I have a little problem with insects."

Fortunately, she said, they wear full body zip-up suits when they move stuff, and her boyfriend took his off and threw it away afterwards.

She also said she doesn't go into a nearby McDonald's, because a woman who works there lives in a place with bedbugs.

Just as I was about to say that that was a little extreme, she was like, "I was talking with this woman, and she says she can't get no sleep because of bedbugs, and she even sleep in her uniform so she can sleep in a little more, but that don't help either!  I'm like, 'Last time I'm going in there, thank you!'".

Then she added, "Ugh, she wear that shit to work then."