Half of what I say is meaningless

i know yom kippur was a week ago but i hope you've all been sealed in the book of life for a good year. [1]

last tuesday, over a week ago, i was waiting for the bus in the morning and got a text from my bank asking if i'd sent a money order for $485. i had not. so the bank froze my card and marked the money order as fraud, and i checked my email and learned that someone had signed up with some online money order company - with my name, my address, my phone number, my bank card - and sent $485 to peru. so i reported it as fraud to the money order place and later talked to a human at the bank who let me know they'll keep an eye on my account for ten days and send me a new card. have i gotten the new card yet? i have not. did i have to go to the bank over the weekend and wait in line to get actual cash from an actual teller like it was still the 70s? i did. OY.

wednesday night i locked myself out of my car and discovered i don't have a spare key, so my sister waited with me for an hour until the road assistance guy showed up and kind of broke me into my car. ALSO OY.

and then saturday my sister locked herself out of her house and the first set of keys i brought over were for her previous apartment because for reasons that escape me i kept them even after she moved out. >.< usually i keep people's spare keys in the junk drawer in my kitchen but the spare keys to her current place were in my sock drawer. because that makes sense. mom thought it was funny when we told her on sunday but at the time it really really wasn't. (we did however end the evening with chinese takeout and mission: impossible - fallout which brings us to the last two m:i movies which we saw in the theater what feels like a very short time ago.)

the night before yom kippur, when you stuff your face in preparation for your fast, we went to cousins j&r's house and had brisket, and the night of yom kippur, when you break your fast, we went to cousins m&e's and had the world's best egg salad. it's also the world's simplest egg salad - eggs, mayo, salt, pepper - but it is so, so good. cousin e can be kind of a bitch tho (is it intentional? is it just the way she is? who knows!) so we may find someplace else to go next year. and for some reason we always end up talking about high school - m&e met in high school when i think she contrived to sit next to him on the bus on a ski trip, and they and both their sisters were all only a few years apart so they remember the same people and the same teachers and my sister and i just do not care about the cousins' high school experience. and yet somehow we always end up there. but the egg salad, seriously.

the day of yom kippur, because we didn't want to sit in services the whole day, my sister and i saw downton abbey: the grande finale which i really enjoyed even tho i never watched the show. the stakes are high for the characters but not so much for the audience and the hats are fantastic and it's just a really nice movie. but oh my god elizabeth mcgovern's face looks old.

work is work. busy. occasionally one of the students in one of my groups will bring me a baked good because it's her turn to bring snacks to the group meeting and i guess she likes to bake. (she's a good baker. today the random baked good was a red bean cinnamon roll.) i submit all the students' expenses and i try to do it right away and as a result some of them like me. :D also one of the admins m is retiring next month and we had her party yesterday. her significant other showed up and it was nice to finally put a face to the name after hearing admin m talk about him for like five years. we got a banner that said "we were just starting to like you" and another that said "congratulations quitter" because that's the sense of humor she has. her so said some nice things and one of her pi's said some nice things and she said some nice things and a bunch of her students showed up and it was lovely. and! we had three cakes. and they were very good.

(it's been an unusually cakey couple of days.)

she told this story about how ten years ago or so when it was really snowing and her so came to pick her up, he told her they needed to stop for kleenex on the way home because she was getting a cold and sniffling everywhere and she said "there's a foot of snow on the ground, we are not stopping for kleenex", and so she just grabbed a box off her desk and took it home. and he asked are you allowed to do that? and she said i'll pay them back. so now it's ten years later and she's retiring and telling us this story and she pulls a box of kleenex out of a bag - "i'm paying you back" - and then pulls another box out of the bag - "and this is interest" - and maybe you had to be there but it was really funny. she is 100% not the person to go to if you need sympathy for anything but she's been at the u like twenty-three years and she's great for work related advice.

i guess this is now old news, but i still can't get over the french prime minister resigning after less than a month in office and less than 24 hours after announcing his cabinet (i read somewhere his cabinet picks were too left for the right wing and too right for the left wing). i think he was the third pm this year and is definitely the shortest serving pm since 1958. i'd say good lord, france, get your shit together but, well, you all know where i live and no one needs to get their shit together as badly as the us does.

costco has a new advent calendar that's five feet tall. that's a lot of chocolate.

if anyone out there wishes their romantasy novels were scented, i bring you the primal of blood and bone, which smells like garlic mayo. because, i dunno, hellman's really wants to reach the booktok crowd. i guess.

fred ramsdell co-won the nobel prize for medicine and as of this past monday the nobel committee was unable to get in touch with him to tell him so because he was "living his best life" hiking in the wilds of idaho. imagine going off-grid for a while and when you finally resurface you learn you've won a nobel prize. surprise?

the guardian knows what's what, as evidenced by this article about the mummy, everyone's favorite bisexual awakening movie.

and finally, rip jane goodall. she was one of the good ones. if you have netflix, if you skip to about 15:30 during this interview, you can hear her discuss who she'd want to put in a spaceship and send away from earth. and then skip ahead to 50:24 for some words of hope.

[1] on rosh hashanah it is written and on yom kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die, who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by hunger and who by thirst, who by strangling and who by stoning, etc etc.