Wednesday, July 18, 2018

#TrueFacts (July 2018)

Did you know that coleslaw is actually lettuce confetti? #TrueFact

Did you know that sauerkraut is actually soggy lettuce confetti pickles? #TrueFact

Did you know that Kimchi is actually festering fermented soggy lettuce confetti pickles? #TrueFact

Did you know that during the Yugoslavian Reunification Celebration, the national anthems are played on a fleet of nose bugles? #TrueFact

Did you know everyone spells 3rd wrong? It’s therd, not third! The reason someone replacd the E with an I iz a misteree lost too tiim. #TroofAct

Did you know that milk is collected from the milkberry bush? The milkberry fruits are small spheres similar in size and texture to popping boba. If you let the milkberries sit long enough on the plant, they become cheeseberries. #TrueFact

Did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandmother had a llama named Tina? Napoleon threw ham at Tina. He was a bit strange, that Napoleon. #TrueFact

Did you know that the pope’s hat used to be a propellor beanie? The propellor fell off about 600 years ago, he never bothered to fix it. #TrueFact

Did you know that sponges and kiwi birds are related? No one knows how, but they keep showing up to the same family reunions. #TrueFact

Did you know that clouds are giant sheep ghosts that are stuck in the atmosphere? #TrueFact

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Last Month Online (June 2018)


Lots of music this month. I suppose to make up for the abundance of comedy last month. :)

We'll open and close this post with Lindsey Stirling, who made two amazing videos this month!



Lindsey wasn't the only busy one this month, Peter Hollens put out three amazing songs as well! I'll spread these out as well. Each one was with a different guest artist, including The Hound + The Fox, who put out a separate song of their own, which I will include later on as well. :)



Devin Graham has done a video like this next one before, and it was just hilarious. But apparently I never featured it on my blog! So if you'd like to see the original before you watch this one, you can click here. However, of the two, this one is my favorite, partially because of the hilarious, epic waterfall dive, but kind of mostly because of the HILARIOUS cameo/twist ending reveal.



Jonna Jinton is back with another haunting song. I love her voice so much!



I don't think I've ever featured Ryan Higa on my blog before, he usually does comedy skits, but this video was so creative, I just had to share. I love dancing, I love stop-motion animation, and this was like the perfect creative fusion of the two.



One of the reasons Peter Hollens had so many great songs this month, is that he just released a new album, comprised entirely of folk music. One of my favorite genres is European/Celtic folk music, which is mainly what this album contains.



Tessa Violet is back! I absolutely love the aesthetic of this video, and it's nothing more than her just singing in a grocery store! I swear, she can make the most mundane things just seem brilliantly creative!

Every time I watch this video I wonder about the logistics of the shoot. Did she rent out a whole store to shoot in, or did she just film in a store while it was open? Are the random shoppers all paid extras, or are they all just random shoppers? How did she get up on the freezers? I feel like the staff has to either be part of the shoot or were prepped in advance, because I can't see any normal grocery manager being okay with any of this. :p Anyway, sometimes I dissect these videos too much. :p



I've never been a very big country musc fan, but somehow, when it's done a capella, it's just elevated to something so much better than just 'country music.' And VoicePlay are just excellent at what they do.



Scarborough Fair is such an iconic folk song, it's hard to improve on some versions I've heard, particularly Celtic Woman comes to mind, but Somehow The Hound + The Fox manages to put their own, amazing spin on it. And the music isn't the only amazing thing about this video, just look at their locations! The lavender fields and the ancient forest are just gorgeous!



One last Peter Hollens before we close. I actually bought his new album twice, once digitally for myself, and once for my parents' anniversary gift, because they love folk music too. This music is so good!



And finally, the Lindsey Stirling video I promised at the beginning. I love this one so much! I also love that she was dancing without her violin in a lot of it! I know she learned a lot more about dance when she competed on Dancing With the Stars, so I'm glad to see her getting to use her new skills.


Tuesday, July 3, 2018

My First Night at the Hotel


As I mentioned in my previous work update post, I had something very weird happen on the very first night of work at my new job at the hotel. It was weird enough that I had to write about it, but I thought it was long enough that it deserved it's own separate post.

During the first two weeks I was working at the hotel, I and another guy were being trained by an older lady who had been there for years. She was moving out of state, and her leaving was the reason I was hired. The other guy had been working at the hotel for awhile, but he had just moved into the night auditor position the week before, so he was also pretty new to everything we had to do as well.

At around 3:30 in the morning an elderly woman clutching a baby doll slowly rounded the corner into the lobby. We have a front door across from the desk in the lobby that we can see, and a back door that enters into the hotel, directly behind the offices, far enough back in the building that we can't even hear it from the front desk.

So this elderly woman comes into the lobby, and all she can do is whisper, "hi. hi. hi. hi. hi. hi. hi." She's probably at least in her 80's if not 90's, and she can't even tell us her name, or where she came from. Because of the placement of the back doors, we can't tell if she's come in from outside, or if maybe she wandered out of a hotel room.

The woman training us went out to try to help her, but without a name, or knowing where she came from, there wasn't much she could do, but she did notice that the woman felt like she was freezing cold, which meant that more than likely she had come in from outside. This was the middle of April, but we had an unusually cold spring, and that particular week we'd had a cold snap. I was coming to work in my winter coat every night, and one morning I left work and there was a thick layer of ice I had to scrape off my car. So yeah, it was cold. Not knowing what else to do, the woman training us had the other guy go get her a blanket, which she wrapped around her, and then got her to sit down in the lobby, and sat with her.

I wondered if she had wandered away from a nursing home, since it was obvious that she had dementia. The fact that she could only repeat one word, as well as the fact that she was carrying a baby doll, which she was treating like a real baby, were all things I had seen a lot when we went to visit my grandpa before he died. He wasn't nearly this bad, but he lived in a dementia ward, and there were a lot of people there who would fit the same description of this woman.

The guy who was training with me decided to try to call the nearest nursing home, so I did a search on google maps. The nearest one was only 0.2 miles away, practically next door. It's so close that it had to be where she came from. It seemed obvious that she had escaped, except, having worked in a nursing home, and having spent so much time visiting my grandpa in another one, I kind of knew that there was no way that could have happened. The amount of security they have to prevent the residents from escaping, from locked doors to security alarms, means that there should be no way for someone to escape, and if they somehow managed it, someone would have been alerted before she got very far. She'd have to have been a complete genius to make it past everything, unless someone there was just completely incompetent.

So he called the nursing home, and the person who answered told him she didn't think they were missing anyone, but they'd do a head count and get back to us. And sure enough, they weren't missing anyone, all their residents were accounted for. They did send over a nurse though, to try to help communicate with the woman, but she was no more successful that we'd been. She couldn't get her to tell her anything, and she was still whispering, "hi. hi. hi. hi. hi. hi." over a half an hour later. The nurse asked if she could check her pockets, but she had no form of identification, she had no life alert or other medical emergency tags or jewelry, and her name was not written in any of her clothes like it would have been had she been in a nursing home or dementia ward.

Finally it's nearing 4:30, an hour later, and I suggested calling the police. I didn't know the number, or how to use our phone system yet, so the nurse gave me her cell phone, where she already has the non-emergency police number ready. So I called the police, but when they showed up, they're no more successful that any of us. The nurse finally did get her to answer yes or no questions by shaking or nodding her head, but even that didn't really help, because she did indicate that she had a husband, but in her condition, you never know if that's currently true, or if she's remembering something from a time long ago.

Finally around five or so, the nurse convinced the woman to get up and come with her, back to the nursing home. She said she'd find a room for her and try to get her warmed up, because it's at least an hour and a half later and she's still cold. The police helped get her out to the nurse's car, and I figured that would be the last we heard about her. We all got back to work to try and catch up on everything we hadn't been doing for the last hour and a half.

Another hour and a half go by, we've sort of caught up, not quite, but we made pretty good progress considering that two of us didn't really know what we were doing yet. About a half an hour before we left, around 6:30, someone, I'm assuming the nurse who came to the hotel, called us to let us know that they found out where the woman had came from.

The area surrounding the hotel and nursing home is full of apartments and townhouses where elderly people can live, without actually having to physically move into the nursing home. I'm assuming sort of like the independent living apartments at the nursing home I used to work in, except a lot more spread out, like a small neighborhood. This woman had been living with her husband, who does not have dementia, and he had basically been her caretaker. I don't know this, but I am going to assume he was around the same age. Evidently he'd left the door unlocked, or she knew how to unlock it, and she just got up and left in the middle of the night.

The people at the nursing home said they were going to try to convince the husband to let them take her, because it was pretty obvious that he can't care for her on his own. It was very cold that night, like, maybe 30 at the highest, definitely below freezing. It was a good thing that she just happened to wander into the hotel, or she could have frozen to death! Obviously I can't really go and find out, but I hope her husband did agree to let the nursing home take care of her, because she really needs to be somewhere where she can be supervised.

So anyway, that was my very first night at the hotel. The woman training us told us after everyone had left, "It's not always like this, I swear!" And so far it hasn't been. I've been here almost three months now, and so far that was by far the strangest thing that has happened. Nothing else really even comes close. However, if anything else weird does happen, you can be sure that I'll let you know about it. :p