Out Of The Blue

 I had a former coworker contact me a couple of days ago completely out of the blue.  

We'd been friends back when he worked out at the plant, but had mostly lost touch when he quit out there and moved out of town.  We were friends on the Book Of Faces, but he hardly ever posted.  Well, he messaged me and told me he was thinking about moving back so he could help take care of his dad and was considering trying to get back on at the plant. 

I had to be honest with him, and told him I would not recommend that place to anyone.  It's gotten so much worse out there since he left.  He replied that he'd heard that from other sources, and thanked me for confirming.  I suggested a couple of other facilities in the area that pay much more and treat their employees so much better, and if I weren't so close to retirement, I'd put in at one of them my own self. 

It's a shame when your work place is so bad you warn people against applying there. 

We chatted a bit more and he was impressed that I still had Slider.  He's the one who gave him to me all those years ago.  He said, "I knew you'd take good care of her."  TBH, I don't know if Slider is a him or a her, but I've always said him and I'm not going to stop now.  Probably because my coworker called him him when he gave him to me.  Maybe he forgot.  It's been 19 years after all...

Speaking of work, I had to turn my alarm back on this morning and it made me want to throw up.  I woke up at 4:00 and made myself stay awake to try to get back into the swing of getting up at 2:30, and boy was I not happy about it.  In fact, I felt so sick about it I didn't really do anything today but watch cheesy Christmas movies, both Hallmark and Great American Family.  

While I was doing that, I played around with AI a bit trying to come up with an autumn picture to use as a thumbnail.  I put the same prompt in:  Create an image of autumn scenery, and this is what they gave me.  

ChatGPT: 

Grok:  

Gemini:  

I think Gemini won this round.  I'd like to be walking down that road myself.  I wish I weren't so exhausted when I got off work.  If I weren't, I'd go walking every day.  As it is, I come home and pretty much collapse.  

In garden news, I forgot to show you this yesterday.  Look, one of my garlics is coming up!  

This is the only one so far, but I'm not panicking.  Garlic really needs a good cold spell to start growing.  Lots of sites recommend putting it into the refrigerator before planting it, which I wish I would have known ahead of time.  Oh well, it'll get cold soon enough.  

I did go out and cut all the green cayenne peppers I could find, but I didn't string them to dry.  I just put them into a Ziploc bag and put them into the freezer.   I also cut a bit more French tarragon and hung it to dry.  That'll probably be all I harvest from the garden for this year, except for the tomatoes, of course.  

And finally, remember how I said I was going to eat up all these canned goods?  

I've made a pretty good start of it.  I ate the corned beef hash for breakfast this morning, and ate the Sweet Sue chicken and dumplings yesterday.  I've used the cream of chicken soup in my squash casserole, and made chicken salad from both of those cans of chicken.  

In an eerie no-such-thing-as-a-coincidence coincidence, a recipe for salmon patties -- sometimes called salmon croquettes-- popped up in my FB feed.  I think I'll make those one day this week.  Then I'll make tuna salad out of the two cans of tuna.  I don't even know why I bought the stuff.  I don't like tuna.  But it's there and we don't waste food.  

In fact, I think I'll go right now and open up that big can of pear halves and make pear salads with them.  I haven't had a pear salad in ages.  

Laters.