We're trying to sell our house, and our realtor sends out Christmas cards like realtors and mortgage originators do. I learned this after we bought a house, that realtors and mortgage originators, once they have your, your name it doesn't matter if you've already bought a house, they will continue to send you Christmas and birthday cards for, like, ever, apparently. Well, ei- eight years anyhow! So she, she sent us a Christmas card and it had a lottery ticket in it. And we, we are not -- I, I have never -- I don't think I've ever played a lottery ticket before. Like, every time it gets really big, I think about it. It's like, "Hmm, oh," but, but then yeah, I don't -- it's like, eh, eh, let somebody else have it, like, cuz I'm not going to win it anyway, and I feel -- we -- it's like, gambling addiction's a thing, and I feel bad participating in that, but I was not the one who gave the money in this instance. And so I looked up -- I had to look up on the Internet how to play the lottery card. It was like some Christmas related one. It's called Partridge in a Pear Tree. And I was like, "Am I supposed to scratch up all of em? Am I only supposed to scratch off certain ones?" Like, "Is there any actual element of play in this, or is this literally just you receive it and you scratch it off to get somebody to have more of a dopamine release?" Like, if you actively do something instead of just looking at a card, like, the dopamine... It turns out it's the dopamine thing because yeah, you were supposed to scratch off all of them. So I scratched off all of em. Didn't win a dang thing, which is not really a surprise. I was hoping. I was hoping. But then I was reflecting. I was like, this is kind of a mixed message, cuz we're going to be trying to sell our house in the next year. Well, the next like six months or so, maybe even, we -- we're hoping to have it on the market in like, four months. So I was kind of like, "Is this a message from our realtor?" Like, "Here's a lottery card. You're gonna need it."

In Krakow at the train station, the chocolate was probably the worst chocolate I'd eaten in all of Europe. No matter which of this little cart -- chocolate carts you went to, they all sold the exact same product. It was cubes of chocolate covered in cocoa dust. Awful. Meanwhile, several stalls down, was the ice cream vendors and this one cart was selling ice cream cones. [In a] communist country you cannot get different flavors. It comes in one flavor: vanilla. There's not even other types of ice cream you can get. It is just a vanilla ice cream cone. That's all you can get. No sprinkles. No toppings. No chocolate chip. Nothing. But there was a long line there, and ice cream cones were 10 cents, and it was the most delicious ice cream I've had in all of Europe, except for Selfridges in London. The ice cream was so -- was so good that after eating it, I got back to the end of the line and waited. I just went to the back of the line and waited til I came to the front again. And I think I did this four times. I think I had four ice cream cones. They were that -- it was that delicious. But I wasn't the only person doing it. The other people in line were doing the same thing because the ice cream tasted so good. I just noticed we were all just getting back in line, eating our ice cream cone while we waited to get to the front again.

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio. [Meow!] Oh my gosh, my cat. Hello. [Meow!] So, [Meow!] he is carrying around [Meow!] a stuffed turkey. Like, it looks like a roast turkey. He's carrying it around in his mouth and yowling like he's worried about it, which is a thing [Meow!] that he picked up from a cat [Meow!] that I was fostering, [Meow!] and he particularly likes to bring it over to Thea, my other cat, and yowl really loudly at her as if she's causing some kind of problem. And she's completely innocent of any problem with that thing. He just -- he's just manufacturing drama. It is the weirdest thing, and we owned him for years without him doing this, and it wasn't until [Meow!] like I said, my other cat -- the cat I was fostering did this, and he watched her do it and I'll be d***ed if he didn't pick it up himself. He used to only do it at night, but now he does it [Meow!] whenever he feels like it. Oh for Pete's sake, would you settle down over there? The stuffed turkey cat toy is pretty cute, I must say.

In my line of work specifically with students, there's like single bedrooms and shared bedrooms. And sometimes those shareds are called doubles and no matter which way you put it people just don't seem to understand what it means. And so when you say, "This is a shared bedroom," they're like, "Oh so they have like four roommates in the suite, but they'll have their own bedroom." "Nope, it's a shared bedroom." And they'll be like "Well, well, I don't understand, like, we thought they were all singles." And I said, "Well no, if you look at the title, it says double. It's a double shared, like two people." And it's like these words just mean nothing, um, and it causes a lot of havoc. And so when I was saying earlier like when they get here that's more stressful than when they're leaving. It's honestly because they just don't read and if they do read they still don't try to understand what they're reading.  Another student, she's currently in a double shared space. Her roommate is leaving and she wanted to buy it out as a single, which we do allow. So I said "Sure I'll do it." And she responds back, "Okay, so since now it is a single I would assume you're gonna take out the furniture." And I said, "Nope. It's still a double space. We're just letting you buy it out financially as a single so that we won't put anybody in the second bed." "Right but you're gonna take away the furniture." "Nope. Our website says that all doubles remain doubles, you know, sometimes you have the option to buy out, but if you don't take the option or if the option is not offered to you, you'll get a roommate. Like the furniture has to stay." And she went around and around with me that just bec- -- like if she's paying a single price, she expects a single room, and I said, "Well, you're not in a single room technically. You're in a double. I'm just letting you buy it out so that you don't have to share it." And so buy out was also a very confusing thought process for her.  Her dad got it, which was really fun. He understood the entire thought process that we have like moving all the furniture out for people that buy out doubles to…

I, I normally, you know, try to enjoy the process of knitting, and I normally do, but it was like, between the cursed yarn, the knitting with double pointed needles that I didn't want to do, the mistake — I just wanted to be done with them. And I did finish them. They looked great. They fit her well, but I brought them to this get together. And we were walking up as they pulled up, and I had gotten my uncle some baked goods. So I was like, "Hey, I’ll just drop these in the car", you know, "there's no point bringing them into the restaurant." And my aunt made some comment about, "Oh, do you also have the IOUs from last year?" And I was like, "What did I IOU you from last year? I don't remember." And one of the things were these mittens. I'm like, "Oh my god." At this point they'd grown to such epic proportions in my brain that I was like, you know, "These are the main gift that I'm giving you this year. And apparently I said I'd, you know, give them to you last year." So anyway, maybe not a big deal to most people. It was just very stressful and definitely felt like that whole day went down the drain.

The really first and longest time that I had a communal bathroom was in college, in a dorm. I remember not really being thrilled with that idea when I started there, and, and knew that that was the situation. We -- So, I grew up in Michigan and I ended up going to undergrad in California, about an hour-ish from where my aunt and uncle live. And so when I moved out there, they picked me up at the airport and took me shopping for the things that I couldn't bring with me on the airplane. And I remember we went to a department store -- I don't know which department store it was. I guess it could have just been Target, maybe, I don't know. But my aunt doesn't really shop at Target, so it could have been, like it was probably like Macy's or Nordstrom or something sort of ridiculous. Um, she's -- she likes to shop at those places, which is fine, but they just are too expensive for, for me. But we got a bathrobe there because she knew that I was going to need a bathrobe because I would be in the dorm, and I would want to have a bathrobe that I could either just walk down to the, the bathroom in or that I could take with me and, and walk back in. Whatever. And I still have that bathrobe. It's at my parents' house and it's -- I still use it when I take a shower at my parents house. I, I leave it -- leave it in the bathroom there. It hangs on a hook like behind the door, and every time I take a shower, I put it on and I think of buying it before I went to undergrad in 2001. So, that was 22 years ago. And it's a white bathrobe, and it still is white. Like, it's held up really well, probably because it came from an expensive store and was actually, you know, of good quality. Um, and it has frogs on it, which I'm not the biggest fan of frogs, so I don't know if there was no other option or if that's just what I decided at the time that I liked. I'm not really sure, but I do remember using it in college.