The door hasn’t closed.

Effective today, I am an unemployed bum without a bum.

Two weeks ago, the boss sent an email to all mechanics asking if any of us were interested in a seasonal layoff. The selling point was that we’d be eligible for employment insurance. Around this time of the year last year, I was working ~20 hours a week. I often came into the shop to do something other than fix bikes, such as organizing the nuts and bolts in the tiny drawers: it was bleak. Why have a repeat of that?

Before booking it from the shop, I made the boss pinky swear to rehire me in four months. He had a splinter on one pinky finger, but the other one still had loyalty coursing through it. Our right pinkies intertwined, manifesting an unbreakable contract.

I have a long list of arts and crafts projects I want to do. This sabbatical should give me the time to build a toddler, ie. learn how to crochet, finish sewing my first pair of pants before it’s shorts weather again, and tone up my glutes.

I spent almost the entire summer wearing shorts with an elastic waistband, thus postponing the realization that I’d lost weight. This has bumped up my power-to-weight ratio and also robbed me of whatever butt I had.

There’s very little meat on these bones.

Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving, which makes today leftover turkey sandwich day. I was most thankful for no longer having the obligation of attending a family Thanksgiving meal. These gatherings left me feeling colder than the next day’s mayonnaise-laden turkey sandwiches as I’d invariably find myself excluded from the familial gabfest.

As a kid, there were two traditional Thanksgiving dishes I was hyped on: Brussels sprouts and Ocean Spray smooth cranberry jelly. The latter gave me joy whenever I successfully got the jelly out of the can in one piece. The euphony wasn’t lost on me: I could feel the thwuck as the jelly dislodged from the can. Then, my eyes were treated to the vision of that glistening, ribbed cylinder of mass-produced cranberry jelly, which bewitched–my nose hairs tingling from the tartness emanating from the jelly–me for the few minutes before Mom would come around to pulverize my ruby paragon with a fork.

I aspire to adopt a Japanese holiday for the food. Mashed potatoes don’t do it for me: I can achieve the same result with baked potatoes by chewing longer and enjoying a wider range of textures. I could have easily carried the canned cranberry jelly tradition all on my lonesome. Instead, I opted for a salmon burger and traded one of my homemade patties for some of the roomie’s hand-cut baked fries. It was one of the rare times he and I both sat at the dining table to share a meal.

Marianne recently, too, pulled me out of my solo mealtime routine with an invitation to a vegetarian restaurant, B Love. She was in town for the Royal Victoria Marathon, and I’d offered up my bedroom. I am always falling asleep on the living room couch without meaning to–a sign I’m comfortable with sleeping on the couch. The dinner was Marianne’s offer, so I wasn’t about to arm wrestle her for the bill. (Also, the odds are in her favour: she’s got those ultimate frisbee muscles.)

My meal was good and messy: the classic burger, with the chutney topping contributing strongly to the mess and deliciousness. I was grateful for napkins aplenty. Their house-made (or so I assume) kombucha, which they’ve branded “Bon-Boocha” (in the spirit of Halloween?), was the holiest of vinegary water. It was so good, I opted to have a second glass over dessert. I was only halfway through this glass when the server came by our table with the bill and gave us a five-minute warning to get out.

I’m a sipper, not a chugger.

The tables were also too close together, and the bathroom doors aren’t equipped with a door closer or automated lights. Whenever someone–myself included–used the washroom, the door would be left ajar with the lights still on. I realized my blunder when I got back into my seat and was confronted with the aftermath of my trip to the washroom. The maze of closely-packed tables to wriggle back through was enough to deter me from correcting that.

Now that I’ve written about it, I’m reassessing whether the food and bon-boocha were good enough to forgive the substandard service and atmosphere.

Back at my place, I introduced Marianne to the cutest simulation of the chaos that is a restaurant kitchen: Overcooked. So far, I have been unable to mention Marianne in a blog post without bringing up her Scrabble proficiency. For someone like Marianne who doesn’t own a TV, video games are uncharted territory.

Marianne, playing as a gray mouse chef, quickly got into the rhythm of switching between actions while keeping an eye on what the other chef (me, the pink axolotl) was doing. Did Marianne and my previous experience as co-workers have any bearing on how well we worked together as a team in the Onion King’s campaign?

We have two more things about Marianne to be impressed by: her Overcooked prowess, and her completion of the Royal Victoria Marathon. She will henceforth be known as Marianne, notable Overcook chef and accomplished word tile setter.

My finest achievement of the week was introducing Alexa to the 1999 cult classic, Office Space. It also holds the distinction of being one of my most-watched films. Y2K references are 50% of my personality. How does Alexa even stand me?

Unlike Peter Gibbons, doing “absolutely nothing” is not the part of unemployment that excites me.

It’s doing everything.