How to find this corner of the blogiverse

As per Google analytics, recent visitors to this blog have stumbled upon me by googling the following phrases:
piatic numbers
"dhaba" nyc
a box of outdated couscous
can you get worms from couscous?
churreria san ginez madrid

Not one, but two people found me by wondering about piatic numbers. Unfortunately, I'm sure they didn't find any answers, other than that I'm in awe of math when my friend Alex talks about it.

And I really hope that the people who were concerned with their expired, wormy couscous found some delicious, non-expired couscous to eat.

Moroccan Neighbors

A lot of the people from my life in Morocco have been around lately (in New York and LA), which is as it should be.

This brings up: it turns out that the neighborhood around my parents' house is turning somewhat Moroccan. The neighbors across the street diagonally from them (where, according to Google street view, the sky becomes unreal) are, as of two or three years ago, Moroccans from, I'm pretty sure, Rabat.



The other day (this was just a couple of weeks ago; that is totally the other day!), my Mom told me about how at some point during the summer, my cousins had been over, and they were all upstairs, and they looked out the window to the garden when my mom told them that she had been growing lots of tomatoes.

At that precise moment, the Moroccan neighbor goes and takes a basketfull of tomatoes from the garden. My cousins wanted to know if my mom wasn't going to do anything about it, and my mom said, meh, there are so many tomatoes.

What I thought was a little bit creepy was that the neighbor had scoped out the house enough to know that there were tomatoes in the backyard, and then had the brass to go into the garden and take them.

I told my mom this, and my mom said, "but they can see the tomatoes from their yard! And they can reach right across the fence!" And I had no idea what she was talking about, because as far as I knew, the Moroccan neighbors were the ones across the street from us.

It turns out that there's a second set of Moroccan neighbors (also, it turns out, from Rabat) whose house is behind ours and whose backyard abuts ours.

Next year maybe we should label the tomato plants in Arabic?