"Do you want some ice cream?" asks Cherry. "The Haagen Dazs was on sale, so I bought it even though it's not even tastier than the store-brand stuff we normally get. It makes me feel fancier." 

"...sure. Thank you."

She scoops them all ice cream in plastic bowls with Mickey Mouse on the inside. The commercial break has ended; they both go back to watching the game.

This is a pleasant evening. The ice cream is really good.

"Honey, I want to have sex," Cherry says after ice cream. 

"Oh, great, I wish that'd happen more often and I'm glad you were the one who brought it up for once," her boyfriend responds. 

Off they go.

He is positive he has never heard his parents do that but he is the youngest child in the family, maybe it's normal in households that are younger. He'll keep himself occupied by cleaning up the burger wrappers and washing the ice cream bowls and getting the sheets moved along through the laundry process and onto the bed.

His hosts - the mechanic turns out to be named Mateo - spend the weekend hanging out on the couch watching more sports, except for a brief interval where Mateo mows the lawn and a trip to Safeway for more groceries. 

"The fact that you cleaned up the kitchen made me glad Mateo brought you home," Cherry tells him. "I doubt I'll be counting the days until you leave. As a friendly gesture I bought more of the ice cream since you seemed to like it. It wasn't even on sale."

"Oh - thank you, you didn't need to. I'm happy to make myself useful while visiting your home."

She makes a slightly puzzled face but smiles at him, and then settles back in to watch the game.

Dove Deodorant. 

We're carving out a marketing niche where we don't add fragrances or dyes. Some people actually find them unpleasant and some others associate their absence with the natural world, even though obviously in the natural world you just wouldn't wear deodorant. We haven't been able to discern any differences between how our deodorant works and how well our competitors' works except with a lot of p-hacking.

Media when people have to pick things to spend money on and everybody's competing for the money to not starve is weird.

On Monday morning Mateo tells Kyeo they're leaving around 7. "Beat the traffic in."

"There does seem to be a lot of traffic here." Kyeo will carpool with him to the shop and set about trying to learn to use their tools.

The tools are all unfamiliar, but mostly of pretty high quality, despite Mateo's claim that most employees bring their own rather than use lower-quality shared shop tools. Mateo's a perfectly competent teacher - he doesn't leave anything out, and he does seem to know how everything works. 

Everyone is incredibly impressed that Kyeo worked on spaceships. 

"Spaceships are huge, they require a lot of people working on them! Even people who don't know much when they start out can help."

Yeah, see, that's pretty cool. 

He will work on the things in the shop and ask if anyone knows when the moon will next be visible around here.

They have to Google it but apparently the moon is a crescent right now and visible in the evenings.

After work he will go and look at the moon.

There are no lights on the dark part.

"I'm a time traveler," he murmurs to Mateo.

"Wow. - I - fuck, man, that's really cool and kind of scary. What's the future like, is it nice?"

"In most ways, I think? I've never been to future-Earth."

"Well, I'm glad to know we don't wipe ourselves out, you know, with nukes or climate change or anything."

"Very few inhabited planets have been destroyed in my future."

" - that's fucked up. I'm not a big emotions person but I'm sad and scared about that."

"Well, I don't know if this timeline will be the same."

"Well I imagine once you tell everyone a planet gets destroyed lots of people will figure out how to, you know, not that."