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My friend’s dog Greta. She was already an old lady when I took this picture in 2015 and passed a year or two ago.
My friend’s dog Greta. She was already an old lady when I took this picture in 2015 and passed a year or two ago.
It really depends on where you live. There are some parts of the world where environmental factors like ocean humidity or winter road salting will cause a car’s frame to rust through in a few years if you’re not careful. Look up the Rust Belt for an example.
On the other hand, if you live somewhere warm and dry, your car’s frame and body will outlast its original mechanical components.
I have the following at home:
My work laptop (2021 MacBook Pro)
My personal laptop (2018 MacBook Pro)
An old iPad Air
My phone
Living room PC (Linux, shared)
Bedroom PC (Linux, shared)
My laptops live on my desk and I mostly have whichever one I’m using plugged into my external monitor and peripherals (mouse and mechanical keyboard). The portability of my personal and work machines is nice if I want to sit on the couch or travel.
The living room PC is hooked up to the TV. My partner and I mostly use it for gaming and YouTube. It’s a few years old but it can handle most of what we throw at it.
We only use the bedroom PC to watch TV in bed.
The iPad is for knitting patterns. Previously, it spent several years sitting unused in a drawer.
My phone is for doomscrolling and spam calls.
I smoked for almost 20 years. I lost track of how many times I tried - and failed - to quit. Last December I just felt done. Put it down and haven’t gone back to it. I even had a few cigarettes while out with a friend in March and had no desire to go back to it after. I know a few other people who quit like that, but far more who have struggled with it for years and still smoke.
I have no idea what changed for me. Every other attempt failed, even if I felt really ready to quit.
Whatever I want. Usually PJs. The three times a year I go into the office, it’ll be a tank top, jeans, and combat boots or high tops, generally all black or dark grey. I’ll also wear a plaid flannel over the tank top if it’s chilly in the office. I save my dressing up for the office Christmas party and shock the hell out of everyone.
Dad was born in the '50s into a family I can only describe as Victorian. Very rigid gender roles, happy and angry the only acceptable male emotions, and all the “fun” stuff that comes along with that kind of upbringing. I’m in my mid-30s now. He worked a job that sent him out of town for weeks or sometimes months at a time, but where he would often have several weeks off at a time as well so he was either never around or home all the time. Mom was a stay at home mom, but that’s about the extent of the gender roles enforced while I was growing up.
Dad and I had a fairly close relationship until I got to about 14/15 but I did learn very early that he was not the person to go to for anything emotional. He never knew how to handle emotions and - like many people of his generation - he didn’t think about the long-term effects that his offhand comments and teasing might have. As an adult, I understand that it was his way of showing affection but it’s taken me a very long time to work through the body issues I picked up because of his (and Mom’s) teasing about “the family nose/thighs/shoulders/etc.”
We drifted apart when I got to high school. The teenage girl hormones hit really hard. He didn’t know what to do with all the feelings I was having so he either ignored them or got angry with me if they inconvenienced him. I never felt like I could talk to either of my parents about what I was going through so I withdrew into myself. Honestly, I was a pretty shitty teenager and my parents were both pretty shitty parents of teenagers (though in my defense my sister was way worse from a much younger age and never really got much better - we still don’t get along.) As I got into my twenties and calmed down, Dad continued to treat me like that hyper emotional teenager. I resented that a lot and kept him at arm’s length.
Dad’s and my relationship is good now but it took a long time to get here. It took me accepting that he is never going to change and meeting him on his level, while asserting my own boundaries. I’ve spent a lot of time unpacking the hangups and baggage I carried with me into adulthood, which has given me the ability to get past “Dad is an asshole”. Dad was raised in an environment with a lot of gendered pressure, came out of it with severe anxiety - which you can see runs in the family if you know what to look for - and his only coping mechanism is control. When he feels out of control, he explodes. However, being a “man of a certain age” (a.k.a. Boomer) there’s no way he’ll ever develop the emotional intelligence to understand and acknowledge that. He has no incentive to and has never learned the language. I learned that if I want a relationship with him, I have to be willing to work around that so I do the work on myself and focus on what he and I have in common - which is a lot! It’s been a slow process, but I’ve also seen him finally start to acknowledge and respect me as an independent adult over the last few years and that feels pretty good.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, my partner has a fantastic relationship with his 7-year-old daughter (my stepdaughter). He’s very emotionally intelligent and self-aware and has no problem talking with his kid about feelings - hers or his own. He also rejects the idea of traditional gender roles and doesn’t feel at all weird about playing dress up with her, getting his nails painted, or any of the other “girly” things she likes to do with him. Neither of us had good parental relationships modeled for us growing up (mine were distant and affectionless with each other, his were volatile) so we do our best to show his kid what a loving, respectful adult relationship looks like. I’ve often thought that I wish my dad had been a parent to me like my partner is to his daughter.
I think the most important thing about any parent-child relationship is that the child feels supported, respected, and confident to come to their parent about how they’re feeling. That’s going to look different in any relationship, but staying empathetic and not assuming you know better than your kid about what’s going on in their mind is always a good place to start. It also helps to be self-aware. Recognize where you might have hangups or emotional baggage and be proactive about addressing it. I have done more self-work in the last two years of being a stepparent than in the previous ten. That’s not to say I didn’t also do a lot in those ten years, but my partner and I both strongly believe that it’s our job as parents to do better than our own parents did, even if our parents had been stellar. But no pressure, right? XD
It’s well after midnight and I’m rambling now so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.
Was there an N on the back?
It’s $26.99 USD on Steam.
Exactly what it sounds like. A crosswalk painted in rainbow colours.
OP said elsewhere that they’re in Canada, so $500 Canadian dollars.
I cancelled my Netflix account. I keep Disney Plus around for my stepkid, and Prime Video because it comes with Prime, although I’ll probably cancel that soon too. I’m keeping Funimation.
Streaming is becoming worse than cable. At least if I got cable (which I won’t) I could PVR shit and skip the ads. The idea of paying a monthly fee to get advertised at anyway is nauseating.
35, Canada, and manual is my preference although my current car is an automatic.
I learned to drive on an automatic, but bought a manual for my first car and got my ex to teach me how to drive it. It was important to me that I be able to get into pretty much anything and drive it. After driving an automatic exclusively for the last year, I miss having that level of gearing control, especially on hills and corners.
I found some money I squirrelled away for a big luxury purchase, so I’m buying a painting. It’s the first piece of art in years that’s stopped me in my tracks to stare. I have a print, but it’s not the same.
Walker Kong, with 47 monthly listeners.
I found one of their albums at a record store in Vancouver a few years ago. The band is defunct now, but they’re the best kind of weird.
$100 is lifetime Ultra, which is subscription otherwise. It’s $20 for lifetime removal of ads.
Fleeing naked along endless paths through mountains of jagged debris. A world torn apart. Feels like moving through molasses. Enough light to register, but not enough to see more than looming shadows. The air is hot and oppressive. It’s hard to breathe. Sounds are muffled, no echoes. Safety lies at the centre of the maze but the path shifts and twists away like a living thing.
It was a recurring nightmare throughout my childhood. I still get anxious in really dim lighting, like when lights on a dimmer switch are down really low or candlelight in a dark room. I call it nightmare lighting.
I just finished The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. I’ve kind of half-followed Welcome to Night Vale for years and enjoyed all the books so far.
I’m currently reading House of Leaves. This is my second attempt, after making it about halfway a few years ago. It’s a great book, but a challenging read because it’s dense and shifts context frequently. I find that the context-switching adds to the unsettling feel that the book is going for, but it’s definitely not for everyone.
During jacket season, right jacket pocket or left inside pocket if there is one. Outside of jacket season, back right because from pockets in women’s jeans are tiny. Purse if I don’t have pockets.
I would donate my uterus to someone who actually wants kids in a heartbeat if I could.