Tinks

I just looked after my neighbor’s cats and they gave me a card with a lovely thank you note and a door dash gift card. Totally wasn’t expecting it but it was sweet. Maybe something like that?

You don’t necessarily need to take it away, there are other avenues of punishment. Detention, Saturday school, no extra-curricular participation, suspension, etc. I was in high school right as dumb cell phones started to become a thing and those were our punishments if we were caught with phones out. We were allowed to have them, but they had to be either off or on silent, and in our bags (same as CD/MP3 players.) We were allowed to have them out to check them only during lunch and before and after school, or if we had to make a call, in the main office. I completely agree that kids shouldn’t be using phones AT ALL during class time, but there’s ways to allow them to exist and punish inappropriate usage that doesn’t require teachers taking them. Teachers shouldn’t be taking phones, that’s a liability risk and not worth the effort.

Choose your battles. Not everything is worth the energy.

They’ve been doing it for businesses for decades so this isn’t really surprising honestly

My husband wanted a special German stew this week and I went to price out chuck roast for it and it was $10/lb! It would cost us $20 in meat to make a pot of simple freakin stew. Round wasn’t even cheaper either! I quickly decided we weren’t having that stew right now. The price of beef is insane. Beef roast and stew was the poor meal when I was growing up - the thing my parents made to stretch the budget because you just buy a super cheap cut and cook it all day to make it edible, along with cheap veggies. Now those meals are damn near a delicacy considering the cost of the meat. Chicken isn’t much better either at the moment. Grocery shopping has become exhausting.

Hard disagree. In winter we have cozy warm clothing, crisp dry air to breathe, beautiful blankets of snow, houses lit up with decorative lights at night, and most importantly significantly less bugs! I love hiking and backpacking in winter. I would much rather sleep outside when it’s 0 C/32 F than when it’s 24 C/75 F+ at night. Once it starts getting warm here the humidity creeps up and you’re just sticky for months. Sitting outside on my porch on winter mornings bundled up in my coat and scarf having my morning coffee is one of my favorite things. If I do this in summer I’m eaten by mosquitoes within minutes.

I’m sure whether people like summer or winter more is heavily influenced by where they live, but here summer is hot, humid, full of mosquitoes and ticks, and just generally all around miserable. Late June through early September is the worst part of the year and it’s not even close for me.

I’m so glad my company a) has a “nobody wants teams” stance and even recommends against it to our clients, and b) doesn’t give a fuck if I go idle for hours because they hired me to do a job and if it’s getting done they’re happy.

Micromanaging culture needs to die. Fire employees who don’t do the job and be done with it.

One of the greatest joys of my life is being able to take my dog out with me in public because he’s very well behaved. Not perfect, but 95% there. The last 5% is the golden excitement over people and comes out when someone excitedly fusses over him (think leaning over him squeeing excitedly and talking to him in baby voice) and he forgets his manners and jumps up trying to hug them. If people act normal, he’s completely normal, chill and well mannered. He goes with me to all sorts of places like the hardware store, craft store, the liquor store, and out to eat at various restaurants with patios. I WISH we had a culture around dogs closer to France, because I think dogs would benefit greatly from it. Instead of being left at home they could be out living lives with their humans. Unfortunately that would put greater responsibility on owners to train their pups. Instead, we just ban dogs from most places because it’s easier for the businesses to not have to put up with entitled assholes and their untrained dogs. It’s sad.

Unironically I do get mad at kids (or anyone) on my lawn in the fall when we’re trying to seed it. The rest of the year I couldn’t give a fuck, but there’s a 3 week stretch where I water the grass twice a day to get the grasslings to grow and people walking on them ruins all that effort. And before anyone comes at me for a monoculture grass lawn, we only do it because our trial of “let it do what it wants” ended in weeds taking over that die in the fall, leaving the yard all dirt, and causing massive erosion when it rained in winter. We literally had to shovel dirt out of our driveway. Our huge back yard is still a sanctuary for bugs and wildlife with native plants and such, but the front yard gets watched over like it’s in an HOA because of the headache we had when we let the weeds and native plants win.

So yeah, darn kids better stay off my lawn in late September/early October!

My husband is German and has always found the crazy flag waving patriotism of the US odd. I never really understood his position until the last few years. Having been raised in the US, all of that seemed completely normal to me, but now I view it very differently.

Not even close. As the other poster said $500 or less is pretty common. Burials with caskets can run into the thousands just like with humans, but most people don’t do that.

My dog got attacked by a colony of yellowjackets for having the audacity to go near their nest that was just on the other side of our fence line. He ended up in the ER for anaphylaxis. The neighbor’s dogs got stung too, though they weren’t allergic. Those little cunts can all die in a fire.

Paper wasps I hate less, I just wish they’d stop trying to make nests on the eaves of my house. They’re chill, but I just want them to find somewhere else to call home.

I haven’t watched the latest season but Black Mirror put me off when it just straight up became horror. I don’t enjoy the horror genre with the jump scares and the scary monster crap. I really enjoyed the episodes of Black Mirror that were psychological thrillers or dystopian, but somewhere Black Mirror lost it’s way and leaned in to being blandly scary, not contemplatively scary.

The wild thing is that because of Delaware’s tax laws, a LOT of businesses are registered in that state. This is honestly bonkers to me.

As someone who works from home with an office job, and is also on a health journey, I’m firmly on the side of team protein. I’m working on losing weight, and am watching my protein and fiber intake closely so that my body doesn’t eat muscle instead of fat. Also protein and fiber keep you satiated longer, so you’re less likely to overeat at your sedentary desk job. While the protein craze IS a bit overboard, I think most office workers would be better off if they got more protein, especially from plant-based sources which also contain fiber. Most Americans at least aren’t getting enough fiber, and beans are fucking delicious, versatile and cheap!

This depends entirely on the vape. I quit smoking by switching to vaping, but this was before the current craze of nic salts. I switched using PG/VG flavored blends with much less dosage of nicotine than even the lightest cigarettes. It absolutely changed my life, and I will advocate for it being legal because of it. The Juul and other crazy high nicotine devices are very addictive though, and I’m of the opinion those need to be controlled better. Lumping all vaping together is very misleading though. I was able to quit vaping by reducing the nicotine blend amount in the juice I was buying, and that’s not really an option for a lot of these mass-market devices. This is part of the problem though - people legislating with a broad brush on a topic they know little about.

I go hiking a lot and I always carry pepper spray and a knife, specifically for dogs. My dog is usually with me and I have no qualms with pepper spraying an aggressive dog, or even hitting mine in the mix, to save his or my life. I hadn’t even considered strays, I’m mainly worried about the assholes who let their dogs off leash. That number of strays is a whole other nightmare scenario.

One of my favorites is Black Sails

It’s so frustrating to me that the vaccine is 50+, as if the rest of us can’t get it. I WISH I could get my shongles shit today.

See the fun thing is we have passenger rail from my city all over the country…but dogs aren’t allowed on it if they’re over 20lbs. I’ve even written the company pleading for them to review their policy and citing the crazy amount of dog sport participants that could use their service, and even suggesting they require an easily verifiable 3rd party obedience certificate and was effectively told to go pound sand.

Almost half of households in the US have dogs, so it’s frustrating that travel with them is limited to personal cars (there’s only one commercial airline that flies large dogs in the US and it has very limited destinations.) I would LOVE to take a train to a backpacking trip in the mountains, but then we’re back to leaving my pup at home. This country needs a major culture shift on a great many things, not the least of which is public transit.