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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Depends on the kind of salad!

    If you mean the leafy greens kind of salad, I’m pretty variable in that I don’t have one specific favorite, and prefer to mix things up (bad pun intended).

    Honey mustard, usually homemade if I have time and freedom to make it.

    Russian and/or Catalina are pretty nice when used sparingly, particularly if there’s egg in the salad.

    Vinaigrettes are great when I have access to antacids lol. Love the taste, but the heartburn can be a barrier.

    Caesar salads need caesar dressing.

    And, in a pinch, some lemon juice, salt, pepper and a bit of olive oil will get the job done.

    For other salads, like potato salad, I do blends as well usually. But it’s going to be blends of Duke’s, Hellman’s and miracle whip. None of them are perfect by themselves for every combination of ingredients, so it comes down to tweaking each batch until it’s right. But usually it’ll start with a 2:1 of one of the two mayo brands to miracle whip. Sometimes it’s all three in equal measures to start. Rarely it’ll be the two mayos only, or miracle whip with either small amounts or none of the others.

    That last is typically only going to be a specific egg salad that has no pickle relish, so it needs the bump of sweetness and acidity MW brings to the table that gets muddied with mayo added too.

    It’s all about creaminess, flavor balance, and the palates of who will be eating.


  • Washcloths dedicated to that use. We have different colors for bathing and bottom drying.

    Mind you, you could use the same washcloths since they all get washed before being used again anyway, but it lets guests be less confused/bothered.

    Now, I do tend to do a check with TP before going to cloth. After a while, you get used to how the stream feels when you’ve gotten everything washed away, but it’s still a good idea to check. But for actually getting dry, it’s cloth because TP just doesn’t dry things well enough to preclude the extra moisture from being a possible problem.

    We keep washcloths in the bathroom in a small cabinet beside the toilet. One shelf has the bidet cloths, and is labeled as such. There’s a small hamper for them that gets emptied daily into the regular towel hamper at the washing machine.

    Sometimes, guests that aren’t familiar with post evacuation bathing can end up leaving a bit of residue, so that hamper load gets washed the same day when we have guests. But not everyone uses it tbh. We only have maybe five regular guests, and only three of those use the bidet. Well, if the others are using it, they aren’t mentioning it and they’re drying with TP despite the little instruction manual lol.


  • It’s gonna depend on your preferences. Around here, the water can start out around 40ish(Fahrenheit) before it bumps up a little as the water that isn’t in the pipes exposed to the cold comes along. So we’re talking a bit cold, but not ice cold.

    That’s during winter. At this time of year, the water stays around 50ish, which is quite pleasant most of the time. It feels cool, but not uncomfortable.

    Obviously, the temp of the water is going to depend on what the pipes are exposed to. Around here, we have crawlspaces under houses, which means you only have a few yards of pipes exposed to the air to get cold. The rest is underground, where temps stay fairly steady. If you have more exposed piping, the duration of the cold water will be longer.

    So, I don’t even use the hot water at all, despite having it as an option. The regular water temp is nice for my preferences.


  • Eh, for me it’s maybe twenty minutes at most, but I don’t do fights with people I care about. If things are reaching the point where voices are raised, it’s time to step back and figure out why things are going bad, then come back to the subject matter from a place of love.

    As far as how long it should take for you and your partner, it depends on how each of you handled things. There’s no single answer to it. The nastier the other person gets, the harder it is to let go, even when the issue that started the fight gets resolved. It becomes about the behavior during the fight, and that’s a separate thing to get over.

    You both would benefit from extra guidance by professional in anger management and negotiating relationships. If you’re fighting like that often enough to be asking this, neither of you has the skills needed to be healthy for each other.




  • Farscape was barely sci-fi. It verged hard into science fantasy, where the science part was essentially magic in space.

    Doctor Who is pure science fantasy. But it’s science fantasy more akin to star wars (which is part space opera, part science fantasy) where there’s a certain degree of internal continuity, even when canon is thrown out the window or just retconned. For Dr who, the consistency is in the fact of time travel, and the doctor being a much more potent creature than they seem on the surface.

    The absurdity of the doctor is that it’s an excuse to run around, utter technobabble, and tell some surprisingly interesting stories that would otherwise be unrelated. That patchwork is likely why you can’t/won’t accept the absurdity of it the way you can with farscape where it’s more ensemble character driven.

    Doctor who relies on the doctor/companion characters being your “in” to the story. The farscape characters are the story itself. It’s closer to more firmly sci-fi sci-fi like Babylon 5, or the second Battlestar Galactica in that regard. But it also does the situational drama the way star trek did it, to some degree. That is what gives farscape its charm; it pays homage to science fiction tropes, with puppets lol.

    Now, modern Who does a bit more character work here and there. There’s a little less of the one-off episodes, sprinkled with the usual recurring villains, and the long term story arcs are centered more on each companion/doctor grouping than the older Who.

    Sometimes, even as a Who fan from the eighties, watching Tom Baker grin and give his wink-and-a-nudge joy to the silliness of it all, the absurdity can be hard to accept. Not impossible! I do accept it, but there are times where I have to choose to do so lol. But Pertwee was peak absurdity, imo. Even K-9 can’t match that era.

    Where the absurdity of modern Who falls a little flat is how all the companions end up having a portion of their run basically being part of a comedy duo that tells inside jokes. They become fast friends with the doctor, and the writers have them riffing off of each other like Abbott and Costello, no matter what the rest of their personality is like. You could probably pick a more accurate comedy duo with some thought, but that’s the best my tired brain can do lol.

    Point being that the absurdity is sometimes shoe-horned in as a way to make it feel like the companions and the doctor have spent all the time in between episodes having other adventures. But it’s off screen, so it feels forced too often.



  • I’m almost always an earl grey drinker. For that, Harney & sons is pretty much my favorite, with Taylor’s being almost the same for my preferences, depending on which is fresher. The key difference that makes Harney better is the bergamot rather than the tea itself. It’s just a tad more aromatic and that matters a lot. However, if it isn’t fresh, Taylor’s matches the flavor profile very closely for me.

    Choice organics is a close third place. The tea is just a tad less aromatic, and the bergamot is flatter. Still miles better than the stuff at the grocery store, even if you ignore freshness.

    For breakfast teas, the only other hot tea I really drink, it’s Taylor’s mostly. I have some Harney’s on the shelf, but I like how the Taylor’s tastes with lemon better, and that’s how I like breakfast teas.

    Iced tea, it’s tetley’s or GTFO if I have a choice. My wife is kinda swinging around to that now that she’s drinking southern style iced tea. She’s a Lipton’s fan, but tetley holds up better at the strength we make iced tea. Lipton gets bitter in an unpleasant way with the strength we brew at. Tetley also holds up better sweetened to the degree that southern style iced tea tends to have. I make mine way less sweet than anybody I know, but it’s still sweeter than my wife or her family ever did it.

    Kinda funny. Hot tea, I barely add sugar, just a level teaspoon for a double cup. Coffee I go a little higher, but not much; a heaping teaspoon. But iced tea? It would work out to about 4 teaspoons per cup the way it’s usually made around here, with mine being a tad under 3. You grow up with that thick, strong, syrupy tea, and iced just doesn’t work without high sugar levels lol. Hell, I know some folks that add 3 cups of sugar to a gallon of tea and that’s just barely sweet enough for them.

    Hence, we don’t have iced tea often because damn, you can’t drink like that regularly. It’s a rare treat.

    But I’m an earl grey guy for the most part now. And I’ve tried something like twenty brands? I used to have a file with my notes in it, but deleted it by accident. I never drank hot tea until my wife moved in before we got married. She’s a tea drinker all day, but isn’t picky. I tried her bigelow stuff and was meh about it. Then I had some at her mom’s house during a visit I yankee land that was Taylor’s, and the experience was totally different.

    When we got home, I used some savings to order a bunch of brands, and tried them all over a few weeks, taking notes and all that crazy crap. It just blew my mind that there was that much difference in brands, even knowing that it could be somewhat different in iced tea.

    But, yeah, I found a few favourites and stick with them. One sugar, splash of milk and that’s my earl grey. One sugar, splash of lemon for English and Irish breakfast teas.




  • Well, yeah. Me, my wife, and my kid live with my dad. I’m almost 50.

    Mind you, I bought the house from him. But the whole “can’t have a family home” thing where you have to live separate from parents or grandparents to be an adult is utter bullshit. It is often easier to navigate the interpersonal stuff when it’s the classic nuclear family and the kids move out to start their own, just because relationships and the work of them is exponential based on the number of people and the number of relationships between them. If you’re the parent and the landlord to an adult offspring, that’s two complicating factors in making things work peacefully and (hopefully) happily. Add in another generation, especially when grandparents are part of the child rearing, and shit can get messy fast.

    We make it work by the framework of: my house, our home, your room.

    The house itself is mine, I have final say in structural changes, repairs, etc, because I’m the one on the hook for any legal issues that derive from such. But the running of the household is by consensus of the adults, and input from the kid, with agreed on boundaries. Within those boundaries, if you’re in your own room, you do what you want. The kid is aware of what the boundaries are, and that they won’t be changing when they become an adult, and they’ll have the freedom of choice to stay or head out, knowing there’s a safety net here they can rely on.

    They ever have kids, those kids would have the same choice.

    Yeah, a house can only hold so many people before it becomes a chaos that isn’t bearable. No matter how big the house, that remains true. But a family home is still a very valid and good choice where life makes it useful/necessary.

    Shit, on my end, if the kid stays here until they’re in their fifties, I’m happy as hell, as long as they’re here because it works for them. They’ll be inheriting the place if I get it paid off before I die anyway.

    I moved back here as a temporary thing in my late twenties. Left the city I had been working in and was looking for a place of my own. My best friend came with me, and when my mom finally moved out post divorce, it just kinda worked until I had to buy the place. After that, it still worked, and the people involved have changed a few times, but there’s this wonderful sense of connection and security knowing that we all have a place to be if we want it.


  • Pretty far in the past now, the kid has gotten a lot more resistant to fear over the years.

    But, back when they were about 7, ghosts were the big fear at night.

    Solution: ghost incense. One of those things I pulled out of my ass in the moment that worked like magic.

    The kid didn’t want to go to bed. Was asked why. The answer was that they didn’t want ghosts to come get them.

    In a rare flash of genius, I said “Well, I can fix that. Ghosts can’t go anywhere when you burn a stick of a special incense. I keep a box of it around for emergencies.”

    We lit some nice smelling stuff, and said the magic words, and that was that.

    Now, the next day, we had a nice conversation about how ghosts aren’t real, and even if they were, they’re ghosts, they can’t hurt anything. The kid asked if we could burn the “ghost sticks” anyway, just in case we were wrong lol. So it became the bedtime thing. When the kid would get tired, they’d show up with a stick of incense and ask me to light it.

    By the end of that summer, the kid had said they weren’t scared of ghosts any more, but can we use the incense anyway, it smells nice.

    Sometimes, trying to convince someone that their fear isn’t based in reality is not only impossible, but counterproductive. For a kid, it’s all about helping them manage the fear, give them control of it.



  • Eh, it is kinda watering down the original punk, as a term for what the original punk movements represented. But that’s language. No matter what a word starts out meaning, people can use it for something else. If that new use takes off, there’s nothing that can stop it other than people as a group ceasing that usage. Isn’t that cool? See what I did there?

    Tbh though, once a word gets used a new way, and it spreads, it’s just as likely that the original usage fades away. Don’t forget that words like idiot and moron had a more clinical jargon usage originally.

    Living languages love shifting. Humans are sort of like birds with words. We collect shiny ones and play with them.

    The various _punks and _cores are just a current example of playing with words.

    As far as disliking or resisting that kind of appropriation, it can be frustrating. Anyone that was a punk back in the day would likely sneer at some of the _punk iterations, possibly calling anyone using them a fascist (and if you’ve never seen the show The Young Ones, you really should just so you can see an early version of the caricatures of what punks, hippies, and such were. Real life punks and hippies were a much more diverse and interesting thing, but less funny).

    My advice as a fellow old dude that knew some of the old school punks? Just shrug and smile. Change is inevitable, might as well just roll with it.