Canopyflyer

The last time I spoke with my Paternal Grandmother was her 103rd birthday. She died about 2 months later.

She had completely lost her short term memory, but was otherwise still cognizant and her long term memory was perfectly intact. She was born in 1901 and died in 2004, so she saw a LOT of history. Three of her sons fought in World War 2 and one did not come back. She saw aviation go from sticks and canvas biplanes to jets.

So that is what I asked her about. Things that happened in her life in the distant past and if her mind started following a string of memories, I shut up and just listened. There are things I know about my family that I doubt my Dad, who died this past February, even knew.

Same here… I’ve screwed up trying to make an omelet so many times, I just gave up and started calling it “Dirty Scrambled Eggs.”

My oldest is on a Synchronized Figure Skating team and two seasons ago a girl from Italy joined the team. She was a great. Awesome skater and added so much to the team. They actually made it to Nationals that year.

My funniest memory of her, was driving the car pool to a team practice. Just as we’re about to get up on the highway, a very large firetruck came into the intersection. Honestly, it was the largest firetruck I had ever seen.

Her reaction was hysterical…

“OH MY such a big truck. So American!”

Thought she had summed up nicely, America’s insane infatuation around overly large vehicles.

We were all very sad to see her go back to Italy.

I’ve had a Yahoo account since 1995 (I think) and I still use it today… For signing up for things that I don’t care to receive spam from on my main account.

Main deployment isn’t that bad. I have been whacked a time or two by my main parachute, but it was my fault for having bad body position at deployment time.

Skydiving

Yes, the first few times are intimidating. Hence why most students do their first few jumps tandem and then with a Jump Master after that.

After that though, you’ll be looking out the window of the plane and seeing just how much air there is to play in. As you gain experience, you will internalize the fact you’re safer in free fall, than you are on the airplane.

I enjoyed the MCU up until Age of Ultron. The movies are almost all from the same mold, just with different names and look and that was true even before the first Avengers film. But it was new back then. The newness has worn off and it’s way past time the MCU evolves, or retires.

The exception are the Guardians of the Galaxy series. They are better made films that actually made me feel invested in the characters. The beginning of Guardians 3 is probably the best scene in the entire MCU.

English may not have gendered nouns, but it has plenty of other challenges.

When I cook? Dish needs salt? Grabs a bit with my fingers and throws it in… Taste… Repeat as necessary.

When I bake? Electronic scale comes out that is accurate to three significant digits. EVERYTHING is weighed using it.

Anyone that doesn’t bake from a box knows this.

I was in the same position as you, except in regards to buying replacement automobile. My current car will not last another 2 to 4 years, or however long it would take for automobile prices to come back down after a major spike. I am looking back over the COVID period and using that as a predictor of what could happen in the next two years.

AND it is is not pretty. Cars are already way too expensive as it is and adding another 10% to 20% puts buying a car outside of what I am willing to do. Could I make my car last longer? Not without putting a short block in it, which is a $6000 proposition and the car might be worth $7k if it was in mint condition, which it is not. Even if I did replace the engine, it would start having the myriad of “old car problems” over the next few years and just how expensive will parts be?

What are interest rates going to be?

So instead of waiting another 6 months, where I would have enough to pretty much pay cash, I went ahead and bought a car this past Wednesday, but with a lot more financing than I really wanted to do. But with good credit, I got a sub 6% rate, I’ll just pay it off faster so I don’t take a bath on the interest.

Now I have a car, 2019 Camry Hybrid, with 30,000 miles on it that I feel will easily last the next 4 years without much more than maintenance. I kept my old car, I have a teen driver that needs it, and will keep it till he goes to university next August. I’ll keep an eye on the used car market and when I can sell it for a good price, I will. Then use that money to pay off my current car, saving that interest.

Or I might just sell everything, go buy a boat and explore the south Pacific the next 4 years… Who knows.

You mean the people I was forced to experience my childhood and early adulthood with? Not seeing them at all.

They got themselves kicked to the curb long ago. Mom died 13 years ago, which greatly improved my life. Dad died this past May and I didn’t even go to the funeral. Middle brother came out as an Oathbreaker, keeper or whatever those idiots call themselves. Oldest brother has always been a narcissistic asshat and I haven’t spoken to him in almost a decade.

Nuclear war between nations is a terrible thing that should never happen.

Nuclear war on toxic relationships is the best thing ever.

Guy who runs Plex on a Ubuntu container on Proxmox.

I’m going to just drop this here (be sure to watch to the end):

The English Language

1994, I was… A manager for Radio Shack. No, I didn’t wear bad pants.

My District Manager (DM) promoted me to a larger store from my current store. The other manager was being demoted… To MY store. Which made the whole thing a bit awkward. The other manager and I also were not getting any more help. We literally were going to do the takeover inventories ourselves… both stores.

I got up Saturday morning at 7:30 and got into my store at 8:30am and worked till 6pm, when my store closed. One of my employees said he’d help with my store’s inventory, but he couldn’t work past 10pm. We entered final counts and started reconcile at 4am. Reconcile is typically left to the manager taking over, but I didn’t trust the guy, so we both did the reconcile (comparing what we counted in the store vs what the computer said was in the store and explaining any variances). That was done about 6am, largely because he wanted to dispute items that were at the repair center that I had documented. We then moved to his former, my new store. Which had a much larger inventory. We stopped and picked up breakfast and started counts around 7:30. By this time I had been awake and working for 24 hours.

Inventory of my new store was a fucking nightmare. Counts were WAY off from computer’s inventory. Entire computer systems were missing, monitors, a couple of hi-fi receivers. Don’t even get me started on force feed. At about noon, I called our DM and said I needed either him, or a senior manager onsite to cover this inventory and some helpers. My DM’s lazy ass wasn’t about to work on a Sunday, so he sent a senior manager and two employees. The senior manager, someone that I knew and trusted, did reconcile as we finished counts. Boy was the inventory completely screwed. That was just the large items, by 10pm we hadn’t even gotten into the force feed items (items hanging on pegs). We finally got counts done at 6am and I signed off on the reconcile around 7:30. The store opened at 9am, but I lived 25 minutes away, so I just freshened up in the restroom, went and bought a case of Cokes and opened the store. I was supposed to have an employee come in at 1pm and another at 5pm…

The employee that was supposed to work from 1pm to close (9pm), decided to just never show up, he was also the other key holder. RS only had two key holders in the store back in those days. The one at 5pm was a part timer and could not close. So I ended up working until 9:30 that night.

I got home at 10pm, made some dinner and got to sleep at 11pm and it was Monday night.

So I was awake from 7:30am Saturday till 11:00pm the following Monday and was at work all but maybe 30 minutes. I think that was about 63.5 hours and I still had the rest of the week to work. It took me about a month to get my sleep schedule back into any semblance of normalcy.

I will starve and die in the gutter, before EVER working retail again.

Absolutely agree.

I tightly control every piece of media that comes into my house. My kids have never had to sit through 10 minutes of commercials to watch a 20 minute program. When they go to a friends house and watch TV, they can’t stand it and go do something else. My oldest loves Figure Skating in the Olympics (he’s a competitive figure skater himself), but all the commercials made it all but unwatchable to him. He just waits till the skaters programs, he wants to watch, are on Youtube. This has had the added benefit that my kids have been completely unaware of the “latest and greatest” toy or thing that all of their peers absolutely had to have.

The absolute frenzy to “make a buck” on freaking everything has made almost all forms of media devoid of worth. An oxymoron I know, but it is the truth. The cost in time and attention to sit through so many advertisements is way too high and I refuse to pay that price. If that means I don’t see or hear the latest and greatest movies, TV series, or music… Oh well.

54m here, married for 19 years.

My wife has a very demanding career, so really needs her hobbies to let go of the stress. What I do is listen when she’s talking about what has her interests. Then if there is anything I can do to facilitate it, it will suddenly materialize. This is not always something expensive or even something material.

Just before COVID the entire family got into playing D&D. Being an artist my wife went bonkers on painting miniatures. So I made sure she had all the paints and brushes she needed. Plus, the dining room, which is actually our “hobby” room, got a lighting upgrade

How bonkers did she get? This bonkers and there are many many more:

Another parent on one of my kid’s team has a ridiculously huge Cadillac. It’s the size of a Suburban. She has one kid and not planning to have more.

She made the mistake of making a backhanded comment about how my wife and I drive older cars to our faces. We have a 2014 Camry LE and a 2015 Lexus ES 300h. (Mine and wife’s respectively)

So I asked her what type of contracting work she does. She looked at me with a bewildered expression. I went on and said; “well you drive a big work truck, I assumed you did construction or something.”

The look she gave me could have melted steel.

Just to be clear, I have a great deal of respect for the trades. She however is married to money, not terribly bright, and looks down her nose at just about everyone. So I knew that would hit a nerve with her.

Given:

You lack the capacity to experience imposter syndrome.

Nail a few of these idiots with sedition charges and suddenly the rest might be interested in checking their sources. Even those in the so called “main stream media”.

Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Service Model”. It was excellent. But be warned, if you’re looking for military, adventure sci fi with snarky AI’s this will not be your cup of tea. The author takes on modern societal issues in the setting of post collapse human society. Yes, I’m aware of the dichotomy there.

If you do want snarky AI’s and adventure, then I recommend the following series:

“Backyard Starship” series. I think it’s up to book 17 so far and the quality of the books have stayed pretty consistent. The prequel series “The Peacemaker Wars” is also pretty good.

“Expeditionary Force” The quality does NOT stay consistent in this series and quite frankly, it’s not very well written. However, it’s like Lofthouse cookies, a lot of mediocre ingredients come together to make something great. I am a die hard fan of the series and highly recommend it if you want something that just removes you from reality for a while.