Meltdown preceded the birthday party. Wee Weasel had a blast at the birthday party. The last one was at a bounce house and I was sure it was going to be too much for him, but he had a blast at that one too, despite zero interaction with other kids. This galvanizes my husband’s belief that a party is a Good Idea. If we do it, we will be off-loading the labor to a kid’s venue, in this case a cafe with a jungle gym my son adores. My husband thinks instead of gifts, we can ask the kids to all wear shirts with numbers on them.
I appreciate the advice to keep the guest list small.
I think my husband is not unreasonable and this is a me problem.
I have not yet fully figured out what triggers Wee Weasel’s freak-outs. Restaurants are usually okay, except sometimes when he first walks in the door. He doesn’t seem to like crowded places, but is surprisingly tolerant of loud noises. Balloons popping? No problem. Noise-wise I think he’s really put off by… for lack of better words… cacophonies of sound. He hates hearing Happy Birthday sung in unison, for example. I think the combination of omnipresent checkout beeps and crowded spaces is what sent him over the edge at Target.
My son’s meltdowns thankfully are not that long or intense. When overwhelmed, he tries to flee and it turns into a wrestling match. Once we got him out of there, he was fine. (And bless the cashier who gave him stickers.)
As for me, I’m beat after two days in the sun this weekend and I’ve got a nasty cough, so I’m taking a sick day today. Not really sure what to do with it. It’s hard to sleep when you’re coughing a lot, and my brain is wide awake even though my body’s down for the count. I’m in the mood to revolutionize my life, or at least do the dishes, but my lungs are not interested.
Speaking of selling things, I almost fell for a scam. I am selling a beautiful (if I do say so myself) crochet shawl I made myself on Facebook. It isn’t going well. I’ve had the listing up for a while and while it’s gotten a lot of clicks, there haven’t been any takers. So when I got a message the other day from someone interested, I jumped on it. It was weird that their Facebook profile was new but, oh well. And it was weird that they wanted to text instead of Facebook message, but OK. So I text them and then they want to send me a random code to verify my post because they “don’t want to get scammed” and I realize that they are scamming me. Assholes.
So I block them. And hope someone will take my beautiful crochet shawl eventually.
That looks very similar to mine, which is no longer listed on Best Buy’s site (it’s a 43" X800G Series). Here’s the little dome I was describing.
I’ve always wanted a universal remote, but a single component in the entertainment system – a CD changer (yes, really!) with a latching on/off switch has prevented me from doing this. I’m with you on DirecTV; if I can get Mom used to navigating the menus of various streaming services, we’re going to ditch that. I just don’t feel like I’m getting my money’s worth from them.
I got taken in by the same damn thing when I first started selling off all my possessions on F.B.
If you haven’t tried them, I had pretty good results with an app called 5Miles and, somewhat less so, with OfferUp.
Similar interface: post a pic + details and pricing.
PRO TIP: take one picture to your gallery to use, rather than taking a pic for the app … and another pic for the other app … and anoth-- oh, hell, just reuse the one from your phone’s gallery.
ProTip Two: take several pictures, from different angles. (We don’t need to see the exact same head-down picture of the exact same thing.) Most if not all apps allow multiple photos, and I can tell you, if imma buying something online offa some rando, I’d like to see as many pictures as possible.
Home AC crapped out Friday evening. It is not yet fixed. Maintenance was here today, says DH, but was pulled away by an apparently even more urgent problem. He’d better be back tomorrow. I have very few qualms about a nag-call to the office each day until this is fixed (I am polite and pleasant to the office staff, don’t worry, but I do want to keep my lack of air conditioning, in August, in the California central valley, with recent higher-than-normal humidity, firmly on their minds). Yes, I know, bit of a first-world problem, but I have not slept decently in several days, dammit!
Bonus points for an intermittent issue with my car’s AC fan. It has in recent weeks decided to only function when it feels like it. We think it’s a loose fuse. This happened to me today. Couldn’t do anything about it at lunch, but on the way home, I hit a pothole and hello nice cold fast-moving air, and the fan behaved itself the whole way home.
My children own a cat, I am allergic. I love them so I endure it. She got Vestibular Disease two weeks ago which is a serious ear infection. She’s on meds, she’ll be ok after a bit. Ear infections are bad anyway, but for a species that always lands on it’s feet the result is serious balance issues. Our cat is nothing short of a fall down drunk. She’s also a hunter and we can’t let her outside because of her state.
I can’t touch her because allergic so she talks to me. It’s usually for stuff she needs, like food, water or to go outside and we both don’t like her whining so it gets done. But I can’t let her outside now and I can’t pet her to shut her up so I have a 4 pound fur drunk whining at me all day every day.
Thought she was going to die at one point so this is better, but still.
One of my cats has had this twice. They look so pitiful when they’re in the midst of it! The good news is they DO adapt pretty well, even if the head tilt never quite goes away. My old lady is indoor-only, but she zips around the house, leaps on and off things, and rarely has a misfire anymore.
Can you get a long-distance toy for her? Like one of those feathers-on-a-stick sort of thing? That might help her feed her need for hunt/chase, as well as being a kind of PT. Or even a scatter of catnip mice might help.
There’s an interesting episode of the wonderful podcast Reply All where the journalist/host Alex Goldman receives a call from a scammer. After confronting him they strike up a bit of a conversation and then Alex ends up flying to India, tracking the guy down and trying to figure out what’s at the bottom of it all. It’s a really complicated story but it seems to be riding on the fact that these are the best jobs a working class person can get in that area, these are coveted positions not marketed to them as overtly scamming people but as respectable call center jobs, and by the time people do realize they’re scamming people (if they ever realize it), they justify it based on the belief that all Americans are rich and don’t need the money. (This was for a different kind of scam than your scam, but I found it noteworthy.)
There’s kind of a send-up of this in the provocative film Sorry to Bother You which adds an entire racial dimension to the shady call center dynamic, but essentially hinges on the question of how much harm you would be willing to do for financial security.
For what it’s worth, I was once scammed out of a laptop despite several obvious red flags and they would have gotten away with it if eBay hadn’t called and warned me, then I tracked the thing down at USPS and prevented it from shipment. This happened many years ago and my husband still uses it as evidence of why I have poor risk assessment when dealing with strangers. He’s not wrong but it is embarrassing to admit.
Guess what’s back? It’s my asthma! Was hoping for a longer period of time to get this shit sorted with my doctor; it weren’t for lack of trying but I had one job commitment after another force me to cancel, then I had a more pressing medical concern that turned out to be benign. Anyway, I’m miserable, coughing so hard my head hurts. At least I can breathe okay. The days are not bad, but my sleep is shit. I was supposed to take my husband and son to work tomorrow for a staff picnic. I wanted my people to meet my family. I’m not sure what’s going to happen now. Bracing myself for another Winter of missed fun, missed work, and social isolation.
Interesting. I have not seen such a thing - your DirecTV box looks different than mine too. We’ve been inching ever closer to going to 100% streaming as the things we’ve wanted to get have been added as streaming options (PBS was one long pole in that tent that finally appears to be available). This TV will help with that.
But! I have something new to mini-bitch about.
There’s a steam train we’re fans of - the 611 (Norfolk and Western 611 - Wikipedia) that is doing one of their increasingly rare excursions this fall and we wanted to get tickets to go on one of the trips.
You would thought I was trying to get Taylor Swift tickets. They went on sale at 10 am today and I went to the site, picked the date and the class of tickets I wanted to get, and BOOM! I was put in a queue to wait. And of course by the time my turn came, the particular tickets I wanted to get for that date and time were gone. Tried to pick a different date, and BOOM! back in the queue!
I got a little smarter then, opened all three browsers I have on my computer and got in line for different dates and classes of tickets on each one. I did get tickets - for a later date and in a different car than I would have liked, but it will still be fun at least.
And then, since we are going on the excursion that’s later in the day, I tried to book a hotel room. The town in Virginia where the train is leaving is very very small, so there’s only one bed and breakfast there. And they won’t let you book just a single night, so I looked in Lexington, VA, the closest larger town. No rooms AT ALL in town! What in the world is going on there that weekend? It’s the same town where Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee College is, so is it something to do with them? There’s also some sort of large horse facility too, so maybe that?
I did not expect to spend so much time on something that seemed so simple.
I’d not heard the cranberry relish thing but agree it sounds tasty and would serve the same moisturizing purpose.
I was referring mostly to pork chops as served in a restaurant rather than at home. Although back in the day most Moms knew to cook pork chops unto death, and also knew that applesauce was the “approved” compensator / cover-up for that habit.
Thank goodness we’ve mostly moved beyond cooking food to death, and also mostly moved beyond having worm-ridden pork that needed cooking to death for safety.
I like to buy thick cut pork chops, sous vide them medium rare, the serve them without searing. They are moist and delicious.
But you still have to have them with applesauce! Pork chops & applesauce!
Peel and core apples. Dice into a pot. Add a splash (teaspoon) of water and simmer until the apples fall apart. Add a pinch of cinnamon or a cinnamon stick.
