Were you that dork with the giant hat and the zinc on the nose and the long-sleeved shirt? Because I was. I must have used every home-made sunburn remedy there was as a kid–I vividly remember my mother putting wet teabags all over my face, though I can’t remember if it was at all helpful.
And are you talking about the old Banana Boat after-sun lotion? I always found that to work almost better than the straight-aloe lotions, but I haven’t seen in it years, so maybe they did stop making it. It kept down the next-day ache better than anything else I can ever remember using.
Oh, no. They still make it. We keep a bottle in the fridge at all times, since TheKid only needs to think about the sun and she becomes red.
Speaking of sun. This is Minnesota. Land of ice and snow. Not upper 90’s, with heat indices over 100 in the last week of August. My poor window A/C is chugging along, but it can only do so much. It’s too damn miserable outside, don’t remember the last time we had any measurable rain, it’s humid as hell. I hate it.
I think we’ve got your weather. I’m in SC, and it was 55 deg yesterday morning at about 7. No humidity yesterday, and I don’t think the temp went over 85. Glorious!
I did the acreage thing when I was younger and while I never had a mini-stallion running thru the place, I feel you. In one place, we were surrounded by people who had moved onto farmettes to “let the kids and dogs run free”. Which of course they did, all over my property. One morning we went out for maybe a couple of hours and came home to 20-30 dead and dying ducks. Put up a real bull zapper of an electric fence and then got complaints because neighbors dogs were getting singed!
If it were my place and they’d killed my ducks, they’d start getting shot the moment they got about 10’ onto my property.
Of course, if you don’t want to do that, in most places if you can identify the dog for your local law enforcement, they can seize the animal, charge them with livestock destruction, and the court will make them pay restitution.
When we lived on the (hobby) farm when I was a teen, we mostly had issues with neighbor kids being in our barn without our permission*, or cutting the back fence to ride through on snowmobiles or bikes. (Back before ATVs were common. Sure it’s worse now.)
That ended when I ordered a neighbor kid out of our barn. He refused to leave. I retrieved my BB gun. He refused to leave. I pointed it at him. He said I wouldn’t dare shoot him. I pulled the trigger. POP. No BB loaded. Scared the fuck out of him and he ran home to tell his parents. They complained to my dad. My dad simply told them to keep their kid out of our barn and never said a word to me about it. Of course, that was in the 70’s. These days there’d be 5,000 cops swarming our farm and charging me with a felony.
You know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned with apartment hunting, is that the small tings you take for granted at once place, turn into a HUGE DEAL at another.
Looked at a place yesterday. Two issues with it:
In a not-so-great are of town. But oh well, the crime there is over-exaggerated, and “high crime” in Burlington, VT is still the envy of any larger city. But the location is a bitch to get to from my work, I found out. On paper, it seems easy…3 miles. Go down main street in one town, and then connects to another major-osh road in the town it’s in, and then it’s one turn off of that road.
Well, I’ve never had to take that other road during rush hour before…it was Hell. My current place is twice as far away, and takes half as long to get to/from. It even has more traffic lights. I think I can find a slightly quicker way around, though.
But it’s location also leads to the second issue:
No off-street parking. Are you fucking kidding me? So when there’s a parking ban because of snow, I have to go all the way to the closest public garage, walk/take a bus/cab back, and the repeat that in the morning? And IIRC, I have to have my car out pretty early, I think by 7 AM…I don’t have to be at work until 9 AM, I’m used to waking up at 8 AM, so fuck getting up at 6 AM to get my car. The tenant who lives there now told me last winter she parked in the back yard (it’s fenced in, but has a small gate.) Yeah, I’m sure that worked for you last winter, when we got, what, ten inches of snow total? In an average winter, I don’t trust my tiny Corolla to be able to easily get in’out of a snow covered backyard, especially since the snow plows will end up piling up a large snow back in front of the gate.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see the actual dogs that killed all the ducks, but since it’s (or at least, was) legal to shoot animals that are harassing livestock, we did take shots at any free roaming dog we found on our property. Given the owners’ reactions to their dogs just getting their fur singed, we took care to not actually hit any of the dogs, but we were able to put a good scare into them. That and the new electricity meant we didn’t lose any more ducks.
In our case, these were not working farms, so they weren’t cleared. Trees and eight foot tall blackberry bushes deter joyrides.
I was out gaming last night. I got home around 10pm. I got to sleep around 12:30am. My alarm went off at 6am. So while yeah, only 5.5 hours of sleep, why do I feel like I got maybe an hour or two of sleep or none at all? Even at this hour of the day after plenty of caffeine?
Aliens. Must be aliens. Kept me up all night, made me play Parcheesi and then wiped my memory. Bastards.
We had to get my niece a bra when she was nine. She hated them and would ‘forget’ to put them on. Her mom had to do a bra check every morning before she left for school.
My parents had 8, then later 10 acres (bought 2 from the neighbors who needed money). So not a working farm. But we had chickens, horses and the occasional pig. Guess who got to take care of them? My dad got rid of all of the animals about 3-6 months after I moved out. Amazing how “lazy” I was as a teenager but how much work it was when he had to do it.
I have regularly shot dogs found on my property. I always call animal control to deal with the bodies - ones with owners got the owners given tickets and I think the ferals got tested for rabies for some sort of rabies tracking info.
Was it a training bra, by any chance? Those things are horrible – the elastic bands in particular are extremely itchy. I always had mine off by lunchtime.
Nope, the zinc was never offered to me. Neither were hats (apparently I couldn’t tolerate hats as a baby, so hats were never again considered for my wardrobe).
The Banana Boat stuff is good, but the lotion I mentioned was made by Coppertone. I still have a little of it; it’s just as good as ever. It’s also very good for cooking or grill burns…
I’d never heard of the “Vitamin K-Leukemia” link - oh, fer fuck’s sake. There isn’t enough real danger in the world, parents have to start inventing it? I say, you waive your natal vitamin K shot, you waive the right for treatment for a bleeding disorder later. Too bad - you rolled the dice, your child lost. Let’s put the Darwinism back in childrearing!
Mmmmm, nothing beats Cheez Whiz on toast. The bottom just starting to melt from the heat of the toast and the top still cold from the fridge. Best stuff ever!
I did not know that. Thank you so much. I wasn’t begrugding the money and time spent on the vet, blocked male cats are a true emergancy.
Its that we don’t treat cats like dogs. When dogs go for rides, they get to go to fun places and meet new friends. When we take cats for a ride, they almost always end up somewhere where bad things happen. So, taking a blocked male to the vet adds more stress to their already high stress levels.
Anyhow, kittyboy is feeling much better and is peeing well and eating and drinking and playing and purring. That’s the most important thing.
For anyone who doesn’t know what is wrong with their cat, please don’t just stuff Amoxi down their throats. I’m a semi-professional cat-wrangler and I have ran so many cats to the vet that I’ve learned the difference between I can treat and what needs the vet.
Had I been able to get Amoxi, I would have given him 2 pills and if he hadn’t shown results in 6 hours, he would have gone to the vet anyhow.
For financial reasons*, my mother and stepfather divorced a couple of years ago. I can’t really fault them for that - they’ve done nothing illegal, and they’re a little more financially secure than they’d have been otherwise. As a result, my mother is now entitled to collect on my late father’s Social Security retirement. Fine by me, except…
Christ on a motherfucking Wheat Thin, Ma! Do you not fathom just how much of a hypocrite you sound like when you bitch daily about “those people” “gaming the system” to get “free shit” from the the government? Daddy died in 1978. As a result of his illness, he collected SSDI for about a year and a half. From 1978 until our majorities, my brother, sister, and I received survivors’ benefits - a total of 31 calendar years. Until my sister was 16, my mother also collected survivors’ benefits - a total of 11 years - and intentionally didn’t remarry until that benefit ran out**. And now, 35 years after Daddy’s death***, you’ve begun collecting on his retirement. Let me do the math here… After his military service and before his total disability, my father would have paid in to SS a total of 12 years. I think the return on investment has been pretty good. And I don’t have a problem with Social Security taking care of widows and orphans and retirees - that’s the whole idea. But how is it not “gaming the system” when you do it, Ma?
*Okay, my mother also doesn’t want my stepdad making medical decisions for her, because he would be far more aggressive with end-of-life care than she would want. My brother and I know that the old broad will come back to haunt us if we agree to extreme measures. But that’s secondary, and my mother never discussed that one with my stepdad as a reason for their divorce filing.
**Really. She lived with a boyfriend for about 3 years when I was aged 12-15, and didn’t marry the second time until I was almost 17. I never put that together until JUST NOW. Because I’m dim like that!
***Weird. I just realized that my father has been dead longer than he lived. That kind of just threw me for a loop.
I had a male cat develop a blockage some time ago. Two days in the kitty hospital with a catheter, followed by about ten days of mugging the cat three times a day to get meds down him, he recovered quite well :).
Scared the fuck out of him and he ran home to tell his parents. They complained to my dad. My dad simply told them to keep their kid out of our barn and never said a word to me about it. Of course, that was in the 70’s. These days there’d be 5,000 cops swarming our farm and charging me with a felony.
