Exactly, though some unfinished/semi-finished basements have cement floors. I was surprised that some people couldn’t figure out why I thought finished vs unfinished was significant and wondered then if they’ve been in much nicer unfinished or much more unpleasant finished basements than I ever have
FYI - the RSV vaccine was approved for adults 60+ today.
Fingers crossed that the lyme vaccine will soon follow. And the norovirus vaccine for those of you who get stomach bugs.
Re: oatmeal. It’s definitely a hot cereal. I hate it. But I kept a box at work as punishment for mornings that I couldn’t get my crap together enough to figure out something else for lunch. It was a pretty good motivator.
After reading replies above, I went back and changed some votes.
I tested my chopstick skills and found that I can pick up grains of dry rice, so upgraded my answer from average to pretty good.
For “I feel like my life is being narrated by” I’d originally picked Terry Gross, since I like her best of all the choices. Then I read @thorny_locust 's post and realized, of course, my life is being narrated by me, so changed my reply to “someone else”.
As for the cold cereal poll, it reminded me that I haven’t had any for a while, so now I’m eating Honey Bunches of Oats with my left hand and typing with my right.
Ah. My town says that i am changing the bulk of my basement from unfinished to finished, and that has triggered building codes regarding insulation and wires. But the unfinished portion of the basement had cement walls and tiles on the floor. And all sorts of crap was stored there, including piles of lawn chairs in the winter, and other stuff that would be convenient to drop some clothing atop. I actually HAVE changed clothes in the unfinished portion, and i can’t imagine why it would be more of a hardship to change clothes there than elsewhere.
I love oatmeal. I use Red Mill Extra Thick Rolled Oats, then add pecans, dried cranberries, maple syrup, brown sugar, butter, half & half, cinnamon and nutmeg. Eating plain oatmeal is like eating plain pasta.
I use chopsticks every day. I have a small collection but prefer my titanium chopsticks. When eating with people who grew up using chopsticks, I’ve been complimented on my use.
My gf uses regular forks, choosing to spear her food like a cavewoman.
I think if the space under the house has soil walls, and doesn’t have either rock or concrete walls, i would call it a crawl space, not a basement. But I’ve never seen a space under a house that was tall enough to stand in comfortably that didn’t have walls that were stone (old buildings) or concrete, or had actually been finished to be nicer than concrete.
I picked up some strawberries Wednesday, so I had dry cereal for breakfast this morning.1. I’m still kicking myself for forgetting about them when I scooped some ice cream last night.
I have an internal monolog. How else would I berate myself for minor screw-ups from fourty years ago? It has grown much kinder and far less cruel since my doctor put me on buprenorphine.
My life is definitely narrated by Ron Howard.
1 - I have no idea why I call it “dry cereal” when I pour milk on it. Just one of those terms I grew up with and never changed to fit in with everyone else, like “grey tape.”
I took a lot of French in high school, but didn’t learn all that much of it. I once spent several days in France. I arrived there exhausted; and, finding myself surrounded by people speaking French, I found myself also trying to think in French.
Except that while I did know enough French to try, I didn’t know enough to think coherently in French; and therefore couldn’t think coherently at all.
Luckily, I thought it was funny (if I hadn’t thought it funny, I expect it would have been frightening.) When I woke up the next day having gotten enough sleep, I could think in English again.
My basement, at least until recently when a NYSERDA grant sheathed it in insulating foam and heavy vapor barrier on the floor, had partially dirt/gravel floors with a bit of concrete, and dry laid stone walls. Quite common around here in older houses.
The difference between a basement and a crawl space is whether any significant percentage of adults can stand upright in the space. Mine has 6 feet clearance floor to beams, higher between the beams, and is definitely not a crawl space because nobody has to crawl (though tall people need to duck a lot.) – my mother, however, on first seeing it, said ‘this isn’t a basement, it’s a cellar!’ so for some people there may be a further distinction.
There is a bit of crawl space adjacent to the basement – but that also has stone walls (and entirely dirt floor.) But it’s definitely crawl space because it’s only a couple of feet high at highest point, and less further back – somebody must have crawled in there once to get the pipe to the back living room radiator, but they must have had to squirm on their belly to do it. All the rest of the piping, wires, etc. are in the main basement and accessible.
I’ve literally never seen a space under a house that was tall enough to walk in that didn’t have some sort of “pavement” on the floor – typically concrete that was poured when the foundation was poured.
Every house here has a basement, because the frost line is low enough that you have to build the foundations about 6 feet deep, so you might as well use the space. Most basements are dug out another foot or two so you don’t have to stoop, because the marginal cost of doing that is small compared to the benefit of getting better basement space.
there are lots of old houses here, too. At least, there are lots of houses more than 100 years old. Maybe not a lot older than that. The older ones often have stone foundations rather than poured concrete. And those are pretty damp. But they have a floor that doesn’t get muddy.
So that’s the range of stuff I was thinking of when answering the poll. And also, that most of my basement was legally “unfinished” until this current project completes.
In the poll I voted I wouldn’t want to change due to the nature of the space. My house has something between a crawlspace and basement. The only entrance is a roughly 1 sq meter opening on the garage-level (garage plus large family room) in a closet, beneath the stairs from the 2nd level to the third level (weird layout I know).
It’s roughly 6 ft from the bottom of the opening to the bottom of the cellar then. Inside, there’s a small concrete slab on which the forced air system and heating rests. There is 7-8 feet of clearance from the rest of the floor (dirt) to the beams of the level ahead, and no outlets (and a single lightbulb) in the area. There are a few areas with somewhat lower clearance (1-2 feet less) where drains from the kitchen and bathroom pass through, but most of the space is available.
When we bought the house, about 2/3 of the floor was covered with various inexpensive industrial carpet on top of the dirt, and the walls are concrete, but we just use it for storage. So a lot of space, a lot of headroom, but not really in the position to ever be finished, especially as we’d have to break through some of the concrete foundations to install anything like even the steepest set of stairs.
Interesting. As I said, quite common in older houses in New York State for full-height – or what was considered full-height at the time, 6’ or more – basements to have dirt floors.
Mine has, and clearly used to have, stairs to the basement from the kitchen; I’m not sure how old the outside entry is, but I’d expect some form of it to be original, though both doors and the stairs themselves have been replaced. Both sets of stairs are odd and steep by modern standards, but normal for the 1890’s. I expect it was originally used for food storage, and the dirt floor may have been considered an advantage. By the time I got here it had an oilburner furnace and the remains of an old woodburner octopus, and generally runs too warm in the winter for really good root cellar purposes, though I do store some food down there.
Some houses of course started with dirt-floor basements, but had concrete and/or other flooring added later on.
I grew up in a house with a crawlspace. It had concrete walls but no floor and sometimes it flooded over into the small basement space we had. However, the builder was clever enough to put the basement floor drain right next to the opening to the crawlspace. The biggest problem we had with it was crickets. For many years, we had crickets because they had laid eggs there before the house became an enclosed space.
Re: oatmeal. It can be served hot or cold. For cold, mix it with milk, yogurt, or other liquid, and whatever flavorings you want and leave it in the fridge overnight. For hot/cooked oats, you can add liquid the night before you cook it for regular oats, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it with instant oats.
My life has always been narrated, but the narrator is on the list. One thing for sure, I know she’s a comedian who likes to laugh at me (and at others).
IMO, if you can’t use a fork with delicacy or stop to feel the texture of a food through it, your doing it wrong.
It seems that the vast majority of people who participated in the inner monologue poll say they do have one. According to the article that prompted it, only 30-50% of people have one so we are well above average. Maybe it’s more common among people who spend a lot of time reading and writing in a public forum. I was hoping to hear from people who don’t have one because I find it hard to wrap my mind around that. My inner monologue won’t shut up about it.
I answered “Sometimes,” but I thought about answering “I’m not sure.” I can certainly think in words in my mind—I did so as I was deciding whether/what to post right now. But I am not conscious of an interior monologue going on all the time. And if I “take a second to sit in silence,” like the linked article says, I don’t particularly notice any “chatter” going on inside my mind—at least not right now, while there isn’t anything in particular preoccupying my mind, though at other times, when there was something I was worrying about or planning or anticipating, there might well be.
I have a visual imagination and often put things into pictures in my mind. It’s not anything like seeing it with my eyes and can sometimes take a little effort. If I’m somewhere, like a waiting room, with nothing to distract me, one of my favorite activities is to design and decorate a house in my head. It’s fun!
I have plenty of inner thoughts but I don’t know if that’s the “inner monologue” that’s spoken of. To not have an inner monologue, you have to have a silent brain all day long - that’s the criteria?
When I was young our family primary care physician was a man, but when I’ve had a choice since then my doctors have been female. I didn’t always have a choice, though, sometimes the local practice only had one doctor, who was male.
My possibly very sexist opinion is that women doctors listen better.
I have an inner dialog only if I’m either recalling a conversation, or internally rehearsing a conversation I want to have.
Otherwise my thought process (say) walking around the house is visualizing the next thing I want to do, picturing my self doing it, visually finding flaws in that plan (I need my left hand free for that), and making a better picture. No dialog, pure visualization.
Same thing if I’m driving - I picture myself driving some route, and ‘see’ flaws in that plan.
Same thing before a meal - I intro in my head the things I might want to eat, visualize myself just about to eat them, then decide if that’s a good picture right this second.
Is this really that unusual?
Again, before I was retired I could ‘see’ code I was going to write as blocks of functionality that I’d pound into a whole in my head. Beforehand or as I’m typing it. No inner person giving me shit about it.
