I had RAI in 2015 – at Christmastime! (I had papillary thyroid cancer) The low iodine diet was a real bitch. Here’s what I did: I went to a local bakery and bought my favorite pastry. I kept in in my fridge all week. It was my reward for getting through the Blandest Diet on Earth.
Hang in there: It really does get better!
I hate everything. Except kicking that squirrel. That was amazing.
Always be kicking squirrels!
Yesterday, late, the lady (Lady A) that takes my daughter from her bus stop to her daycare in the afternoons asked me to have my back up person (Lady B) do it today as her children are sick. This is all fine. Her kid’s bus stop is being changed anyway and we were going to have to stop our arrangement soon. So I text Lady B, who was going to be the fulltime person once the bus stop changed for Lady A, and ask her nicely to pick up my daughter starting today. And I get crickets. And then I thought about it and realized I hadn’t seen Lady B all week. So I quickly realize that I have likely been ghosted by Lady B and now need to leave work early to go get my kid from the bus stop. Which I will be doing. And now I need to find a new person to take my kid to daycare after she gets off the bus. This parenting shit is hard, yo.
Here. It won’t help with anything except probably your mood, and your drop-kicking the squirrel is what made me think of it.
Neighborhood Hazard (Or: Why the Cops Won’t Patrol Brice Street)
This made my day (or night). 
I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard! I was crying!
I was shopping this afternoon. A “service” dog came in with 3 people and immediately took a dump on the floor. Even worse, none of the people had a poop bag or even a paper towel. Two employees has to clean it up. What kind of service dog craps inside, and what kind of asshole people don’t have poop bags?
grump
Just finished my US tax forms, ready to be mailed in. Six pages to tell them I didn’t have any US income, didn’t pay them anything, and don’t owe anything. Simplified my ass. When I first moved to Australia, it was three - two pages for the 1040, one for the 2555-EZ. Now the 1040 is still two pages, I have to add a Schedule 1, and they don’t use the 2555-EZ anymore, and so it’s three pages for the 2555 (which used to be two pages).
I swear, being a dual citizen is usually handy, but at tax time it’s a pain in the ass.
My husband’s stepsister’s husband just died of Stage 4 lung cancer on Saturday. They officially diagnosed him about 3 weeks ago. He went to hospice last Thursday. He was in his late 40s, and just an all-around good guy. They found it because he started having trouble breathing, and his chest was bruised. Turns out that the tumor had grown large enough (or was putting enough pressure on things, I’m not sure which exactly) that it broke a rib, which punctured one of his lungs. It had already metastasized, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a smoker. Fuck cancer! :mad: 
A similar thing happened to a friend’s mom. She was short of breath, oops its cancer and a couple weeks later, she was gone. Fuck cancer, indeed.
My mother is the glue that holds a lot of her side of the family together. So it really sucks that she’s laid up right now. It’s a bit of a long story but, basically, my grandparents were staying with my aunt. My grandmother is paralyzed from the waist down and my grandfather has a illeostomy and both need help to live. They finally made the decision to go to the nursing home but, before they could, my aunt’s house was condemned. My grandmother was able to get emergency admitted to a nursing home but my grandfather is now officially homeless and has to stay that way for reasons I don’t understand. So now the race is on to get them both permanently placed in a nursing home and my mother has been doing most of the work. Then, over the weekend, my mom fell and broke dominate handed wrist. And she needed surgery. She’s doing ok now, but I fear nothing is going to happen if she isn’t doing it. And, right now, she can’t.
See, that’s why I like the Straight Dope so much - only you guys would feed into my twisted sense of humor and include stories of attack squirrels.
To add to the story, when I got to work late (after drop-kicking the squirrel), my boss was unexpectedly in town to present to a bunch of high level executives in our company and she said that the squirrel story made her a lot calmer through the whole presentation. So…I guess squirrels do have a purpose?
Edited to add that I can’t leave without ranting, so…
Today is elementary and high school summer school signup day. An email goes out at the time the registration links become available and then it’s fucking hunger games until the class avaiability runs out. I hate this time of year because it’s so intense getting a kid into a program that’s reasonably priced and not deadly boring. But that’s a pretty minor rant as rants go.
Had to pay son’s girlfriend’s electric bill last night because their power was shut off. They had the cash, and I’m sure I’ll get paid back today, but they couldn’t pay the company themselves because both of their bank accounts are overdrawn. :smack:
We gotta send that man a board invite or something. That is right up there with Evil Blimp, Insurance for the Cataclysmically Stupid or How to Dissuade JWs with a Katana.
This morning some idiot in a Volvo SUV decided s/he had to make a left turn from a side street to get in front of me even though there was not a car in sight behind me. He (or she) pulls in front of me and can’t ramp up to the 30 mph limit on the street. I kept chugging away at 30 mph and eventually was on his/her tail. After a block of this asshole poking along, s/he finally pulled over and let me go by at the mind boggling speed on 30 mph, the limit.
I am never an asshole driver, but this really chapped my hide. Fine if you want to pull in front of me, but make sure you can go from 0 to the speed limit in a nanosecond.
No, I do not want to wait on the line after my customer support request is fulfilled (yeah, right) in order to complete a survey on how great or lousy you’re doing.
No, I don’t want to rate my “U-Haul experience” (the truck didn’t break down and I didn’t throw my back out loading and unloading, so there’s that).*
No, I don’t want to review my eBay purchase of Northern catalpa seeds. They look like seeds, fine, but I won’t know if they sprout and turn into catalpa trees for at least a couple months.
And an old-fashioned, hearty “bite me” to all those faux consumer rating sites for every product and service imaginable, which exist to make money off ads for those products and services.
*kind of unfortunate that the huge graphic on the side of the truck was celebrating the wonder of bats, in the middle of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.
A good friend and his family are waiting for what they expect to be tragic news. One of his sons had a fight with his wife several days ago, drove off, and never came home. The car was found the next day on a rural road, police searched the area on snowmobiles, then brought in tracker dogs. They found his coat on the bank of a stream, and now have divers checking the water and under the ice.
Squirrels are cute. That’s plenty of purpose for them. 
I so need to find another job. I am getting sick of getting yelled at about impossible metrics when I’m not getting the backup I need (today’s biggest example: having ZERO available sups to help with a problematic account).
My mother has been hospitalized since Sunday. She was unresponsive today and the doctor asked me if she wanted extraordinary measures. She does not so we are meeting tomorrow about hospice care. This is not a surprise. She is 92 and has had serious problems this last year and she has been going rapidly downhill since the first of the year. I was in the process of looking for an assisted living place (she was living alone in her own home). It was becoming more than I could handle.
My rant such-as-it-is is that I’m now going to have to listen to the weeping and wailing of family members who haven’t done their share of taking care of her the last several years. I’m the oldest and it all fell on me. My mother never expected things of my brother and he took advantage of that. She would never ask him to take off work to take her to the doctor or for tests because he was a man and he was busy. (She has absolute 1950s beliefs in male/female dynamics.) He never volunteered to help out though he would sometimes if I insisted. Usually, it was just easier to do it myself. And, yeah, that’s partly on me.
Years ago my sister who lives across the country told me that there was nothing she could ever do to help because she didn’t live here. She said she didn’t need to talk to me about how mother was doing because she could just ask her, even though I told her that she wasn’t always getting the whole story. Telling her that that I could use her emotional support was met with confusion. But boy is she a Facebook-carer. I hid her from my feed because I got so tired of reading about how her precious mother was so sick or in the hospital so all her friends could say how sorry they felt for her.
Anyway, she is flying in tomorrow. My brother has been with me at the hospital for most of this so I’ll give him credit for that. I’ve been preparing for her death, I’m at peace with it and glad she is not in any pain. But I’m really dreading dealing with them through this. My brother started sobbing just talking to the nurse about the meeting tomorrow. My sister is sobbing on Facebook. I don’t know if I can take it.
Happened with my Brother - we showed up to hang for a random weekend, he looked like hell so we did a fast round trip home to get me a couple weeks clothing and my medications figuring I could hang out and cook for him and get him to appointments, he had just had a biopsy to see which kind it was to determine treatment, 4 days later he wanted me to call an ambulance to get him to the Er because he couldn’t breath, week later I was arranging his funeral.
And into the beginning of my 2nd year of the 5 year countdown, I agree, fuck cancer.
I ran into issues back in 1986-87 with whichever electric company was in tidewater Virginia - I would mail the payment from my house in Norfolk to the office on the payment stub as visible through the envelope as Norfolk, and it would go from Norfolk mailroom to Richmond VA mailroom and then back to Norfolk, where it would get sorted and sent to the local bank [um, I think they used Sovran Bank?] so almost invariably it would register as a late payment even though it got dropped in the mail at least 2 weeks before the due date. It got to where i would just go to the damned office and pay in person every month. I really really like autopay! True, one really does have to make sure there is money every month, but it does save a lot of agony.
[We have one bank account, mrAru’s military pension goes into it and that is where we have the autopay done. Luckily, his pension is about what we normally pay for the various utilities every month so that is pretty handy. Seems easiest to have the military pension going into our Navy Fed Credit Union account, he started it in boot camp =) It is , admittedly, the one bank account deposit that has never been screwed up though it got funky back in the 80s when they went from a physical paycheck to auto deposit, and did this funky shift from paying once a month to first and third, then simply every other week. I still sort of miss the days when they would have a bunch of Marines and a few bursar open a pay window in Dealy Center and have basically a few foot lockers of money to cash the paychecks for the guys. My dad was military when they would actually just hand out the money [I think I may still have military pay scrip from when he was in Germany in WW2. ]