We’re staying at a place about 40 to 60 minutes north of Tokyo by train, and there wasn’t just one suicide by jumping in front of a train, but three, all in this general area.
The trains stop, and people have to find alternate routes, and the lines that are running become insanely crowded. It added another 45 minutes today the trip.
That’s a lot of jumpers.
I encountered this a couple times in Europe and was taken by surprise
by how chaotic travel could become.
I feel bad for the people and their families, but good god, it inconveniences a lot of people.
Thank you! It’s an ordinary day for me. My son has therapy tonight so both he and my husband will be out this evening. Also, I have virtual therapy, but I definitely need it, so that’s not a bad thing.
I plan to leave work early, at least.
Plan tonight is to change the electronic door lock (the one we have is old and needs to be replaced.) I’m hoping it takes 15 minutes but you never know.
Then maybe spend some time on my current video game.
I don’t really mind the alone time.
I’m thankful I made it to 43. A lot of people don’t. Every year is another miracle, really. Another year I get to spend with my son and my husband.
My husband: What day is it today?
My son: excited Mama’s birthday!
My husband: And what does that mean?
My son: That means six days until my birthday!
Kid’s got his priorities straight. He’s getting SO spoiled this weekend. His first laptop, Steam account, and Minecraft! He has no idea. For me that’s the real birthday gift. I love bringing him joy.
I’m pretty late to this, but I didn’t realize how much of a piece of shit Richard Dawkins has become.
I mean I knew he’s an anti-trans bigot, right up to including him calling for a female assigned at birth athlete to be banned, merely because she doesn’t look like his idea of a “real” woman.
While inexcusable, he’s (sadly) not alone in such views.
But his section of The War on Science gives away numerous other failings:
He shows absolute contempt for the soft sciences. Basically, he conceives of a scenario where we encounter advanced ETIs, and scoffs at the very notion that they would even have fields of study like psychology. While at the same time pointing out that they would revere the hard sciences i.e. Dawkins’ area of study.
He uses non-scientific and self-inconsistent principles to basically conclude that intersex people don’t exist. I wish he’d written a paper like this as an undergrad, because then he would have never graduated.
He takes a political side, basically saying all the attacks on science are coming from the left, giving the example of Lysenkoism under the Soviets (because, you know, Communism). What a pity that there are no recent examples of anti-science by the vaccine-denying, climate-change denying, creationists who boo the very word “science” on much of the political right.
There is no free excerpt of the text that I could find, but this article sums up some of the problems with it.
You are all welcome to gather round and congratulate me, and I thank you in advance! I’ve been avoiding both garbage day and recycling day for weeks now because of crappy weather, and in particular, all the unusual snow we’ve been having.
But tonight, with only my dressing gown flailing in the wind and summer sandals, I loaded up the recycling bin with weeks of accumulated detritus (TBH, not all of it, but most of the worst of it, including a bunch of oversized Amazon boxes that had been cluttering up the front hall) and hauled it out to the curb. I am now enjoying a well-deserved reward – a triple dose of Bacardi Gold!
Yesterday my local council instituted a new food recycling scheme.
I got rid of a load of unwanted/outdated food from my cupboards and
freezer. 
Meanwhile, back in rant-land, the touchpad on my 16 year old Toshiba
Satellite laptop has died. 
I have bought a usb mouse which works,
so not too bad.
Although … this gives me the … opportunity.. to get a new one. I will need
to soon anyway as mine won’t run Windows 11 (I got the update extension by enrolling in the MS backup thingy somehow (I don’t think it’s actually backing anything up but I’m getting the updates.))
That’s going to be fun. 16 years of crap stuff to sort through !!
Tweaked my knee. I was taking a walk yesterday, and I guess pushed off too hard as I was making a turn? Felt a twinge, and now the next day it gets all achy when I sit and takes 4-10 steps before I can walk without a major limp.
Getting old is not for the weak, I guess.
You got rid of trash & had a drink; why are you posting this in rants thread; shouldn’t it be in the mini celebrations thread? 
You do me a great disservice, my friend, in trivializing what I accomplished with this tremendous and uncharacteristic burst of energy. It is like asking someone where Hercules is, and being told “oh, he’s just out for a walk” whereas Herc is in fact slaying the Nemean Lion, destroying the nine-headed Hydra, capturing Cerberus from the Underworld, and cleaning the Augean stables while he’s out.
I will also note, as an additional anti-rant, that my very kind next-door neighbour has moved the recycling bin from the curb and returned it to its usual place, so I don’t have to venture outside today.
I was saying what you did was a positive, not a rant.
This OTOH, is not a mini-rant but a full blown catastrophe! I have been outside every day for years, including hurricanes & blizzards; Hell, even the day I was knocked on my arse with Covid I still got out & walked around the block…once.
My birthday sucked, unfortunately. It took me an hour to install the door lock and then I hit a dead end in my video game and ended up getting really depressed.
Today is better, I think.
I got pulled into HR today to talk about FMLA. I truly did not know what to expect. I entertained the possibility of getting fired. This job has been so weird lately. The conversation was about fixing a technical error in the payroll system. I don’t know why he couldn’t just tell me “this has been fixed now” and this needed to be a twenty minute conversation that included my boss, but okay. They were really nice, telling me I was doing a great job, and I’m left scratching my head.
I also talked to the CEO about the board trying to bring AI into the grants process, and she said, look, this probably isn’t going to happen. She had the same reservations I did.
I swear this job has been an emotional roller coaster lately. I had an anxiety attack Tuesday during all staff, I had a depression spiral last night. I keep blaming myself for our funding problems and one minute I’m thinking I’m going to have to change careers and the next minute everything’s fine.
Then the school we’re trying to get me son into asked to observe our son in his current school setting, but the current school won’t allow it, which we already told the prospective school, so I can’t tell if they just forgot this isn’t an option or are pushing back and maybe they’re going to reject him if they can’t observe him. More doom spiral.
I’ve got to get it together somehow. I was telling my therapist that I have a long history of severe depression from which I’m mostly recovered but once I get to a certain stress level I just start thinking everything’s going to fall apart - because it has in the past, several times. So I’m doing okay, usually, for the most part, but I just have this fear of catastrophe hanging over my head.
Really. I’ve got to figure out how to cope better.
The fact that your laptop lasted 16 years is impressive. After about 5 years a laptop is considered obsolete, and after 10 it wouldn’t be a surprise for a laptop to be barely operational. 16 years?
That’s so long that it could have installed Windows 95 when it was brand new, and then go all the way to Windows 7 (and a couple of years past that launch). That’s forever in the computer industry.
Toshiba really does make workhorses, or at least they used to.
It’s a fine machine. In 2010 it came with Win 7, 2GB RAM, 256GB HDD and a
CD/DVD recorder. I upgraded to Win 10, 4GB RAM and a 512GB SSD !!
Everything still worked fine - not so much as a sticky key - until the
touch pad/mouse keys just stopped working.
A couple of drops of water may have hastened its demise.
I’d love to keep it - I could probably find a replacement touch pad - but
it can’t run WIN 11. It’ll be easier to get a new laptop than to try to get
round that issue.
Which is pretty typical for Toshiba. They engineer really good laptops.
It’s the first week of March and I had to turn the A/C on! It’s been 78 in the house for two days and the temps are going to be in the 70s and 80s for the next week. I hated to do it but I had to give in. This necessitated taking the cover off of the unit which should be ok since there are no leaves left to get in it. But I’m not even scheduled for yearly maintenance until mid-April. Grrr.
On the other hand, I got the utility bill today that includes the two weeks of winter weather we had in February. I’ve seen horror stories on Nextdoor about doubled bills. This was the highest bill I’ve ever gotten but only by $50 or so. I must be doing something right. I’m not sure they actually read the water meter, though. I dripped water for several days and it says I only used one unit. I guess I’ll see next month if that jumps up.
So I just told my husband I could give him some money for a rather pricey trip we’re contemplating taking in the fall.
Two days later I got a medical bill that is 3 times higher than what I’d been told to expect. I think that has something to do with the estimator not taking into account that it’s the beginning of the year and my deductible has not yet been met. They should know better, but they never seem to.
And now my car is acting like it’s possessed. My husband pulled it out into the driveway to do some spring cleaning in the garage and when he was done, he came in to ask if he could have the other key to it because the one he had wasn’t working. I’d just replaced the battery in that fob a couple months ago, so I went to investigate. The car won’t start at all - not even a little click, but the instrument panel icons light up and flash in all sorts of crazy patterns and the tachometer occasionally goes nuts even though the engine isn’t on.
Good thing we have AAA because it’ll need a tow to take it over to the garage. It won’t shift out of park, either, so I hope that’s not going to be a problem too.
Ea$y come, ea$y go, I gue$$.
I have a nephew with a wife and and 5 year old son, they live on a farm about 30 minutes from me.
Five years ago they were struggling, he was working as a mechanic for about $20 an hour and his wife was going to school and doing gig work, like delivering for Amazon and Walmart. One of the gig jobs was weekend farm work….she did this in exchange for housing, a single wide trailer on the farm.
The trailer had been decently renovated, but it’s still a single wide trailer.
Now my nephew has a job that pays almost twice what his previous job paid, and his wife has an even better paying job. They are actually making good money now.
But - they are still living in the trailer, paying rent instead of doing farm work. I think they should find a better living situation, but they haven’t. It’s partly inertia, partly the fact that they are outdoorsy and like country life, and partly the fact that they have multiple vehicles (4 or 5 cars plus a motorcycle and a trailer) in various states of disrepair and some vague idea that the can fix up the extra cars and sell them.
He was over at my house last night and mentioned an incident that had happened on the farm this weekend.
There is another trailer on the farm, about 15-20 ft away from their home. There was a domestic firearm incident with the man that lived there- his girlfriend shot him in the face. He did not survive.
And the woman is claiming it was accidental and has not been arrested. She has been trespassed from the property but keeps sneaking back in. I’m horrified, especially after my little grand-nephew was telling me about the really mean lady and how scary she was. It doesn’t sound like they are on her radar ( yet, but they have been calling the cops on her ).
I’ve been trying to get them to stay with me for a week or so, but they don’t seem as horrified as I am.
Fingers crossed, don’t know what else I can do.
That’s very scary. I hope it gets resolved. There’s no way I could stay in a living situation like that with a probable murderer living next door. Especially not with a child.
78° is what I set the thermostat to. Even if I had the AC on, it wouldn’t have come on.