Almost. 
In preparation, I’ve done the Car-Car Shuffle. The Jeep is on the street, the RAV4 is in the driveway (with plenty of room in front of the canopy garage), and the Prius is behind it. I’ll have to move the Prius when Wifey, RN goes on her patient visits tomorrow. I hooked up the battery in the MG, and started it. I’ll need to find a place for Mrs. L.A.'s Christmas decorations (a sleigh and a reindeer), but then I’ll have room for the R1.
I have food packed, am wearing clean clothes (and a bit of eyeliner), have a reminder set about the biiiig trash bin for Later Shoe to deal with, and about to head into the blinding sunshine to feed people again.
Probably about as good as things will get, today.
Oooh, speaking of peanut M&Ms I have a bag stashed in my locker! (No FoxNews for me, thankyouverymuch.)
So dinner AND dessert are sorted. 
It’s a proxy for hitting the other person. It fulfills the emotional need for violence without actually triggering assault charges, and the possibility of escalation beyond one’s ability to cope.
In a typical heterosexual couple fight, she will often resort to throwing things when verbal isn’t working to her satisfaction because it’s symbolic violence and she understands that crossing the line into real physical violence directed against the man may well get far beyond her ability to contain.
Someone who appreciates the good stuff is not doing a disservice when they withhold it from others who do not.
HL and I went around that bush a LOT. From his POV … it is exhausting to ask for clarification on nearly everything and I often had a plausible interpretation of what she said/meant. So I wasn’t certain I had it wrong/ no clue. I was merely mostly certain I had it right.
Separately, she had a habit of tossing off comments assuming my atention was already focussed on her. Hint: it wasn’t. It was usually focused on the stream or words I was reading or writing on the Dope. She’d be 2 sentences in before I’d notice she was talking, much less talking to me. Late first wife and I had long ago settled on “I love you. I love you back!” as our way of opening a hailing frequency and thereby being sure we had the other person’s attention before launching a question about dinner or an announcement about a dinner date 3 weeks hence.
And this was all long before we added any mental infirmity into the mix; this was just about paying attention and hearing.
The other trick we both got good at was the detailed acknowledgement:
She: I love you!
He: I love you back!
She: You want salad with your pasta shrimp alfredo with peas?
He: Sure! (Wondering just a bit what exactly she just said but thinking it involved dessert.)
She: Ok, we’ll have salad with the meal. (Rather than just “Ok”.)
He: Salad?!?! Who said anything about salad?! The peas are plenty of veg for me!
Confusion averted.
Please explain for the cat- and gardening-challenged amongst us. What is it, why do you want it, and why do you call it that?
The only context I’m familiar with about wheat grass is as a common ingredient in the smoothies and suchlike common at “health food stores” where all the food and people look especially sickly and they sell lots and lots of mysterious pills.
Quite stylish. I’m sure a fine meal and special cocktails were had.
Some of the best flirting is the pointless kind. Sorry you had a cry, but it sounds like you both needed it and benefited from it.
There’s a difference between being scared for your own sake, and being scared on behalf of strangers. Agree it’s better to experience neither, but we can turn ourselves into (dare I say it?) Nervous Nellies by gratuitously importing other people’s drama into our own lives.
I’ve certainly interceded into public violence before and will again when the need arises. But I’m not going to get bent out of shape over two fairly equally matched contenders having a spat about probably nothing.
Two thoughts.
Please do share your links; that driving tour sounds fun.
And I’d be curious to learn why you’re backing out of the cruise? Dense crowds, boat food, boat entertainment, rough seas, “cozy” (read cramped) cabins, all the above? I’ll probably do a short local test cruise in a couple weeks myself and am curious to see what you think.
As I said to wordy in my previous post, you might consider getting a MS Surface next time you’re ready for a new tablet. All the portability, none of the difficulty.
I know most of us know this, but the whole problem is inkjets. If you use the cartridge to print a few pages every single day they’ll last about 6 months. if you print once every 6 months, they’ll print that one page badly, then quit because they’re clogged with dried ink.
The solution for people who print very sporadically (e.g. me and seemingly you) is a laser printer. Increased upfront cost, but vastly less cost and hassle per actual page sporadically printed.
My decade-old reliable-as-sunrise HP B&W-only laser printer was pitched when HL and I combined offices and she insisted on color, which meant we kept her cockamamie HP inkjet instead. Sigh. Anyhow, that’s over and I now have no way to produce a piece of printed paper. Or to scan. I expect my house-owner host can fix me up with his printer/scanner if need be. It’ll be interesting to see how long I go before needing to do either. Might be years.
We / I always called that “Bachelor ironing”. Turn the dryer back on for 10-15 minutes of timed heated dry, then when it beeps, hang up the freshly dewrinkled stuff. Bonus points for useless effort if you dig through the dryer first for items, e.g. underwear, that don’t need bachelor ironing and remove them. The others do reheat quicker that way, but why?
Yaay! I have loved that approach for many years. Awakening and jumping right in the shower is very much a workday thing. Doing that on off-days just wrecks ‘em. Far better to pull on a clean t-shirt & sweats or whatever, do your caffinatin’, breakfastizin’, and computeratin’ then whenever it’s finally time to engage with the world, go through the 30-60 minute rigmarole of full shevelment.
In a nutshell, post the pix to imgur or wherever you normally post pics for others to see, then put a link here to the pic on imgur or wherever.
Hooray! SOnds like a success. And certainly a multicultural extravaganza. Good on ya for raising kids willing to eat that broadly.
For clarity … Does this stand for Louisiana, or southern Alabama? Day drinkin’ and hushpuppies sound like just the ticket to get past a day with BIL around.
Good luck. Seriously, not snarkily.
Once more, into the breech! Good luck on a happier day. Is there any point in having a pre-shift group yak about lessons learned with the P.O.S. POS? Kinda like stone soup, if everybody learned one clue and shares it with everyone, the crew will get better faster which will make everyone feel better about everything.
Cheers all!
ETA: lotta new pics uploaded at the same folder as upthread:
LSL @ Sint Maarten - Google Drive .
Also, staying here: Divi Little Bay Beach Resort | Resorts in St. Maarten (diviresorts.com). Had meant to include that earlier.
Church was wonderful as always. Now that I and another lady are members, we were told to come up front at the end and everyone walked by and hugged us! Lots o hugs.
What I also love about this church is theres a 13 year old boy in the choir and he gets into it, clapping, singing, bouncing.
I had only ever seen teens in other churches look bored. This is inspiring!
Cats often like to eat grass. Goo does. Since they’re not allowed outside of the catio, we buy wheat grass from the supermarket and Goo enjoys eating that. So, ‘kitty grass’.
Here are some photos from their website. It’s not actually that well-lit in real life.
Shrimp cocktail (six large shrimps on a bed of lettuce with radish slices, and a side of cocktail sauce) and six chicken potstickers with teriyaki glaze for starters. I had chicken-fried chicken (they call it ‘Chicken/Mushroom Schnitzel Plate’) with salad and garlic mashed potatoes (we each ate about ⅓ of the potatoes), and the Spousal Unit had a salad with cranberries and walnuts. We each had three Hemingway daiquiris.
Howdy Y’all! It was pourin’ rain this mornin’ and still is. Anywho, I said ick. OYKW said ick. We did not deheathenate. Thus we have two gallons of tea to drink up. There’s also < pause of woe > a cake to eat up. It’s been rainy all day long, so feel good about the decision to remain inside and dry. The biiiiiig trash can will have to wait ‘til mornin’ to be drug all the way down to the road for pickup.
Pilot The book is The Good Life and while it is not a religious book, will make for a good Lenten study.
I tend to use mine mostly for text, but when I go into personal scrapbook mode, I do print pictures. That’s where I begin to stamp my feet and curse. Like you, HP or Canon tend to be my replacements.
After spending several hundred dollars on an Epson wide format printer that had multiple software / hardware issues, I swore off them forever.
Mine is a Pixma as well. It never did that until I upgraded desktops and started running Windows 10. The combo sucks. It took googling just to find out the steps to print photos (hint: nothing like earlier versions of Windows).
I’ve made progress! The pics are printed, frames, mats and ephemera cut and once KP is done, I’ll type, print, cut and mat the captions. After that will be assembly of the first two page layout. I’m thinking that instead of a four pager, this is going to wind up as six pages, like my career USAF uncle, because there’s just that much more material to cover.
As far as printing goes, when I do wedding albums, the photographer provides the prints (they do pro quality prints), so I only print text for the paying gigs.That said, I do like heritage scrapbooking as a personal project.
You owe me. 
I guess I appreciate the thought, but it’s a pretty big leap from not being crazy about the way Chrome handles SDMB reply windows on the iPad* to “what you really want is something else.” I’ve had MS Surface and Android tablets, and I vastly prefer iPads for most mobile computing. The Surface, in particular, unexpectedly got on my nerves. For computers I like Windows, for phones I like Android, and for tablets I like iOS. I’m pretty happy with my tech choices, thanks.
*Which was what I meant, but do you see how you didn’t bother to ask what it was about posting/replying on the iPad that I didn’t like? Or ask whether I’d ever tried anything else? Or ask anything? You just jumped to a conclusion and went full steam ahead. And threw in some MS Surface mansplaining for good measure.
I was running Windows 10 with my Pixma until last weekend. Never had that issue. 
Pilot - I’ll post links when I get home. Stoopit tablet…
As for the cruise part, FCD doesn’t like to cruise nearly as much as I do, and it’s no fun for me when he gets in a mood. Plus it’ll be a good bit cheaper to take the driving tour.
We’ve put our bags out in the hall. My alarm is set for 5AM. We’ll shower, dress, finish packing our carry-ons, and grab breakfast before heading to the theater. We have to go thru Argentine Customs, then we’ll take a 4-ish hour bus tour before being taken to the airport.
Our departure from Montevideo was interesting - we think the ship got a bit stuck. The thrusters seemed to churn up a lot of mud and I think we got a bit of a push from a tug. But we’re puttering along…
Another short walk.
The commercial kitty grass comes in flimsy one use plastic pots. A determined cat can grab the grass and drag everything through the kitty door so they can spread potting soil all over the kitchen floor, hence our discussion of growing our own.
I have two clay pots that I am able to keep going all year long. One pot is in the catio and the other is in a sunny spot on our front porch and I swap them out and reseed as needed.
That isn’t an issue here, hubs listens to his computer through his hearing aids. Between his games and fucker, I am positive that unless he has specifically addressed me, his attention is 100% not focused on me.
I get his attention and then look at him while I’m talking because I am sure he does a fair amount of lip reading even if he doesn’t realize it. Repeating what he said back might be helpful, I will try to remember that.
That’s why I am so upset with this, I feel as though he has chosen to get old.
I’m glad you are having a good time on your trip, I’m starting to really get excited about my train ride in September. I’m going to take a short trip to California so I can find out how I like it and then the following year I’ll head across the country.
I don’t want to sound horribly intrusive, but are your monthly cycles starting to get different? Menopause can sneak up on someone, I started crying about stoopid shit when I was in my late 40’s and didn’t know what was going on until I started getting hot flashes.
We get low clouds which I just adore now that I’m retired. It was ick when I had to go to work.
It is supposed to come this way when it is done with you. Save some rain for us, please!
I agree! I LIKE my standard clicky keyboard. It’s what my hands are used to, which is good because the most of the letters are worn off now and I’m too lazy to find a sharpy and reletter it.
I hope your return trip goes smoothly and without too many stairs.
I see you’ve met my mother, or probably a less extreme version of her. My mother once hacked apart our living room sofa with a kitchen knife. And drove a car into the side of my stepfather’s office building. Those kind of outbursts were just the norm growing up. The fucking irony of this is that one day when she got into a confrontation with my stepfather (who is an abusive sociopath in his own right), he shoved her and she tripped over some boxes and sustained a permanent back injury. OMG you never heard of the end of it. Whhah my husband was so abusive. Whhaaaah I’m such a victim. She still identifies as a survivor of domestic violence, when she was in fact, overwhelmingly the perpetrator. She has also used him abusing me for her own pity parade, when she orchestrated the whole thing. She once said to him, (I was standing right there), “I’m beginning to believe you really did abuse her… just so you could hurt ME!” My mother’s combination of narcissism and violence is something to behold…but I no longer behold it. It’s so nice not having to behold it.
My Aunt, who has not spoken to her in years, is still terrified she’s going to come after her one day. And I wouldn’t be shocked if that happened. My Aunt’s therapist is like, “Oh, that’s just PTSD talking,” And I’m like, “No, no, my mother is actually capable of that level of violence.” Like yes, PTSD is a factor, but there was a very real threat of death living under her roof, she frequently confided to my Aunt that she was afraid she was going to kill me, and I consider it more luck than anything else that she didn’t.
Here’s to being a better Mom than my own! (Oh, and a better wife by the way! Much better wife!)
It’s a fucking miracle if you think about it.
Oh, boy.
Chicken Chettinad (spicy) with a little rice, saag paneer, tandoori chicken with ‘Indian coleslaw’, and garlic naan. Mrs. L.A. had butter chicken (mild) on rice and garlic naan. She said, ‘Two good meals today!’ (The first being the breakfast sandwiches.) I told her she needs to try the tandoori chicken. A lot of leftovers!
Good evening all. Made in to the gym between raindrops and pedaled off enough calories that I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about making an extra sammich for the evening repast. Like swampy, we’re still having rain here and according to the Weather Wizards it will stick around until midnight or so. So will be an inside person until tomorrow.
Itchiness seems to have abated, it might have been from having the space heater on too long and too close to me that was drying out my skin. Will dose with the hydrocortisone again tonight and see how tomorrow goes.
Pilot, sounds like a fun time was had. Never thought of St,. Maarten for tourists except for the low-flying planes over the beach, but after seeing your pictures I may have to add it to the bucket list.
Shoe, I do not have the discipline you do; a bag of peanut M&M’s in my locker would mean no peanut M&M’s very shortly.
Coppertone, not a churchgoer myself but sounds like a welcoming and friendly community.
Spicy, Yikes! So glad you survived that and then thrived on your own.
All-righty then, need to finish the internetting, write up the next weeks plans (will be much like this weeks, but if I have something to cross off it’s more likely I’ll do it) and then shuffle off to dreamland. Take care all and I’ll see you on the next MMP.
So the NFL All Star game was more fun thn the NHL, for once. I cleaned, I laundered. I’m having a Wisconsin Old Fashioned, poke loin, and baked N.O.T.
Sounds like my Grandpa’s second wife. {{{{{Spicy}}}}
As worthless as he is, he might actually manage to get sacked.
I have not.
But I pretty well understand how the emotionally disregulated share of humanity operates, at least at the higher levels of abstraction. I’m genuinely sorry you’ve had to live through your Mom’s existence, and now have to live with the aftermath of all the harm she caused to and around you.
One of its practical advantages is they all speak English, at least on the Dutch side, and 90% on the French side. The more Spanish-influenced islands are a lot less English-capable.
Yeah, sorry, that wasn’t a tangent I expected to go off on. Certain things trigger me I guess. But it’s always followed by this moment of relief when I realize I don’t have to deal with it ever again.
In lighter news, I had purchased a new bathrobe and didn’t really love it, so I ordered a different one instead, and the new one just arrived… it’s a lovely purple and so comfy I may never take it off. Perfect indoor winter accessory. I’m trying to be mindful of the little wonderful things that happen every day. This one’s definitely going on my gratitude list.
We also had a long visit with one of my husband’s cousins and her infant daughter. It was a good, broad, authentic conversation, a lot of it about the challenges of motherhood as we both had a rough time of it for different reasons (she’s a single Mom who decided to conceive with a donor through IVF.) It just felt like good, deep, real connection. And she and her sisters have been so loving and inclusive of my boy, it has made a big difference for us and him.
spicy Sounds like you ended up on the good side of a crap situation. Go you! And yay for the new robe!
pilot I’m envious of your travels. Hope you continue to have many more.
As to me, the only thing I have said out loud today (and yesterday) is for the google dot to play NPR, and then stop several hours later.
Stay safe and sane, y’all. I’m doing my best.
Today has been a day of laundry. Hubs rubbed scratched the scab on his foot during his sleep and got it bleeding again so he seeped blood all over the sheets. It didn’t get to the mattress pad and pillows weren’t involved which was nice because those are a PITA to clean.
Seeing as how my day started with dealing with bloody sheets, I washed the comforter because it’s been about a month and then I washed the cats’ fleece blankets. I moved on to clothes and then towels. VBC has had a very good day of burrowing into warm laundry and snoozing.
GG spent most of his day wailing because he still can’t find VBC when she is on a pile of towels and I’m not going to disturb her. If she wanted him to join her, she would tell him where she is. She’s a good step-mom but sometimes she just needs some me time.
We are looking forward to the predicted storm. I feel really sorry for everything folks in Calif are going through now, but we also need some rain. There are all sorts of weather warnings and alerts happening up north but but the snow level is expected to be at 6000 feet and we are much lower.
I’m really worried about you. Can you volunteer to foster an older dog? You would have warm fur under your fingers and someone to talk to.
While that’s obviously a very low bar, you are clearly soaring many many miles above it.