I heartily endorse this sentiment.
Oh.
My mini?
Why am I getting zits and hot flashes at the same time?!?
(I mean, I know why I just wanna bitch about it.)
Admittedly I’m a guy who doesn’t wear bras but I humbly submit if they’re a pain in your ass that you’re somehow wearing them wrong!
Okay, that was funny. Thanks for the giggle.
I work with a 23 year old and we older ladies try not to scare the pants off of her when we’re swapping perimenopause/menopause horror stories. Between this and our parenting stories I think she’s terrified of getting older.
But I think there needs to be a PSA that menopause actually starts in your 40s. I’m already feeling it.
I grew up never hearing about menopause, except for some oblique jokes about it (usually as a part of misogynistic “humor”).
Now, I hear about it often in various places. On TV, in podcasts. And I think it’s good to normalize it, because it is normal.
(That’s my perspective as a clueless male, at least.)
OMG, this seems to have been a month where absolutely everything has gone wrong. It’s a wonder my roof hasn’t fallen off. Now the fridge isn’t cooling properly, one of my worst nightmares. It’s running, but not cold enough. I have someone coming to look at it tomorrow.
I actually tried to explain menopause to my son today, because he asked what’s the oldest women can be and still make babies, which came up because he wanted to know why the population rate was falling. Hard to keep up with that kid. But we haven’t fully covered reproduction yet so I felt like I was working at a handicap (while driving. He always asks this stuff when we’re driving.)
Sometimes I wonder what his actual perception of the world is just based on my half-baked answers to his questions. 99% of the time the answer is, “Because XYZ. I think. I dunno. I’d have to look it up to be sure.”
And I’m guessing that you have months before your garage can be a refrigerator again.
Wouldn’t be much of a help anyway, as thie garage is never a freezer, and not even a reliable fridge for long-term food storage, just drinks. As a worst-case scenario I’m looking at fridge prices and a proper replacement that will fit the kitchen decor and be large enough to be satisfactory to future house buyers ain’t cheap. Meanwhile the Ukrainian brothers have dispatched one of their assistants to replace all the smoke detectors and replace many light bulbs on Sunday and that won’t cheap, either. And pretty soon Snowplow Guy will drop off this year’s contract the cost of which I’m sure will be higher than ever.
In Snowplow Guy’s defense, I’m sure his costs (fuel, insurance, etc.) are climbing too.
A lot of the conversation in here has me loving being a renter, since appliance repairs/replacements are not my wallet’s problem. 
On the third hand, the guy loves making money. To be fair, he provides excellent service, with frequent plowing after even a small snowfall, but right now I’d settle for much crappier service for a much lower price!
I could have solved some (not all) of my headaches by buying a condominium townhouse that I had been looking at. These were places where you paid a fixed monthly fee and most maintenance was all done for you. Unfortunately these were hoity-toity places that were either affordable but too small to have much market demand as a resale, or very nice but too freaking expensive, not to mention the condo fee. A regular house in a nice neighbourhood somewhat further out turned out to be cheaper, and appreciated terrifically, so there’s that. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m being bled dry by all these sudden expenses. This was also the month that I promised my son that I’d pay for a fabulous sushi dinner for him and his wife at one of the best restaurants in the country, which – and I find myself using this expression a lot – ain’t cheap.
I went through the exact same thing, me and my then-fiancée (now wife). I wanted a condo so I didn’t have to deal with any of that crap, but you pay a huge premium. We got a house instead, and got a much bigger place cheaper.
We’ve been lucky though, as our expenses have been reasonable for the most part. And we apparently bought at the right time, because if we wanted to buy a place like this now we’d be paying 3 times as much as it cost when we bought it. (It was at the tail end of the real estate crash, when house prices and interest rates were extremely low.)
But you are right about the downside. You have to be a DIY person, or pay a ton for an expert (or replacement for equipment) if anything goes wrong.
That’s exactly my situation, though for slightly different reasons. I didn’t buy at a low in the housing market, but I did choose what I thought was an up-and-coming neighbourhood and boy was I right, though perhaps largely by luck. But we have multiple great transportation services to the big downtown of which we’re a distant suburb, including commuter rail, and so many new retail and food businesses have relocated or established here that it’s become a rapidly growing and vibrant community and a great place to live and house prices have gone through the roof. At least I can console myself with that as I slowly go broke.
That was part of our situation too. We bought this house when it was just an empty shell in a dirt lot in a brand new neighborhood being built. It’s located at the intersection of three major highways in the area, which makes it easy to get everywhere from here, and since we moved in the old drive-in movie theater was torn down and replaced with new businesses, and yet there is still more development happening (including a big apartment complex where there used to be nothing but overgrowth). That’s another reason for the appreciation, it wasn’t just a buy low situation (though that was part of it). We lucked out so much.
Has your real estate tax gone up too with the home value? (I wasn’t sure if that was a thing in Canada like it is down here.)
I really wonder how these things are tested? The lacy stuff actually feels really soft to the touch, but dealing with it all day…
If only! This stuff chafes (which I haven’t been able to figure out because the material fits very well, and shouldn’t be moving around enough to cause skin damage).
I bought two bras recently, and didn’t realize until I got home that the salesperson had misunderstood my sizing request, and had given me UK sizes instead of US. Fortunately, for these particular manufacturers/styles, the cup difference seems to be in the amount of material on the sides of the bra, which isn’t bad at all. The last mix-up I had many, many years ago resulted in cups with comically oversized underwires for my body.
Perimenopause starts earlier. It is a phase.
Menopause = 12 months without a period. It is a point in time.
And then there’s postmenopause. With some of the same fun as perimenopause.
Many years ago I was in London and visited one of the premier bra retail companies and got measured. So I ordered bras from them. This year they had a fire, and stopped shipping. So I got off my butt and found a local (still 1.5 hours away) solution. Well-fitting bras are well worth the price. And since she knows me, has contacts in the business and other locations, can give me recommendations which suit me, without me having to do the research. Which isn’t really a rant.
The rant? I have been sitting on my butt for the last week and eating too much. If I keep doing this, I’ll have to buy new bras. I’m already curvy enough.
Speaking of itchy lacy stuff, I cannot wear Triumph. I have no idea what they do, but just trying one of their bras on makes me itch.
I would like to register a complaint with management about that.
I run hot. Hot flashes for someone who’s already running her tail off (“your lobby is so cold!” “Well it’s pretty toasty back here!”) I swear to 
It certainly is a thing here. It’s what pays for schools and municipal infrastructure. The property tax is based on something called an “assessment”, but the assessment is a fiction that is quite different from actual appraised value. Property taxes here have only been rising roughly in pace with inflation even as property values tripled. If property taxes actually tracked real market value they’d be extortionate and unaffordable. OTOH, they’ve always been very high to begin with here compared with urban properties back in the Big City.
Thanks, that makes sense.
My biggest issue right now is not hot flashes but executive function. It makes ADHD a lot worse. But at this point it really comes and goes. I can be out of it for months and then for the last month or so I’ve been pretty clear-headed. I mean, relatively. I still have ADHD!
That and fatigue, dear God. But I’m getting tested for sleep apnea next week. I hope it’s that easy.
Everything you said is identical to how it’s done here, including the “assessment” which is completely different from a real appraisal and is based on who knows what. 
A small happy anti-rant as I sit here contemplating my various woes. I love the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, who is a conservative, but conservative in a good way, IMHO. He’s a practical no-nonsense guy who’s done a lot of things I like, like completely eliminate annual car license renewal fees for private cars and soon thereafter eliminated the free renewals altogether which under the circumstances had become pretty pointless.
He also stopped the practice of police using photo radar, wherein automated equipment in a roadside van snaps a picture of a speeding vehicle and the registered owner (not the driver, who obviously can’t be identified) gets the ticket, an obviously flawed system. There was a lot of backlash from goody-two-shoes types who thought it would reduce safety, but that was bullshit because unlike police patrols it did nothing to curtail truly dangerous drivers, like drunks or distracted drivers.
In fact some years ago, an automotive writer for a local newspaper wrote about how he happened to be behind some lunatic on an expressway who was driving erratically and wildly changing lanes, and zipped right by one of those photo-radar vans parked at the roadside. The reporter stopped behind the police van and asked the officer if he’d seen that nut and why he wasn’t going after him. The officer basically told him to piss off and stop bothering him. Such was photo radar and its awesome impact on traffic safety!
I mention all this as a preface to my anti-rant. Since that time, some muncipalities – including my own – have started to set up fixed photo radar devices mounted on light poles on certain streets. There happens to be a section of street that I always drive when going to and from the local shopping area that is thus equipped, and I frequently forget that it’s there and go faster than the limit, but fortunately haven’t yet exceeded the threshold. But on the news today, I heard that Doug Ford had introduced legislation that would outlaw those stupid speed traps, which he considered a pure cash grab and ineffective at improving safety.
Some of my liberal friends criticize me for supporting “a right-wing troglodyte” like Doug Ford, but that’s why I do it. He’s actually a very moderate conservative.
As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing wrong with conservatism (small c) as a reasoned political stance. But the field has become so polarized that one can’t use the term today without igniting a flamewar…