I’m gargling hot water with salt.
I’m sure I’m fine.
May the Fourth.
Look, it’s not clever at this point. It just makes me hate your fucking guts more than usual. Fucking fanwank losers!
Hell, you make the 4/20 crowd look like geniuses. And those guys are brain dead.
Good news! It’s over. I’ve never understood the Star Wars phenomenon.
They wanted us to send Wee Weasel in Star Wars garb, but he outgrew his Baby Yoda shirt, so we just sent him in planets. Close enough.
I don’t think I understand how to rest sometimes. I spent my Wednesday doing laundry and cleaning the house. Thursday was a bit more restful I think.
I’m back at work today. The project is behind schedule. It’s not great. We can’t stop talking about E-stops. I’m already exhausted. It’s gonna be a long day.
That was definitely doing it wrong. Mental rest is doing nothing involving an obligation. Even an obligation to oneself. Physical rest is doing nothing involving motion.
At least that’s how I think of “rest”.
The Bing news AI needs editors.
A few moments ago in the Bing page:
Beloved TikTok dad Bobby Moudy dead at 4
Chances are they will correct it soon, (it was correct in the original New York (Com)Post) and it is a sad bit of news, but my brain had like a scratching broken record sound when I saw that headline. Besides, I dislike the Bing search, even if it has AI.
Last night was nasal drip Hell on Earth: almost no sleep. I did find 2-3 hours of piece today; I took a big mixing bowl, tossed in a can of diced tomatoes, chopped up Italian long hots, chipped up Jalapenos, chopped up habaneros, some chopped up left over chicken, two chopped up slices of onion, and the remains of an open ‘pizza quick’ jar in the fridge.
I ate it with tortilla chips.
< ruining a Sheryl Crow song >
Sinuses…! Will be free! Will be free, oh yeah… oh yeah… oh yeah!
Sinuses…! Will be free! Will be free, oh yeah… oh yeah… oh yeah!
Sinuses…! Will be free! Will be free, oh yeah… oh yeah… oh yeah!
That sounds delicious actually.
It would have been easier to simply drop the habaneros in the food processor then snort the resulting apple-sauce like goo through a straw. The only good sinus is a dead sinus. 
Seriously, I’m sorry your head is acting up; that’s a nasty experience. I have become a firm believer in Dayquil all day and Nyquil all night. The perpetual drippage & resulting sore throat is just not worth suffering through.
It’s 6 AM on a Saturday. Now he tells me…
Please can this be the last month I have to hear about the British monarchy. Or is that a death wish since it is otherwise impossible to escape this seemingly trivial but society immersing “news” hurricane?
Got the full report for Wee Weasel. Mostly test scores. It says he has the social skills of a 9 month old and the danger awareness of a one year old. There’s no domain he’s not behind in some way. It’s just so fucking… pervasive. How can we possibly address all this?
I was hoping we could spend some nice time together today, but he’s being a whiny screaming perseverating toddler mess today, starting this morning when he woke me up screaming, "41! 41! 41!’ ad nauseam because he wanted something to do with 41 ( it’s always Numberwang) and it’s really only been downhill from there. At one point I was like, “If you can’t be nice, I don’t want to play with you.” I don’t know if that’s bad or good to say, but I am really thin on patience today.
If you’re an American the only reason to hear about it is if you seek it out.
You will do what you can and get the results that you get. Which is, scarily enough, exactly what parents of with “normal” kids experience too. They’ll have a different measuring stick, but the same idea of effort in hopes a result that probably won’t be fully successful is pervasive.
Yes, you & he & hubby have been dealt a shitty hand. Do what you can and know that’s enough. you’re trying a lot harder than many parents in the same boat. And thank goodness it’s 2023 and not 1950 right now.
I almost started a whole thread about this, because I don’t understand it. Like the whole idea that these people have fans is hard for me to wrap my mind around. I’ve never totally understood celebrity in general, but most celebrities are at least pretty good at something, like acting or being a musician. Royalty as far as I understand it never actually does anything. They just stage these elaborate events during which nothing of consequence happens.
The idea that anyone would want Charles and Camilla as their king and queen boggles my mind. (Let alone having a king and queen to adulate in the first place.) (Autocorrect initially changed “adulate” to “adultery”!)
A YouTube channel I sometimes watch is ticking me off. Fricking content creators acting like Tourons for likes and subscribers their greed is so transparent.
Sailing to a remote island off of Thailand to interact with wild monkeys with their young children and staff of go pro holders and ill- advisors is stupidly gross. Good on ya mate Riley, glad you needed rabies shots after bitch slapping monkeys who acted like wild animals. And Elayna picking up a stray street dog to bring home to family to cuddle and sleep with was your best parenting moment yet until you discovered it had an oozing pustules and a well developed case of hookworms. Dopes!
Or seek anything else out really. Would it be the case that one in America had to seek it out.
Lucky you… Being English, I’m stuck with the whole mess. At least I live in Scotland now, where it’s decidedly muted in comparison.
Anyway…
My main rant at the moment is a shitty situation with a friend, a PhD student I met last year. Lovely guy, helped me out a ton during my master’s degree before I moved away. We parted on very good terms, him and his girlfriend came to my graduation party, and said they’d come up to visit me. I wasn’t as good friends with the girlfriend, if I’m honest; I’d had a few issues with the way she’d been treating her housemate, a good friend of mine (both also PhD students, as am I now) but we’d generally got on fine for the most part. He’d been pretty stressed about the project when I left, and said he’d be really busy for a while, so I shouldn’t expect to hear much from him until next year.
Since then, his girlfriend has managed to completely piss me off. The way she’d been treating her housemate went from dodgy to straight up bullying. She started ignoring and avoiding me- stopped replying to messages, didn’t want to meet up when I went down to visit- when I asked him, I always got the reply that of maybe, but he wasn’t sure if she had plans, best to ask her, but she’d ignore me or make stuff up- but she still kept insisting she was coming up to stay, to the point of referring to my spare bedroom as ‘her bedroom’. It was, however, obvious that it wasn’t because she wanted to visit me, but part of her course apparently requires a trip up here. He, on the other hand, had said he’d really like to come visit with her, and seemed to genuinely want to meet up on the rare occasions I actually heard from him, just the project was taking up almost all his time and head-space, and the girlfriend was taking up what was left.
Then she pushed me over the line; a few months ago, he sent me a silly in-joke present, which had a note stuck on from her, saying she’d probably be up the end of next month. There were no details- no length of stay, no actual dates, and a follow-up message a week later didn’t clear anything up, just asked if I was going to an event here which was around the time she’d said. Unfortunately, although I did buy a house here with 2 bedrooms, it needs a lot of work and I’m slowly renovating it, so the spare room was not in usuable condition without a lot of messing around. I replied to her explaining this and said that it would be difficult but doable for her to stay, but she needed to give me plenty of notice of the actual dates so I could arrange things.
She didn’t respond.
In the absence of any actual firm dates, I had to basically plan for her to stay at any time that could maybe fit the ‘end of the month’, leaving me having to do stuff like delaying booking some building work, because they’ll have to take the floor up, and getting a spare bed delivered despite not really having space, because it needed a trailer, and if I didn’t say yes then there wouldn’t be another opportunity for another month or so.
The silence went on for 5 weeks.
When I finally got fed up of waiting for a reply and chased up - in the middle of the next month, so about a week before I was expecting her. At this point, I found out she’d cancelled the whole thing and arranged a trip elsewhere instead. I was more than a bit annoyed. Cancelling was fine, plans change, and not having to host was a relief, really, but cancelling without telling me? C’mon…So I told her I was not happy about that, if she wanted to stay she needed to keep me informed and explained how much trouble it had caused. Instead of apologising, she argued, claiming none of it was her problem because she didn’t say it she was definitely coming, just probably, and besides, she didn’t say I had to get her a bed, so that was my own fault…
It felt like I was being treated like a free hotel, by someone acting like a bratty teenager. I’ve really had enough stress myself lately, and was not up for being the only one putting any effort in, so I told her that if she genuinely thought messing me around me like that was OK, she was no longer welcome. She stuck with the claim that she’d done nothing wrong. This unfortunately meant I had to tell him that, although he was still welcome to visit she isn’t, so the trip with her wasn’t happening.
He’s always been the sort of person who tries to see both sides of things, so I expected him to be a bit upset, but to understand that it’s kind of an obvious consequence- you don’t get to insist someone treats you like their friend if you don’t act like one. I knew he was pretty stressed out, so I didn’t get into details or bring up any of other issues with her, just made it very clear that I wasn’t annoyed with him, but I wasn’t OK with being messed around by her.
He responded by sending me a message saying he was sure there was just a mixup, and he’d have a chat with her about it that evening then phone me back… then silence. I sent a follow up message asking if I could call him, which got me a furious message in response which very much read like it was written by her and blocked me.
I have since emailed him, several weeks later, asking a question about a possible overlap in our two projects and apologising if I’d accidentally made things more stressful for him. I’ve had no reply to that either.
I was down in the area visiting recently, and met up with everyone else still there from the friendship group last year. No one even suggested inviting him or his girlfriend to join in. Last year, that would have been unthinkable. It seems that, since I left, his girlfriend has managed to start fights with almost everyone on campus and has somehow convinced him if he talks to anyone she has a fight going with (which at this point means talking to any of the other students), he’s ‘interfering’ and ‘not trusting her’. In 6 months, he’s gone from being one of the most sociable, kind and helpful people on campus- the guy who was running as student union rep, the guy who organised a football club for some visiting international students even though he doesn’t like football, just to make them feel more included- to being the guy who comes and sits in silence on the computer all day every day and doesn’t talk to anyone except his girlfriend. It seems to me that she’s deliberately isolating him.
The one mutual friend - no longer a student- who she hasn’t managed to fall out with yet says every time he sees the two of them, it seems they’ve just had an argument, and every time the guy seems more and more withdrawn and stressed. Apparently he’s not seen or heard anything from the guy in well over a month now either, whereas they used to chat about once a week. The last time they met, the guy invited him round to a BBQ, but there was no follow up, and the weekend it was going to be passed some time back.
I was concerned when he blocked me, but the fact that now he seems to have dropped everyone is making me think there’s something really bad going on, but it only seems to be me and the mutual friend- who’s not a student- who are worried, as it’s happened gradually, and everyone on campus is so annoyed at the girlfriend. Everything I’ve heard sounds like the relationship has gone toxic as hell. Seriously controlling, going into emotional abuse. But, he’s a 6’ rugby player from the local area and she’s a tiny Latin American who just came to the UK, how could she possibly be getting abusive to him? 
She’s been spending a lot of time at his place for months, but just told her housemate (in what I have to say was probably the most obnoxious way she could come up with) that she’s quitting the flat and fully moving in with him in a few weeks. Moving into his tiny canal boat, where he’ll be solely responsible for everything, as she can’t drive in the UK and there’s no public transport and no shops near the mooring. It all sounds like a terrible plan; even if she’s not being as toxic as it seems, that’s a really stressful extra level of responsibility for someone who’s clearly having a very hard time with things already. What happens when he has to go away to an event, something he should probably be doing a lot in the next year or two? It all seems like a really bad idea.
Although we’re both based at different sites, me and the guy are both technically enrolled at the same university- not the one either of us are physically at, while the girlfriend is not. I could report the situation to student welfare for out shared institution, but… I’ve not seen either of them since October at this point, and I’ve barely had any direct communication this year. I have nothing to tell them but second hand reports, my suspicions and the fact she’s started a stupid argument with me and he’s had a drastic character change and stopped talking to me. It all sounds really petty, if you don’t know the people involved. Even if they did take it seriously, I doubt he’d actually talk to the welfare team anyway, he’d probably just fob them off with a claim that he’s OK then get even more angry at me if he found out I’d called them, but I’m getting really worried, and I don’t want to be the person who saw bad things coming and did nothing.
Minor rant. I went to Urgent care, and Petsmart was next to it, so stopped in to look at the cats. Its always a bad idea, cause I want to adopt one and can’t afford to right now. Rocky was beautiful.