GLARE
In all seriousness, we had crockpot dinner. It was low effort. He did help shred the chicken after I put on my big girl pants and told him that I was frustrated.
Another “went on vacation - did not get the right weather” rant.
Go to England they said, it’s cool and damp there. So we did. And ended up in London on the hottest day of 2023 - after a week of sweating on a canal boat during a heat wave. We had booked rooms at a rather nice hotel in Kensington for just a bit over 300GBP/per night. With blessed air conditioning, yes? Nope. Not in our room. And, of course, the entire hotel was fully booked so ‘sucks to be you, we’re terribly sorry, here’s a fan and you can open the window 6 centimetres and no we can’t remove the safety chain so the windows can be opened further because safety’.
Finally fell asleep after a cold shower and the fire alarm went off. We were so disoriented and generally disgusted that we figured it was just in our room. It wasn’t. But it was a false alarm which we discovered when it stopped and we stuck our heads out of the room.
The only bright side was that I had suspected COVID the previous week (really more like a summer cold) and lost the ability to smell. Good because I couldn’t smell my sweaty self nor any of my sweaty friends.
Oooh, he helped make the food he was gonna eat anyway?
I say: you get $100 to spend on something YOU wanna do, while he wrangles the kids AND does laundry. And starts dinner.
Trade for a day. What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander.
Totally get why it would be stressful to be on your own for a day. My husband works all day Saturday and I only have one kid and it’s lonely and hard. (We recently changed this a bit so it’s a past problem.)
But husband was putting his heart into something cool for the kid. That’s kinda sweet.
I’m hurting today. I offhandedly mentioned that I was going to take a look at Wee Weasel’s mess of a closet and Spouse Weasel got it into his head to do the whole thing, so he kind of took over my project and I mostly just sat there in pain telling him what stuff to throw away. Not exactly how I’d planned to spend my entire morning. At least it’s done, though.
And I finally set up the Roomba. MIL got us one at least six months ago (after we told her we weren’t sure because we have a toddler, sigh.) and it took me that long to get around to setting it up. It’s a dumb motherfucker, but it’s cute. Kid’s predictably obsessed. I can tell you right now he’s going to be messing with it at 4am tomorrow while we’re trying to sleep.
My old house had a half bath off the kitchen with the hot and cold faucets reversed. It took me a little while to adjust to this, and I came to pretty much the same conclusion as you: more trouble than it was worth to try to get the plumbing replaced. When I sold the house the new owner was a house flipper who all but gutted and rebuilt the interior. I wondered once what was done with the half bath.
Fucking Windows.
This morning, my computer decided that all of my files were read-only. It took about an hour to undo, which was annoying, but the most annoying thing is the pointlessness of it all. There should be a setting for “this is my own god-damned computer, I’m not sharing it with anyone, and I am allowed to access every single file on it.”
(Solution, for those who care, was to log in as an administrator and globally change the permission so the group Everyone has access to everything, and then click “okay” eleventy-billion times when it refused to change the permissions for individual system folders and folders brought over from old computers, which were also mine. Figuring out the solution and relentlessly clicking “okay” took most of the time; the rest was waiting on the machine to make the changes.)
LOL, I was about to respond that there is such a thing, it’s called administrator access, then you mentioned that in the beginning of the very next paragraph.
Even as Administrator there are files I can’t access. Usually these are system files I’m not competent to mess with, so I don’t care, but occasionally legacy files, like pictures or music, from an old computer where I gave myself a different username (lastname instead of fullname).
Yeah, then you have to go into advanced properties, change ownership, then give admin access. That’s when Windows can be a real pain in the ass. I’ve had to deal with that issue many times in my career, it’s especially annoying when it happens in the Registry Editor.
You just completely neutered substantially 100% of Window’s defenses to malware. That was IMO not a smart move.
Understanding why stuff appeared to be read-only all of a sudden and resolving that would have been a better move. Typically that’s a slightly bunged up profile that can be repaired by simply logging off and back on and / or a reboot.
That’s a good point, going in and taking ownership of every file willy-nilly is not a move I would have made. If it was restricted to a particular set of folders I know I should be able to access (such as documents) then I’d be comfortable. Not system files or even program files.
Resetting every file folder and file ACL to Full Access for Everyone is far more destructive thing to do. That machine is now 100% naked to any malware that ever begins to execute.
It’s sort of like saying that you had trouble with your key one day, so you removed all the doors in your house.
See, I’m quite ignorant about computer security. I just want access to my damn files. So now I learn I’m more susceptible to malware, because of something Windows did that I had to fix (I need access to my files).
Great.
I don’t have the time, or, frankly, the inclination to sort this out properly. I really wish there was some way of just not having background systems screw everything up.
That’s a good point. The unfortunate flip side to this is that file protection/ownership issues most often arise in emergency situations, most typically when using a replacement computer for desperately needed urgent access to data saved on the previous one. At which point Windows goes into Full Security High Alert mode and refuses access to anything inside the private “Users” folder where almost all user documents are typically stored. Because although you may be logged in as Wolfpup on the new computer, the files previously owned by Wolfpup on the old computer have a different security ID (objectSid), and Windows goes “I don’t know you. Go away or I shall taunt you a second time!” And this of course always happens in the middle of a crisis!
Though I do appreciate the heads-up, and something this week I’ll spend another hour perhaps giving my individual self access to everything but removing it from Everyone.
Oooh. It’s never a good sign when you recount a memory from your past and your therapist has to struggle to compose herself. She’s typically very composed, but we had never explored my history in detail. We’re doing good work and she warned me I was going to be shaken up for a while, and yeah, I am. A day in the life of the “clinically fascinating” as I like to call myself.
In completely Other News, how can you tell if you got a shitty roomba or are all roombas just shitty? I have to rescue the thing constantly and it can never find its way home.
We have a Shark vacuum that gives us no end of trouble. It’s always getting stuck or clogged or needs to charge or just defiantly doing the opposite of what we tell it to do. On the other hand, even a half-assed daily vacuuming makes a world of difference to the cleanliness of the house, and with four dogs it’s not an easy job!
In all fairness, I had to dump out the filter and there was a TON of dust in there. Poor thing got trapped under the TV stand and wore down its battery somehow. 
You mentioned before that your kid would probably be obsessed with the vacuum…I have to admit that when we first got it, I would just stand and watch it too! 