Yes. That seems like excellent news.
And malaria needs human hosts to complete its lifecycle, right? Which means that with a vaccine, it could possibly be eradicated.
Right, but there will be a pro-malaria group of sufficient numbers to keep it alive.
Wow, that's so great. How affordable is it?
Malaria is free in most countries with or without insurance.
Here you can get it through your employer, at least, if you have stable employment.
I just didn't realize it was a mosquito net. And that it was keeping the mosquitos in.
It blows my mind that there's no climate reason for malaria not to exist in the US -- the only reason people don't catch it every summer still is that we eradicated it here.
DDT really was a wonderdrug for Malaria.
And for getting rid of larger birds.
I feel a little bit sorry on the timing. This would have been the news of the month in like 2015.
Just got home from Yellowstone. The grand canyon of the Yellowstone continues to be amazing, even if not that well known. Old Faithful as impressive as ever. Giant prismatic spring -- holy shit.
Old Faithful made me wait around for a long time. I assume the 'Faithful' refers to sexual morals and not punctuality.
Wait. Malaria was a thing in the US until DDT? I didn't know that.
Yep. That's why the CDC headquarters is in Atlanta: https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/index.html
CDC's origins are closely linked to malaria control activities in the US. On July 1, 1946, in Atlanta, the Communicable Disease Center was created as a new component of the U.S. Public Health Service. The new center was the direct successor of the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, an agency established in 1942 to limit the impact of malaria and other vector-borne diseases (such as murine typhus) in the southeastern US during World War II. The center was located in Atlanta (rather than Washington, DC) because the South was the area of the country with the most malaria transmission.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/history_cdc.html
The City that's too infested to Hate.
20: I maybe was not very patient at 14.
A major moment in post-Covid life: I shook hands with someone this week. The painting crew came to the house to start the job, everyone outdoors and masked, the leader put out his hand tentatively and said something like do you shake hands. I'm vaccinated, I answered, and we shook. A bit awkward but handwhakes always are, and satisfying to have an awkwardness that was normal.
The equivalent moment at the height of America's previous pandemic was my first experience with condom free sex long long ago. To my recollection that was both more awkward and more satisfying.
Homeowner/parent nonsense. The toilet in our half-bath broke last week.[1] Mr. 8 used the other bathroom.... but he wasn't willing to poop there, or to mention that to us, so this weekend started with abdominal-pain constipation and then accidents, which he says he never notices. Ugh.
Fixing this turns out to need a replacement, since a whole tank for this model is hard to come by (and our plumber doesn't want to use a generic tank? I'm not sure what the issue is there), so we're toilet-shopping, which is a strange multi-axis optimization problem, where half of the variables you didn't even know you were supposed to care about (skirted base? comfort height?) and what you really want to know is if it will work well and not be terrible to clean, and the review sites have reviewed a different random subset than you can find out about, and the subset the plumber can get for us is different still.
1: I had previously fixed a leak-into-the-bowl by replacing all the tank-to-bowl gaskets and hardware, a slight drip out of one of the tank bolts developed, and then in trying to tighten it any more I cracked the tank, just like you're not supposed to do.
Nothing looks as generic as a generic tank. Your plumber is right.
Los traficantes dicen, "¿Plata o plomo?"; yo digo: "¿Por qué no los dos?"
so we're toilet-shopping, which is a strange multi-axis optimization problem, where half of the variables you didn't even know you were supposed to care about (skirted base? comfort height?) and what you really want to know is if it will work well and not be terrible to clean, and the review sites have reviewed a different random subset than you can find out about, and the subset the plumber can get for us is different still.
WE ARE TOOOO! We can compare notes!! Our goddamn toilet gets clogged literally multiple times a day. Buying a toilet is confounding.
Jammies is kind of into this one because shmutz can't accumulate around the little bolts like a normal toilet. I have no opinions on anything except that I want to get the least wasteful thing that will flush like a champ.
A button, not a lever. Very European for your-a-peeing.
We have a pressure assist that came with the house and it gets shit done. I had to replace the pressure tank last year when it started leaking and getting a replacement was easy so I assume they still make the whole unit too. Extra bonus, since it's under pressure they technically have to put a warning on the inner tank that it could unexpectedly explode so every time you go to the bathroom you can pretend it's a life threatening adventure.
So what you're telling me is Trump was right about the toilet thing?
If you go want something that will flush like a champ, you need an overhead tank activated by a lever with a dangling chain. But I don't suppose any body has made them for 50 years.
"Gets Shit done" A plus; would steal joke.
You do not, under any circumstances, for any bathroom, for any location, any place, for any reason, ever want to get a German-style shelf toilet. Ever. Just don't.
Unrelatedly, except that it is also shit, my GP cancelled my vax appointment this morning an hour before it was supposed to happen. Has no idea when they will have another delivery of the only one I'm eligible for. Has no idea whether people whose appointments were cancelled will get them re-scheduled.
25, 28: We have two toilets sitting in boxes next to our front door, and have for a month or so. Our contractor is a bit slow ...
36.1: But you can wave goodbye more easily.
I have no idea what a shelf toilet is but I'm picturing it as an outhouse toilet with an extra deep pit.
Nope. There's a shelf in the bowl. Your poop sits there, high and dry, until you decide to let it go.
re: 39
This explains the difference:
https://wonderfulengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/German-toilet.jpg
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-64e88618dc4d502482d8798f041d301f
It's great for frugal people who swallow lots of coins.
Ah, so the opposite, an extra shallow pit so you can grade your output. That's terrible since one of the functions of the standing water is to contain odors.
36.2 Jesus. I'm assuming you're far right is anti-vax enough that a 'make the trains run on time' campaign wouldn't work, but the people in charge of vax rollout are surely going to pay a price for this.
While watching NHK World-Japan last night they had a show about toilets. The built-in bidet toilets were called "shower toilets". I'm guessing that's a straight translation. Some interesting stuff in the show. These toilets have a 75% market penetration in (public?) toilets. The show discussed the socially-challenging research for proper positioning of the wand and for setting the water temperature. The show is part of a series, called Japangle in English, explaining Japan to foreigners. It is quirky; it's hosted by two puppets. Each short show has many little segments.
Ha! I found the Spanish version of the episode on YouTube.
Ah, here's the English one on the NHK site.
It's only penetration of your plumber gets the settings wrong.
Wasn't ogged an apostle of the washlet?
ogged is all about the soggy bottom.
44: I'm charitably presuming that the EU stupidly locked themselves into later deliveries somewhere in mid-2020. So Germany is still terribly short on supplies and compounding that by being overly stickly about categories and priorities. The predictable upshot is a lot of wrangling, plenty of wasted doses, and first-shot rates that are nowhere above 1/3 of the adult population.
There was a time in March/April when it was absolutely mandatory to have an invitation from the city to get an appointment at the vax centers. The city was only issuing invitations to people age 70+, with very few exceptions. That's when the powers-that-be decided AstraZeneca could only be given to the under-60s. So a major Berlin vax center with capacity for, I think, about 4000 people daily was vaccinating about 200 people daily because all it had on hand was AZ.
Anyway, if polls are to be believed, the national powers-that-be are going to pay a price in September elections that will determine who will succeed Chancellor Merkel. The Greens recently passed the Christian Democrats in single polls, and are starting to do it in the aggregators. There's practically no chance of forming a government without the Greens; in any left-of-center coalition they will definitely be the largest party. There's a decent chance that they will draw the largest share of party votes, though it will still be tough to overcome the CDU advantage in constituency seats. If rollout continues to be a fustercluck, say hello to Annalena Baerbock, first Green head of government anywhere in the world.
Skirted toilets look nice but are super annoying if you want to attach a bidet. I ended up getting a travel squeeze-bottle bidet after moving somewhere with only skirted toilets because we ran into too many difficulties trying to attach a bidet hose to the water supply.
Hey, out of curiosity, anyone else's tax refund taking longer than usual this year?
Wasn't ogged an apostle of the washlet?
Yup.
52: I guess I don't know how long it takes because I usually owe. I haven't gotten my refund yet and I filed in early April.
Thanks to ogged I bought a swash. One of my kids is addicted to it and won't shit anywhere else so I had to buy a second one for the other bathroom because that's where the aforementioned pressure assist toilet is and he was clogging the normal one. I had to install an outlet for it too because that bathroom didn't have a nearby plug. Congrats on stimulating the economy.
I had a federal payment which of course went through on the exact day I scheduled it. I got state refund a couple weeks after I mailed it in.
52, 55: It's too early to tell for me. We've sent the info to our accountant but I'm not sure if he's submitted it yet. We always get it in at or near the last minute and pay a professional for help anyway. I keep on meaning to save time and money and do it myself but never get around to it. Maybe next year, though!
I had to install an outlet for it too because that bathroom didn't have a nearby plug.
I've had to do this in all our bathrooms. The washlets have become so popular that in addition to various knock-offs, there are also unheated, unpowered ones you can install on any toilet where the incoming water pipe is accessible.
Of course, then you have to be ready for shocked delight.
That seems so wasteful. The outgoing water is warmer and already dirty anyway.
52: Yes, and you can Blame Biden and the democrats. The IRS had to send out 160 million economic stimulus payments between mid-March and mid-April, in the heart of the refund season. Refunds were pushed back a bit.
Any "yes, it's systemic" answer is fine with me, since it suggests that we don't have to individually submit the return again. Thanks.
Okay, for anyone who isn't quite up for a discussion of sexual abuse today, I have a hopefully less trauma-related question. I need to quit my job, as everyone basically knows, and I have a ton of things to accomplish during a hypothetical 4-6 months off, and we can technically afford it. However, I realize that my sense of self-worth is completely bound up with paid employment. The mere thought of "losing" the job (even voluntarily) makes me feel subhuman and incapacitated. Now that it's gotten to the point where I can imagine giving notice and have rehearsed what I'd say to my boss, I find that the idea of being jobless is more acutely unpleasant than the burned-out loathing I feel towards the job. Anyone been there and gotten over it? Did anything help?
Basically, I need to get to a point of monumental arrogance ASAP.
I feel like I am drowning right now. Tim is depressed, because he can't cross the border, and his boss is kind of troubled and abusive. As he gets more depressed, his boss's criticisms are self fulfilling. I made him go see his new PCP who upped his meds and referred him to a Buddhist meditation relaxation group at the clinic. Also recommended a therapist.
I hate my job right now - both because of the personalities and how depressed my team is and the work is repetitive at this point. We are all supposed to be getting back on track but people in healthcare are so burned out, they don't have the energy to go above and beyond to pull ourselves out of our quality metrics hole.
I think Yoga is the answer to everything from the corporate standpoint.
Two depressed people just depress each other. I'm afraid I'm going to lose my temper at work, and I really need to work on figuring out my next set of plans. I'm even afraid to go see people, because I don't feel like I remember how to interact and am so down I don't want to be around myself and can't imagine anyone else wanting to.
Also feeling truly disgusted that we outsource Data entry to doc*tor*s in In#dia in the middle of a humanitarian medical crisis there.
Yoga is the answer, right?
61: you and me both. Except my workplace is predicated on the principle that physicians are gods.
However, I realize that my sense of self-worth is completely bound up with paid employment.
Me too. No idea how to fix it. Sorry.
my sense of self-worth is completely bound up with paid employment.
I'm kind of that way. You're probably not going to fix a core personality trait in time to quit your job. Can you set up your next job prior to leaving this one? That way you have something to look towards during your time off.
I actively avoid thinking about the vaccine situation in the EU and avoid information about it, because it makes me so angry. I think this is literally the first time in my life I've thought "What do I pay taxes for?" I presume I'll be a raging libertarian by summer.
61. self-worth Tough and common problem. Hard to reconcile all of [ listening to colleagues, maintaining reasonable but not easy goals, and workplace problems (which can be deep or connected to influential individuals) ].
I'm definitely no champion at this, but IMO leaning into one's own neurotic style is the way to go-- if you're prone to anxiety, take steps to minimize effects or onset of it if you can, if you're disorganized, try to address that firrst or primarily. Basically trying to solve several style-of-life problems at once is a lot harder than focusing on the most important. Don't know what to say to the many who have a hard time focusing.
my sense of self-worth is completely bound up with paid employment.
That's definitely not me. If I magically didn't have to work but nothing else changed, I'd politely give 2 weeks notice and take up competitive beer-tasting afterwards.
I think my self-worth could have become bound up with my employment if things went differently back when I was a reporter. What actually happened was I found another job that was soulless and meaningless but paid about 80 percent more for less work. I never looked back.
Sorry, I don't mean my self-worth is bound up with professional identity or the work I do or anything like that; I mean being financially self-supporting. If I were guaranteed adequate income for the rest of my life (more than UBI, if not necessarily what I make now), nothing whatsoever would keep me at this job. That's why I think it's probably something I should get over. I don't want to feel reducible to my life's cash value. (And I have other sources of self-worth that are inhibited by this particular position -- much of my aim in quitting is to focus on those -- but my terror of not making money is really acute.)
I sympathize -- I have the actual work ethic of a house cat but I feel really weird about not being self-supporting. When Sally was born I had an offer for a job I hadn't started yet, and I put my start date off for six months, and even with a job that I was definitely going to, I felt guilty and unhappy about spending any money Tim made during that period.
I don't know how to talk yourself out of it. Mentally defining it as a leave, rather than unemployment, and having clear plans for restarting work might help.
How about waiting for a global pandemic and blaming that?
69: Can you access the feeling of it being okay-to-mooch on occasion, and you're just not able to sustain it? Or is it fundamentally an anathema? I don't think either answer is terrible, but they point to different coping strategies, IMO.
If it's the former, then the question becomes, "how do I support the habit of being in that headspace? what practices get me there and what keeps me there? what are the cues when I fall off? how do I get back in the headspace?" ie a lot of self-study and implementation of idiotic-feeling systems to keep yourself there.
If it's the latter, then the question becomes, "what can I substitute in that will scratch that itch for the 6-8 months, and make me feel like I'm "taking out a loan for college" and still being productive, instead of mooching? Like, acquiring training for a new profession, figuring out how this break pulls you towards the next thing, etc, if there's an organization to get involved in.
There may be cringey self-help podcasts involved either way.
Basically, I need to get to a point of monumental arrogance ASAP.
I'm in sort of the opposite position. I've been promising myself for years that when I do leave this job I'll take a break and allow myself a gap before looking for the next job (which might or might not be wise, I'll be a developer in my mid or late 40s who's skilled but well behind the times in terms of technology -- but that's my point I want to be able to make the decision to leave my job without worrying about that upfront). At the moment work is more-or-less fine but I'm so burned out that the idea of doing absolutely nothing sounds really appealing.
In my case I know I have savings, and that's what I would encourage you to think, "I have put in time and effort to be in a position where I can take this gap and be fine" whether that's financial savings, skills you've developed, or contacts or familiarity with an industry, you can say, "I have built up enough capital that I can afford to take some time off -- and that's the best thing for myself in the long run."
It's hard to decouple the practical reasons to care about jobs and money from the psychological. Like, my job makes me feel secure and free. I'd say that's more because it's relatively stable and pays well as opposed to because I've pegged my self-image to the American capitalist paradigm, but is it, like, maybe 10 percent of the second thing? Maybe 20 percent?
58: Glad to see that contribution of mine to the Unfogged lexicon lives on and is even being used to describe the exact sensation it was coined for.
It is a desire to avoid shocked delight that has kept me from adoption of a bidet. I can't imagine a worse (although likely caffeine-replacing) way to start the day than to get up on a January morning in Minnesota and use unheated water to rinse that particular body part.
At some point I'll get to it--likely when I get a bathroom fan installed, since that will also require electrical work. I think the kiddos want the fan as much for the white noise as the ventilation.
lk, I took a rather long (4 months) gap between grad school and my post-doc. It wasn't exactly on purpose; I followed AJ, who got a nice post-doc in DC, and although I maybe couldn't admit it, I was exhausted and bruised from finishing. I spent a month visiting folks I hasn't seen in far too long, then I decided my "job" for those months while I looked for a paying job was basically homemaking with a side of recovery. I slept a LOT, and I ran errands, and I made fancy dinners (and breakfasts and packed AJ nice lunches). He made all the money, but I did everything else. It seemed reasonably fair, if amusingly old-fashioned. Would something like that work? We rebalanced immediately when I started working again, no issues.
In a different reason to use the phrase "shocked delight," I'll say that I seem to have hit the jackpot on my very first date once vaccination allowed me to return to the scene--3 dates in and we're talking about meeting each other's kids and rearranging custody schedules (neither of these will be rushed (much) but we're both so very clearly into each other that the practicalities of making a relationship sustainable have become a bit of a priority.
I suppose it's possible that I'm in a post-Covid delirium due to just being able to be with someone, but this woman is so far out of my league and yet somehow into me that I'm choosing to roll the dice and just go for it. I've proven repeatedly in the years post-divorce that I am perfectly capable of getting my heart broken being cautious and responsible, so why not throw caution to the wind?
BG, I have no practical advice for you, but I'm sorry you're both struggling. Hope you both find a path out of your jobs and into better ones.
2nd 79. Best of luck for lk and Chopper too.
LK, just noting that I see your conundrum and sympathize even though I skipped ahead to comment on something else before reading the whole thread. I get the attitude and that it's a trap--I think others upthread are wise to point out that if you are in a position to take the time off, it's precisely because of the work you have already done--you wouldn't be mooching, you would be reaping your deserved reward while focusing on other endeavors.
This is likely to be the best economy to do something like what you're contemplating in quite a while--the job boards seem to be going nuts--a friend who recently had his contract position end at my company had literally six interviews within a week of starting his search and very quickly landed someplace appropriate for his job history and skill level, something that just wasn't likely to happen last year.
That said, if you can find a job or contract gig that you know will be waiting for you at the end of your time focusing on other things, it might also help lighten the mental load. I don't know if it's practical or even possible, but the safety net of a job on the horizon might give you the ability to give yourself permission to relax. Job searching is always, always a pain in the ass, but you'll have to do it at some point and having it out of the way would probably feel pretty great.
And BG--what you describe sucks. As I said above, this kind of seems like the time to be making a switch with the way folks are hiring. It's never fun, but likely to be far less of a grind now than in the recent past. Sympathies.
Thanks, everyone. I've definitely seen people saying that there's going to be massive turnover in the job market this year, as everyone reevaluates what they want to do and how they want to do it.
So... the idea with stopping out is to take time to write creatively and to be a more involved parent (astute readers will note that those are two full-time jobs). The third full-time job to pack into my "break from work" is some kind of career change, where I stop working to make rich companies richer and do something that is beneficial to humanity in some way. I'd say the actual reason I've stayed in a random first-job-out-of-grad-school for almost seven years is that I have no idea what that other, desirable career might be.
So yeah I have a bunch of problems -- in fact too many for one discussion thread. Maybe I'll just write a short, devastating masterpiece and then immediately become a wildland firefighter. I don't really have muscles, though.
BG, can you take any time off? I think my advice would be to take as much PTO as you possibly can right now and do self-care, maybe something more martial than yoga. I've been very grateful for the occasional days off I've squeezed in. For the social awkwardness fears... Boston meetup?
I'd read a short devastating masterpiece, if it was short enough.
76- I think you've been looking at the wrong models. The water on ours comes out hot from the first squirt as long as no one mucked with the settings, and the seat is pre-warmed.
87::The pre-warmed ones require electricity. Even if I tapped the hot water line it takes 30 seconds to warm in January. I know which model I want, I just need an outlet near my toilet.
Whoa, Biden supports patent waiver on COVID vaccines. I wonder who changed his mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/politics/biden-covid-vaccine-patents.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
85: We're going to Vermont in June for 3 nights. The package includes a massage. I feel like I have work I need to catch up on too. I have a ton of PTO at this point. No real ideas on what else to do or who to do it with. I kind of like Having enough that I can cash some out, but I do need a break. I was hoarding it for a while but now MA has paid family leave and we have disability insurance as a top up, thought the latter is useless if you have to care for family.
I've got extra work right now, because someone is out on leave, and our temp did not work out.
We also need to move, so figuring out which comes first feels overwhelming. Was hoping to buy but unsure if we should just rent a bigger place if the market is overheating and there is limited stock. Still trying to figure out which communities on commuter rail would work.
If anyone in the Boston area knows of a good realtor with comfort working on the North Shore (Salem, Beverly) or metro west/central MA (Acton, Sudbury), please send me an e-mail. I find the whole process confusing.
||
People say the Guardian is losing its touch after 200 years but I learned from it today that there is baseball player called "Big Sexy" Colon and my life is a little better as a result.
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Everybody in the airport is wearing their masks right except the woman who had to stand by me.
91: Not Sudbury, Hudson. So tired.
Anyway, it's been downhill since they took "Manchester" out.
https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article/3131643/illegal-trade-rich-black-soil-heilongjiang-robbing
Updates in AZ election audit.
1) Apparently are now demanding NDAs from independent audit observers rather negating the purpose of observing.
2) They say they are trying to detect bamboo in support of theory thousands of ballots smuggled in from Asia...
3) DOJ has written letter re concerns about lack of security of ballots, and plans to canvass door to door to verify voters in "select" precincts.
I expect at some point some audit thingie becomes huge over at Fox, but hoping it will not. But Rs seem fully locked in now to Big Election Lie messaging as part of midterm strategy (Stefanik potentially replacing Cheney in House R leadership is mostly about that.)
Just get a panda and put the ballots in front of it. If it doesn't eat them, it's not bamboo.
I'm not objecting but man, the various requirements for leaving here, entering the US, and returning here are a major pain in the ass.
Also to return I think I need a PCR test 48 hrs before but there is no list of acceptable testing sites in the US on the ministry of public health's website, though they do give such for other countries.
100: Which vaccine did you get?
Pfizer. It's only Pfizer and Moderna here.
Fortunately being vaccinated means I'm exempt from hotel quarantine upon my return.
One of my nephews who is 18 and got COVID back in the fall is refusing to get the vaccine. I'm going to try to talk him into getting it. I think he thinks he has full immunity.
91: I don't have a good sense of MA geography--how far West did mcmc move (presuming mcmc was happy with her realtor)? Maybe if her realtor isn't a good fit based on geography they can recommend someone?
It looks like a disembodied shoulder with a flexed arm.
107: She moved to Western MA, farther than I would go.
61,85: Inertia's terrible; I was very much stuck where you were in the mid-2000s. It took a years long campaign by my wife and father to convince me to look for new jobs -- my previous experiences had been in recessions, so I very much dreaded it. And, of course, the way I'd been sidelined in my current job led me to fear being exposed as clueless on joining a real company in a role matching my title. It's incredibly hard -- just the way you're musing about it is the beginning of a good path.
When my wife and I started the store, we both suffered from the loss of prestige of our former professions. I wound up back in engineering in 2012 partially for those reasons (though a steady income & health insurance for us both was also a big consideration). She's been dealing with self-worth challenges for a decade now; part of it is that the new identity (small business owner) is locally filled with jerks that she doesn't want to be confused with. She's found some workarounds, like investing personality in geek properties (t-shirts, etc.), and in being publicly supportive of her former industry, but it's a patch, not a full solution.
I once went to a wedding in Hudson. Seemed like a pleasant little town, but quite far from Boston. I definitely wouldn't want to do that commute.
98(2) -- You'd think it would be easier to see how many ballots each county ordered from the printers, and how many they have left over.
Don't tell anyone, but the straight line to establishing one of the elements of election fraud in Arizona is to find 20,000 people who voted Republican and are willing to sign affidavits that they did not vote. Unless you have people who the voting rolls show as having voted who are willing to say that they didn't vote, you can't get to first base. The problem, of course, is that these morons believe that there really was fraud, although it you lined up the number of ballots printed, the number of registered voted who show as voted, and total votes counted, you'd see that there isn't an issue.
105: A lot of colleges are requiring vaccination for on campus housing. Maybe that will tip the scales for him.
Good news for people who want to punch anti-maskers!
Gah. My bicycle was stolen off of my front porch this morning. It was locked, but the porch is enclosed, so it seems that they were able to cut it with some kind of grinder while out of public view. I found out when the police called from my front steps, as a neighbor had seen them taking it and riding off. Unlikely I'll ever get it back, of course, but now I'm extra-mad about losing the work I put into it (those fenders took &^%&(^* forever to get right) and the collection of useful stuff that was in the panniers (including the Respilon gaiter that SP recommended around a year ago).
112: I work in Waltham a few days a week, so Boston might be only one day.
Bicycle thieves are the lowest form of life on the planet (well, maybe tied with musical instrument thieves). I'm so sorry. I also envy anyone who is able to forget a stolen bike ever in their lives.
The bad actors in 97's link are near that level, sure, but there's some dignity in being more broadly dstructive.
As mentioned before, someone stole both my bike and my wife's in 2019. Hers was really good, mine was a 15 year old hard tail -- fine, but not really worth stealing. The police ended up finding hers after a month or so, but the insurance had already paid. I ended up with a one notch upgrade, still a hard tail but 29 inch wheels. She's still shopping.
116 looks like a Pyrrhic victory
The only thing about the present epoch that isn't crushingly depressing is that people are fighting back. Losing a $600 bike to bike thieves is really annoying, but it isn't much compared to my health and time stolen by the capitalists.
Some happy news, cause I wouldn't know where to start with the bad news: A friend of mine from the local arts scene, really great champion of the local Hmong arts community, has been posting Green Acres-esque photos and videos from her parents little hobby farm -- I'm not sure it's even that big, just far enough out that they're okay to raise pigs. So they've got a sow, who just had piglets, and the parents are pretty old, so my friend has had to do a lot of (totally incompetent, 'cause she grew up in Frogtown, I believe, no pigs allowed) pig wrangling. It's hilarious and cute. She said her mother grew up in SE Asia in a traditional, subsistence-agriculture Hmong village, and she much prefers this style of "farming". [n.b. I believe the plan is to eat most or all of the pigs.] So that's nice, at least some people are getting some well-deserved happiness.
Homeowners/renters insurance covers bicycle theft, but the one time I used that to claim reimbursement for a bike theft, our insurance paid up and then dropped us immediately. It seems like the advice is to not use the insurance for costs that you can afford, to avoid being dropped.
113.1: You'd think it would be easier to see how many ballots each county ordered from the printers, and how many they have left over.
That would involve trusting data from George Soros funded traditionally conservative election professionals. And everyone knows they are in on it. So the telltale bamboo filters it is.
hey, who was the blogger who died recently, who commented once here like 15 years ago about some actress?
So, my sister has a very old Chihuahua that occasionally poops on the floor and continually moves in circles until he bonks head first into a wall. Then he'll just kind of slide along the wall until he comes to an obstacle where he stops.
Fortunately, Chihuahua poop is pretty firm.
Not that I've tested it to the point of failure under pressure.
I have been vaccinated. AstraZeneca, by friendly civic volunteers. No side effects yet although, if you're planning to deploy enterprise workloads in the cloud, have you considered Microsoft Azure?
129: We had one of those marble maze games growing up. Maybe there's one of those in his brain.
You can get similar behavior if you run a Roomba when the waste bin is full.
If I recall correctly, a roomba can reverse.
It looks like a disembodied shoulder with a flexed arm.
With a sword in hand.
I went to HS in two towns in MetroWest (Marlborough & Sudbury) and have lots of friends in the area. Unfortunately the only realtor I know in Mass. doesn't work in those towns.
Hudson isn't very close to a Fitchburg line rail station. Acton sure is. Hudson certainly should be less expensive than Acton. For towns closer to a station, I'd suggest Stow and Maynard. Neither is as desirable as Acton, Concord, or Sudbury and you might benefit on price. You might also focus on parking at the Littleton 495 station. Living in a town like Berlin could work with that. I wish you good luck. Looking for places to live, and moving, is so stressful.
If you move to Dalton or North Adams, you can walk to the Appalachian Trail. That may be too far west though.
137: I really wanted Beverly, but that has gotten pricy.
Acton is less than Concord. Tim did not like Maynard for some reason. Also maybe something small in Wakefield.
How is Concord fancy when the wine from those grapes is shit?
You got a better way to get to Europe in three hours? then shut up and drink your wine.
Fair enough. Only the first two glasses taste bad anyway.
Sometimes the dog will walk straight into the wall too. But not straight otherwise.
the wine from those grapes is foxy
Anyway, in eastern New England Concord and Concorde aren't pronounced the same.
Place names that are shibboleths. A tradition brought over from Olde England.
Yesterday evening, I had to walk over to the bank to get money for laundry. I'm not sure if my town dropped the outdoor mask mandate, but I wear in the halls of my building when I leave my apartment, so usually I wear it until I get to the car and just take it off there.
I took the mask off for a bit, and it felt so weird to me. It was a cool evening, and I felt kind of cold, like a I wanted a warmer jacket if my face was going to be exposed. I think I may just wear a mask outside in winter. There are some nice stretchy wool ones. Fewer germs to catch on public transit.
The dog will sometimes fall over while seated.
I tried jogging with mask off, but I found myself passing enough people I was putting my mask on and taking it off annoyingly often. I'll try doing it earlier in the day.
