Great. Thanks for asking. How are you?
I have a cold for the first time in years and I'm having trouble figuring out which of the precautions we starting using to prevent in-house COVID transmission are too much. Fire up the HEPA filters? Sure. Lock myself in a room for a week? Probably not. Wear a mask when I'm in the rest of the house with my family? .... dunno.
So, if I skipped going to the gym for four months and lifted nearly as much today as I did then (I shaved 5 pounds from a few sets), does that mean that my regular life is a good strength workout for reasons I can't understand or that the workout I was doing for months was shit?
You can probably still take Elon. Instead of taunting him, distract him with maddening nerd arguments, then deck him when he starts flailing.
I just want to be able to hike further. And not fall easily when I'm old.
6: The key thing to insist on is that it isn't healthy for others if you do the cooking. Someone else must do that.
To be fair, very few people believe me when I say that.
2: Incredibly sad that that's a sensible thing to do, and I miss going there, but I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long. Given everything.
This is the second week out of the last four the baby has had to stay home from nursery due to various illnesses. Full-time baby parenting plus full-time working from home, plus finally finishing up our move on weekends, has been pretty taxing.
I'm doing as good as I can do without spending too much time away from playing Civ.
12 to 11, and I am pretty sure everyone here believes you.
Let's see, figured out what was wrong with me, scrounged up enough treatment that I can think again which is nice (missed that), have had to deal with a string of doctors saying "oh my no if that sort of thing happened we would know about it" and thus am now almost out of medication before it can finish the job. I have been able to retrain myself to program again, however slowly and intermittently, and even work on a long-standing project, which is still my best value despite having the biggest concrete results from it thus far stolen by a former coworker, but as I'm out of resources and no references I'll have to abandon it to work at Walgreens or whatever until I get fired because I've reverted back to the withered husk of a human I was.
14.1: I have my doubts about the effectiveness. And it seems pricey because it's not like hiring a guard for services. It's open all day, most days.
Waiting to see whether my wife has breast cancer. In theory that's early stage if it is there and hence treatable. Also waiting to see how bad my mom's cancer is. So far it sounds like it's gone from a supposedly cured Stage I to Stage IV in a few months, which obviously makes it sound terminal.
My wife has been depressed since Kid 1 was diagnosed with ASD/ID a few years back. She doesn't seem to pulling out of it. She's never really embraced the whole urban yuppie mental health culture so it's tough to know what to try to get her to do that might help. She tried therapy but it didn't really stick. More and more bombs have been tossed out with respect to our relationship as we now routinely discuss how unhappy we are with our lives. Her moving out came up twice this week. I don't know at what point this sort of talk transitions from blowing off steam to something "real" which I think neither of us really wants. We have a general agreement to do couples therapy but neither of us can get up the energy to go find a provider. "Neither of us can get up the energy to do X" is a general theme.
Meanwhile we're trying to hold down our jobs, both of which continue to pay extraordinarily well for the amount of work we actually do. The low amount of work we do (primarily due to middle age burnout and our supremely distracting personal life) gives us both imposter syndrome and we're sure we'll be called out come annual reviews. I feel like this guy as I try to come up on a new codebase alongside a bunch of 20 somethings who have nothing going on in their free time other than rock climbing.
17: It started out strong! Welcome?
20: That's a whole LOT. Wow. Hang in there.
21: Thanks, but I've been around.
20: Let me join you in middle-aged-not-terribly-hardworking-imposter syndrome. And sympathize on the rest of it.
17: Also, sympathy.
Sympathy for both 17 and 20, those sound like really difficult roller coasters to be on.
I had a snow day yesterday and a holiday today, so I'm doing pretty well. Sympathies to those who aren't.
The snow is still coming down but it's supposed to stop sometime this afternoon. We've had at least two feet at my house.
Yes, sympathies to 17 and 20. 17 seems worrying to look forward to - especially if the drugs for thinking are looking scarce. 20, cancer is miserable, but it sounds like it's acting mostly as pressure on everything else. Making move out talk a habit is dangerous, if only because you don't want it to become a part of either of your self-concepts, so you feel inauthentic when you don't follow through.
I'm doing pretty well; my wife is beginning a new therapy that make help her back pain; it'll take time to see if it works, and it's compromising her immune system, but it's also a glimmer of hope.
Interest rate hikes have cooled construction, especially big developer projects where financing is more a concern, so workload is increasingly choppy - a few days of extra breathing space, then a few days of late work on proposals.
Oh man, I was going to complain about an annoying client for whom I'm doing a bunch of work, but now it doesn't seem worth bringing up.
After some squinting I unscrambled 17/22 into a president, but I might have missed the installment where part 1 of this went down. Sympathies anyway, that's severe (and 20 also).
I'm a primary caregiver for a friend of 25 years who is dying of brain cancer, my almost 80-year-old father abruptly got remarried and his new wife requires a lot of emotional energy to deal with, I just bought a new house and am overseeing renovations, my teenage niece is on week 3 of hospitalization for a complicated autoimmune thing that is somehow different from other family members' complicated autoimmune things, my therapist remains amazing, my job has been incredibly forgiving of the caregiving demands but I feel like I'm perpetually behind on everything, and I am going to buy myself an $850 illuminated floor globe because I have always wanted one and life is short.
Also my friend who is dying doesn't have a spouse or kids, so we friends are handling all her care. The group text chats are massive and ongoing, and we have a running joke that each of our respective therapists should be on a group chat with the other therapists so they can debrief together the way we do.
Unrelated to absolutely anything: Moby, the best way I found to get stronger for hikes was to...hike more often, for longer distances. Not super helpful, but fwiw.
After some squinting I unscrambled 17/22 into a president,
Goddamn I'm an idiot.
In other news, Naked Gun held up better than I fear it would. 3 out of 4 Geeblets said it's the best elder comedy yet. The 4th found it a little too suspenseful.
34.last: Have never actually seen it in its entirety. I should as we have been on a recent Airplane! kick prompted both by recently listening to a Gilbert Gottfried* podcast (recorded 3 years ago for the 40th anniversary of the movie) with Julie Hagerty and Robert Hays, and just now reading a new book Surely You Can't Be Serious; The True Story of Airplane!** which is basically an extended interview of ZAZ with a lot of great pics going back to their Kentucky Fried Theater days at UW. I think I avoided all the subsequent movies at the time to avoid the inevitable descent into suckage but apparently Naked Gun still had the juice.
*Sadly died not too long ago. If you like old movies and character actors and can tolerate his voice his podcast with Frank Santopadre is a hoot.
**Learned the Robert Hays part took a long time to cast, the studio at one point pushed Barry Manilow, and Bruce Jenner and Frank letterman both read for the part.
If you knew someone who was in their mid-50s and who had been using Windows and MS Office for at least 25 years, how worried would you be if they were unable to recognize that they were looking at a Gmail attachment in the browser and not at a file opened in Word? Would you be concerned if they were consistently unable to open files that they had downloaded, and sometimes downloaded a file four or five times before asking for help?
Asking for a member of my carrier strike group.
Not at all if there's a SharePoint/Office Online thing going on. Otherwise, maybe.
Anyway, Microsoft changed "downloading" to "opening from SharePoint" or some shit. I don't like it.
33: Right, but Pittsburgh doesn't have steep and tall enough hills and I can only leave town so often.
35: I think Airplane! is funnier. Naked Gun is sillier. But it resonated with the kids a little better.
40: I've heard the Zucker's discuss how they think one of the issues with the genre's evolution was that the "straight" actors started leaning into their comedy chops too much. Nielsen (with his fart noise device) clearly relished that type of role. In the book, Beau and Jeff Bridges tell a story about being in a dramatic film where they needed someone to play their uncle, the suggested Lloyd and the director said he had not considered him because he thought of him as a comedic actor.
NMM Linda Hirshman, who provoked a few arguments here.
President Ford: Not at all, unless such behavior was a stark departure from their previous technology skills. I've done a lot of professional work (via my library job and otherwise) on digital skills and they are a lot less binary than many of us assume.
A startlingly large portion of the US public has memorized a set of ways they do things like read emails, use mobile apps, write in word processing apps, create spreadsheets, etc. without having the cognitive scaffolding to understand how and why those process work the way they do.
As a result, even cosmetic changes in user interface can throw otherwise intelligent people for a loop. Even watching a peer do the same task (say, downloading, renaming, and moving a file to another folder) can confuse them if the peer does the task differently than they do.
I have seen this happen again recently with co-workers who are entirely befuddled by our new expense-reporting app, even though I have worked with these people for years and I know they are perfectly smart and capable. They just didn't have a mental model of how credit card charges were processed under the old app (separately by the bank, then manually reconciled on a monthly basis with their expense report submission), so when the new app processed them differently (bank integrated with expense report app, processed on a rolling basis throughout the month) people were totally lost and kept making elementary mistakes.
I never stop being surprised by what at-the-elbow technical assistance at my library job illuminates for me about how people use technology.
One last example -- I had no idea how many people scroll "through" a news article by randomly clicking on different words on the page. I don't know if they're doing it to visually hold their place, jumping around to read snippets, or what. It's so foreign to my beginning-to-end linear reading style that it took actually watching people do it to figure out why they kept complaining that the computer was abruptly and unpredictably sending them to a different page. Of course, the reason was that SOME (not all) of the words they randomly clicked were hyperlinked. But they didn't interpret them as links, so they felt blindsided when they were bounced to a new page.
45 is much better explanation of what I was trying to say. I don't like it when shit gets moved and Microsoft has been moving shit. I started with MS DOS and really never updated my understanding of file storage. I realize that copying all files from the cloud to somewhere with a C:\ location is equivalent of a Boomer printing their emails, but I don't care. Unless you pay me to care, then I'll do it your way.
I should have stipulated that Office Online is terrible. I don't know how MS managed to make the browser version of Word SUCH a huge step backward from the desktop version, but it costs me ridiculous amounts of time. The commenting/track changes functions are especially terrible.
And there is a reason that cars' turn signals and windshield wipers are highly standardized. It's because our brains can't concentrate on the big task (driving safely) if the little crap keeps getting moved to a different location. If only tech companies understood this with software.
That plus I don't even get the point. "You can share your document with colleagues and collaborate in real time" isn't a positive for me. Get out of my document until I'm done and then you can do what you want. I know I can lock the documents, but if I do what a normal person would do, work on a local drive and uploaded a finished file, it causes all sorts of problems.
45.2 et seq, Yes! Quit moving my damn cheese.
45 last: I do that, the highlighting random words as I read through! It started subconsciously but I think the reason is that without the landmarks of a printed page (top, bottom, right and left pages of an open book), scrolling through a document of unknown length is disorienting and highlighting random words creates landmarks. I definitely do not read every word in order - there's almost always some level of skimming.
If I'm going to read an article deeply I very much prefer a printed copy for the same reason. Anything longer than three or four pages if I'm reading on a screen I need to use a search function to find anything.
49: Also, if I'm editing that group document at 11pm on a Saturday night as I sit at a hospital bedside, I DON'T want Word to notify the person I'm commenting to. Good grief! Let them read my request to them when they open the document, don't bother them with an email late night on a weekend!
50: So interesting! Thank you for illuminating. And agree on printed copy for deep reading.
49: Version control and no more duelling attachments.
I had no idea how many people scroll "through" a news article by randomly clicking on different words on the page. I don't know if they're doing it to visually hold their place, jumping around to read snippets, or what. It's so foreign to my beginning-to-end linear reading style that it took actually watching people do it to figure out why they kept complaining that the computer was abruptly and unpredictably sending them to a different page. Of course, the reason was that SOME (not all) of the words they randomly clicked were hyperlinked. But they didn't interpret them as links, so they felt blindsided when they were bounced to a new page.
I'm confused, just reading this linearly.
We just changed our time-reporting software at work. This is a system with thousands of employees encompassing many office workers and care providers both, many hourly or paid overtime, and most unionized but with a range of unions, so it was bound to be complicated. At first I thought "This seems about as usable as the last system, the complaints I'm hearing may be dominated by those too used to a particular format," along the lines of 45. But then I discovered if I changed a workday to an (approved PTO) day on my timecard, it somehow thought this should add up to 88 hours in the pay period, even though the original workday was gone in my view. (Something to do with the original 80 work hours being in a "schedule" elsewhere that I can't change.) Even the payroll people who have to intervene each time I have this issue are highly frustrated with the system.
I'm with Alex on document-sharing. So much easier to have one central shared document. But the automatic notification of changes is super dumb.
You can turn off the notifications. The ones that come to you, at least. I don't think you can control what other people see.
I'm supposed to be finishing my response to comments on a manuscript.
I have a grading question. Every once in awhile I teach an intro class that relies on learning concrete, measurable information and skills. The HW consists mostly of problem sets. The most straightforward way to grade would be like grading a test: each question is worth X points and you get points off for being wrong. My intuition, however, is that this isn't totally fair. A student could put in reasonable effort and get a 0 or close to it if they missed the point of the concept or really didn't understand something, and it doesn't seem like doing HW wrongly should be the same as not turning in HW at all. Secondly, it feels that the point of HW is to practice the skills, not have already have mastered them (like with a test). This, however, means that I sort of have to subjectively decide how much to take off for various degrees of "wrong" and it feels time consuming and somewhat arbitrary. I suppose there's no way around this, but for people who teach things like math, are there easy systems to apply to give points for wrong answers that demonstrate effort?
My thought is that just doing the problems should be worth 50%, so if you do the whole HW but get everything wrong you'd get half credit, and if you do half wrong you'd get about 75%, etc. This is a lot better than a 0 for doing nothing but still bad enough to motivate students to learn the material and put in effort.
But anyways, I am hoping tips to make grading mostly mindless and efficient but also reasonable to the students.
Also I am building up a program and trying to encourage students, not teaching a large weeding out course.
I'm not good at teaching or gardening.
A substantial majority of students cheat on problem sets, which is another good reason not to grade based on correctness because it pushes them into cheating even more. I've moved to a combination of:
-Homework done in groups in class (graded purely on attendance).
-Optional homework combined with in-class quizzes which ask very similar questions to what was on the homework, and trying to convince the students that the homework is for their benefit.
You could try to do the second and also collect homework and grade it just on completion, but this even more encourages them to just look up the answers to get it done quickly. Keep in mind that they have 10+ years of homework at lower levels which is lots of busy work that they just look up the answers to because otherwise they wouldn't have time to do anything, and so they think that's what you're supposed to do with homework.
How am I? Very OK. Some personal/self-care stuff seems to have hit a snag. Trying to get a therapist, or meaningful psychiatric assistance, on a fully virtual basis for executive functioning issues seems so complicated it seems like a catch-22. If you can get it, then you don't need it. On the other hand, Atossa seems to have mastered biking in 2 weeks, which is something I've been working on (or at least hoping for) for years. So that should make getting her to school and some day-to-day errands a little easier.
I'm not good at teaching biking. I succeeded, kind of. But it was not pleasant for any involved.
I was thinking about going back to therapy, but it turns out my therapist has switched to online only. And I both hate online therapy and hate change and so don't really want to find a new one.
55: Is this UKG? They are trying to eliminate or drastically reduce the timekeeper jib where ai work. As an exempt employee, I don't have to punch in, but I now have to put in requests for time off rather than just asking and having the department secretary do it. No big deal really, except that it's annoying to have to put in requests for my manager to approve.
Anyway here's how to open O365 documents in the native apps by default:
And you can always open the browser ones in the native app by clicking on the button marked "editing" and selecting "open in desktop app".
[good lord, does anyone remember the cock jokes]
I genuinely thought this was about some canon of MS Office cock jokes that extended [heh] far beyond the "spreadsheet" double entendre set and... I'm reluctantly listening.
Clippy used to ask "It looks like you're trying to imply you had sex with my mother. Would you like help?"
|| Does anybody have any ideas/suggestions as to why none of my devices can detect my new Canon printer on the wireless network? Is there some kind of magical incantation? Maybe prayer? ||
Are you using the factory-provided rock to beat the printer?
re: 74
I saw some wag online somewhere opine that whatever the machine was that Rage Against the Machine were raging against, it was probably a printer, and I'm inclined to agree.
My own Canon printer occasionally decides to make it a nightmare to connect, and I end up factory reseting it and reconnecting it to the wifi.
We have an HP printer and I can't remember how we connected it to the new wifi. I think it involved hitting a button the router and one on the printer.
For a while I kept printing HPs, but then Ace and Rascal came along.
Oddly, I had switched to online therapy in roughly 2018, as my therapist had been commuting from his suburb to my city one day a week to see a few clients (including me) and got tired of it. So when the pandemic hit we hardly had to change at all. I don't think I would like trying to develop rapport with someone new that way, but with a bunch of history already it wasn't terrible.
80: the first two are officially Hawaiian Punch and Hokey Pokey.
Forecast calls for another foot of snow tonight and into tomorrow. Five-day weekend!
I wish we'd had a check in thread at the time because about three weeks ago I was watching a talk by a visiting prof here and got a text from my brother in NY, "Hey. I just wanna say that I love you and I'm sorry. Have a good day." I texted him and asked him if he's ok and that he's scaring me. Of course I had to leave the campus and go back home (home here that is) immediately. He said he was ok and with a little more prodding indicated that he was looking forward to an event that is a couple of years from now. But I did agonize over whether to pull the family fire alarm and get my folks and/or her wife involved. Later and over the next few days we mostly texted about horror movies so it seems like whatever crisis it was had passed and I'll wait until I'm back stateside this summer to find out what the hell that was about and give him a piece of my mind.
The atmosphere here is surreal. Tons of canceled events at my institution and everywhere else here. We've had faculty and students who have lost family and friends in Gaza. Thankfully, the family of a very good friend who is from Gaza is still ok last I checked but I know others who were not so lucky. I'd have more to say when this came up in the two other threads but I was traveling last week in the UAE.
85 me of course.
In personal news I'm doing quite well. I'd gone as far as I could with physiotherapy after my knee surgery last year and my surgeon told me I should be hitting the gym and start with a personal trainer. It turned out one of the two fully equipped gyms in my residential tower has a dedicated personal trainer and I've been working with him three times a week since the beginning of September and really loving getting in shape. Losing about 35 lbs since I got back from NY in late July has done wonders too.
||
Joe Biden probably has the least amount of daddy issues of any president since Jimmy Carter.
|>
UK politics has reached the point each headline makes me think it's April.
We have another year of this to go.
Braverman is said to be preparing a leadership challenge. Maybe they'll bring back Cameron as PM!
We have another year of this to go.
Braverman is said to be preparing a leadership challenge. Maybe they'll bring back Cameron as PM!
Re: printers, I've almost given up on getting our personal printer working. It's just one glitch after another. I think part of the problem is our use pattern - nothing for months, then five PDFs urgently for some school or legal thing - but in the meantime I've been going to the library to use the printers there. That's easy, free, user-friendly, and a healthy walk.
91 was closer to the truth than anyone would have dreamed.
I did actually know that Cameron was coming back to FCDO when I wrote 90. Otherwise that would have been pretty impressive!
re:: 92
My wife prints quite a lot for work (teacher), so I might end up scrapping our shitty Canon printer and buying an ink tank printer that takes refillable bottles. Initial cost is about twice the price of a replacement equivalent to the Canon, but the savings in ink will be paid for within 6 months.
22: Hi Tarrsy, good to see a fellow CVN! Hang in there, bud.
45: Thanks, Witt, especially for reminding me that previous level of skill is the real benchmark. Considering that for years now they've been exiting applications instead of minimimizing windows when they want to see the desktop, maybe it's less surprising they're frustrated that a document preview in Gmail is not editable.
Yrs, Gerry
Sympathies to 17 and 20. That sounds really rough.
It's well, not nice exactly, but confirming to hear that other people are mid-career feeling overpaid given lack productivity and imposter syndrome. That's where I'm at, with the caveat that I'm underpaid relative to where I could be if I took my career seriously. But that's not where my brain and life are taking me. Maybe it'll be different when I get ADHD medication, but that's waiting for the national shortage to be over.
Witt, being a primary caregiver is incredibly tough. My sympathies to you, too.
UK politics made me audibly ugly laugh at the bus stop this morning, followed not long after by a "the hell..?" Another year to go indeed. This feels like an American election cycle, except more is actually happening because the executive has so much more ability to enact policy. (And then flipflop on it.)
How bad is covid for the unvaccinated these days? Even the people on the Herman Cain awards aren't dying anymore. It's a much less lethal disease now for everyone regardless of vaccination, right?
I think so, but I haven't seen anything on how lethal it is for someone unvaccinated with no immunity from a prior covid infection. Maybe that's too rare to matter?
98: Yes - per the CDC, over Sept. 18-Dec. 2022, age-standardized mortality rate was 2.0 per 100,000 in the unvaccinated, vs. 0.4 among those with only monovalent vaccination, vs. 0.1 among those with a bivalent booster. But in the similar period a year before that, it was 12.2 unvaccinated, 0.7 vaccinated.
It doesn't break out previously-infected within the unvaccinated, but presumably that's now a large part of both populations.
unvaccinated with no immunity from a prior covid infection
As far as anyone knows, this describes the elderly people I'm supposed to take an overseas trip with in a few months. After a couple of years of relentless anxiety about his parents, M has decided to just stop worrying so much. I mostly endorse this approach (he can't do anything about it anyway, short of hiring a burglar to break into their house and vaccinate them against their will - which he has considered!), but occasionally I think about it and freak out a little.
If you can't do anything, denial is probably your best option. I think that's Stoicism.
It's been a long time since the Herman Cain Awards have been giving many awards. But like half the people I know are sick this week with a cold.
A large number of my coworkers are out today, probably mostly or all not Covid.*
My uncle's elderly mom has refused vaccination and has never had Covid. But she also rarely goes out. It's caused him and his brother a fair amount of worry but they've accepted they can't do much.
*no one has mentioned it, plus a couple have had it recently, so probably don't have it again.
I have a temporary crown and it really is awful because all food sticks to it.
But that is precisely its function.
While none of your comments re my printer woes were exactly helpful, they did make me feel better. Thank you!
I gave up on connecting to the printer via wifi. It's working fine (for now!) with a USB cable.
What's an appropriate gift for a friend's child's bar mitzvah? I'm not able to attend the party, and the parents are gentile and nonobservant, in case that makes any difference. I assume a card with a check, but in 2023, what is the normal amount?
$100 if they thing you have a good job. $50 if not.
You could also have a tree planted in their name in an illegal West Bank settlement.
The parents are gentile, but the kid is Jewish? Am I missing something?
As for a gift, the canonical answer is a fountain pen.
I read it as one parent was gentile and one was Jewish but nonobservant.
115, 116: Is it actually important to follow this rule, in the sense that someone will take offense if I don't? (I'm sure the parents and the kid wouldn't care, but I'm thinking of the kid's grandparents.) Obviously I don't mind following the rule, except that I don't like to pretend familiarity with a tradition that I don't actually have.
When they picked up the chairs with the bride and groom at a wedding, I didn't participate because I thought it was cultural appropriation (the couple were gentiles) and because it looked like they were about to drop the bride on her head.
fountain pen
Reconditioned Parker 51, forget the kids, buy for yourselves
lw
I think I destroyed one of those when I was a kid. Trying to fix it.
120: At our wedding they made us do this, even though neither M nor I are Jewish. There were only two guys holding up my chair and like four or five holding up M, I guess because they assumed he would weigh a lot more, although in fact the difference between our weights is not all that much. The next day one of the guys holding my chair had a sore back, and was like, "see, this is how the patriarchy hurts men too."
Jake Gyllenhaal was at your wedding?
Jake Gyllenhaal is the mechanism by which the patriarchy hurts men?
Am I supposed to understand that joke, or is it a Taylor Swift reference?
I assume everyone knows about his keychain and his couch from Taylor Swift.
It's anachronistic though, one of the proofs that TS is lying about the new 10 minute version being the alleged old demo.
Is it actually important to follow this rule, in the sense that someone will take offense if I don't?
It's not really a rule per se, just a custom. No one will be offended if you give a different amount. Following the custom just indicates that you're familiar with it to the extent of knowing that it exists. It's quite common for Bar Mitzvah checks to be in round numbers too though.
I can't speak to its Wi-Fi capability, but the solution to most printer woes is to buy a relatively cheap Brother laser printer and get the bigger toner cartridge.
Printing shit at the office used to be a solution before everyone started working from home and the office printer went back to the printer farm.
Like any multiple of 18? Like $54 instead of $50? Or only easy normal multiples like $180?
135: Any multiple, yes. Traditionally it was common to just give $18, but with inflation that came to seem like not enough so people started giving $36 instead. I'm not really in those circles much these days, but I imagine it's started to go up to $54 by now.
Not to Judaism-splain, but the 18 thing is numerology -- the letters that make up the number 18 also spell "life" in Hebrew. So it's a way of including good wishes in the present.
Thanks. I was too embarrassed to ask.
Sorry, I just assumed people knew the reason already. LB's explanation is correct.
Technically it's Gematria. But it's in the same general branch of the tradition.
How about if I just give $420.69?
138: what if I don't particularly like the person whose bar mitzvah it is? Is there a recognised gematria value for "irritating little shit" in Hebrew?
Myanmar may be the quintessential state where numbers have religious, political and magical meaning. Closely bound with astrology, they have affected key decisions throughout the country's turbulent history. Little is done without careful consideration of such factors. After all, the founding of independent Burma on Jan. 4, 1948, took place at 4:20 a.m., a time clearly chosen by an astrologer
Nice.
(Their dictator also redenominated all the currency into multiples of nine because it was his lucky number.)
re: 121
Seconded. I do like fountain pens. I just sent a couple of mine off to be serviced/repaired, including an early Parker 51. Parker 51 is a mid-century design classic _and_ it's really nice to write with, reliable, and amazingly cheap--because they made millions of them--for something of that quality with a proper nib.
I handwrite all the time, and have gone back to doing it more and more as a tool for getting away from the computer and thinking through problems at work, so it's nice to have "tools" that are aesthetically attractive and work well.
We (my brother and our spouses) went to our parents house to see the condition and make a plan. We also invited a social worker specializing in hoarding disorders and adult housing who came 30 minutes after we did. We did not tell our parents about that part until we were there.
It's really bad. Stuff hoarded all over the house. 80% of the floor space is not accessible. They have carved out the kitchen and laundry room, one bedroom (of four), one bathroom. The ceiling of one main room and a couple bedrooms are completely exposed to the insulation, or if the insulation has fallen out, to the roof boards. Lighting fixtures have fallen down and are hanging where the sheetrock has come down. They've cleaned up most of the materials that have fallen down, and the stuff they're storing is mostly covered with tarps. Upstairs there were tarps with standing water on the floor even though it hasn't rained in a week. Mold is on the walls where there is still sheetrock. They were using space heaters because the central heat system doesn't work, and since they were having "guests" they turned on the electric oven and left it open to provide more heat.
On the plus side my dad agreed that it's in bad shape and seemed ready to repair the roof, sort of- he's been talking about doing it for 20 years and his procrastination is why there's so much damage. He's obsessed with the little details about getting roof material at a discount (apparently this type of obsession about small details in the context of a bigger disaster is common for OCD/hoarders) and didn't sound happy that we suggested a general contractor to coordinate all the repairs that need to be done. He seems to think he's going to manage a bunch of repairs in some kind of sequence. He at least didn't freak out when a social worker showed up which we were worried about.
The work required is obviously a gut renovation down to the studs and there's no way they can live there during that. But I don't know how we can get them to move out before that starts. First we'll have to clear everything out which the social worker can help with. We could just hire a service to remove everything and sort into store/trash, bringing either shipping containers or dumpsters on site as needed.
I'm thinking maybe I take a week off and tell them I'm coming down to get it cleaned out working for 9 days full time until it's done. If we can coordinate the dumpsters and some day labor I think it's possible, which will the let the gutting start which would get them to move out which is the primary goal at this point. But I suspect the cost is going to be mid six figures, more than the value of the house (the land has some more value). They're pretty attached to staying there long term and we discussed part of the renovation making it senior living compatible- shower on first floor, railings, etc.
WOW. This sounds so stressful. But thank god you're moving forward instead of continuing to let it get worse and worse.
147: Wow! That sounds like a horrible horrible mess. I always think of "o cursed spite/that ever I was born to set it right" when I confront a mess like that, although I don't know that I've ever confronted that bad a mess.
113.2: Just curious - does everybody know about the "Today I am a fountain pen" joke, that I was referencing? It's a joke that I always remember, just because it seemed like such a terrible joke to me.
re: 147
That sounds hard work. I have an uncle who has similar issues, although not so bad, and the obsessing over fine details stopping him from resolving problems is a thing that he has, too.
The fountain pen thing is pretty googleable, but peep can probably tell it better than I can from a first impression.
In the process of googling I learned that "bar" and "bat" before mitzvah mean "son" and "daughter" (mitzvah = of the commandment, e.g. legal responsibility) respectively, but are both loanwords from Aramaic into Hebrew! (Basic Hebrew for "son" is "ben".)
"Ben Kenobi" took that name to say he is the son of Kenobi. That is, his failure to notice he was training a murderer of Jedi was the father of his life in a cave on Tatoonine.
Wow SP though that sounds like it went as well as it could have possibly done
156.1: Yes, I googled it and was surprised at how much I found.
It's not a joke I can tell as a joke, it's a joke I can only try to explain. So, the famous line that a bar mitzvah boy says is, "Today, I am a man." But he is getting so many fountain pens as presents, he gets confused and says, "Today, I am a fountain pen."
Does the joke work better if you know Hebrew?
147: We had a similar situation with my father-in-law's house (not hoarding but long-term lack of maintenance leading to catastrophic systems failure). We had a contractor look at it and he said to just demolish and rebuild from scratch, which is what we're going to do.
162- yeah my concern is that's going to be the recommendation and they'll either want to do partial insufficient repairs (he seems to think once the roof is fixed that it's mostly better) or just be too overwhelmed and keep living the way it is.
We've thought maybe install a mobile home or tiny house on the property, if that's legal (that idea might have come up last thread) so they can stay near their stuff but live in a safe environment. A double wide is going to be more usable square footage than what they can currently access.
158 is true, we had speculated on outcomes from they lock us out of the house to they insist everything is fine. It was in even worse condition than I imagined though. I had been there ~7 years ago and the worst of it was stained walls and one part of ceiling crumbling, not entire rooms looking like a shed.
The only problem with a double wide is that they attract tornadoes.
163: Yeah, I think the main short-term goal should be just get them out at least temporarily and create some distance from the problem. My f-i-l moved in with us when his place first started to completely fall apart and kept talking for a year or so about how he was going to repair it, haggling with the insurance company, etc. It was at that point that he had the contractor look at it, ostensibly to give him leverage with the insurance company, and the contractor broke the bad news in a way that got him to agree it was a lost cause.
But he is getting so many fountain pens as presents, he gets confused and says, "Today, I am a fountain pen."
The sources I found also suggested this gift tradition was bound up with the idea that when you get to the age of responsibility, you're responsible enough to use fountain pens instead of pencils, so more conflation between the two.
I think we can't get an estimate until we've removed most of the stuff. Even an estimate probably involves some pre-work like removing more walls to assess structural integrity. Which is why I'm thinking about ways to expedite the junk removal.
Yeah, makes sense. Having the social worker show up unannounced while you were there was a brilliant idea, btw.
We played that really carefully- "oh, since we live three hours away we wanted to have someone local who has experience with elder housing available to help make decisions, and she was available today so we asked her to come by and introduce herself"
170: Sounds like the perfect way to handle it. I think I was the one who suggested a trailer or RV last time--how it works out!
Echoing everybody else - it sounds like you did so well, couldn't really have done anything better at this stage. So glad it went well, and I hope the next step happens soon and is also effective. Fingers crossed.
That really does sound like as much success as could be hoped for.
On the bar mitzvah front, the joke I know is that the 13-year-old bar mitzvah boy commences his speech with "Today, I am a man. [pause] Tomorrow, I return to the eighth grade."
SP, that sounds like such a difficult thing to do, and it seems like you handled it so well.
So the IDF basically murdered a few hundred people at Al Shifa and have less than what an average American gun nut has in his closet to show for it.
SP, that sounds like such a difficult thing to do, and it seems like you handled it so well.
I agree. It's obviously just the start of a long process, but good to feel like there's some movement happening.
So devious of Hamas to pack up and take their tunnels with them.
Did I mishear or was this weapons cache found in the hospital's MRI room?
You shouldn't put weapons around strong magnets.
Fortunately Israel cut the power or that could've been dangerous.
Yeah. A lawyer in Brazil died because he didn't listen to the doctor and brought his gun into the MRI.
Did I mishear or was this weapons cache found in the hospital's MRI room?
Apparently we're currently trying to decide between "these weapons were brought in by the IDF, there were no weapons there, the IDF are lying" and "of course there are weapons there, we always knew that, the hospital was treating wounded Hamas soldiers and Hamas was responsible for security at the hospital, but this proves nothing".
The next argument will be between "there are no tunnels there, the IDF are lying" and "of course there are tunnels there, we always knew that, because the Israelis built them when this was an Israeli hospital, but this proves nothing".
The debate continues about whether Gaza is a hideous open air concentration camp whose very existence is an unforgivable act of genocide, to avenge which any number of rapes are forgivable, or whether it was a flourishing, vibrant community with luxury hotels, beach cafes and excellent state healthcare until the IDF invaded it.
Come on, a few AKs, a box of dates, and a couple of cans of WD-40. Does this look proportional to you?
Some good news - there might be a deal coming in which Israel agrees to stop committing war crimes for three days and then start again, while Hamas agrees to stop committing some war crimes and continue committing others.
Do you want to talk about goal post moving? We were promised a command center and hostages. Not a bunch of rusty AKs that would outfit what, two squads?
I have seen IDF post on their official account a purported intercept of two supposed Hamas fighters talking in crappy non-Palestinian accented Arabic that native speakers have identified as an Israeli acccent (I can tell a Palestinian accent and many others but I haven't heard many non-native Arabic speaking Israelis to identify an Israeli accent in Arabic, English otoh, but we'll get to that).
I have seen an IDF spokesperson point to a calendar on the wall of one of the hospitals and say that it was a guard schedule for Hamas terrorists holding Israeli hostages with the names of the Hamas terrorists written on it. Anyone who knows even a fairly rudimentary amount of Arabic could plainly see that was written there were the names of the days of the week.
I have seen person purporting to be a nurse in Shifa claiming that Hamas was stealing all of the medical supplies, etc., Her accent was clearly Israeli, when she spoke it Arabic at the end it wasn't colloquial but in MSA. She was also wearing a pristine white medical coat and had a stethoscope around her neck. No one from the hospital knows her. While this one can't be laid upon official Israeli sources it was widely retweeted by members of the Israeli government.
IDF lies all the time and have for decades.
As for the tunnels or whatever the bunker that the IDF built under the hospital in the early 80s when Gaza was under full military occupation was reported on contemporaneously. So yeah, when they find the bunker and tunnels that they built no one should be surprised and it doesn't justify the murder of several hundred civilians for what amounts to what any American gun nut would have in his closet.
I did find the boxes of supposed medical supplies with the large labels saying "MEDICAL SUPPLIES" in English hilarious. As well as the IDF bringing incubators to the hospital when they had incubators and what they needed was the fuel for the generator to run them and for the IDF to stop fucking shooting at them.
Another recent hilarity, videos of IDF spokespersons in Palestinian homes pointing to curtains covering bare walls and saying that the only reason to do this is to film hostage videos. This is a Palestinian decorating thing that older generations of Palestinians do that they are widely mocked for by their Gen Z children.
187.last to 178 :) we have a balanced sample here!
As for the tunnels or whatever the bunker that the IDF built under the hospital in the early 80s
According to ajay's Newsweek article it's a cement basement under one of the buildings.
Say what you like but they promised the WMDs.
https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1724857866106949908
Aric Toler on the IDF's evidence. Can't seem to format the html.
"Do you want to talk about goal post moving? We were promised a command center and hostages"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-middle-east-67446662
Follows link: Netanyahu said there were no hostages at the hospital when forces entered the hospital on Wednesday
Follows link: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken to CBS Evening News in the US, telling the channel there were "strong indications" that Israeli hostages were being held at the Al-Shifa hospital and this was "one of the reasons we entered". Netanyahu said there were no hostages at the hospital when forces entered the hospital on Wednesday, claiming: "If there were [hostages], they were taken out"
I mean, if we're now regarding Binyamin Netanyahu as a trustworthy source - which is a bit of a turnaround but there you go! - I think it's only fair to quote his entire sentence.
Sure, but I could say the same thing about my spare bedroom.