It’s 78° and sunny in Santa Barbara today; you need to leave the East Coast if you’re still living there. Talk amongst yourselves!
Tags: live here and not where you live, open thread
It’s 78° and sunny in Santa Barbara today; you need to leave the East Coast if you’re still living there. Talk amongst yourselves!
Tags: live here and not where you live, open thread
Yeah well, shitty weather builds character. Or something.
Yeah! As all good New Englanders know in their bones, nothing is good (Spring) unless you really suffered for it first!
Also California has no water and it’s all going to go up in flames and we’re all going to starve and die. No region’s flawless?
Escaping the weather at home was part of the reason for building the British Empire.
Oh! Oh! Open thread!
So… I was thinking over the weekend that I have some very silly and unreasonable habits. Tell me of your silly and unreasonable habits.
I watched an episode of Luther almost a year ago and since then, I have checked under my bed for a murderer every. single. day.
After seeing that episode, that is not an unreasonable reaction.
ty ty i’m glad other people know exactly what i’m talking about!
picking at my face 🙁 I KNOW that it makes me breakout worse, I KNOW that there’s nothing to pick at, but I will sit there and get my face 2mm from my bathroom mirror and squeeze and pick ughhhhhhhh
augggh me too. Sometimes I go a few days without doing this (generally when I am staying over with friends/on a trip with people and do not feel like I have an opportunity to park myself in front of the mirror and pick, nor can I just pick at my skin while sitting around because I am never by myself) and my face looks so much better by the end. So I even get evidence that picking is bad! and yet. I still do it.
picking is the best, will never stop, don’t care
After I yelled to him the disgusting news of my latest zit conquest from the bathroom, my boyfriend recently told me that he gets a bit sad in the summer when his skin gets better and there are no zits to squeeze.
He really goes to town when he’s stressed though, and it can be a bit of a massacre. I’ve grabbed his hand and been like “honey, please, your poor face.”
Me too. Ugh it’s so satisfying.
I peel my cuticles and the skin around my fingers until they are quite damaged. It drives MrChouffe nuts and makes me sad, but.
Can’t pee naked. Must have on a robe or t-shirt at least.
I am currently sporting sparkly fake nails because I do this, too. My hands looks TERRIBLE except when I do the fake nail thing. 🙁
My mother, who has known of this habit for my entire life, is going to take me for biweekly mani/pedis for the three months leading up to my wedding because of this exact thing.
I too will go find a shirt to put on so I can pee. You are not alone.
I kind of love pulling out chin hairs (the few coarse ones that stick out especially) with my nails. It always goes wrong at least a dozen times, but I can’t really stop, and when I finally get it, it feels SO satisfying. I’ve been trying to stop by using tweezers every few days, but occasionally one still squeaks through.
Yup, me too. I’m actually in the process of getting hair lasered off my chin and I’m not supposed to pull any of them – no hair removal procedures that mess up the root. It’s driving me up a wall because it is so satisfying.
I’ve been a compulsive hair puller since I was about 12, but I thought I was mostly okay. APPARENTLY NOT. It got channeled into chin hair.
I don’t know if this is a habit just yet but I recently developed a SCHEDULE by which I play video games. I need a schedule because my games backlog is full of really fun games that… have no clearly-defined end point, such as Hyrule Warriors and Super Smash Bros and, now that it’s out of early access, Sunless Sea. So Mondays are for Hyrule Warriors, Tuesdays for Skyward Sword, etc. etc.
Really I have a strange habit of strictly scheduling my free time anyway. I find it useful!
I have to fold clothes (t-shirts and underwear, specifically) and towels in a certain way and I will refold them if my fiance folds them the “wrong” way. I’m trying really hard to knock this off, though, because 1) it’s pretty churlish to re-fold something that someone nicely folded for me and 2) why am I making more work for myself?!
I am on the other side of this sort of obsessiveness over folding technique… so now I fold my clothes and hubby folds his. It works out okay, except that sometimes this means we have baskets of unfolded laundry in our living room for… I wish just days, but occasionally it turns into weeks 😮
When I’m loading the dishwasher, I always make sure there are at least two utensils in each of the little compartments in the utensil-holding thingy, so that no utensil is all by itself. I feel like if there’s an odd one out, it will be lonely.
I do the opposite — I want to make sure every compartment is used, even if it means half of them have only one utensil.
I always try to put a knife, a fork, and a spoon in each compartment, and only put two identical utensils in the same compartment if I have some left over. I guess someone told me at some point that spoons would interlock with each other and not get washed properly?
This isn’t a habit so much as a quirk, but I can’t drink water from the bathroom sink. I guess the proximity to the toilet squicks me out, which is weird because I’m not very squeamish in other respects.
same-ish! I will rinse my mouth with the water, but I refuse to actually fill a glass from the tap.
Me too!
No! But bathroom sink water is always so much _colder_ and tastier than kitchen sink water! (I have no idea why this is/why I think this, but it has been true of everywhere I have lived since childhood. The colder part, at least, is actually true — it gets colder faster, because of old buildings/old pipes maybe? The taste thing, though, I can’t explain, and it might just be a weird psychosomatic thing. But still.)
I recently moved to a new house, so the kitchen sink is a whole flight of stairs away and the bathroom is right next to my room. Though I have been drinking water from the bathroom sink because my laziness wins out, but I think it’s weird every time.
I can’t drink water from the kitchen sink because ew, dishes live there.
When I turn on the oven, I have to open its door a bit to let out the thing that lives there (no, I don’t know what that should be, the ghost of failed cooking, maybe?). This has to be done after the oven has been turned on; the oven-spirit is a bit dim and doesn’t understand that it has to leave for a bit unless it hears the oven fan.
This is wonderful.
More of a compulsion really. I can’t stop cleaning my ears. It used to be with whatever was at hand, leading me to suffer from multiple outer ear infections. Since I can’t stop, I now at least try to temper the urge and only use ear curretes.
I have a habit of flossing my teeth… wherever. I really like to floss but I also find standing around in the bathroom flossing really boring, so I do it in bed, on the couch, walking around the house and then sometimes leave little balls of floss around EEEEEEEK.
I also brush my teeth sitting on the bed reading a book.
I wander round and do stuff one-handed while brushing my teeth, but mainly with me it’s because I get bored otherwise and don’t do it for long enough to be of any use. I do tend towards the ‘process’ rather than ‘results’ school of thought, so in my head if there has been toothpaste on the brush and my mouth tastes minty, it’s done, regardless of how clean my teeth actually are. I am the same with washing up, which used to mean a lot of plates going back in the dirty pile rather than being put away, until I kicked myself up the arse about it and made myself get into the habit of doing it more carefully.
I do horrible things to my ears to get wax out of them and thus have a constant low-grade ear infection. It ain’t pretty, but I haven’t been able to get myself to stop yet.
I check behind the shower curtain for ghosts.
Hate walking into a dark room, especially bathroom, will always find light switch and reach in to turn on light prior to entering room
yes! you never know!
If I don’t thank the parking fairy at least 5 minutes before I arrive at my destination, how will she know to save me a spot?
DC is supposed to get 5-8 inches tonight, which here in America’s capital translates to “it’s the end times.”
My office is open today even though everywhere else is closed for the holiday. But that’s ok, its not like the heat in our building wasn’t on all weekend and my office was only 59 degrees this morning…OH WAIT.
ditto. I’m wearing so many layers right now it’s a bit ridiculous.
Frankly, I’m a little amazed our office is open then!
My office is open too, and my client is a fed agency.. what are we doing with our lives?
It’s freezing in my office too.(I’m across the Potomac, in Mount Vernon.) My daughter reports that there are no onions at her Giant on Capitol Hill. Are onions required Snow Emergency supplies?
Possibly a lot of other people have the same plan that Mr. BHam and I have, which is to make French onion soup from scratch during the (*knock on wood*) snow day tomorrow!
Snow days would be a lot more fun if I wasn’t expected to work from home during them. Telecommuting is occasionally the worst.
Boston: 7 feet of the snow on the ground and 9 degrees outside. Cry me a frozen river.
Yeah, my whole family has been sending me increasingly angsty picture messages about snow levels in and around Boston. I know 5-8 inches is a pittance in comparison, but the difference is ABSOLUTELY NO ONE in D.C. can handle their shit when there’s snow. Not all of them come from hardy Massachusetts stock like me and Mr. BHam.
My local/regional friends have stopped posting boasting snowbank/snowdrift photos on Facebook and started posting the same photos headlined with warnings like “Live near me? Look away! Live elsewhere? BEHOLD.”
It is… pretty angsty, yeah, especially since our city calls parking bans for every storm and in between in a (so far, not particularly effective) attempt to clear some streets, so we (okay, just my husband: I don’t drive) have to find a place off-street to stash the car and just leave it there, which usually means an extra 30-60 minute walk in the freezing cold, not counting the walk to and from his day job since the car is out of commission.
I work from home, which PHEW, because my walks now take about twice as long as in pleasant weather. The sidewalks can only be shoveled so much when there’s just no place left to put the snow. Banks are over my head in many places (in my boots, I’m just shy of 6′), and our shovelers have given up trying to clear the long path to our doorway; we share a path with the house next door, winding through 8-foot banks. It’s like The goddamned Shining out there.
Apparently I had some complaining stored up.
The snowbank situation has become absurd. I am more and more nervous about all my friends’ and family’s sanity, especially now that pipes are starting to freeze all over the place (on top of the ice dams, roof leaks, and immovable snow mountains).
I’m in Russia this winter. Given the choice between spending this winter in Russia or in Boston (where I’ve spent 9 other winters), I would choose the current Russian winter without hesitation. I love Boston but I’m so glad I’m not there right now.
I think that is exactly what mother nature is doing for you!
It was -41 C this morning when I left for work. My weather app likes to put the post-windchill temperature in very tiny font at the bottom of the screen, like I somehow won’t notice that it’s marrow-chillingly cold outside.
catthreadcatthreadcatthread! (It is not a day off here and I am boooooored at work.) Here are some photos of my cats staring at me in a creepy fashion.
This is from a while ago, but I love how they made kind of a yin-yang composition:
I love that they’re both just gently poking each others’ butts!
While it is cold and snowy here in Ohio, I’m glad I’m not with my parents and friends in and around Boston! and here’s my cat sleeping sort of on me and next to me,
Dinah all tucked in for the night!
Dear human,
In boxes, small is the new big. Do not make me remind you again.
I finally got a good picture of Gertie!
No pictures of Atticus. He’s just discovered the kitchen and has been knocking everything off the counters for four days now. And it is NOT CUTE.
Gertie looks like my Diesel 🙂
Klaas-Jan, relieved after a housemate accidentally let him outside without opening a window so he could come back in. Fortunately, he does go outside enough to know where “home” is and how to get back there when I open up the window and say his name.
He is so flat! And so happy to be hugging his chair.
He went floof so bad once he got indoors. Just right up to the chair he commandeered as soon as he emerged from under my bed two years ago. (I have bought him actual cat beds. He much prefers the chair.) Later he came up on the couch next to me and slept under the fleece throw blankets. So much recovery.
My cats have really, really thick fur for shorthairs. Just… a lot of fur. The vet techs can never give them shots or take their blood without shaving a little divot in their dense fluffiness.
But somehow on days like this, they think they’re cold! And they get rolled up in comforters or snuggle under blankets with me, and purr rustily:
and then 5 minutes later they overheat like little engines, and crawl out to shake it off and groom.
Mine too! This was Captain’s belly after he had ultrasounds when he had a blocked bladder. They are shorthairs but I can lose a finger up to the knuckle in the fluff.
It’s negative 6 in Ann Arbor this morning and I discovered that I can’t run my space heater in my bedroom when I’m using the blowdryer because it blows the circuit.
I need to move.
It is so damn cold here. I’ve been running my space heater pointed directly at my legs for the last 2 hours and I’m still not over the trek in to work this morning. The shitty thing is it’s just going to stay cold. Booooooo.
OH NO. You should move. Ann Arbor makes me sad.
Hah! I generally like it (I’m a librarian at UMich) and the summers are gorgeous. It’s just this weather is ridic. There ARE a lot of hipsters here, however. Most of them dressed inappropriately for the weather.
I honestly didn’t dislike Ann Arbor until leaving it, at which point I could more easily detect the Smug. I mean, the people are in large part cool and working with Zingerman’s was life-changing and awesome in so many ways, but I am REALLY glad to not be there anymore, it’s just too much.
The summers are pretty great though, that’s true.
I feel like there’s 1 month every year that I hate Ann Arbor but I think that would be true anywhere I lived. The rest of the time it’s pretty great, I’m very much looking forward to summer.
I like how we have this mini-Ann Arbor thread in here. Working for the university, my A2 specific hate usually emerges at the end of August/beginning of September when all the undergrads return.
I work for the U but off campus so I don’t have to deal too much with rage-inducing undergrads. Except that one time I tried to go to Target during move in. Nope! I almost like football season because of how delightful it is to run errands during the game. No lines anywhere!!
I’m so pleased that I can participate in an open thread on this day off! My new job is a bit hectic during the day and by the time I get home, most of the commenting has cooled down. I miss that, and I miss several other forms of social media interactions. Despite what the naysayers claim, I find it very pleasant to see what my friends are up to on Facebook and Twitter, and very satisfying to register my interest as a Like or a Favorite, and I feel the loss of those interactions now that I can’t get to them as regularly.
Anyway, relevant to your interests, Toastfriends: you can download a print-and-play version of this game called Slash. It’s like Cards Against Humanity without the racism and other -isms–or at least those things aren’t built in to the game. You play by trying to create a pairing that each round’s matchmaker would ship. We had a sort of unwieldy number of players–I think it would be more fun with more time to expound on why each pairing would work or not work–but it was still very entertaining.
Oh man, I wish I’d had this over the weekend when my friends were down! I’d been waiting for the boxed version, but I didn’t know they had a print-n-play. <3
(My friends and I have made so many custom Apples to Apples cards that those games are frequently an elaborate version of this.)
It’s cold. And snowy. And I still live in New Hampshire, where we kind of pride ourselves on not bitching about such things. SO! Instead, I’m going to reflect on the fabulous weekend I had, celebrating my cousin’s wedding and seeing out-of-town family. The best part? My cousin and his wife just relocated to San Francisco, and I am SO planning a trip later this year. I’ve lived in small-town NH my whole life, and there’s a significant lack of queerness in my day-to-day, if you will. So, Toasters – what do you consider must-see/must-do in the Bay area? I’ve got a few months to plan, so all suggestions welcome! Stay warm, lovelies.
I cannot help you with the Bay Area but I’m also from small town New Hampshire! I live in DC now, though, but I still miss New England (although obviously not this winter) and its delightful grumpiness. It makes me sad when Mallory disparages New England, although I can understand if she’s talking about Connecticut.
Have a great time in the Bay Area! My brother went to a drag show there a few years ago and loved it.
Can’t leave, my feet are frozen to the ground. : (
Apparently, it can get so cold out that you get dizzy and almost fall over on the way to the bus! Good times.
My office doesn’t close for President’s Day, so I am stuck at work; something made extra unfair by the fact my girlfriend does have today off. It was so hard to leave this morning, friends! However, since she’s at home today, she’s very generously offered to take care of house chores I hate (dishes, folding laundry), which is very nice. For my own part, I’m picking up some fancy beers for her on the way home tonight, to say thank you for being wonderful.
For those of you also stuck on either side of the holiday divide, what are some nice things you/your other half are doing for one another today?
My boyfriend has the day off, and this morning he made me eggs and pancakes while I did a little work from home and waited for the apartment driveway to get cleared if snow (and for the 35 mph wind gusts to maybe die down). Now I am physically at work and fairly grumpy about it, but at least I’m not hungry and I got to sleep in a bit! It was very nice of him to do.
D: An open thread to remind me of how I don’t have the day off AND weather gloating? Too cruel, Mallory, too cruel. Yesterday the high was 7 degrees and I proudly refused to leave the house. Today it is not much better and I have work. Boo hiss. I thought I was so clever yesterday.
So, since I had a few “anxiety threads” a number of weeks ago, and have since upped my vitamin D and been feeling truly wonderful since then, I thought I would put a “happy thread” up. I know not everyone is doing so well, so if you’re feeling great we can post it here and build it up! and if you want to hear about other people doing great, come on in!
I’m feeling wonderful… worked as a nurse for the first time this weekend, at the nursing center for homeless individuals that I’ve been volunteering at through nursing school. They pay well, I got to see all the people I’ve come to know and love and care for, and I’M FINALLY WORKING AS A NURSE!!!
OH! and the Best Boo and I are planning a lil trip to SoCal next month to 1.) get some warmth in our systems, and 2.) hang out with his Dad (!) who I haven’t yet met. EXCITING.
and I’M FINALLY WORKING AS A NURSE!!!
Congratulations, noodge! That’s great news!
I’m feeling great because I did a top-to-bottom cleaning of our tiny kitchen over the weekend. I finally realized that the reason all our cups and glasses were weirdly grimy and gross no matter how much we washed them was because we kept them in the cupboard right above the stove, and since the stove has no hood, whenever we cooked something little particles of oil and food and whatnot would make their way into the cupboard and coat everything in there. I scrubbed the inside of the cupboards, washed the cups and glasses (Husband helped with that), got glass containers for rice and sugar and pasta, etc because they look prettier than keeping it all in bags… I know this is really boring but I’m not much for housework and it took a long time, so I’m proud of myself for getting it done!
Congrats on your hard earned nursing career! You’re gonna be great at it!
Now that my jerk boss is no longer at work, and his business partner is running the show, I feel 100% better. Turns out my depression was not from SAD, but was instead from getting yelled at all the time.
I’m also taking care of a coworker’s plants while she’s in Australia for a month, and she’s totally fine with my dividing them and keeping some. So I’m increasing my houseplant collection (so many succulents, you guys), and having pleasing arrays of living things around the house is really good for my mood. Now if I could only succeed in getting my room clean…but I’m going to do work on unfucking my habitat today, because that always makes me feel good about life.
Congratulations on your nursing!! And even more so, on feeling wonderful!
I recently purchased some neeeeewwwwww books. Although they are not actually new, or new to me – both are old reference books that my former roommate owned, and which I always coveted (one was actually a gift from me, and you know how sometimes when you have a dear friend with similar interests and you get them the perfect gift but it would ALSO be a perfect gift to yourself, and you always feel proud at giving the perfect gift but also HUGELY DISAPPOINTED that it is not yours?).
Roommate and I had a very messy friend breakup several years ago and I’ve never simultaneously had the time/inclination/money to replace these books. And I’m so happy now that I have.
Here is some very useful information from the health section of one of the books.
WOO! Congrats! You’re gonna be great. 😀 – Eris, RN
All things considered, I have a few things to be stressed about at the moment, but I still think I’m doing alright. This probably has something to do with the fact that I mostly know how to manage it. I have a job I’m pretty secure about, which is more than I can say about the last place I worked, so it’s nice. It’s nice to feel stable, even if some nonsense comes up from time to time. Being happy with security is a lot better than pining for perfection, which is what I used to do a lot. So yeah, I’m feeling pretty good.
Congratulations! Nursing is a seriously badass profession and you should be so proud!
I’m six weeks into training for my first half marathon and already feel like a champion. I ran a 10:17 min/mile this morning, which is pretty darn fast for me, especially while my legs and face were freezing off.
It was SEVEN degrees on the thermometer and that is about seventy degrees from my view of what the temp should be
The Weather gurus say “significant snow” which is their way of scaring the pants off Virginians, who consider any snow past a dusting to be an affront and an excuse to eat potato chips and shut all the schools.
My housemate asked if we should run the faucets overnight to keep the pipes from freezing, as the weatherman had mentioned. I pointed out that we have central heating.
dear god!
I am glad he/she has you! 🙂
Also, the faucet in my bathtub is leaky, so there’s a constant drip of water from that. So even if the basement got cold enough for the pipes to freeze (and the basement gets cold, but not that cold), I think we’d be ok.
We got 10 inches of snow over the weekend, on top of the 6 ft that was already on the ground. Yesterday my husband an I spent a few hours digging out, then he went to the store to get ice melt so our roof doesn’t collapse. His truck slipped on a patch of ice and flipped over. Thank God he’s okay, but it’s just another layer of shit in a shitty, shitty winter. I think the universe is making it pretty damn clear that human habitation is no longer welcome in New England.
Jesus Christ, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have been so glib upthread if I’d seen this first.
Thinking good thoughts for you and your husband (and the truck).
Glib away, this is the third time a truck he has owned has tried to kill him. If they total this one I’m making him get a reasonably-priced sedan goddammit.
I’m so glad that your husband’s okay!
Ice melt, is that like this? http://smile.amazon.com/Snow-Joe-MELT25CC-Chlorid… My husband and I are still relatively new to Massachusetts and are quietly freaking out about how much snow is on the roof and how to get it off.
Thanks! Yes, that is ice melt. I too am new to the area. What a fucking introduction amirite?
At this point, we’re ordering a snowblower because it’s just too much.
I dream of seeing grass again.
His truck slipped on a patch of ice and flipped over.
JEEPERS
But he’s okay? Phew, that’s a relief. But yes, that is a terrible fright and inconvenience during an already stressful stretch.
It’s cold but lovely and sunny in Paris. I’ve got narcissus growing on my desk and changed my winter coat for a less bulky one today.
After living in Canada for 6 winters, I have come to appreciate the beauty of the moment when you change your winter coat for a less bulky one!
Hi Toasties! It is no degrees here and I’m wearing a hat in my office because it is not enough degrees inside! But I’m trying not to complain because at least I’m not in Boston.
Hey, would you like to come talk about/complain about/boast about workouts? Come do that at Burnt Toast Google group! There are a lot of exciting animals being lifted!
Are you me? It was also no degrees when I got to work this morning and I was also wearing my hat in my office!
Ever since the man lifting post, I’ve been lifting my 1 year old nephew over my head every time I see him. I figure I can just keep it up for another 17 years, I’ll slowly work my way up to lifting a man over my head!
[swooooon] My favorite poem is that Auden one that starts “Shut all the schools, eat all the tater chips”
In non-cat-related news, what are we all listening to at the minute? I spent all morning listening to L7 playlists on youtube to remind me of my youth and prepare for them touring this year (really hoping they come somewhere useful in the UK) and then decided I have no desire to hear a man’s voice today so put on my ‘women singers’ itunes playlist and am happy. Turns out I have 15 hours and 2 minutes of women singing on my computer.
My playlist like that is one of the few things I can listen to for hours without having to ever skip any songs.
I’m listening to iheartradio’s cibo matto playlist/station. It’s pretty excellent.
Also listening to Fiona apple’s hot knife on loop.
My really long work Spotify playlist at the moment- I’ve been adding to it since summer 2013 (when I realized there was a web Spotify and also there was a ton of construction going on around my office), so it’s got a bunch of random stuff on it. Currently it’s on “Love is a Bourgeois Construct” by the Pet Shop Boys.
I am really slow to pick up on current pop music because I am really never any place that plays it, but some friends introduced me to the videos for Sia’s “Chandelier” and “Elastic Heart” and now I’ve been listening to 1,000 Forms of Fear via Youtube playlists for dayyyys.
I am listening to the Taylor Swift album on permanent repeat in my brain. D:
Currently on deck: “Blank Space.”
I had a hard time dragging myself out of bed this morning so I listened to Uptown Funk while making breakfast and now I’m fighting really, really hard not to dance like a 90s hip-hop artist all throughout the library.
Why would you fight an urge like that? DO IT.
I am 300 songs into the 1000-song mixtape that Caribou posted a few weeks back. I finally got bored enough with my own collection to try it out and now I’m powering through. So much good soul and disco, oh man.
Very happy for this open thread since I missed Friday’s due to two endless days of travels. I’ve been home visiting my family for two weeks and today is my first day back at work. On the plus side, my two classes of kids/teens today were relatively well-behaved and I only have one more class of adults to go today before I’m done. On the negative side, I slept zero hours last night and can’t wait for bed. It’s 6:30 PM here and I plan to come home, eat, and go straight to sleep.
I got to see my new niece for two weeks and now I miss her. She’s so small and soft and smells nice and likes to look around the room with her newborn eyes and always looks very concerned. When I left she was just starting to get to the point where she was able to be awake without crying or eating. I’ve lived in different states or countries than my family for 10+ years, but only going home once or twice a year is going to feel much harder now.
Mmmm, onion soup. We’re making chicken vegetable. Snow days are good days for making soup.
Indeed. We made a lovely beef ramen for breakfast yesterday and soupy, lovely goulash for supper. It never got above zero here, so it seemed reasonable to eat soup twice.
Lovely! I found myself gazing at pictures of pot roast this week, so I will make lovely vegetarian dinners for a few more days (because it is too cruel to expect my vegetarian husband to walk through bitter cold and snow to get home, then have to make his own dinner when I’ve been working at home under a blanket all day), then the first time he’s working a night shift, I’m making pot roast.
So, I’ve been curious: how many Dutch Toasties/Toasties living in the Netherlands are there?
I am Dutch! From near Eindhoven originally but I have spent most of my life in Belgium and now I’m in France. Where are you?
I’m originally from around Haarlem (though I lived abroad for 7 years as a kid), then lived in Utrecht for 11 years, and moved to Eindhoven last July.
Cool! I have most of my family still living near St Oedenrode so I try to visit every few months.
I live in the Netherlands! I’m not Dutch (Ik ben Amerikaanse), but I live in Utrecht and work in Rotterdam. I would also like to know if there are more of us.
My husband and I really want to move to Amsterdam in the next few years (we’re in Chicago). We figure the easiest way to do that is for him to get accepted to grad school there–at least easier than one of us landing a job, but making the move seems so daunting. How did you do it, if you feel like sharing?
Um, actually because of grad school! I went and did a Master’s degree in Utrecht, and then was lucky enough to land a PhD position afterwards. I actually do recommend coming out here for grad school- a lot of good teachers and researchers, a lot of connections to more European networks that have different perspectives on things, comparable/better pricing. If he gets accepted, the school will help with a lot of the paperwork, and then he’ll have a year to find a “real” job. So far it’s working out for me, although we’ll see what happens in two years when (hopefully) the PhD is done. I’m not thinking about that yet, although I probably should be.
Plus (former PhD student here, in Utrecht actually), grad school, at least after your Master’s degree, is kind of a “job” here: you have some teaching obligations, but you also get a salary that you can basically live off of.
Great to know, thank you both 🙂
Are you familiar with the DAFT? If you’re American, have the equivalent of €4,500 in a savings account, and want to start a business (and “self-employed” is considered a business) you can relatively easily move there. I know some people who’ve done it, and I’ve considered it myself.
So glad we’re having an open thread on this bitterly cold, snowy Monday (here at least).
On Friday I was predicting a nice/quiet weekend… LOL. Instead I got invited to Mardi Gras festivities. I missed most of our city parade but still ended up with beads at the end of the night, which is what counts. Although I’m not sure how or when they were acquired. As I texted a friend yesterday morning, “I bitterly rue last evening’s activities.”
Is anyone else celebrating Mardi Gras?
This time of year always makes me miss Mardi Gras and there isn’t anything awesome going on in my city related to it, so my friend group and I usually throw a combined Valentines/Mardi Gras party wherein my baker friend can make elaborate sweets and I can make jambalaya and throw beads on everything. This was last Friday and it was lovely.
That does sound amazing. Everyone should have a baker friend to throw parties with, and oh gosh, I could go for some jambalaya. Are you from New Orleans originally?
No, but I lived there for two amazing years, and have gone back for a couple of carnival seasons since then. I was shocked to find this time that I’ve given away almost all of the beads I’ve collected over the years–guess I’ll have to schedule a return!
i’m from Nola and currently living further up state, so there are festivities but it’s been cold-ish and my mix of anti-socialness and slightly snobbishness (re: these parades vs., like, endymion (which is absurd)) have kept me away. BUT my dad did send me king cakes on friday so my coworkers and i have been happily munching through them 😀 which is the best part of the holiday anyway.
My city does not celebrate Mardi Gras, but I am nonetheless gorging myself on pancakes and semlor and any other feasting foods I can get my hands on.
Anyone have exciting plans for the summer? That’s what I am trying to focus on these days when it feels like it will never be warm outside ever again. We are tentatively planning a trip to the Czech Republic but not sure where to go outside of Prague – if anyone’s been, feel free to lob a few suggestions my way! (Tentatively because my husband’s permanent resident card has expired and the current processing time for renewals brings us to mid-July and his vacation starts in late July. He submitted a citizenship application ages ago and hasn’t heard back yet.)
I really want to do the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela within the next 5 years. I can’t plan for it yet because of my uncertain job situation (my current job ends this June and I don’t currently have anything lined up after that). No job means a lot of free time to peregrinate around Europe but way less money to do it on…
I am very very much hoping to buy a house in the near future so I’m tentatively looking forward to doing house/yard/garden stuff this summer. If that doesn’t work out for some ungodly reason I’m taking over my boyfriend’s yard. So either way, looking forward to growing some stuff!
The only other place I’ve been in the Czech Republic is Cesky Krumlov which is beyond lovely and worth a day but probably not much longer than that.
I will second Cesky Krumlov, which has a bear pit in front of the castle (!!) and a beautiful baroque theatre which is now a museum, and looks like this:
I have dear friends that live in the Giant Mountains region (Krkonoše in Czech) and it is absolutely glorious. In the summer, since its the off-season, you can get really good and cheap rooms, and there is a ton of great hiking, cycling and horseback riding.
I’m moving to a new city next month (Portland!) where I’ll live near a dear friend and I’ll finally have the feeling that I can start my life after years of putting off what I really wanted to for sake of school and family. So I’ll spend the summer being social and exploring my new home!
Hopefully next summer I can go to Turkey.
It’s a bit silly, given my youngest sister will be 20 when we get there, but my family’s going to Disney World for the first time in August. We’re spending two days at Wizarding World of HP, and then five at Disney. My sisters and I have been to Disneyland for an afternoon, but never to Disney World. It was something we never had the means to do growing up, and my mom has been going nuts with the planning since last September. I’m very excited.
I’m planning a trip to Iceland (SO EXCITED!!), but the friend who was supposed to go with me–and who also already bought plane tickets–is more than likely bailing. So now I’m torn between my desire to do an Adventurous Single Lady tour of the island, or to recruit friends to go with me so I feel a little less awkward at dinners.
What is most certainly happening, though, is a scuba dive in the Silfra fissure. It’s where the North American content splits with the Eurasian one, so you can touch two continents at once! And hopefully not freeze to death while doing so!
You are going to have such an amazing time!!!
Thank you, I hope so! June cannot get here soon enough! Have you been? Would love to hear any and all recos!
Yes! We went last May, rented a car and drove the ring road with a few detours. Definitely take a ferry out to Heimey for a day- that was the very best and incredibly cool with the crazy lava landscape- bright red cliffs against the empty sea, carefully tended lava gardens where homes used to be, other cliffs with ropes that you can climb up to be surrounded by astounded seagulls…
Excellent puffin watching and black sand beaches at Vik, also on the south coast, and sweater shopping at Vik Wool!
Head up into the Westfjords to an abandoned herring packing plant that is now a hotel/cottage rental at Djupavik, and then go a bit farther (on crazy not-quite-roads) to a hot springs at the edge of the world at Krossneslaug.
Myvatn and that whole geothermal area is like being on a completely different planet.
The Snaefellsnes Peninsula was also fantastic- crazy sea stacks, seal colonies, weird trails through moss covered lava by the sea at Budir.
I’m pretty much convinced that it is impossible to go wrong, though- every single place we saw was incredible!
Wow, I’m apparently super torn about a lot of things. Color me Natalie Imbruglia.
If it helps for calculations, I think every other place was a lot cheaper than Reykjavik (a private double room was generally in the $70 range?) so your transportation costs are obviously higher but lodging and food are less! We had brought a tent but there were gale force winds the entire trip and we decided it was worth shelling out for lodging in exchange for not ruining the trip by making ourselves miserable. In two of the places we stayed, the room also came with access to the guesthouse hot springs!
That’s a great point re: prices, plus–a tent, wow, y’all are sturdy!
Included access to hot springs sounds like everything I’ve ever wanted in life. Can’t it be June already??
Hopefully this picture works- is there anything more delightful than puffin street signs? I think not.
Omg all this is wonderful–LOVE the puffin street signs, love your advice! I’ve been torn between Vik and Snaefellsnes; my priority, beyond the scuba trip, is to ride Icelandic horses, see puffins flying, and perhaps try the rotting shark dish (eek). I’m also intrigued by the Westfjords–they just look so wild! Also, totally did not have Heimey on my radar, so I’ll get to investigating right now!
Right now I’m trying to figure out how much time to spend in Reykjavik vs. traveling the island. If I do go by myself traveling around gets to be pricier, but Reykjavik may be a bit too small to spend a full week in. Ugh, decisions.
Did you go to the Blue Lagoon? I know it’s, like, criminal to go to Iceland and not go there, but I really hate heavy tourist areas so I’m torn.
I only spent one day in Reykjavik, with the rest traveling around the island- that was ideal for me, because my priorities were more along the lines of crazy landscapes and remote hot springs and small villages. We did go to the Blue Lagoon at the very end of the trip (on the same day we flew out) and I’d recommend it! It is touristy, but at least in May once you were in the water there was enough space for the crowds to thin out so you could find a private spot and relax against the lava and spread mud all over yourself. The timing worked out really well, so we had a few hours there without having to give up anything else, and since the rest of the trip was so packed it was nice to just lie there and feel at ease before getting back on a plane!
But there are so many, many other geothermal pools that I think you’re covered either way.
Ooh, that sounds like the way to do it–a total Treat Yo Self moment at the end of all the adventures. I love this idea! I think you may have sold me. 🙂
That’s exactly what it was! And our expectations were fairly low- more along the lines of pampering ourselves than having An Authentic Icelandic Experience- so the touristiness was not disillusioning.
I went in September, and while Reykjavik is nice, we found there wasn’t actually a whole lot to do there. Like, maybe 2-3 days at most? I’d recommend travelling around. If you are going to stay there a while and are going with a couple of people, we really found it worthwhile to get an Air B&B place with a kitchen because holy crap is it expensive to eat out there. The carriage house we rented was awesome if you want the contact info for it.
We did the Blue Lagoon. It was pretty amazing and I was glad I went, but we went in the shoulder season and it was still pretty crowded. The day we went was cold and rainy, which was perfect because it was very atmospheric and the resulting clouds of steam hid most of the groups of giggling, semi-drunk teens/early 20’s people.
The one thing we didn’t get to do that I really wish we had was to go to one of the smaller hot springs, which might be a good, less-touristy option. It seems like there are quite a few to choose from.
Yeah, I started worrying about that when I realized that “Downtown Reykjavik” was basically one street. That was my thought, though, for the AirBnb: get the kitchen and cook in for breakfast/lunch so I could splurge on dinners. I would love to see the carriage house if you wouldn’t mind!
I think I will probably do Blue Lagoon because even a “bad day” in a spa setting is still pretty magical. Also, ladyimogen above said that a few guest houses they stayed at included access to onsite hot springs, so this possibility has given me new purpose in life!
Oh I spoke too soon. It looks like she’s not listing it anymore :(. It was on a street called Leifsgatta which was a really excellent location (quiet, central, easy to find when you’re walking around because there’s a really prominent church at the end of the street that you can see from all over town), and there’s a lot of other places listed on the same street that you could look at.
No worries! That’s around where I was looking to stay, so I’m glad I’m on the right track! 🙂 Thank you!
I went to Iceland about a year and a half ago, and it was amazing! I skipped the Blue Lagoon in favor of short hikes to hot spring-type things out in the middle of nowhere – these had the added bonus of being free, and I was on a budget! We rented a car but just took short trips from Reykjavik rather than driving all the way around the country, as we were only there for 10 days.
Trip one was the Golden Circle route – lots beautiful scenery and history. Trip two was south as far as Vik, and this was the route with the hot springs. If you can get to the Seljavallalaug pool, I highly recommend it – it’s a swimming pool fed by a hot spring and a cold river, and it’s only a short hike (15-20min) from the road but it feels like you’re completely alone in the mountains.
The other similar thing we did was take a hike through Reykjadalur – this was a longer hike, and we didn’t quite make it to the end (there’s a hot river that’s apparently very popular) but we found a geothermal pool with clay sides about an hour in and just jumped in. Bonus – we were there during the sheep roundup, so while we were busy painting ourselves with clay in the pool, there were people on ponies with dogs chasing sheep all over the mountains around us.
SHEEP AND DOGS AND MOUNTAINS AND SPRINGS, I JUST CAN’TTTTTT. I’m seriously starry-eyed and clutching at my heart reading this!
It was just as great as you’re imagining!
As an aside, I also stayed in an AirBnB in Reykjavik, and it was an excellent decision. If you’re so inclined, you might check out the public pools – they’re all over the place, inexpensive, and popular with locals of all ages (as far as I could tell).The one nearest my apartment also had a steam room and several hot tubs of varying temperatures. We ended up buying multi-day passes and going just about every day, it was super fun!
That’s awesome, thank you! I found a few places on AirBnB that didn’t have showers or baths and were like, “The public pool is just down the street!” Which was honestly kind of terrifying to read, but you make it sound more fun. 🙂
If you want to try an adventurous single lady trip, Iceland seems like a good place for it. Since you need to be in a car to get everywhere you can either rent one or do bus tours, which seems like a good way to try to meet other solo lady travelers. I went with a friend, but there always solo people on the trips we did and I’m sure you could strike up some conversations.
Yeah, good call. I’ll definitely get in on a few tours I’m sure–horse-back riding and the Blue Lagoon (if I go), plus the scuba trip will have other crazy people to talk to. 🙂 If I do go alone I’ll be looking at renting an AirBnB in Reykjavik and using that as my home base and just seeing how that goes. I remember Edith from the Hairpin did a solo trip there and just did whatever and that’s kind of been my role model vacation since. (http://thehairpin.com/2012/02/ask-someone-who-rec…)
I’d say the Blue Lagoon is not worth the money. Like everything else you need to pay for bus tickets (or rent a car) to get out there and then once you’re there the entrance fee is pretty expensive. We stayed there basically all day to try to get our money’s worth, but there’s only so much sitting in hot water a person can take. It was the only hot spring we went to, but I know there are a ton in Iceland that are a lot cheaper and probably less crowded.
Haha, I’m looking at the prices online, and for some reason it’s cracking me up that their main selling point for the Comfort package is basically “Use of towel.” http://www.bluelagoon.com/blue-lagoon-spa/prices-… Sure sure, algae mask, whatever–but those towels, now THEY were a dream!
I have heard that the onsite restaurant makes a good curry, but meh, we’ll see I guess.
Btw, my main motivation for meeting people is to get a big enough group to get my certificate from ELF SCHOOL. This will be the most important degree I’ll have ever gotten, plus they serve coffee and pancakes!
Oh! I’m replying all over the place, but I went to elf school! It was… an experience. Honestly, I’m not 100% sure I’d recommend it – I was there with 3 other lady friends in our late 20s (we were the entire group), and it was a little uncomfortable. It may have just been an off day, but some of Magnus’s jokes and comments were off-putting. Might be different in a mixed-gender or mixed-age group.
Hope I’m not crushing dreams! I do still have my Elf School certificate.
You’re not crushing dreams at all! I don’t have a full Friday there (going Saturday-Friday), which is when they hold their normal session. So the other option would be to find two random people to join in, and that seems like kind of a stretch. So if I know that it’s not really worth it, I feel better about it (even if I miss out on the kooky story)!
We have tickets to Ecuador, but might cancel that and take our dogs on an epic roadtrip across the Canadian and American West. If anyone wants to gush about the coolest places west of the Great Lakes, including best places to hike with your dogs, please share! Alternately, arguments in favor of Ecuador would be welcome- I have two more weeks to dither before I lose the chance to get my airline miles back.
I recommend Utah, generally. We only hit Antelope State Park/ the great salt lake and Arches (as we were otherwise doing a cross-country move), but I would have stayed a lot longer if we’d had the time and spent more time at Arches, done Canyonlands, and headed down to Zion too. Alternatively, Idaho and the Bruneau Dunes/ Craters of the Moon National Monument is pretty great. Or Yellowstone… (actually, every national park I’ve ever been to is absolutely amazing, so…pick any that strike your fancy).
– Karlovy Vary is a funny spa town—the waters there are said to possess all-healing minerals so lots of people make pilgrimages there. Go on the Becherovka factory tour where they make a spicy (and famously Czech) liqueur from the water. They also have an international film festival there during the summer.
– Basically all of the midsized-to-biggish cities outside of Prague—Hradec Kralove, Ceske Budejovice and Cesky Krumlov are gonna be breathtakingly gorgeous, with lots of amazing architecture, old castles/churches/cobblestone streets etc to wander about in.
– If either of you like beer, Pilsen to the west is home to Pilsner Urquell (and other) breweries and is the namesake of all “pilsner” style beers.
– If you like churches made out of bones (who doesn’t?) you must go to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora!!!!
I haven’t been to Karlovy Vary, but I have seen The Last Holiday with Queen Latifah at least a dozen times and very much approve this recommendation!
OMG I did NOT realize that was set there! MUST SEE!
You had me at BONE CHURCH.
Becherovka is the most delicious liqueur. Spicy and warm and it tastes like apple pie smells. It is TOO HOT here in Aussie land, but when winter hits, I’ll be cracking into the bottle in my pantry.
Also if you double fist it with red wine *cough* it ends up tasting like mulled wine.
Ooh, try it with tonic and lots of ice—it’s like a super spicy, refreshing ginger ale!!
So far my only summer plans are an epic weekend of canning with a friend in her new kitchen. I suppose it’s time to start dreaming up some more adventurous goals!
I really just wanted to offer up encouragement and enthusiasm for your pilgramage. I walked from St. Jean Pied du Port to Santiago de Compostella (& then also to Finnesterre) this past summer. It was an incredible experience and I really believe anyone who wants to do it CAN do it. There may be a local pilgrims’ group where ever you are. The Portlandia group meets for monthly strolls and happy hour events. It’s a great way to connect to other pilgrims and the camino. Buen camino!
If you don’t mind my asking, what happens when you’re pilgriming and nature calls? Do you just dive into the nearest shrub? Am I gonna be walking past dozens of people trying to surreptitiously pee behind a tree?
There certainly are more isolated stretches where a bar with a bathroom isn’t nearby, and people do occasionally make use of trees and shrubs, but I managed to walk the entire way only using actual toilets. There are some pilgrims who don’t mind if everyone around knows what they’re sanding off trail for, but most people are discreet about it. I was more bothered by people who would litter their snack trash. As the camino enjoys a popularity resurgence, litter is becoming more of an issue.
I have zero plans for the summer beyond saving money, working a lot, running a lot, and planning a wedding. But I think the payoff will be worth it.
Karlovy Vary is so so so gorgeous but it is also popular with rich Russians, so it’s also one of the more expensive places I’ve been within the Czech Republic.
Seconding the recommendation for Ceske Budejovice. My partner’s family lives around there and ahhh too pretty. Ceske Krumlov is also amazing.
The thing I love about Prague is how musical it is as a city. It feels like everywhere you go there’s flyers for concerts or choirs in parks or the sound of music floating out of someones window. Even the fancy concerts are pretty cheap too – five of us got a box at the opera for less than $100 and I got top level seats to see the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra for about $15. Most hotels will have the schedules available.
The other place I really recommend checking out in Prague is Museum Kampa, which shows modern Czech and European art. It has some great pieces. I’m not even much of an art appreciater, but several moved me to tears.
Oh, and there is the Prague Communism and Nuclear Bunker tour as well, if you want an insight into some of the more painful aspects of Czech history. And you get to tour a nuclear bunker. I know.
I am not the hugest fan of Prague, but my very favorite eating/drinking place in the city is Dobra Cajovna — it’s the platonic ideal of a teahouse. Definitely go there. Also, Kutna Hora — to see the Sedlec Bone Church — is totally worth a day trip. (And there is also a convenient second location of the Dobra Cajovna teahouse there, on the way back down from the church/town to the train station.)
And Black Light Theatre — there are quite a few, I went to three different shows when I was there, and all were excellent in their own ways. It is something you will either love or totally not like, though. I was expecting to find it cheesy and hackneyed, but I completely completely loved it.
Also, weirdly, Prague has a staggering number of really good vegetarian restaurants (for that part of Europe, especially), so if you are vegetarian and/or enjoy vegetarian food, you can eat really well. Also, they (along with most of Central Europe) are really into scented toilet paper. It’s everywhere, and it’s terrible.
I know we don’t have to pretend to be interested in Fifty Shades any more, but I just ran across this charming reinterpretation (?) of it and it cheered me up enough to go out for bagels in six-degree weather. “Fifty shades of socialist feminism.”
http://laurie-penny.com/fifty-shades-of-socialist…
Mwahahahahaha!
Oh my god. That was amazing.
I PULL MY TAMPON OUT AND THROW IT VIOLENTLY AT HIS HEAD
I wish I could find real erotica like this.
WHO AMONG US WILL WRITE THIS?! I also would read that up.
Seriously. Also, I’m sure it exists, but I would also love to see a story about a mousy secretary dominating a CEO become a best seller one day.
oh my GOD this is amazing
pahahahaaa amazing.
“Shut up and call me Melinda Gates” I say, buckling on my strap-on.’ YES Christian Grey gon get fucked.
(reminds me of last week’s Broad City haha)
Yesssssss
I hate my research paper(s) so much. I hate doing revisions most of all.
Also it was really cold this morning (below freezing, that’s cold for here) and I guess cold makes exercise harder so I spent my whole train ride coughing and trying to catch my breath. It reminded me why I’ve always hated exercise, because sometimes that happens and it sucks.
Who wants to talk about where you would like to relocate? I am in Boston so I’ve been thinking about this a great deal.
Stretch goal: Seattle. It is temperate, the city seems so calm and friendly, and the surrounding nature bits are so lovely. If I had all the money in the world I’d buy one of the nice houses near Volunteer Park. Or something in Ballard! Just seems like an awfully nice place to live.
Maybe more attainable: my company has an office in San Diego and I have been seriously considering requesting a transfer.
My ultimate relocation dream is Barcelona – I’ve been in love with it since I went there at 19. I would love to live abroad so every now and then I nag my husband into applying for a job in Luxembourg or Estonia or something. We are unfortunately not the type of adventurous people who would just quit our jobs, move overseas and hope for the best.
Maybe more attainable: Montreal, but Husband would have to improve his French considerably to land a job there.
It definitely takes a certain type to just move abroad– my older brother quit his job and moved to Tokyo and it all worked out fine, but as his sibling I recognize our differences and know I could never do it myself. I’d be an anxious wreck. Barcelona sounds wonderful, though. I’ve never been but my friends who have always talk about wanting to go back.
A friend quit her job, sold 99% of her stuff and just up and moved to Thailand; she’s a freelance writer/editor and her plan is just to wing it until she gets bored enough to return to the States. Another friend did the same thing but moved to Poland and ended up teaching English for a year or so and then moving to the Netherlands to do a master’s degree. It’s worked out very well for them but I would also be an anxious wreck if I tried something like that. I need the security of a job lined up.
Iceland! Or Canada, they are the only places I’ve been where I’ve felt I’d like to live there.
I posted this upthread, but the Netherlands/Amsterdam in particular is my dream location. My husband and I spent a few days there on our honeymoon and we loved it so much. BUT, we also recognize that we were ON OUR HONEYMOON, and pretty much anywhere would have been magical, probably.
I was just coming to the open thread to talk about relocation!
I’m also in Boston, and I’m currently applying for jobs in the SF Bay Area (which was my ultimate dream next-place-to-live for a long time) and… Stockholm? I have interviews in both places coming up in a few weeks, and am excited and a little terrified. They’re such different places! And this winter is making me question the wisdom of Sweden, though I generally love winter and Stockholm doesn’t actually appear to be as cold as it is here right now.
Any Toast-folk willing or able to weigh in on living in Stockholm? I’m much more familiar with the pros and cons of the Bay.
Just north of the Bay Area at present, but my friend keeps telling me to move to Stockholm for grad school (which I feel too old to bother with at this point) and it looks *amazing*. That may well be because friend is amazing and any job she works at will have spontaneous dance parties enforced and the best foods ever. I’m trying to find a forever home somewhere, so this thread is nudging me to think bigger.
Everything I hear about it makes it sound great, too! I would be moving for a temporary position (a post-doc, so 2-4 years), which makes me think I should be adventurous.
Stockholm: fairly quiet, but there’s fun to be had if you’re willing to look for it a bit; introvert’s paradise; shit if you have SAD. That’s about all I remember.
Thanks! I have introvertish tendencies, so that’ll work out, but it sounds like I’ll have to get one of those fancy light therapy lamps for sure.
Oh man, my relocation dreams from Baltimore, listed on a spectrum of likelihood: Philadelphia, Chicago, San Diego, SF Bay Area, Hawai’i, Toronto. Naturally, the swoon-worthiness of each city goes up for me the less likely it is, although I’d probably be equally as excited for Chicago as San Diego. New Orleans used to be on that list, but I think as I’ve gotten older I’m okay with being a tourist in that lovely underdog city. (I’m from Baltimore, I know underdog cities!)
The idea of finding jobs for both my husband and I are just too daunting though; we’ve weathered a period where he was un/deremployed, and I would really prefer for us not to return to that. We also have a nice little next egg right now too. ^^;
Truthfully, I’ve begun meeting more interesting people in Bmore and have started getting plugged into some interested civic engagement conversations that it makes me more comfortable with putting down deeper roots here. But it doesn’t mean I can’t dream about other places..
Faved because I have a lot of friends in Baltimore, and for the shoutout to the underdog cities. I live in St. Louis, which is now internationally known for being terrible, but it is a fascinating place to live.
Sometimes I lurk on the Instagrams and Facebook accounts of friends who live in cooler places– is it just me or are they always having brunch? There are moments where I have a flash of envy but for the most part, I prefer where I live. Gritty, unglamorous cities just feel more grown-up to me somehow. There’s a Neverland quality to some of those “cool” cities that grates on me.*
*Obligatory disclaimer that I might just be seeing the social media highlights reel.
St Louis does brunch well, we need to get on a social media bender ASAP
Umm, I know I’m way late to this thread, but are you in St. Louis? Because wow, I am definitely interested in brunch (grumpy post above notwithstanding). I’ve heard rumors of brunch in St. Louis. Inklings. I feel like it’s something that happens in Soulard.
Austin’s tendencies towards Neverlandness is why we’ll probably move in the next few years- the city council hasn’t figured out that they’re running a city, not a tourist town, and are basically making planning decisions for the next ten years that should have been done at least ten years ago (or more…). I’d like to live someplace run by boring bureaucrats that at least can see reality out their window- maybe Denver again, with Salt Lake City as an alternative (I’ve tried the east coast and we don’t work, same for the Pacific northwest).
We do eat brunch a lot, though.
This is hilarious because I used to live in Austin, and my! Is this ever accurate. They were really not planning to have a city, were they.
SALT LAKE CITY IS MY DREAM CITY.
I love the idea of underdog cities. The only city that’s ever felt like home was Providence, which is definitely viewed as kind of a “shittier Boston.” I liked it better, though.
Glad you’ve found some good in Baltimore! I have some family and friends from Baltimore and enjoyed visiting as a kid. The AVAM is awesome.
I lived near Kyoto for a year, just long enough to know I’d never be able to do it permanently. And not just because none of the shoes fit me.
My goal for next year is to move from my current position in clinical research to a CRA, which would basically mean I could live just about anywhere, since you’re traveling 4 days out of the week. For a permanent residence, I’m thinking either Seattle or Portland. They’re very different, yes, but I like them both.
This year, I’m just concentrating on my Get The Fuck Out of Texas Fund. It’d be nice to live in a state where I know I could get married.
I’m really intrigued by Seattle and Portland right now, or somewhere in Vermont–the Green mountains or Burlington…. I live in Atlanta and am apparently evolving into a giant hippie flower child, so it’s starting to feel a bit conservative here. My parents just moved down to South Carolina last year, though, and I don’t feel like I can just bolt across the country. But maybe Asheville, NC?
I want to relocate exactly nowhere (it’s sunny and gorgeous out right now in Vancouver! There’s so much craft beer and amazing food here! Bikes!) and everyone feels that way and housing and cost of living prices reflect that reality and so maybe I will be forced to relocate *sob*.
Vancouver is my dream relocation (lived there for six months before and swooned the whole time) and you’re making me simultaneously more excited and less hopeful about it coming true!
Just come! It’s great.
We are starting to explore relocating from interior Alaska back to the lower 48 or to Canada- Minneapolis, Madison, Boston-area, Seattle, Vancouver, Newfoundland… Places with large bodies of (preferably salt) water go high on the list, as do places where large and unruly dogs will be happy.
My ESL contract in Russia ends in June and right now I think I want to move on, so relocation has been on my mind a lot. My goals are really vague though. Pretty much “Central or Eastern Europe if anyone will give me a work visa and also hopefully have a stronger currency than the ruble”. The one benefit of ESL jobs in Russia is that everyone needs visas, so I’m on equal footing with all the English speaking EU residents, which I’m not in pretty much any other country I’m interested in.
I was going to suggest Ukraine since it’s more relaxed than Russia visa-wise, but then I remembered that the past couple of years happened, so…
I saw a job posting for a position in Lithuania that would be right up my husband’s alley, but he has concerns about annexation by Russia…
Toronto. I went to university there, and then I moved to Edmonton because it was a little closer to my family and the job market and housing costs were better, but I miss Toronto so much.
A huge part of what I miss is the decent transit, because I don’t drive and I don’t want to. So if not Toronto, then any other Canadian city with decent transit, which I think basically means Vancouver or Montreal. My French is terrible, and Vancouver seems really smug, so.
Unfortunately I’ve gone and made friends and things in Edmonton, which makes relocating a bit harder. Also I am terrible at job-hunting.
Fistbump of Toastie solidarity from another person who doesn’t drive and doesn’t want to.
I don’t (and don’t want to) drive, either! And am also in Canada.
I was born and grew up in Toronto and miss it dreadfully. I live in Ottawa at the moment and am not very fond of it (for a number of reasons, transit being one of them). I do live downtown, so it’s not difficult to get around (I usually bike or walk), but it’s awful at this time of year, because even ten minutes outside is far too long.
My partner and I are planning on leaving Ottawa once the children are finished high school (blended family and we need to stay here because they go back and forth to the other parents) — either Toronto or an undetermined place in Europe (my partner is German).
I’m moving to Albuquerque in April. Long term though I want to get back to the northwest
I live in a place a lot of people dream about relocating to, but as someone who doesn’t care about mountain vistas or scrambling over rocks, my favorite hobby is to look at real estate listings in Cleveland (especially Cleveland/University Heights) and get really depressed about what a sweet-ass adorable mini mock-Tudor I could have for like half of what I’m paying for my stupid apartment here.
California dreaming! But pretty much everyone in the world thinks the same way and there’s so much competition, so.
UGH. Toast. Please share with me cooking disaster stories because I just created one of my own. I’ve been baking since I was eight and I’ve made this banana bread probably a hundred times in my life, and today for no reason I can see, substituted tablespoons for teaspoons. I wrecked three loaves of bread and wasted a ton of ingredients and I’m not entirely sure that my pan can be salvaged! Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Please someone tell me a story to help me feel better.
I will bake brownies now and do blog work to soothe myself.
These were meant to be separate cupcakes. They were not.
I am constitutionally incapable of making biscuits – or anything that needs to be rolled and uses a cookie cutter. I can (almost always) cake with the best of them, but I have never yet managed to make a successful cookie.
I chuckled out loud at this–great job of drawing a dragon attack!
I have had nearly ruined pots that I salvaged by boiling a mixture of vinegar and water in them for several minutes.
Oh, and I set a dishtowel on fire last night while whisking the egg yolks for my chocolate mousse in a poor man’s double boiler. That was fun.
I made meringues for the bf for Valentine’s Day. The internet told me I could use beetroot powder to make them red and I would only need a little so I wouldn’t be able to taste it. I only used a teaspoon of beetroot powder and yet the cookies tasted overwhelmingly of dirt. And now I have a huge bag of beetroot powder that I have no use for.
Easter egg dying?
On v-day, my husband covered fish filets in giardinera (basically spicy papers and vegetables marinated in oil – yum so delicious) and stuck them in the oven to bake. The oil from the giardinera leaked all over the oven, and our kitchen was literally filled with smoke. Luckily (?) we don’t have a smoke detector in our kitchen, so we just shut the kitchen door and let the smoke billow out the window/door to our back porch.
The fish was delicious, luckily. And last night I had a nightmare that my husband set our apartment on fire to test the smoke alarms. So.
On the subject of dream-arson, the other night I dreamt that a stranger on the bus shoved me, so I followed her home and set her apartment building on fire. My dream self does not have much of a sense of proportion.
I cannot for the life of me cook ground meat properly. No matter what I do it ends up being lumpy and with the consistency and flavour of a dish sponge. I also messed up steaks yesterday – my meat thermometer said they were barely at the appropriate temperature for rare steak when in fact they were cooked through and practically bone-dry by the time I took them out of the pan. Sigh.
Oh, overcooking steaks is so disappointing. 🙁
i gave up on meat thermometers years ago. every single time i’ve used one i’ve ended up with meat that’s cooked all to shit.
I at least once had brownie batter boil over in the oven. I think because they were dulce de leche brownies and the dulce de leche I used was more liquidy than what the recipe author used. However, they ended up tasting okay, though the dulce de leche ended up diffused throughout the brownie. Another time, my mom convinced me that canola oil I thought smelled weird was fine (she had a new bottle waiting; she just didn’t want to “waste” any oil) and I baked a giant apple cake with it. Once baked, if was clear that the oil was actually rancid. She and my dad still ate the cake, and I baked a new one with fresh oil. (The cake was edible, but had a definite weird side to the taste.) I’ve also spilled a good portion of pie filling on the oven, had crusts slump more times than I can count…
When I was younger I fancied myself THE MASTER OF COOKIES.
I was making basic sugar cookies for my class’s valentine’s party. You know, the kind you can make in your sleep? Well maybe I was asleep because I swapped the salt and sugar.
I ended up with Play-doh cookie-bominations.
My Play-doh eating sisters loved them though, so, bright side.
I made a simple white cake for my daughter’s first birthday and somehow made it with like twice the butter and forgot to put in the sugar?? I remembered to put in the sugar after all the other ingredients were mixed, but it was all flat and pound-cake like. My relatives were like, oh, it’ll still be good, but I went all Pinterest Mom and was like, no, I will make a goddamn cake that tastes good and looks good for my child’s first birthday and remade it at like 10pm. No regrets, except for all the wasted butter. Butter is expensive. I feel your pain.
I once doubled the butter in three sheet cakes that were needed for a large birthday project. They were…okay, but I too went all perfectionist and remade them. Six pounds of butter total was not, indeed, cheap.
On the upside, the rejects made excellent tiramisu.
I cut my reject cake into cubes, froze them and used them later in ice cream sundaes, so it wasn’t a total loss either. Tiramisu is smart, I’ll have to remember that for future baking brain short-outs.
Or trifle!
This happened when I was in high school. I got the urge one afternoon to make peanut butter cookies. There was a recipe right on the back of the JIF jar, and I thought it would be cool to surprise my parents when they got home. And man did those cookies look and smell delicious. But they tasted like nothing but salt. Because the recipe called for something like 3/4 tsp salt, 3/4 cup flour, and I conflated them and put in 3/4 cup salt. Oops.
To this day, whenever my mom sends me a recipe she highlights and underlines the amount of salt and adds a little note reminding me to double check.
When I was about 11, in home economics class at school, I made a swiss roll that looked like it was made of shoe leather. I am now 37 and my family still tease me about it even though I have been in charge of making all their birthday cakes for the last 7 years.
I once made a kale and potato gratin that managed to be both watery and crunchy. Ugh. I also made a salmon potato bake that was so bad I think it contributed to me being hospitalized for appendicitis the next day. Don’t buy the cheap smoked salmon, everyone, it’s not worth it.
Once I used White Lily all-purpose flour instead of King Arthur or the store brand to make a salted focaccia (that I have ALSO made a trillion times) and it turned out chalky and inedible. I had to throw away the whole loaf. Lesson: White Lily is for biscuits and nothing else ever.
When I was a kid, I attempted to make brownies FROM SCRATCH! instead of the mix. But because I cooked the batter on the stove, when I went to add the eggs, they actually COOKED IN PLACE instead of mixing in the rest of the batter and there were lumpy bits of cooked egg white all the way through.
I stick to Ghirardelli now. .___.
There was a weird two-year period in my life where I suddenly couldn’t make cornbread. The texture was wrong, the taste was off, it would burn in a perfectly fine oven. I decided someone had cursed me. My chocolate-chip cookies also went terribly weird during this time.
I moved to a new city and now both are fine. But one day I will find you, Chicago food witch.
I wonder if it was the water, maybe it was more hard or soft or something.
JUST LAST WEEK I made the Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe that I have been making for literally 20 years of my life and somehow managed to put a teaspoon of baking powder in place of the teaspoon of salt.
The cookies were still edible but too sweet and also, somehow, bland but the thing that really gets me is that I’ve made this recipe hundreds of times and still managed to mess it up!
I can’t even think of a proper disaster at the moment, so I’ll just tell you about the time I made a single-layer cake from a simple recipe I make all the time… and stuff I make all the time is where I’m most likely to pay poor attention and go astray.
So, this time, I made a blueberry variation, but I forgot to put in the baking powder, which I remembered after it had been in the oven for a few minutes. I shrugged, thinking A. it’s too late now and B. heck, it’ll be flat, but it might be edible anyhow, who knows?
The resulting cake was not only flat: it was a slick, flexible, slightly shiny disc reminiscent of nothing so much as a remarkably thick version of the rubber vomit simulations that are available to buy as a prank. It smelled like nothing. It is the weirdest thing I’ve ever produced from my oven.
When I was a kid I decided to make an edible cookie bowl. The recipe said to stick the dough to the outside of a cake pan to bake it in a bowl shape. Except I substituted margarine for butter and the thing started to fall apart in the oven as it baked. Some of the cookie bits fell on the heating element in the bottom of the oven and that is how I managed to set the oven on fire. Luckily it was small enough I could put it out myself before the house burned down.
I have been baking for a long time and usually consider myself pretty good at it. A couple years ago I somehow swapped tablespoons for teaspoons of salt, creating the least pleasant cookies of all time. I was baking for one of my friends who clearly felt bad about how much this disaster upset me, so he kept on choking down cookies and saying “these are great! really! they’re fine!” while looking like he was in physical pain. I have still not lived this down (the next year on my birthday said friend baked me cookies and put my initials on one of them with salt. The rest of the batch was delicious though).
What is it that causes that brain meltdown??? Honestly, I’ve made this recipe amillion different times and never misread t for T until TODAY where I wrecked all that banana bread. I swear I do know the difference!
Maybe it’s all just overconfidence from making the same thing too many times. I usually am so careful when measuring, but at the time I remember thinking “oh these cookies are so easy I’ve made them a million times”. That’s exactly when disaster strikes.
About a month ago, I made a beautiful chocolate layer cake to take to a small dinner party. When I went to cut it, I tried and tried and could not get the cake server to cut through the cake. Finally, after they brought a bread knife, I realized the problem.
I hadn’t removed the parchment round from the bottom of the cake layers. So there was a sheet of parchment paper running through the entire center of my cake. That was…embarrassing. Womp womp.
Also when I was in high school and making brownies from a mix, I once forgot to add the eggs. Oops.
Ohhh! I’m a second-generation baker working on starting my own business and you’d think I’d have nothing but successes, but alas, the opposite is true. What stands out the most was the time I wanted to make brownies with a salted dulce de leche ribbon. Again, like others in this thread, I mistakenly put in 1/2 cup of salt (not 1/2 a tsp). Nothing could save those brownies, nothing at all. I still remember that.
Oh yeah, and the stuff I’ve messed up since going gluten free. Holy.Shit.
I bake all the time, and just last week I made peanut butter brownies and completely forgot the sugar. It was a shame because the peanut butter part was so tasty!
I’ve killed yeast and tried to salvage loaf bread into a foccacia-esque bread disc that was a dramatic failure.
I’ve left out eggs. I’ve reversed the water and oil amounts in brownie mixes. I’ve put way too much pie filling in and had bubbling fruit pour over the edges and scorch onto the bottom of my oven. The list goes on. But you pick yourself back up and get back to a-baking and churn out more delicious things!
Also! Despite years and years of successful baking I CANNOT make chocolate chip cookies. Every time they spread and become one big buttery cookie. I have no clue why.
i recently made jalapenos poppers that had… no flavor? like, the blandest things EVER. how can jalapenos, 2 kinds of cheese, and **BACON** have no flavor??? i took one bite and was like NOPE. it was a mouthful of warm squishy flavorless horror.
i completely bombed the first time i tried to make greek lemon potatoes. i used the wrong kind of potatoes and forgot the chicken broth. they came out of the oven as gummy little starch cubes with a salty lemon crust. i also completely fucked up the chicken that night. i actually started crying at the dinner table. my partner disappeared to the kitchen and returned with leftover pizza and beer for us both. we have not spoken of that meal since.
and there was also once a lasagna that refused to “come together”. it ended up being a brick of pasta & cheese in a pool of liquid.
Toasties I need your help! What should I read next? I survived a marathon of Alice Walker and Jean Rhys so I need something entertaining and amusing and not stressing at all 😀 (Also I’m only reading women this year AND I’M LOVING IT!)
Also, yesterday I looked at the list of brand names for fluoxetine (ie what is generally known as Prozac). I am so glad I wasn’t born in Lithuania cause the mere thought of having to buy DEPREXETIN makes me panic. I also want to punch the idiots who thought that Felicium and Felixitin were a nice idea.
I just finished Cold Comfort Farm and it was very entertaining and amusing! And written by a woman too!
Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher books?
Seconded!
I am enjoying the heck out of Amanda Foreman’s biography of the Duchess of Devonshire (which a Toastie recommended in another open thread, so thank you!).
Different Duchess of Devonshire, but I’m reading Deborah Mitford’s memoir, Wait for Me. Loving that so far!
I’m currently tearing my way through Through A Glass Darkly: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79484.Through…
It is soapy, ridiculous fun, and I adore every minute of it.
I adore Karleen Koen. All her books are great.
i find lorrie moore forever comforting and i love her sense of humor but some of her books are indeed very stressful (in particular “a gate at the stairs,” in my opinion) so…your results may vary?
I recently discovered M.E. Braddon, who was a 19thC British ladywriter who specialized in “sensation novels,” but kind of in the same way that P.D. James wrote “detective novels”–they are fairly literary but also good fun in the style of the genre. Her books also have a much more modern feel than the Eliots and Austens and Gaskells which I also enjoy. Also if you have Kindle, her books are all free. I read “Lady Audley’s Secret,” which is a fairly absorbing mystery, and “The Doctor’s Wife,” which I loved because of the way it plays with the expectations of a steamy romance novel.
Ooh, I will go and hunt her stuff down!
Ooooh I have Lady Audley’s Secret on my nook and couldn’t remember why. I think I’ll have to read it before I forget again…
I have a question! I started “The Doctor’s Wife” and then it seemed like it was just going to be Madame Bovary, and I hate Madame Bovary so I stopped reading. Is it? If not, I will start it again.
The M.E. Braddon I really recommend is “The Trail of the Serpent.” It’s gloriously funny as well as sensational.
It is not! Some of the characters become very self-conscious that they’re acting out Madame Bovary and they take decided steps in the opposite direction, which doesn’t always work out for them, but they try. It’s a messy and not entirely satisfying ending, but I liked the journey.
Will download Trail of the Serpent next!
I just got the second book in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice series from the library and I’m very excited about that. So read that, or read the first one first then read this one.
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein! They are heart-pounding and people you care about do die, but it isn’t a dark series if that makes sense (no GoT is this) but YMMV. They’re feminist fantasy/sci-fi and intelligent and fascinating. If I was mega rich I would pay the author as much as she wanted a year so she could quit her day job/work it part-time and write more (which is something she wants to be able to do! I’m no Christian Grey). The only negative is there are only four and she is very busy/has been ill so you’re going to get to the end and yearn for the next and you just don’t know when the next will come.
Feelings on YA? I love love love all of Libba Bray’s books. Also Rainbow Rowell.
It is 0 degrees here in PA. Without considering windchill. I have college classes.
I just want you all to know what an inspiration you have all been and how wonderful this site is in case I don’t make it.
Damn it, Anthro class, you better be worth this!
-salutes all of you-
Open thread! Amen. Work’s been awful lately- I screwed up a spreadsheet last week and now i’m worried I’m going to get fired. I’ve been in this job for three years and haven’t had any problems before, but the company isn’t doing as well as we’d like and everyone seems to be on edge. I’m planing on leaving in August for grad school in the UK, and I was counting on the money from this job to get my savings up to where I’d like it to be over the next five months, and if I lose this job I just don’t know what I’ll do. AHHHHH. *rips hair out*
In other news, my hair is super soft today and it’s making me happy. Also, leftover Valentines cookies.
So I’m told it’s possible to secure an apartment for rent in a town you don’t yet live in. Has anyone does this and can they offer advice?
As a former real estate agent I say: visit, so you can see the places in person. Seriously, there’s no substitute for seeing a place with your own eyes (and clients seemed to agree: they all arranged weekend-trips to look at places).
I get that but I’m two states away and I have to rely on the help of a friend.
Do you have a friend in said town? My girlfriend contracted the services of a DC-based friend of hers when she was looking for summer sublets: she’d make the necessary contacts with the subletters, and work out a time when her friend could come by and look at the apartment in person; then her friend would give her an emailed rundown of the good, bad, and indifferent of each place.
I do have a friend there who promised to keep an eye out so I’m hoping I can ask her to take a look for me. I live two states away and I’m saving my money for the move so I’m hoping this can be the easiest way for me.
I managed to secure a co-living situation when I moved to Ann Arbor, but it turned into more of a temporary place while I figured out a better spot. If you’re OK with roommating it for a little while, it’s a decent option. Craigslist was my friend, and also Google Earth to get an idea of what the neighborhoods were like.
Mr. Rose and I needed temporary housing. We were leaving New England for a job in a Texas college town. We looked at Texas student housing complexes online while we were still in New England, knowing that apartments are hard to find after the school year starts. After checking Yelp reviews and the like, we narrowed it down to 2 complexes, and chose 1 after talking with management by phone about door locks from inside only, dog policy, and ease of dog park access. We gave a credit card number over the phone. Moved in 3 months later.
Could not / would not have done this without serious internet search skills. Maps, reviews, comments on non-review blogs. And we knew it was only for a year. We can survive any situation for only a year. Maybe that’s something you can engineer: a short lease, just in case. Good luck.
Thanks very much! It’s good to know it’s possible. And I’ve lived in horrible places before so I know I’m capable of putting up with a lot.
Such good ideas for the remote hunt! Trying to find places online feels like wearing those big nuclear plant gloves that are in a whole different room from your body, so knowing what to ask about ahead of time, and that it’s something you can bail on after a year? Smart as heck.
If you can swing the cost, I recommend looking for a short term lease so you can look for a permanent place when you get there. We moved into a place sight unseen- it worked fine for what we needed, but I definitely wouldn’t have chosen it if I’d been looking myself. My sister-in-law checked out the place and liked it, but it wasn’t really our style- no fatal flaws, just not right for us. We had a four month lease- left a lot of stuff in boxes knowing we’d move again shortly. Usually short term leases are fairly easy to pull off in the more corporate apartment complex-y places- they’ll have a rate list based on the term of your lease. Sometimes you can even get a break if you get your move-out month to coincide with a month that has a lot of rental activity (e.g. july/ august in a college town).
The paperwork stuff was pretty easy- we e-signed a lot of stuff and did the final lease when we got there.
I’m adulting like a boss this year: bought a new washing machine ( my first!), an awesome vacuum cleaner ( it’s rechargeable! and scares the cat!) and, most importantly, have been using both regularly. What feats of adulthood have you performed lately, Toastrons?
Fuck yeah, adulting! washing dishes and vacuuming can be so satisfying too.
I’ve been creating personal awareness about my afflictive emotions and managing them with kindness instead of projecting them on others and causing suffering in my interpersonal relationships! does this count?
That totally counts. Very advanced level adulting right there.
I bought a new washing machine, had new carpets put in and am still at the stage where the new carpet is noveltous enough that I hoover it before it is ankle-deep in cat hair.
I have a big list of Stuff I Urgently Need to Tackle and I’m going by easiest stuff first (not very adult) but they’re all very tedious things so that feels kind of adult
*Set up a high interest (well, “high” is paltry nowadays but w/e) savings account for maybe someday buying a place
*Set up a meeting with an accountant to sort out my local taxes because I’m like ????? ??? ??????? help I don’t understand any of this
*Started bringing in lunch as opposed to burning money
I’ve been flossing!
Woohoo! Oh god, I’m living in my first apartment with an in-apartment washing machine and it is heavenly.
On my end, since moving into this apartment, I’ve managed to vacuum and swiffer mop regularly (once a month, which I know for some would be wildly inadequate but is way better than my last apartment where I vacuumed twice in two years, no joke). Since January, I’ve also gotten clutter almost completely under control? I did apartment therapy’s january cure and i’ve got a (spaced out/deconstructed) landing strip and it works!!
I have been going to bed at a sensible hour more often than not for, like, a week.
Eleven is a sensible hour, right?
This year so far:
-Bought a (front loading!) washer and dryer
-Cleaned the fuck out of my apartment on a pretty regular basis
-Crashed my car, called insurance, and got repairs started with minimal crying
-Worked together a system for “soft landings” when I have an emotional crash (e.g. when I want to stress eat, I stop when I’m full; when I want to go on a shopping tear, I don’t make any final sale purchases)
+1 Your “soft landings” rule is clutch!
I am tracking my foods, avoiding added sugars (except today, and tomorrow, because paczki!!), and drinking 120 oz of water a day. It is HARD. There is so. much. pee. But I feel good.
I’m one armchair away from having a complete set of living room furniture that isn’t cheap student purchases or ex-roommate discards. And this week, I’ll be ordering that chair! The ingrained cheapskateness of grad school still runs pretty deep, but picking out fabrics and furniture styles and having them look beautiful together is SO SATISFYING, you guys.
This is my dream, but I have two cats and must defer it until they die. Or at least until one of them dies, because the other one is much more amenable to having claw caps put on him.
Understandable! The start of the new furniture purchases coincided with the arrival of New Kat after the sad passing of Old Kat, but he’s been pretty good so far with using scratching posts.
I did catch him starting to scratch the brand-new chair yesterday, but hopefully he will associate that event with the claw-clipping session that immediately followed and knock it off.
Broke my bottle-opener carabiner that I keep my keys on, promptly ordered a stronger one on eBay!
Cat-scaring is the primary use of vacuum cleaners, brooms, and plastic bags.
And kimonos, we learned last night, as my house-mate swanned around in her new kimono and my cat violently leapt in terror from my lap, using my mons pubis as his launching pad.
Does it count as adulting if I am hiding evidence of mature adulthood? I put myself on a schedule to henna my gray hair away.
Every time i do the dishes, laundry and wash my hair (natural black hair can be a lesson in perserverence) on the same day, I strut around the apartment like a mutha fuckin HBIC.
Lately, it’s been doing my taxes and taking care of the huge checklist that comes with moving.
I just ate a huge plate of roasted cauliflower for breakfast because I am the worst/best at feeding myself. I regret nothing. Brave little Toast-ers, what are your favorite atypical breakfasts (bonus points if vegan)?
I eat carrot sticks + spicy hummus for breakfast pretty much every morning (plus greek yoghurt usually). I guess it’s not typical but it’s very low-effort and it’s gotta be better for me than eating half a carton of cornflakes every day
Yeah I’ve heard lots about proteinaceous breakfasts being so much better than the big bowl/slice-o-carbs we typically associate with the meal, but I usually translate that into hummus…on toast. Old habits die hard. The veggies idea is great!
Avocado toast! Brown rice with toasted almonds! Warmed-up hummus with feta and pita bread, tomatoes in season.
Super-duper not-vegan, but I suuuuuure do like it: chicken livers on toast.
I definitely love me some avocado toast, the rice and almonds idea sounds really nice! Do you make it sweet or savory in any way?
I do a lot of potato-vegetable fry-ups with hot sauce. (Broccoli/cauliflower, chard, whatever.) I sometimes top with a fried egg but can easily forego that garnish.
This isn’t so atypical, but I’ve been doing Vegan Mondays this year and so far every single one has started off with avocado on toast. I like it best with a bit of lemon juice and zaatar on top. YUM.
I also used to be a big fan of savory oatmeal! Lightly salted instead of sugared, with olive oil. (I don’t dislike it now, I’m just usually too lazy to make it.)
Ooh I do avocado toast too and usually use sriracha, but I have a bunch of zaatar sitting around that I rarely use so I think that’s in my future tomorrow morning! I used to do savory oatmeal a lot and it seems to just never occur to me lately in my sleepy hungry state, I’ll have to make an effort to try it again. I usually just pretend the oatmeal is rice and put sesame oil and soy sauce on it and green onions on it, soo good.
I vary in breakfast foodstuffs because ADD makes grocery shopping fun and interesting (“Oooh, I came for apples but what’s that thing over there, wait, am I here for bananas, oooooh chocolate bars…”) so currently my morning meal consists of Greek Dolmades with plain but spicy goat yogurt dip.
Oh man I’ve got a can of dolmades sitting in my pantry right now! good call!
Pinto beans or Health Valley chili over shredded corn tortillas with optional cheese melted over the top, another hand raised for avocado toast, and also avo toast with canned salmon and hot sauce. Mmmm.
Not vegan, but MrChouffe and I have been making big hearty spicy beef ramen soup on Sunday mornings. It is so lovely and a poached egg goes in it, and, trust me, it is the most warming, salty, delightful thing ever. Can be easily made vegan I believe, with a miso base and tempeh if you’re so inclined.
Oh that sounds sooo nice. Pre-veg times I used to go out for pho as a hangover breakfast and it was just perfect. I do a mean miso-tofu noodle soup as well but I never thought to have it as breakfast food!
Soup is a favourite of mine. Something brothy with some vegetables and maybe noodles. I desperately wanted some this morning, but all I had was granola so I ate it in great sadness.
This week, jelly bellies.
Roasted cauliflower is the best! I keep meaning to try other ways of cooking cauliflower, but I just end up roasting it every time because it’s easy and tastes amazing.
Lately I’ve been making avocado shakes: avocado + milk (I think soy/almond would work just as well) + sugar (or your sweetener of choice), blended until smooth and pudding-y.
Steel cut oats with sauteed mushrooms. Or pico de gallo. Or a brushetta type topping (fresh tomato + garlic+ basil). Yum.
I dreamed last night that it was 9 a.m. Monday and I had already met all my week’s deadlines. Neither the unlikelihood of that nor the fact that I was Colin Firth clued me in that I was dreaming.
It was very restful being Colin Firth.
… so, if you’re wondering who is the target market for those Kingsman ads, apparently it’s me.
Saw that this weekend and WOW, I had no idea Colin Firth could kill people in so very, very many creative ways. …I’m still not sure how I felt about this movie.
Now I really want to dream that I’m Colin Firth! I need a restful interlude.
realized this week i have a terrible way of dealing with being annoyed at people, which is letting everything build up for months until something is the last straw and i get SO PISSED. im really good at building a case in my head against someone. but that is no way to go about interacting with people! but the alternative is always confronting people which would be not good either? how do you guys do it? also this latest case(lol) is very legitimate anger at past terrible behavior coupled with minor annoyances…
i don’t know but i would love to learn. i haven’t snapped yet, but there is a person in my life for whom 90% of their actions/habits/manners of speech are annoying to be, for a wide variety of reasons both understandable and insane. every time i think i’ve gotten zen about it, something new pops up and BOOM back in the rage spiral. there has to be a way out but i don’t know where it is.
ahh if the things annoying you aren’t things the person can reasonably change (mannerisms etc.), that is tougher. I have one of these situations in my house currently, and in this particular my therapist suggested trying to reframe my housemate’s habit in my mind into something kinder and milder. She also suggested acknowledging (to myself) that my housemate is just kind of an awkward person, so he’s not doing this thing AT me and could use some slack. It’s sort of helping…
For daily fury, I try to frame it as, I see that other people in our orbit are not equally enraged by this person, so it is not that his qualities are inherently unbearable, so in a way I am the one with the problem. Honestly I find that sloughs off well over half of my annoyances, leaving me with a better sense of what’s worth addressing and better acquaintance with my own intolerances.
The OP’s question is more difficult, because that sounds like a serious talk that is a little past due. I tend to limit my interaction with or degree of intimacy with people whose ethics I mistrust, but there’s surely a better way to live.
Maybe practice bringing up annoyances before they build up to be big deals? Like, look for a middle ground between not mentioning anything at all and BIG CONFRONTATION. If you bring up something calmly, I wouldn’t even call it a confrontation (because that sounds kinda bad), just call it bringing up a small issue.
Also, use “I” statements! (“I feel _____ when you _____, and I would really like it if __________.”)
I do this too 🙁 It sucks. If I knew of how not to do it, I would share it with you.
Ughhhh I have done so much work on this in the past two years. I’m still not there yet, but I’m getting more comfortable with it slowly but surely. What’s helpful for me is, when I get annoyed or stressed, to pay attention to where I’m feeling that stress in my body, and see if there are things I can do to make that body discomfort go away.
So for instance, if I’m in a situation where I want to say something desperately but am hesitating, I usually get a giant lump in my throat. I’ve learned now that this means I need to say what I’m thinking and trust that it will be OK, and so far it has been. Or, if I’m uneasy in a situation, I’ll get butterflies in my stomach, and that’s my cue to, like, go home and not be around people for a bit. This helps me get out what I need to get out before I get ragey or upset or anxious, and that also means that other people aren’t as affected by my moods. Not sure if that is helpful to you or not, but wishing you luck–I know it’s tough. <3
I would also love to hear constructive responses to this, because I am exactly the same way and my solution is usually “avoid the person until I don’t hate the sight of their face.” Which, since it frequently takes years and that is a good way to lose friends, is far from ideal.
thanks for ur replies. i think my main problem here is that this person has done something really, really terrible a while ago to a friend. they confessed to me afterwards and i was not as angry as i should have been because, basically, i didnt want to think about it. and now they are being minorly bad and ive realised the real reason im furious is the Bad Thing, but if i bring it up now, it will seem like im co-opting the Bad Thing to make them feel bad about the Small Thing which would not be ok
Do you think that learning about the Bad Thing they did (and how they handled it afterward – were they remorseful, did they try to fix any damage they’d caused, etc) fundamentally changes your view of them as a person? It sounds like what your emotions might be telling you is “I have lost respect for and/or don’t wish to remain close to this person.” Which is different than just being annoyed at a friend or roommate’s annoying habits.
this is something i have been working on. i’ve realized it’s not so much an anger issue as the fact that i have imaginary relationships a lot. sometimes i have happy conversations in my head with people, or i forget whether we actually talked about something or i just imagined it. this also applies to anger. i build it up so much that i then can’t believe it’s not obvious to the other person, who is, of course, oblivious. i’m an enneagram type 4 and learning about this helped. and just getting better about mentioning small annoyances and not burying it out of a need to be “polite.”
I just got to work because I took the morning off (“worked from home”), mostly because I checked the temp when I was supposed to get up and it was 1 degree outside. I noped my way back under the covers.
Also, datefriend is back from his month away and has been texting me like whoa this morning! SO HAPPY.
Haha that first point = me exactly this morning. Not to mention this is the first Monday in… 3 weeks? that I haven’t been legitimately snowed in, so I have to get used to the 5-day week again.
We don’t even have that substantial of a snowfall down here, so my sympathies are definitely with you guys. I am lighting a candle for my productivity this week.
I am likely to get tomorrow off due to snow (whoo! snow dayyyyyy! At last!). So I am plowing through my to-do list today at work in the hope that I can relax tomorrow. Work seems to be finally- finally!- easing off a little with the stress, mostly because I am almost done with this particular part of my massive project! And my bosses have made a point of telling me that I’m doing a good job in between their concrit, which makes me a happy person. There are also rumblings of a promotion happening as well which would be AWESOME. Hooray, brain! You did good keeping together these past few weeks!
Should I marathon the Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice while knitting and cooking tomorrow, y/y?
Should I marathon the Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice while knitting and cooking tomorrow, y/y?
YES!
Reporting live from Buffalo where the temperature has barely cracked freezing for a month and a half…this past week nature decided to double down. Now temperatures in the 20s are like a fond memory. I commute to another city for grad school, and I am skipping one of my evening classes this week because it’s going to be too dangerous to drive the 75 miles at 9pm when class is over.
It needs to stop. It just…needs to stop.
Something is wrong with my heat. The registers are warm, but no warm air is coming out. And unlike Santa Barbara (I imagine) we have a wind chill advisory. YAY. If it isn’t fixed by tonight I’ll be crashing in a guest room elsewhere.
I spent just 36 hours traveling from Massachusetts to a conference up in a ski resort in Alberta. This involved taking a train down the East Coast to avoid the blizzard, followed by two flights and a three hour bus. The snow was literally chasing me out of the East Coast, and it was -2F when I connected through Toronto. Arrived at 10pm, had a glass of wine, and passed out.
This morning, it is crystal clear and 32F. Up in the goddamn Canadian Rockies. Sons of bitches stole New England’s weather.
Also, this conference hotel is ungodly expensive and luxurious. But my university is paying for ALL of it and I’m leaving academia in a few months so I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT. *Quaffs hot cocoa while ignoring conference talks.*
Thank you so much for sharing this, because I am vicariously enjoying your “balmy” weather/luxe hotel/hot chocolate trifecta. Enjoy yourself! You deserve it!
Oh I have been terribly procrastinatey at work recently, so I decidedly do not deserve it. But I so deserve it. *Eats some raspberry mouse!*
Treat Yo Self!
*Sings* It’s the best conference of the yee-eeaaar!
This is beautiful. As a fellow soon-to-be-fugitive from academia I salute you.
I’ve only got so much time left to use ALL MY UNIVERSITY’S MONEY!
Enjoy! Take them for all they’re worth! 😀 Are you going skiing? Go skiing while the talks are on!
I’ve actually never skied before! Think I’ll take a class later in the week. The great thing about a ski conference is that the entire afternoon (like, from 1-6pm) is free so people can go ski. I, um, might skip some of the morning and evening sessions too, though…
To make the most of 5 hours of snow time I would have to sleep through the talks – this might explain why I’ve never been sent to ski based conference!
Definitely do it though! or snowboard – which is better (…don’t look at my bruises 😉 )
Boston Toastrons, can we talk about how we’re preserving sanity/joy in life/our toes right now? I’ve been eating gummi vitamin D drops, working on the house, and dreaming about the bulbs planted under the eleventy million feet of snow in the yard. But it’s really hard and disorienting here right now!
I put these suggestions on Twitter yesterday 1) cook really delicious things: I made vegan barbecued ribs yesterday and an apple sticky roll this morning 2) Do something that gives you a sense of accomplishment: I am working on writing A BIg Thing 3) Don’t watch anything snowy on TV or a monitor, including movies: no “Snowpiercer” or snow news. Instead go outside during the day for a little bit and look around. Mother Nature might hate us, but she’s still pretty awe-inspiring.
Gummy vitamin D is so dangerous to me right now – I love fruity gummy things, and I want sunshine, so sunshine candy? I’ve snuck more than the recommended dose a few times!
I think I’ve got Stockholm Syndrome, because I’ve started to sort of enjoy shoveling. :/ And I’m thinking about how much I’m going to want a snow bank to jump into come August. Snow, what are you doing to me??
Trying to get outside when it’s sunny (like today) even if it’s stupid cold. I feel like getting some sunshine on my eyeballs is good for me.
ETA: Also drinking the ginger-lemon-honey steamer my student brought me (unprompted!) at our meeting today. That helps too.
Watching Netlix and snuggling with my kitty. Strangely, the sun is out today, but I think this is only to lull us into complacence, since another (!) snow storm is coming tomorrow.
COOKING. My partner and I live in 425 sq ft so it’s an especial challenge for us to stay sane, but we’ve been cooking up a storm to keep things exciting!!
Enjoying how much money I’m saving, I guess? I have been doing tons of cooking and reading and barely going out except to work, and it shows in my credit card bill, which is nice. Even if I have a little cabin fever by now.
i woke up with the hugest itchiest bug bite on the side of my neck. what the hell. ughhhhhhh
It is gorgeously frosty outside but I am inside, home from work and encouraging my pup to chase his tail for my amusement. Life is beautiful. I think this has been discussed in previous threads but I didn’t follow the threads very closely. Are there Toasties in Chicago and do you ever meet up?
There are! There is a facebook group (Chicago Toasties). I just went to check the group, because I thought there was a meetup scheduled soon, and it turns out it was last night… Maybe we can organise another one soon. Did Passive Aggressive Brunch Club ever happen?
Hey there New England, just thought I’d let you know that it’s 25 degrees ABOVE ZERO here in Interior Alaska today! Muahahahahahaha!
Sure, rub it in. At least we’ve started to see the sun after 5 pm again.
Here’s another Photobucket image that I wanted to give as a V-Day card to all you wonderful Toasties (hopefully this will work…deep breath…)
We are having a lovely sunset right now.
OMG, my apologies…that image is HUGE. (It’s called “the Miracle of the Modern Zoo-Tiger” the title taken from an old “Book of Knowledge” encyclopedia insert…remember those, fellow Olds? Anyway, the b/w picture accompanying the article showed a worried and fashionable older women holding a downed Pronghorn antelope while “the man in charge” grinned straight into the camera and I thought “Jeezus, that woman and the antelope are the same-caught” so I took her image and flipped it to make her, Ida know, more possessed and powerful (but still something to be stared at).
Now I’m off to eat Dolmades, yum!
I have an unexpected day off today so I am feeling very grateful for snowstorms right now. Had a wicked sore throat all weekend and didn’t get much rest, so I spent this morning catching up on sleep. Now I’m settling in to watch The Musketeers all afternoon 🙂
I would have you all know that I glutted myself on Korean BBQ this weekend and have no regrets. Also, ladiez, if you want to keep ur bae by ur side, fill your hair with BBQ smoke and ur man will keep sniffing ur head because u smell like hot meat. #HotTip #SoSexy #RelationshipGoals.
ALSO in blog news: I am having such a fun time writing my blog and seeking out books to review for it and ordering cheap books off ABE Books and hunting out used bookstores and it is SO MUCH FUN. Why did I not start this long ago????
Better question: why did you not include a link? 🙂 This is the historical YA blog, yes?
Yes you are right! https://yahistoricalvault.wordpress.com/
One of these days I’m going to streamline my internet life so that everything is connected and links to everything else, but that day is not today.
I have today off, not because of President’s Day, but because I never work Mondays. Which is a good start to the week, let me tell you. Today, I plan to do some cleaning in my room, get my seedlings started, and put a new suet cake in the birdfeeder.
Packing up the laptop shortly in order to move tomorrow morning. I’m…whatever it’s called when you’re moving. Overwhelmed? Freaking out? It’s short term, so really just a matter of sticking my boxes in a different garage and existing while I look for a place to actually live, but the expense involved means that’s going to take longer now. Just lost a family member who was one year older than me, so I’m thinking a lot about how long it’s reasonable to put my life on hold for…so, yeah, full brain.
On a happier note, did anyone else watch the SNL 40 thing? I hadn’t planned to but ended up liking it, and kind of want a device that would let me watch all 40 years on the app.
I am kinda bummed I missed it! I only saw Kanye’s performance (so good) and the Andy Samberg/Adam Sandler digital short about corpsing but I’m hoping it shows up on demand so I can watch it!
Miley Cyrus was great, too, and something about all the self-congratulatory backslapping between casts was charming instead of eye-roll-inducing. I missed more than a decade of the show, so maybe my next device purchase will have to be something Apple store friendly.
Dispatches from the frozen wastes of Boston:
The bad: it is NO DEGREES and my office heater is broken. WTF. And the building manager is away till Weds., according to his auto-response.
The good: my student showed up for our meeting bringing me a ginger lemon honey steamer. Bless her.
It’s so cold, the degrees have migrated! Love it.
SO EXCITED
I’m going to LA for a conference-y thing tomorrow, and even better, staying an extra day to go to Getty Villa.
The only downside is how to deal with a live-in lover who will miss me but I won’t miss him… does that make me an asshole? I should probably be kind, as in, “I’ll miss you too, smooches” and then sail off into the sunset of having myself to myself for once in my goddamned life.
“I’ll miss you” is not a lie. Eventually, you will miss him. Not as soon as he imagines, but that’s OK. Maybe not at all while you’re away. But at some point in the future, maybe years from now, you will miss him. So it’s not a lie.
After a couple of decades, Mr. Rose and I openly acknowledge the relief of time away from each other and away from demanding, adorable, needy dogs. “I’ll miss you … eventually.” “I’ll miss you after a couple of days.”
Checking in after 2 days apart, “Do you miss me yet?” “Not yet, probably tomorrow.”
Sudden, unscheduled call after several days apart, “I just called to say I miss you. I was (enjoying X activity / thinking about X) and I suddenly missed you.” That right there, Toastfriends, feels so good, was worth waiting for.
Yes, this, completely. Mr Pi and I both enjoy the time on our own, to the point where we gloat about how much we will enjoy not having to share the remote, lol. And then we call or text sometime(s) during the time apart and go “Oh I saw this awesome thing and had to tell you about it!” It’s lovely. (Can’t wait for my next conference, lol.)
So my weekend plans were derailed because my aunt called me Friday night and reminded me that my grandma’s 85th birthday party was Saturday. It was an excellent birthday party, and I have apparently gotten old enough to enjoy chatting with relatives I barely know, but it took up most of Saturday.
I am (hopefully) starting my new job tomorrow and I am overcome with anxiety to the point where I had to take an ativan and am now lying in bed without the motivation to even sit up straight. Feeling better anxiety-wise, though!
New jobs are exciting, exciting things are stressful! Good luck tomorrow! (My mantra in these situations is usually “Dumber people than me have done this.” Helped amazingly when buying a house, which was TERRIFYING.) 🙂
Uuuuuuggggggh I just got turned down for a mortgage and then came home to a parking ticket and everything is the worst. I mean, it’s not the worst it could possibly be, many people have things worse than me, but I’m in a terrible mood, so I’m off to look at video of puppies falling over in the snow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBgPwNiQfU
That’s better.
Ugh, that is a rough day! I’m sorry, how disappointing and frustrating. Sounds like you have a great plan to boost your spirits. Puppy videos rule.
`so frustrating! I basically got turned down for being responsible and not having any credit card debt (so I have no real credit score), but I’m a regular saver! I pay my rent on time! I don’t spend money I don’t have! buuuut they would rather have someone with lots of debt who makes the minimum payment every month, because it looks better on their algorithms. Boo to them!
They definitely don’t want someone with lots of debt. I was turned away for leasing a car. They just want to see payments made regularly over a period of time, but without actually carrying debt. Ideally they want to see someone use the card constantly, for mundane expenses (nothing unusually high) and pay it off every month or something.
Do you use a credit card at all? I use one for most things, but I pay the balance in full every month, and that’s sufficient to make my credit score very good, but it doesn’t require me to be in debt and paying interest.
I’m in Canada, so it’s possible that there are different algorithms, though I didn’t think they were that different.
Of course, this advice would perhaps have been more helpful to you several years ago.
No – that’s the problem. I didn’t know it mattered so much or I would have bought, like, petrol with it or something and paid it off each month. (I just know people with stacks of debt who pay the minimum each month and still got approved, which is irritating!) I’m going to start building my rating now, but I’m not sure how long it will take :/
Hooray for puppies. Other people’s puppies are the best. I’m sorry about losing the mortgage. So frustrating And solidarity on the parking ticket. I was passing Mr. Rose’s lab on the way home from an errand and took him a surprise brownie. I forgot we live in a college town, that parking is therefore permit-only. I forgot to park in visitor parking. That was a $32 brownie.
Hey everyone!
I should have gotten here earlier, but just in case: I’m road-tripping to the Bay Area tomorrow, and will be stopping around Salt Lake City Tuesday night because I’m too old to do a 20-hour road trip like I used to in my youth. Anyone in SLC or environs feel like putting up a nice Toastie for the evening? I am clean and friendly and have fun stories!
Forget Presidents Day… I want to celebrate Daisy Bates Day… https://www.facebook.com/WomenYSK/photos/a.298137…
At least they let you have a space heater. My landlord found out I had one and made me get rid of it, claiming it is against the lease because it is a fire hazard.
Awww, if I had known there was going to be an open thread today, I would have posted my Tucson Gem and Mineral Show stuff here instead of hidden deep in the comments of Fridays open thread! Anyway, they’re in the third page of those comments if anyone wants to see them (I’d link to it, but I’m on my phone which is totally useless).
Also, its 66 degrees over here in southern AZ today, so I’m kinda feeling bad for all the toastfolks over on the east coast. The entire city of Tucson shat itself when we got over an inch of rain in a couple hours back in September, so I don’t know how you all are dealing with six feet of snow. Yikes.
So it’s 74 degrees and the sky is cloudless here in Hawaii, but our island seems to be going crazy. Three teenagers passed away in a terrible car crash, and then a woman set herself and her estranged husband ON FIRE at a beach park down the road.
In less somber news, I spent too much time in the sun on Saturday and now I have both a sunglasses tan AND a slippers tan. Fuckin’ problems, man.
Did you move to Hawaii, or have you lived there all your life/a long time? Hawaii is a potential relocation destination for my fiancee and I (depending on career prospects). If you don’t mind, could you share some thoughts on moving to/living in Hawaii? Some people say it can be really hard to adjust (to the distance/traffic/cost of living/weather/everything), and some people say it’s perfect. I’ve spent a couple of weeks there, but perspectives from people who actually live there are always appreciated. Thanks!
I’ve lived here all my life, so I don’t think I can give you really good advice, but I can certainly try.
I think it really depends on where in Hawaii you move to. If you move to Honolulu, the culture shock is definitely going to be a lot lower, since there’s still a lot of shopping/restaurants/clubs/culture in general.
Also, the way you look WILL make a difference, at least in the beginning. If you are white, it will be a bit harder to fit in; if you’re Asian, people will assume you’re local (until you speak). One of the boys on my son’s baseball team moved here from Missouri recently, and had to switch to a private school because he was getting bullied so badly for being white.
Cost of living is a real concern. Not only does everything cost more here (gas is currently $2.88/gal, milk is about $6/gal on sale) but we tend to get paid less as well.
But I think it comes down to how laid back and adaptable you and your fiancée are. If you make an honest effort to understand the culture, and listen, and don’t mind sacrificing a few conveniences, there’s no reason you wouldn’t love it here. It really is paradise.
Sorry the reply’s so late – please let me know if you have any other questions!
That’s very helpful information! One of the reasons we’ve considered that we might do well there is that we’re very willing and eager to understand and respect the local culture (which we’ve discussed in respect to several new and different places we may end up). But we are both white, so I do worry a bit about that, just because I’ve heard the same from several people. Thank you again for the insight. I will be sure to let you know if I have other questions.
I am home today and not in class, but because I’m sick, not because of the holiday. 🙁
Has anyone ruptured an eardrum before? I had stabbing ear pain last night, and now there is a slightly delayed, slightly lower-pitch echo in one ear of EVERYTHING that I hear or say. Listening to music is torturous. What do I do? Web MD says it will heal on its own…
I’m in Boston too with a boss who is a non-native speaker of English. My favorite phrase by him is: “When the cat is away, the mice will dance upon the table.”
Apparently this is actually a direct translation from the German.
In Spanish, “eats like a bird” means “throws food around every which way, like a canary”.
For YEARS, my husband would say I ate like a bird, and I’d be confused and flattered.
Aha my favourite was a Belgian roommate very pleased to be using English idioms: “It is raining cats, and it is also raining dogs.” So close.
My period started early and it turns out one of the pipes in the downstairs apartment froze, so my incompetent landlord has arrived in his Hummer to ineffectually attempt to fix it while my terrifying period shit languishes in the toilet I can’t flush
Oh. Oh, you poor thing. This is a bad, bad day for you, and I am sending you hugs and paczki.
Aww, thank you so much! I also want to shout out the other real heroes, my roommates, for staying elsewhere this week. PHEW
I clogged my (quirkily-running-at-best) toilet for the same reason yesterday. Solidarity,moon sista!
Back at you! (And also, been there.)
Solidarity, sister. Rumour has it our pipes have frozen, but as I’m abroad I am not involved in the repair. Praise be. Your terrifying toilet situation will soon be resolved.
Hope your cohabitants also had a happy ending to their plumbing problems! And thanks!
I managed to clog things here in sunny Northern California. With no frozen pipes for an excuse I may need to examine my diet more closely. Best wishes for a quick fix.
Thanks! It got fixed yesterday evening, and I’m still delighted by the miracle of modern plumbing.
I’m also really happy that this became a thread about women overwhelming their toilets. What a beautiful corner of the Internet we have here.
Oh no! At least things can only get better from here!
SO, real question, is it doxxing someone if I publish a phone number here but instead of sending him death threats we all just starting sending him passages of dense feminist theory, ideally between 12 and 5 am? Asking for a friend (actually asking for a sister).
seems fine!
Blehhhhhh sick. Have a cold. Spousal unit has said cold as well and is being a GIANT BABY. Apologies to everyone I owe emails and stuff to. My throat hurts and I can’t stop sneezing and I wanna go back to bedddddd.
My best responses when spouse is being an entitled baby: “I don’t know.” And “I’m not sure.” Which I translate internally as “I don’t know why you have to be such a baby.” And “I’m not sure I want to answer that.”
Feel better. Try to ignore the needy spouse until you do feel better.
Gloat all you want about the sunshine, Mallory. The 10 or so inches of snow the lovely Octavia layered on top of ice here in this small Kentucky town are the fertilizer of quiet, stillness and beauty. She is cultivating solitude and I, in my fortress, thank her.
Hi fellow London toastie(s)! That cake looks amazing! What kind is it? I’m afraid I had a rather heteronormative Valentine’s day, but I did send my friends some Galentine’s cards and posted loads of Leslie Knope gifs all over social media.
Yeah London is so grey and drizzly today, and yesterday was so nice! More Winter sun please! At least it’s staying light later. 15 mins a day apparently! 🙂
Peak dad: my dad is in town for a conference. I met him for lunch today, and as we were parting he offered me a bottle of water…from a sixpack he bought to keep in the rental car. Never mind that I live here and am ten minutes from home.
My dad hit peak dad yesterday! He called (again) to talk about my planned trip to see Fleetwood Mac with him next month, and let it slip that he plans to take me to Sam’s Club while I’m there to buy me bulk non-perishables.
I’m nursing both a cold and a broken heart with my parents this weekend. My mom offered me some ginger tea and my dad said that even if I don’t like it, I’ll feel better after drinking it – because then I won’t be drinking it anymore.
Today I am just a sad sack post-breakup wallower. At least I’m doing it at my parents’ house where there is sun and cats?
Always a lovely idea. I am a personal crisis sad sack right now. At least I have my kitties! Spinsterhood will be good for me.
just a mini rant. Mini, I promise!
I’m attempting to maybe get the process rolling to adopt a fuzzy friend. my building is only managed in the very loosest of senses, with an operating logic that would delight a Carroll or a (benign-ish) Kafka.
Last week I contacted our brand new building manager (there wasn’t one for the first 5 months we were here) asking about pet deposits and necessary next steps. She lets me know that she doesn’t know, but will check in with leasing agency.
Manager then very nicely forwards the response she gets from the agency (essentially, tenant must contact Ms. A, whose relationship to leasing agency and manager is left undefined) in an email to both myself and Ms. A. Manager lets me know that there will be a $250 deposit and asks Ms. A to please be in touch with me for the necessary paperwork. Ms. A does nothing for four days, so I respond to and thank all parties as a prompt to get the ball rolling. Nothing
Another four/five days go by. My boyfriend sends direct email to Ms. A explicitly asking for the paperwork and restating our intentions to adopt a pet. Ms. A writes back that there will be a $250 deposit, and that she will be happy to send us the paperwork once we’ve been in touch with our building manager and gotten approval. Apparently she does not remember any of last week’s emails?
Our building is lovely, but seems to have high turnaround given the number of other people whose mail is all addressed to our apartment. It took us 3 months after move-in to get the keys to the laundry room/mail boxes/garage, with a lot of similar wiggling around.
I am incredibly happy nothing has broken yet.
Go get that doggy! Don’t wait for others to get their shit together. When they want money or paperwork from you, they can let you know. And maybe start looking for better housing.
Thanks, I think you’re totally right, I don’t want to put off getting a puppy just because they can’t coordinate, and we have informed them now, so. There’s an adoption event I’m visiting next weekend 🙂
As for housing, I’m torn. I’m very underwhelmed with them so far, but the building itself is this gorgeous 1930s spanish revival. I love my tiny balcony and my fireplace and the high ceilings and I’m probably paying 1/4 less than similar buildings would cost. I’m not gonna show an actual picture here, but for perspective it looks remarkably like this LEGO model, except take off a story and add a pretty fountain to the courtyard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24166730@N07/4410789…
Sad I missed this post but just in case anyone is still around, I’m wondering if there are any Dallas toasties who might have a recommendation for a fat-friendly doctor and a really good therapist. No major health things, just need a general checkup. Therapist would be for depression and anxiety.
I got to work today (the office isn't open but I'm working on a couple of things) and decided it would be a good time for my first post-coffee trip to the bathroom (yes, that one). I did my thing and then tried to flush the toilet. Nothing. Then I remember the email from the office manager last week that the water will be turned off for the whole day today.
I am a monster.
It's literally 48 degrees and raining where I am in Alaska. RAIN.
It is not! Some of the characters become very self-conscious that they're acting out Madame Bovary and they take decided steps in the opposite direction, which doesn't always work out for them, but they try. It's a messy and not entirely satisfying ending, but I liked the journey.
Will download Trail of the Serpent next!
Don't know if anyone's still reading this, but I wanted to thank everyone again for their kind words and advice. I also forgot to add that during this exchange with the guy on the metro, there was a young woman sitting right across from us, and she kept looking at me like she knew how uncomfortable I was, and honestly, even if this isn't true and I just perceived a level of recognition that wasn't there, it felt so comforting in the moment. Like someone from the toast was there, being like "…this guy, amirite?"
Always a lovely idea. I am a personal crisis sad sack right now. At least I have my kitties! Spinsterhood will be good for me.
Just wanted to say Hullo. Saw Mallory/the toast in Reader’s Digest and Mother Jones and decided I needed to investigate further. Have spent the better part of the past 24 hours on the site, tears streaming from my eyes from laughter. Hate to inform you that y’all are stuck with me.
Online dating update!
I think I’m getting trolled by one guy who is just copying and pasting stuff:
“I don’t believe in fate but do believe in some material basis for our actions. I imagine there are infinite universes that span all possible outcomes. We just happen to find ourselves on this path like a pinball bouncing around in a machine. Deterministic to an extent but with a variable of randomness. Free will I think is a construction of ego. I don’t think we control our thoughts but we react to them and feel them. The feeling part is what’s human in my estimation.”
YEAH. It’s okay. In my other message threads, we’re making up pun-tastic names for breakfast/poutine places or talking about taco guns. Then, when asked for my “real name”, I wrote back:
“My real name is only whispered by trees on a moonless night.”
A+ response.
Erghhh yes. I've found some relief by dabbing some Mario Badescu Drying Lotion on top of whatever area is bothering me.
1) it does seem to bring crud to a head if there's anything there
2) it stings just a bit so it feels like it does something, which helps me resist picking
3) it dries as a bit of pink plaster over the spot, which discourages my picking since I don't see it in the mirror and I don't like wasting product by picking it off
Items 2 and 3 are all in my head, but since like 99% of this problem is in my head it works for me. It may well work with other products (mint julep mask, egg white mask, clay mask, charcoal whatever, baking soda some thing something) since the main thing is just feeling like I'm doing something about it and covering it up. Every once in a while I still find myself in front of a magnifying mirror and just. can't. resist. YMMV, but this has really helped me.
dear god!
I am glad he/she has you! 🙂
Or, say, picking the one squashed-looking roll in the cafeteria because you're afraid it will get left behind? Yeah, I totally get it. The Christmas tree is a struggle too. I feel bad for any ornaments that end up on the back of the tree, but I would ALSO feel bad for those branches if I didn't decorate them.
Enjoying how much money I'm saving, I guess? I have been doing tons of cooking and reading and barely going out except to work, and it shows in my credit card bill, which is nice. Even if I have a little cabin fever by now.