Toasties! Let’s talk about airport food. Sometimes (see evidence above), you’re stuck in the Oslo airport and it’s amazing. Other times … Less so. And what about prices? The Bartender strongly feels that money spent in transit is not real and so is not fazed by $8 water and $55,987 pretzels. Anyway, fly anywhere lately (or soon)? Airport stories? Allergy complaints? Open thread!
Tags: cocktail hour, open thread, the bartender is in
Best airport food I have ever had was at Reagan Intl. Delicious, reasonably priced beer and pastry-wrapped brie with fresh sfruit and lovely baguette, it was glorious.
TOASTS, MY DRESS ARRIVED.
Pictures? And I’m not talking about the brie.
I’d take pictures of the brie! But also the dress, yay the dress!
Brie, bride, only one letter difference, COINCIDENCE??? Yes, but let’s go with it anyway and start a tradition. I can’t wait to have a briedal shower and a briechelorette party!
PRETTY SURE THIS IS A THING THAT WILL HAPPEN NOW, THANK YOU
*singing “Here comes the brie”*
Yes, pictures if you can! I have been following this saga with great interest.
OBVIOUSLY some different underneath-wear (visible in second photo) and some alterations required. However. It is so so sososososo beautiful, the beadwork along the neck almost exactly matches my engagement ring, it is just lovely and perfect in every way.
Gorgeous dress!!
It is gorgeous and you look beautiful!
Beautiful!
Lovely!!
lovely!!! And it looks like it will be super fun to dance and twirl around in 😀
gasp! and then you turned around and the dress got even better!
Gorgeousss!!!!!! I love it!
OMG beautiful!!!!!
It’s here!!! You look beautiful.
Oh gosh, it’s so pretty! I love how it highlights your tattoos on your back.
I am absolutely in love with that neckline. And those sleeves! So beautiful.
Beautiful! I love the back, and the draping at the bottom.
WOW. I especially love the back, it’s gorgeous and elegant and a little sensual all at the same time!
Hello, Gorgeous! And the dress is lovely too.
I had a six hour layover in LAX on my way home from Australia this summer. I had taken a ZZZquil on the plane but it didn’t kick in until I’d landed and I was already a gross mess so I figured I’d better just stay in place so as to not lose my seat. For six hours.
I had a 5-hour layover in Zurich a few years ago and I was looking forward to going to the observation deck to watch take-offs and landings. Alas, I had taken one Ativan too many and by the time we landed I too was a gross mess. It felt like my head was full of, and also wrapped in, several thick layers of cotton wool. It was all I could do to crawl to my gate before I fell asleep.
I got detained in Zurich a few years ago and nearly missed my flight back to the US. They claimed I was traveling with a falsified passport. As a result, I hate Zurich and every single thing in and about that airport.
#seriouslyuncoolstorybro
Spouse was stuck behind a couple with a kid in Zurich who the customs agent clearly thought were up to no good (they were brown-skinned after all!), and we almost missed our flight because of it. Still have no idea what they thought was going on — it sounded, Spouse said, like mom and kid went on a trip and dad met them later, then they all traveled home together. Clearly that is some sort of plot to destroy us all. I felt so bad for them standing there repeating over and over the same information.
>:(
Ugh, how awful. If I’d had a kid with me, I don’t think I would have handled it as calmly as I did. That’s just flat horrifying. Zurich airport can suck it, for real.
omg that is terrible. D:
Luckily, I was so fucking exhausted and plain done from my week in Italy that I was in Hateful Rage Mode and didn’t dissolve into tears. The Burgomaster said when the guard pulled me out of line my face was terrifying instead of terrified. Boy, I was angry.
This is the passport I almost didn’t get in time for the trip at all and when it did arrive (two days before departure), it had an RFID chip–one of the first ones to have that. So I was already not feeling so great about the damn thing.
I had a seven-hour one in Dubai on a flight to Australia. We landed at about 7pm local time, so didn’t take off again until 2am; normal people were getting to go home and go to sleep, and I was stuck sitting on uncomfortable airport seating for hours, very tired due to having been travelling all day, knowing I had another flight (11 hours?) to go. It was not an experience I want to repeat.
Trust me. You missed nothing. LAX is the most filthy, disgusting airport. I bought a coffee after an all-night flight from a conference with squealing cheerleaders and a crying baby and an angry senior citizen. They steamed the soymilk until it burnt. I’d been up for 72 hours at that point, and I gagged on the coffee, which cost way way way too much, and threw it away. It is a sad place.
Happy almost-Sondheimas, one and all!
What is your most-quoted-in-everyday-life Sondheim lyric?
Not sure about mine. Possibly “I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right. I’m the Witch” or “And one for Mahler!” I test out pens by writing “At last my arm is complete again” (choosing Heard over Cerveris but I love them both)
Oooof, I don’t often quote Sondheim aloud, but for sure my most listened to album is Assassins. So probably something from that…like “Where’s my prize?”
Assassins is totally my favourite too.
There are a few good contenders, but dramatically crying “AGONYYYYYY!” takes the cake for me.
FAR MORE PAINFUL THAN YOURS
When you know that she’d go with you
IF THERE ONLY WERE DOOOOOOOOOOORS
AGONYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
I just have to say, my mom, my daughter and I at the movie theater for this–the 11 year old was so mad at me for laughing too much!
“Finish the hat, George.”
Ooh ooh ooh my favorite Sondheim song is Finishing The Hat as performed by Mandy Patinkin.
However I absolutely adore the lyrics to Anyone Can Whistle. It’s pure poetry and I find myself quoting “relax, let go, let fly” often. The songs in Company are pretty hard to beat as well. “One for Mahler” being one of my faves too.
“Shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd on top” exits my mouth with every visit to a pub or when I’m cooking anything close to shepherd’s pie.
Likewise.
I have a cat named Bobbie, so I sing her the parts of Company with her name in it sometimes. Or the “Poooooor baby” parts when she’s being melodramatic.
Oh what a wonderful question. I probably inverse you and think/say “You’re so _nice_. You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice.” Also, I find myself speaking/singing the lyrics to Comedy Tonight a lot. (Which is nice, because it’s one of the few Sondheim shows my husband knows well, so he’ll start singing along.)
I mean he kneads me. I mean like dough George.
I’m not sure about most-quoted, but in terms of recently-quoted (though it’s not a lyric), I busted out “When Julius Caesar got killed, he was…assassinated.” on the Ides of March, because I pretty much had to. I didn’t have to do it in a terrible approximation of a Southern accent, probably, but why not?
“I wish my house were not a mess” “I wish a lot of things”
“People make mistakes” is actually probably the one I say out loud the most
I have a running medley of Assassins songs going through my head most of the time. I don’t know why, but it’s SO CATCHY.
Anyway, the one I probably quote the most is ‘everybody’s got the right to be different / even though at times they go to extremes…’ but ‘where’s my prize?’ is really good too.
My most often quote is “leading the glamorous life” from A Little Night Music, whenever I’m describing some annoying/boring/embarrassing/ eye-rolling detail of my work day.
Somehow “DWARVES ARE VERY UPSETTING” comes up at my house a lot as well.
Toasties, tell me: what is in your purse/bag?
My bag is a printed cotton tote from Catbird, because I got sick of the pretense that purses should not carry all given necessities for any given day. It contains:
– choir concert program
– packet of developed photos from Walgreen’s
– tan & metallic zip wallet from Banana Republic
– “Marc Jacobs” makeup pouch, obtained as a free gift from a fashion magazine purchased in Tokyo. Contains: lip balm (shea and coconut oil), lip balm (spf), lip balm (tinted), tampons, Excedrin, Advil (rapid release gels), Dramamine, Claritin (24-hour gels), lotion (from a hotel), dental floss, MCMC “Kept” perfume oil, a broken “reproduction votive” another student made as part of an Egyptology final project.
Inventory your stuff! No editing! (Or editing, I’m not really checking.)
Boring stuff (wallet, keys), pocket knife, earplugs, e-reader. Fluff, three small pieces of chocolate (won’t last long). V old makeup. Pills that I once thought I would be able to identify even if I just put them in my purse without their package.
Oh good, I needed to kill some time:
I carry a Betsey Johnson bag because I got it at Marshalls or TJ Maxx or Burlington or something and I loved the bright colors.
+ black polka-dot clutch wallet with necessities
+ makeup pouch of things I do not wear unless I really need to impress someone
+ my iPod and two sets of earbuds
+ hairbrush
+ currently, two dirty tupperwares that I am bringing home from work
+ keys
+ checkbook
+ more pens than I know what to do with
+ the nail polish I brought to the salon with me on Monday
+ hand warmer pouches that hopefully haven’t activated in there
+ a tampon case
+ Costco-size bottle of advil liquigels
+ sunglasses and case
+ passport
+ a wad of business cards for both cosplay and work
+ like four chapsticks
+ a seamstress’s measuring tape
+ a hand lens
+ a nail file
+ a padlock for the gym
+ a CPR face shield
I…carry a very large pouch.
Advil liquigels- the only way to go
They are the #1 most important thing in my purse for certain.
I have this big Fossil satchel– I usually carry the smaller version but it’s not big enough for my lunch AND my Thermos o’ Coffee. (I, uh. I might have a Fossil purse problem.) It contains:
– the aforementioned lunch and thermos
– my journal and a couple of pens
– wallet
– bus pass and keys
– bobby pins and spin pins that I had no idea were in there until I looked just now
– gloves
– powder compact, lip balm, perfume rollerball and 5 lipsticks (two of them are sample sized, okay, cut me some slack here)
Sometimes also a book, but I tend to have a book I’m reading at home and a book I’m reading at the office, which then gets left there so I don’t have to carry it around all the time.
The only Fossil purse problem is not having enough Fossil purses.
Fossil! I’ve mostly switched over to coveting Rossetti bags because they have a similar aesthetic but are cheaper, but I have a wallet (I say wallet, it’s more clutch sized) from Fossil and I love it so, so much. So much.
– Wallet
– 3DS
– Writing notebook
– Pen
– Outline for the fic I’m working on, 03/18/2015 version
– A check I’m supposed to cash today
– Umbrella
– Gloves
– Two pads
– Notebook which is used exclusively for to-do lists and groceries
– A second pen
Yesterday I was also carrying a Japanese light novel in a protective Ziploc bag, and ghost-it notes! But I decided I do not need it today.
noooo japanese office supplies – my fatal weakness!
*spends rest of afternoon shopping*
Birth control, sunglasses, headphones, wallet, day planner, keys, 2 tubes of Palmer’s cocoa butter chapstick, Luna bar wrapper, my one good remaining Pilot Easy Touch pen (blue), contact case, bobby pins, a couple of receipts, and empty lens wipe wrappers.
Oh man. I never understand people who can just breeze through life without a purse. There’s so much stuff I have to have with me at all times. This includes:
paperback
tablet
phone
metro card
head phones
wallet (with ID, credit cards, insurance card, gym card, and various buy 10 get 1 free sandwich cards)
lactaid pills
hand lotion
chap stick
tinted chap stick
neutral lipstick
not-neutral lipstick
house keys
car keys
contact solution
contact case
work ID/badge
retainer case
kleenex
birth control pills
various drugs (advil, sudafed)
pad lock for the gym locker (I don’t know why this is in my purse instead of my gym bag, but that’s where it lives)
This all gets shuffled between my work purse (an enormous leather bag) and my casual purse (an equally enormous canvas bag that can be tossed in the washing machine)
i loveeee this kind of thing. what are your photos from?
my purse is a black leather totebag from baggu. it is the fanciest bag i’ve ever owned and i bought it with my first paycheck at my first full-time/salaried job after years of languishing in food service. it contains:
– phone
– keys
– wallet
– coin purse
– extra phone charger
– my little ipod shuffle + headphones
– my little moleskine planner
– whatever book i’m reading. currently tove jansson’s “the summer book”
– miscellaneous just rattling around in there: mini hand lotion, mini hand sanitizer, mint chapstick, usb drive, sunscreen, sunglasses, bottle of xanax, little pack of kleenex, probably a ton of gum wrappers
disclaimer: the one reason i don’t have a dozen disgusting crumpled kleenex in there is that the inside of the bag is unfinished leather and leaves these little black fluff bits all over anything and everything, but especially tissues.
Photos are from Christmastime, during which I “inherited” my mom’s old Canon SLR. Film is fun, but I don’t own a scanner, so I have to bring the prints to work to scan them in after hours.
The Baggu leather totes are super cute! I didn’t “get” Baggu until I saw those and now I’m like yeahhh, nice!
i’ve been thinking of starting to take photos on film but i don’t know where to start!
also, i looove my bag. little bits of black fluff beside, it’s great. i was looking for a leather tote forever but everything was huge and super structured. the design i got is basically exactly like a standard canvas tote, but it’s made out of soft leather instead.
The Summer Book! What do you think of it?
Used tissues and receipts. So many used tissues and receipts.
This is a fun game. My bag is a red leather cross-strap purse of a convenient size (small enough to dance with, big enough for my Kindle) that I found at a thrift store in Memphis.
-the usual necessities (wallet, keys, phone, subway tokens)
-emergency supplies (bandaids, Mucinex, tissues moist toilettes, condom)
-a small bound day planner from New York Review of Books
-pens
-camera (Canon Powershot)
-a collection of sexy poems by Philly poets called Bedfellows (it is currently occupying the bookhole that is the perfect size for a Kindle or similarly-sized book
-stuff I don’t need every day but forgot to take out (checkbook, ID for my old job, hangnail clippers, sunglasses [thx a lot winter])
-random assortment of flyers for jazz festivals
Oh boy! My bag is gray suede from Clarks, but I got it for free from a friend. I stuff an unreasonable amount of stuff in it.
– Black Coach wallet (probably the most expensive thing I own, a Christmas present from my parents two years ago. Best wallet I have ever owned. Not a single fray has happened, which is amazing considering how many cards I shove in it.)
– Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, which I still haven’t started yet
– pads and tampons
– sunglasses
– a save-the-date to my friends’ wedding that I keep forgetting to put on the fridge
– checkbook
– various brochures from New Orleans from when I went in December (ghost tour, zoo map)
– spoon I stole from Galatoire’s in New Orleans
– umbrella
– Robb Stark POP Vinyl doll, a 3-D printed Greyjoy sigil, and a “Harrenhal & Oates” badge for A Song of Ice and Fire trivia every Sunday
– Walgreens brand Mucinex (thanks, bronchitis!)
– paystubs
– iPod
– chapstick
– Orbit gum
– pen and a mechanical pencil
– Metrocards (only one of which is valid)
– uncharged portable USB charger
– Moleskine
– lots of receipts and tissues
Man, I don’t advocate stealing but I wish I had thought to steal a spoon from Galatoire’s. Had the happiest night of my life there.
My purse is a meeessssss. Current contents:
–enormous keyring with too many keys and definitely too many snarky keychains
–giant pink fairy wallet with a million cards & forms of ID, checkbook, etc.
–Midol
–economy-sized tub o’ibuprofen
–pack of playing cards printed with neon stars (why???)
–small clothing-repair kit (pins, safety pins, tiny scissors, tiny thread, spare buttons)
–four different lip balms
–USB stick in the shape of a Nikon
–digital audio recorder
–cell phone floating around completely unprotected
–little box of razor blades (again, why????)
–my work nametag, which I never actually wear
–ear buds tangled up with everything
–a compact, a lip stain, and an eyeliner I hate
–about $2 in change even though I never use cash and thus can’t explain its presence
–a 1-yuan note because I like the image of Mao Zedong on it
–nine pens. NINE. what even am I doing
–two giant books
–my Kindle, which contains many more books, thus rendering the real books redundant
–a pack of cigarettes and two lighters
–a Valentine my son made for one of my friends which I have inexplicably not yet given to the intended recipient
–three Guatemalan worry dolls
–a small booklet on the care and shaping of bonsai trees
What am I even doing with all this junk? Why do I feel anxious at the mere thought of removing even one item? What is this life for?
tissues, half a pack of polos, some lip balm.
Mine’s pretty empty right now ‘cos I just used it to haul a bunch of stuff up to the office, but what’s left in it now is:
Keys, phone, wallet, checkbook (who else still carries around a checkbook these days, geez), lip balm, hair band, USB drive, oversize safety pin, a pen, my planner, and… a spoon?
I carry my checkboook in my purse too, for the sole reason that if it’s in my purse I can always find it when I need it (once a month, at most!) I tried leaving it in file cabinets, drawers, other “safe” places but then I’d spend hours looking for it.
Wallet, water bottle, phone, pens, chapstick, book, tiny notebook, crumpled kleenex.
Nice! I have:
Hayfever snorty up the nose stuff
Fishermen’s Friends
Eyebrow pencil
A memory stick with a file of the film ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’ that a colleague gave me and I still haven’t watched
2 free tickets to the BFI that I really need to use
Muji oil soaking up blotting sheet things
A Muji pen
Eyeliner
Business cards for my SFF website that I do for funsies that my co-editor got printed in wild enthusiasm and I’ve given two out ever
17 lipsticks/balms/glosses. SEVENTEEN!!???? What’s wrong with me.
A copy of Sarah Pinborough’s ‘Murder’, which I finished at lunch today. It was ok.
From what I’ve seen, 17 lip things is the record!! Congratulations! (Lippies are so easy and fun to accumulate, I totally get it)
I’m not even wearing any right now! They’re adding a significant weight to my bag. I’ll have to decant some tonight.
Everything ever. I have a school backpack and a messenger bag, which holds: tinted lip balm, pencils, wallet, phone, iPod/earbuds, whatever book I’m reading, tiny spare book, comb, hair elastics, band-aids, bobby pins, tampons, water bottle, sunscreen if seasonal, and a Planned Parenthood key chain with a hidden condom compartment.
Oh fun, I love these. Mine contains:
– wallet (coach mini-zip thing, actually, I stopped carrying the ones with separate pockets a while ago)
– additional small bag for “lady things” like tampons which only is in there every, uh, 4 weeks
– additional small bag full of medication (mostly various headache pills)
– 3 or 4 pens, you can never ave too many!
– Tide stain remover pen
– like, 4 lipsticks/lip gloss/lip balms
– mini sewing kit (never used)
– metro cards for DC and NY (hey you never know)
– business cards
– keys
-extra car key for the valet in the parking garage
– earplugs
– bandaids
– a razor
– tic tacs
– a nail file
That’s a weird collection of stuff, huh. I also carry a separate lunch bag and briefcase. I’m pretty overloaded…
I love doing this sort of stuff because making lists gives me intense satisfaction.
Purse from Brooklyn Industries. It’s ginormous – I needed a heavy-duty bag for hauling books.
– wallet (credit cards, metro card, so many receipts, library card, and a pic of Mr. Jaeferous when he was in high school)
– PSP with Sweet Fuse (which is SO AWESOME gonna play it during lunch)
– a few chapters of a novel I’m proofreading for a friend
– tissues
– used tissues
– Lipsmackers in various flavors
– fruit cup
– coupon for Petco
– cover-up
– pill bottle with asprin and some allergy pills
– keys on a Spongebob lanyard
– hairbrush
– pens, so many pens
– cereal bar
– Swiss army knife
– mp3 player
I recently downgraded/upgraded to a small purse, it is great!! All I gots is:
– wallet
– keys
– phone
– sunglasses
– kleenex
It helps that I live a 3-minute drive from work so I don’t have to worry about commute supplies, etc. I do miss being able to sneak a full fountain soda into the movies though 🙁
Empty tupperware with remnants of Ethiopian chicken stew
iphone charger
ziplog bag of vitamins
nonsense homeopathic “stress relief” pastilles that I bought for some reason
keys
“The Enchanted April”
“How to be Both”
some underwear, socks and t shirts (I’m going to my parent’s house tonight).
Oooh how convenient. I’m going to a benefit tomorrow, so I have to change purses/purge stuff anyway.
I’m currently using the orla keily for target yoga bag as my purse http://www.target.com/p/orla-kiely-yoga-bag-multi… It’s pretty much the ideal work tote for me–lightweight, goes with everything, lots of pockets, cheery print. It’s even got a water-resistant lining.
Right now it contains
2 reusable shopping bags
a small makeup bag (from catseye) contaning: chapstick (nivea kiss of healing), lipstick (lipstick queen bete noir sheer), powder (coty airspun in a travel kabuki brush), a mirror, hand cream (neutrogena norwegian), tampons and advil
sunglasses
a travel umbrella
a portable usb battery http://www.mophie.com/shop/universal-batteries/po…
the world’s best scarf http://tolanicollection.com/products/bright-multi
my wallet
a half-empty package of tissues
a small package of mixed nuts http://www.planters.com/varieties/nutrition-infor…
three ballpoint pens
an unopened package of big red from the last time i traveled
a kisslock coin purse i keep my jewelry in if i need to take it off
the button that came off my pants three days ago
two receipts and one shopping list
a small quantity of purse sand
Ooh coin purse for jewelry safekeeping is a good idea. I always just put mine into my makeup bag and then curse myself for not having a safer, gentler place to put rings and things while I work out.
Also “purse sand” made me giggle. Yes, I have a some of that, too.
The designated jewelry container came about after I woke up in a panic, unable to find my engagement ring (three days after I was given it), and Mr. Delperro and I frantically turned the house, my car, and the neighborhood inside out, only to find it in the zippy inner pocket of my purse. It really is the best purse-related idea I’ve ever had. This is very similar to the one I use http://www.amazon.com/Leather-Change-Purse-Clasp-… but I have been sorely tempted by the small zippy bags from Blue Q ( http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Q-Coin-Purse-tycoon/dp… ) which would better fit my larger earrings.
-Wallet
-Checkbook
-Various receipts, loyalty cards/ gift cards that don’t fit in my wallet
-Check lists for both mine and my mom’s china so if I happen to find some at an atique store/wherever I know what pieces we’re missing
-pillcase with various meds
-the headphones I turned my apartment upside to look for 2 weeks ago
-a contact case
-1 pen
-SEVEN tubes of lipstick/gloss
-wallet
-keys
-makeup bag
-pencil from Viking Golf in DE
-cocount lime lotion
-Naphcon A eye drops (come at me springtime allergies…no, seriously, please spring, please get here)
-Metro card
-sunglasses (which will not be used today)
-a single condom that, if you listen closely enough, is laughing at me
-a recipe for jerk seasoning, written on the back of an envelope from a collection agency, that also contains a note reminding me that 3×8 = 24 and 2×6 = 12 (I think I was converting things for another recipe but…still)
In my messenger bag (I’ve given up carrying purses, as I intermittently do):
A couple copies of the Stranger (the Seattle alt-weekly, not the book)
A travel pack of kleenex
A ziploc with hand sanitizer, contact solution, and chapstick
Another ziplock with bandaids, some antacids, and some loose pills that I’m pretty sure are ibuprofen
One of those reusable bags that stuffs into itself
A pill case with more ibuprofen
Seven pens, most of which work
Four mini sticky note pad things
Nail clippers
A spare key
A paperclip
-Elisa Albert’s AFTER BIRTH
-a Moleskin with a quote by Sarah Manguso on the cover
-sunglasses
-regular glasses
-two tea bags (you can always ask for hot water on the plane and brew something nice)
-a granola bar
-five binder clips
-a backup pair of earrings
-gum, chapstick, wallet (every possible transit card)
-playing cards
Wait yes why have I never thought to bring my own teabags onto a flight before? I am traveling all next week for work and you saved me. Travel Throat Coat!
OH man, I love this. My bag is a (seriously discounted) small Timbuk2 computer/messenger bag, with a bicycle cross-stabilization strap that I only just remembered to remove. (Have not ridden bike since October.)
+ laptop or tablet
+ plastic document sleeve with whatever weird notes/outlines I’m working from
+ tiny yellow Moleskine
+ floppy paper notebook with giant balsamic vinegar stain across cover. (Great conversation starter in meetings.)
+ two packets tea
+ wallet, keys
+ phone/tablet charger
+ projector connector/dongle
+ USB stick
+ gloves
+ umbrella
+ travel shopping bag that folds up in a pouch
+ mini bottle of Advil (soon to be joined by mini bottle of seasonal allergy meds)
+ two styli, two pencils, something like 8 pens. (Identical pens. I am either super prepared or I might have a problem.)
+ I think I have six different styles of post-it notes. That’s ridiculous.
+ spare pair of earrings, taken off at the gym, zippered into pouch, and forgotten about
+ at least one granola bar at all times, or else I turn into the Low Blood Sugar Hulk
I sometimes pare the collection down, or transfer to a smaller, chic-er bag, but really…the only change is that I only bring two kinds of post-its on a shopping trip.
My bag is a fairly large navy blue shoulder bag from Roots that I adore and picked out partly because I can fit two wine bottles into it. Unfortunately, the leather is really thick so it’s on the heavy side, but it’s so indestructible it’s worth it.
– purple wallet
– ereader
– lipchap
– several lipsticks
– Burt’s Bees cuticle butter
– phone
– earbuds
– three (?? why?) travel-sized containers of painkillers
– many pens
– little notebook
– home keys
– work keys
– What Are These For, Better Keep Them, To Be Safe? keys
– sunglasses
– chequebook
– thumb drive
– cat treats
– soft, springy mulch made of old receipts and bits of paper
I don’t carry a purse, just a work bag (if I’m not going to work, everything is usually in my pockets). It is a Baggu that my lovely coworkers got me for my birthday because they all had them and thought we should match – which sounds idiotic but is actually cute.
It contains:
– Macbook Air (well not RIGHT NOW because I am typing on it)
– iPad mini
– Mort, by Terry Pratchett
– a green notebook from Staples
– a Sharpie pen
– my passport (by accident, as I just got a new one in the mail)
– my boss’s mail (thanks for reminding me to take that out)
– the charger for my Fitbit Flex
– a half-full thing of Tic Tacs
– Bumble & bumble Sumotech wax
– extra strength acetaminophen, store brand
– kleenex travel pack
My coat pockets contain:
– wallet made from bicycle tire inner tubes
– phone
– Burts Bees acai chapstick
– heattech gloves from Uniqlo
– too many old gift cards from Barnes & Noble that I really want to go spend
Right now: phone, chapstick, metrocard, plastic sleeve with probably 20 old monthly train tickets (they make great bookmarks!), mini subway map, blotting paper, eyeglasses prescription, train schedule, wallet, comb, brush, hand sanitizer, hand lotion, tissues, pen, a few loose cough drops, pads, ibuprofen, compact mirror, sunglasses, keys, office ID.
If I’m carrying a purse, it’s generally phone, wallet, lippy, knitting project. But as I still need to wear a winter coat ;<, all my stuff goes on the pockets. As of this morning, that was wallet, phone, keys, 2 mini twix, assorted napkins and receipts, inhaler, and a cat toy.
I have a messenger bag from Thinkgeek that has tentacles on it. It contains:
-wallet
-tin with lesser used cards
-checkbook
-“Stiff” by Mary Roach
-hat and fingerless gloves
-keys (work and personal on separate keychains)
-ipod in hand knit cozy
-sticky notes
-pen that I love and will not let out of my sight if I loan it to someone
-sunglasses
-workout socks that I keep forgetting to take to the gym
-chapstick
-lotion
-several random old receipts that have fallen to the bottom
-pouch that transfers between bags that has all the essentials (sewing kit, mirror, more chapstick, bandaids, kleenex, tiny toothbrush, etc)
-headlamp that is a holdover from walking to the bus stop in the winter when it is still dark in the morning.
I go back and forth between “CARRY ALL THE THINGS” and “jesus christ my shoulder hurts why do I have all these things” mode. Right now it’s a small purse.
– wallet
– infinite number of receipts that really should have been entered into my budget spreadsheet weeks ago
– Altoids tin with one Altoid
– Altoids tin with emergency sewing kit
– pack of gum
– charm bag
– microfiber cloth for cleaning glasses/phone/etc.
– chapstick
– five pens
– two cartridge refills for the fountain pen I never use
– $0.12
– pillbox (empty)
– bottle of Advil (half-full)
– quarto-size notebook
– a bunch of Target coupons I will never remember to use
I am intrigued by the “charm bag” and would like to know more?
Oh gosh, this dates to…college, probably? when I was super into small-scale magic as a means of improving my mood/treating my undiagnosed depression. (It’s surprisingly effective, but meds are a more drastic improvement by far.) So I made a wee charm bag out of fiery/inspirational type things to carry around with me, to keep my brain active. I have not the foggiest idea what’s in it any more, but it’s part of my standard carry now.
I have managed to stuff everything into my pockets today, which always makes me feel less burdened, at least until the part of the day where I wish I had something that I might have had with me if I had my purse.
Right front pants pocket: wallet & keys
Left front pants pocket: phone & earbuds. I also carry my nice pen here, but it’s not in my pocket at the moment, it’s on my desk.
Why do these pants even have a left watch pocket, that doesn’t even make sense, who has two watches: lip balm
Left regular jacket pocket: reusable shopping bag
Both regular jacket pockets, probably, I didn’t actually get up and check: expired bus transfers and random receipts.
Left inner jacket pocket: Collapsible water bottle. This more often lives in my purse, but I remembered this morning that I’m going to be eating supper at a food court that has a drinking fountain near it today, and that is basically the exact situation for which I own a collapsible water bottle.
I am so impressed at your efficient use of pockets (and the fact you can fit so much in them!)
Thank you!
My bag is a brown fake leatherish messenger bag that is getting fairly run down. The fake leather is peeling off in parts. Oh well.
Inside: Wallet, various lip things, compact mirror, keys, flash drive for work, Kleenex, glasses (in a case!), small pouch full of tampons and things I rarely use and can’t even remember right now, a grocery list because my phone screen is broken and I could not use that for my list, and the silver name badge that I forgot to leave at work today.
My bag is an LL Bean backpack! It holds:
– sweaty gross gym clothes and sneakers (I work at a university and use the gym before work)
– toiletry kit containing: lil bottles of Head & Shoulders shampoo, Clean & Clear face wash, and OptiFree contact solution; contacts in their case, a comb, Neutrogena face moisturizer with retinol & SPF, and a smaller bag of makeup (BB cream, brow pencil, powder and mascara, only the finest drugstore brands)
– lunch bag containing 1 apple (I am eating the rest of my lunch now)
– manila folder containing various important tax and education documents that need scanning
– wallet
– pocket tissues
– 4 tampons
– a combination lock
– a KIND bar (cashew and ginger spice, my 2nd favorite flavor after the dark chocolate chili almond one)
– Umbrella
– Gloves
– Furry ear muffs (NO ONE TOLD THE WEATHER THAT ITS SPRING)
– Wallet
– Advil
– Keys
– business cards
– lady-time equipment
– Pepperspray (Pink for breast cancer awareness!)
– An orange!
– Sunglasses bc i’m from LA and i cant NOT have them
I have a keen bag that is not cool, but withstands all things.
Inside:
-badge to get into my work
-hand sanitizer wipes
-empty sunglasses case, made by my aunt
-pendleton wallet
-checkbook because I am an old, apparently
-beano, because I eat a lot of chili
-gloves
-compact mirror
-everlane pencil case, containing stamps, pens, earplugs, tampons, hair ties.
-glasses case
-“extra” keys which I rarely need
-one eos lipbalm that I use
-five lip balms/ lipsticks/ lip tints that I don’t use
Bag is a red corduroy Letter Bag by Moop, and contains:
Notebook
Calendar book thing
Orange leather pouch containing: 5 different lip glosses, a fancypants red lipstick, eye drops, 1000 bobbypins, 2 different types of hand cream, eye drops, tampons, dental floss
A wooly pouch containing: my birth control, gum, allergy meds, earrings, fountain pen, Bonine
A bag containing one of my knitting projects
A large, colorful, hand-knit cowl
A couple of comic books I bought thinking maybe I’d get into reading comics (haven’t read them yet)
Knitting wallet
Work building pass card
One dirty handkerchief (I usually have a few spares but I forgot to grab a clean one this morning.)
A Baggu reusable grocery bag
Fingerless mitts (hand knit!)
Sad ipod nano that’s one more drop on the sidewalk away from disintegrating
Wallet
And…I think that’s it. Oh, my keys! My bag has a cord thingy that the keys attach to so I always know where they are. This is very important.
wallet, bus schedule, spear lip gloss, staedtler lumocolour in blue, blue pen, small notebook, USA passport, 2 mix cd’s I burned last night (previous 2 items are b/c Mr. Floridagal and I are going on a road trip after work today to see his folks and they live in the States, we are in Canada), jar of apple/celery/walnut salad, iPhone 4, keys.
bag is a piece of crap that I got for $20 at Army & Navy and that is disintegrating.
EDIT: it should say sephora lip gloss. Autocorrect changed that to “spear lip gloss” and I think that would be pretty great too.
My purse is an beat-up old Coach purse I got on ebay for $10. I like going into Coach stores just so I can watch the greeters do a double-take and ask me if I ever moisturize it. Nope!
-Windows phone with a v pretty cover
-receipts which are going into recycling/bill pay now
-oops more receipts, that is not the receipt pocket!
-wallet, including a Tokyo transit pass
-I have never been to Tokyo
-packet of Advil
-notepad
-checkbook
-2 business cards, not mine
-Totoro coin purse packed with all the cards I rarely use, also dollars
-1 tampon
-I do not use tampons
-god damn it another receipt
-sugarfree gum
-2 more business cards, get it together Goomaly
-sunglasses
-itch cream
-tiny bottle of Bayer with my anti-depressants in it
-work keys
-Body Shop coca butter lip balm THE BEST
-lip balm with sunscreen
-USB stick
-blue pen, Pilot v-ball
-automatic pencil
-lipstick
-I do not wear lipstick
-brown eyeliner, WTF this is not even mine
I carry an oxblood leather satchel that needs to be cleaned and repaired. Contains:
– keys and phone
– hot pink wallet (with an Ursula charm, because my friends know me)
– business cards
– lots of loose receipts
– packet of tissues
– headphones
– yesterday’s paystub
– sunglasses
– a miniature toothbrush
– a boxcutter keychain
– bandaids, nail file, comb, lip balm, two lipsticks, benadryl, vintage pillbox that was my grandmother’s with advil
– compact mirror I got when I was 12 that says “Hello Princess” on the inside
And that’s not including the reusable tote that holds my lunch and umbrella!
Oh dear let’s see
Wallet
Glasses in case
Keys
Headphones in little pouch
Umbrella
Black woolen beanie
Pink furry earmuffs
Red Sour Patch Kid flavored gum
Mint gum
A boarding pass from Vancouver from a conference I attended two weeks ago
Flowered sunglasses
Fluorescent green earbuds
Bobbypins
That piece of paper they give you if you take a cab from the airport
A Canadian five dollar bill
Hand lotion (Tocca Cleopatra)
A red sharpie
A spoon
A watch
A leather wrap bracelet
Inhaler
Commodity perfume in Gold
Eyeliner
Four lipsticks
Hand and face wipes
A mysterious, kinda dirty pear (jesus christ why am I such a disgusting garbage person)
Loose change
My bag is a LeSportsac satchel with a gorgeous, brightly colored floral pattern. It doubles as a diaper bag, but that is when it is on weekend duty. It contains:
-wallet
-manicure kit
-12 month sized in case of emergency baby pajamas (polar bear)
-make up (Bert’s Bees chapstick/lip stain, powder, etc.)
-Anker portable cell phone charger
-check for $9 from BOA I keep forgetting to cash
-anti-bacterial hand sanitizer
-Bert’s Bees lotion
-Orbitz sweet mint gum
On the weekends it contains a Skip Hop Changing Station and various baby foods and toys.
My bag is a gorgeous giant Haiku with an orange strap and large green and blue flowers (I think it’s an earlier model of this style) that MrChouffe gave me as a birthday gift last year. It is gaudy and bright and not at all my style and I LOVE IT DESPERATELY.
-work keys
-car keys
-wallet
-Burt’s Bees lip balm
-fizzy-wine-flavored lip balm from side job
-some change and elderly receipts
-an artist’s business card
-the rewards cards from a local chain of athletic-apparel/supply stores, never made it to the keychain
-half-used gift card for the running specialty store
-stubs from my last two paychecks, awaiting filing
-Subaru swag knit gloves
-a pen
-my starter information for new meds
It can fit significantly more in there than ever actually goes in it.
I love these! I have a pretty large bag that I only take to and from work. It contains:
~wallet
~my roommate’s bus tickets (because I am the best and printed them for her at work)
~old pen with no cap. gross
~prescription strength anti-itch cream for my mosquito bites from LAST SUMMER
~headphones
~chapstick
~wine key because you never know
~gloves
~blotting sheets
~glasses
~a couple cough drops
~barette
And honorable mention because it should go in my purse but is instead next to it because I am lazy:
~cash and change
~building key card
I got a new purse on Wed night and moved things into it, and took a bunch of stuff out last night for various reasons, but when I got home last night, here’s what was in it:
work laptop and charger (it’s a big purse)
my kindle
my tablet
my wallet
my transit wallet (the thing I keep my bus pass and smart trip in so I don’t have to take out my real wallet)
my phone
work phone
my keys
a baby blanket I am crocheting and a new skein of yarn to add to it
cough drops
a small binder clip full of my business cards
an umbrella
the paper
some junk mail I meant to shred at work
a travel set of make-up brushes
eyeshadow
lip gloss
a sample size of moisturizer (from Birchbox)
a sample of leave-in conditioner (also from Birchbox)
iPod (this normally lives in my bra, but I put it in my purse when we went to dinner last night)
phone charger
Excedrin
Some of this is only there because I will be working tomorrow and thus wanted those things with me, and the laptop is because I am working from home today.
I have this bag: http://www.lodis.com/womens-handbags/satchels/aud… but in a fun pinky-purple color from a couple of years ago. It has aqua edges to all the leather (the handles and seams) which is super fun, and it holds a ton!
I’m a bit of a makeup junkie, so there are loads of cosmetics in there, especially lipstick. This is a picture of the makeup products I grabbed in a hurry out of my purse, there was also a liquid eyeliner and a red lip liner that didn’t make the picture. I have been known to do a complete makeup look with what’s in my purse (I did it yesterday! overslept)
In addition there is the boring stuff (wallet, phone, keys, headphones, garage door opener) socks, dog poop bags, pens, MONEY!, the needle plate to my sewing machine, a pair of dress makers shears, star shaped stickers, a houndstooth umbrella, reusable grocery bags, inhaler, advil and pet store coupons.
I am weirdly enthralled by every single one of these (or maybe I’m just procrastinating real hard…little of both?)
My work/school bag is a canvas and leather messenger bag from Hasso which I got during a really good Father’s Day sale (I am not a dad, nor do I have one, but whatever)
-ipad mini
-stylus (nice-ish notier one that I will definitely lose soon, unlike cheapo drug store ones, which I somehow keep forever)
-10 pack of Staedler triplus fineliner and 4 uniball signo 0.38 pens (the best pens ever) in various colors
-nearly halfway used-up engineering grid notepad
-keys
-travel toothbrush
-two empty ziplock bags that used to have almonds in them
-2 hair elastics and several bobby pins
-tampons (I don’t even use tampons anymore; I just feel it’s my civic duty to keep a few in every bag)
-chapstick
-bandaids
-a mini carabiner(?)
-Cape Air gate check tag from a couple of months ago when I flew in the actual plane used in the opening of the show “Wings” and had to check this bag because the plane is TOO SMALL for any carry on whatsoever
-JP licks cow card (ooh maybe there’s still money on there and I can get free ice cream…yesssss)
-business cards and ID from my old job (I have not worked there for two years)
-a very dubious clementine
-Microbiology review book
I’ve got my work bag with me which is an amber Dooney & Bourke Lexington bag. Some things I carry in it are on my desk so I’m only going to list what’s actually in it right now
-keys (to my apartment & my fiat) with an NPR keyring
-keys to the library where I work on a teal leather keyring
-one very old blue wallet from Anthropologie
-small gold bag with tampons & liners in it
-moleskin notebook (black, lined)
-small can of WD40
-black and white mini umbrella
-kleenx pocket pack
-kindle paperwhite in a purple case
-copy of Stephen Dunn’s The Insistence of Beauty
-mini haibrush
-dayquill/nyquill
-red expanding totebag from the Met
-black pen case with 5 pens in it (including my Lamy Safari fountain pen)
-prescription bottle of generic xanax
-mini bottle of Jurlique rosewater balancing mist
-Clinque chubby stick in “chunky cherry”
-black and white mini-makeup bag (full of stuff)
–
WD-40!! I love it.
I usually switch between the reverse denim tote from Everlane or the classic Willis Coach bag (in tan). When I have the tote, I keep:
– Extra battery for my phone – it cost $35 but is worth every. single. damn. penny
– Sleek Cole Haan leather wallet … <3, makes me feel like a lady
– Packet of tissues
– Sometimes a handkerchief because I’m trying to make handkerchiefs my thing
– Prescription sunglasses w/ case, glasses cleaning cloth (I can go nowhere without a proper cleaning cloth)
– Toiletry bag w/ pads, tampons, extra underwear, a Ziploc bag, that’s cute enough to take out on its own but you can totally tell it’s for tampons so wuteva
– Mini hairbrush
– A couple of pens
– Cheque book
– Ibuprofen
– Acetaminophen
– Lemon cuticle balm
– Neutrogena Norwegian Formula hand cream
– Reusable shopping bag
– Work BB
– Mini umbrella
– Old wallet containing all the seldom-used cards that don’t fit in my main wallet ……
– Work lanyard w/ security pass
I usually use a messenger bag during the week and a purse on weekend. They have my wallet and my keys in common. My purse also has my tabletop gaming dice bag and a pencil. My messenger bag right now has ibuprofen, pads (I was expecting to start my period today), a granola bar that I don’t like, a bag with some nut remnants, a plastic grocery bag, Oathblood by Mercedes Lackey, and a really old Dr Pepper lipgloss that I will use until it disappears.
Oh dear, this is going to be embarrassing (but I’m procrastinating and my office-mate is out getting pizza, so I can do what I like including tipping my bag out on the desk)
My bag (it’s a ‘bag’ or ‘handbag’ in New Zealand, and I only realised last year what y’all mean when you say ‘purse’) contains:
*Two tickets to a show called ‘Rotunda’ tonight, which is modern dance-meets-brass band and themed aroundthe experience of WWI troops, and I’m taking my sister and brother and I can’t WAIT.
*A glass tupperware lunchbox containing kidney-bean and chicken-liver pie, which is to be my dinner
*A battered floppy notebook in which, embarrassingly, I’ve written everything from love poetry (I KNOW) to comics to shopping lists to meeting notes. I live on the edge.
*folded up plans I drew up for renovating my house (it’s not even really my house, but it badly needs renovating)
*My useful leather Trade-aid man’s wallet which is a massive step up from the flimsy ladies’ wallets I normally own, but STILL never contains my cards, because I always shove them in my pocket
*slightly scratched, hexagonal sunglasses
*headphones, phone charger
*packaging from the pair of THUNDERPANTS I bought last week (they will NEVER GO UP YOUR BUM, toasties! http://www.thunderpants.co.nz/collections/origina… )
*my swipe-card for work
*A bottle of argan oil I forgot about
*Ash Wednesday order of service from WEEKS AGO
*assorted pens and highlighters
*assorted icecream sticks (???)
*assorted old receipts and train tickets
*assorted hairpins
*toothbrush from days of yore when a sleepover could be around the next corner… sigh.
*tea (not teabags. The remains of teabags. I know. I’m a dirtbag)
*first-aid kit, containing 2 different kinds of moisturiser, lip balm, ibuprofen, panadol, cough lollies, many plasters, inhaler,and pressed powder
*many assorted lipsticks
*rocks (bloody hell)
And in the time it took to inventory that, dear office-mate is not yet back and I can throw out some of this hoard in safety. Cheers toasties!
oh… and a walnut.
Toast, my first performance review ever is in two hours. Hold me.
You are wonderful and your review will be wonderful and it is Friday so that’s wonderful!
Thank you! It is Friday! (My boss seems like he’s in a good mood!) You are so great for saying this and I hope you have a good weekend too!
It’s going to be great! Have you written down one or two things to say?
Yeah, I had to fill out a worksheet! But still need to think of things to say about my personal and professional development! But I’m sure I will think of something, because I totally have, you know, goals and stuff. eek. Thank you!
Good luck! I had my first big kid on last year and I was sooooo nervous, but it was fine! Treat yoself to a bottle of wine tonight!
*clings* I had mine two weeks ago and to me they are the most anxiety-ridden things…until they happen, and then they are over and it is a HUGE RELIEF.
Good luck!!
Thanks! I am going to be super relieved to just hear my boss’s honest opinion- getting out negative feedback from him can be difficult and I just want to know! So I can do better!
And I recall your PFR a few weeks ago and glad to hear it went well. Cheers to spring performance review season?!
I just want to tell you good luck, we’re all counting on you. (/Leslie Nielsen voice)
Ha, thanks!!
Thank you lovely!!
You’ll be great! Treat yourself to something after work – a drink, a cookie, something.
Thanks! Honestly someone I’m super, embarrassingly into just sent me a ‘good luck <3’ message, which is all I can really ask for from this day.
Woo!
It’s over!!!! Mostly good although there are places I can improve. Toasties, thank you for your kind words, have yourselves wonderful weekends. I hope that a dog wags its tail at you or a baby smiles at you, because y’all are great.
TOAST IT SWALLOWED MY COMMENT BUT IT WAS FINE AND I LOVE YOU ALL AND WISH YOU A FINE WEEKEND!!
Hello, friends! This is my 1000th comment on the Toast!
Today is also the equinox, and the day of an eclipse and supermoon, and yesterday I posted my 10,000th tweet. This is a special time indeed.
A supermoon! There’s no way I’ll get to see it (hello, clouds).
ILLUMINATI
I feel like maybe more of you should be sharing my manifesto about The Jinx on social media, even if you have never seen The Jinx or vehemently disagree with me.
I am going to watch The Jinx this weekend because of your manifesto!
Also, Morris Black, the guy who Durst DISMEMBERED ( D: ) is a former patron of this very here library where I work! Before my time, but my coworkers remember him.
I feel so bad for Morris because he didn’t have any friends or family members to be all FUCK THIS SHIT during the trial.
FWIW I shared w my office who had a FULL HR DEBRIEF on the Jinx and are all #TeamNicole
I shared it all over the place!
i had a pretty great breakfast burrito at the long beach airport once, but besides that, i usually just get horrible (but very very hot) coffee and maybe a bagel. i’ve never had fancy food, or anything approximating fancy food, at an airport. that plate looks amazing, like something i would gladly buy if i was not in an airport in the first place.
ughhh, i’m so glad it’s friday. this week has passed in a haze of flaking on plans to go home and hide under a blanket and feel vaguely ill, watching “the fall” and then being too scared to fall asleep. i’m so smart! this weekend i have plans that i’m actually going to follow through on, though! a crafternoon and a museum visit and going to see “blade runner” on the big screen. please please please let me get out of my funk in time for these fun things.
GLORY IN THE AMAZING POWER OF THE ECLIPSE.
or, don’t.
I looked out of my window this morning and that was basically all I saw. The wonder of the heavens!
That’s actually an amazing photograph, though.
I thought so, too! Cool photo!
Thankyou! Is just the view out of my lounge window. Looks better at sunset.
BEAUTIFUL.
The same here. It got slightly darker, I guess? But when you have no fucking clue where the sun even is, an eclipse isn’t exactly spectacular.
I was so angry earlier in the week when there was supposed to be spectacular auroras due to the electromagnetic storm, and just as the sun started to go down, the bright sunny day clouded up solid for the rest of the night. Screw you, northern Canadian weather! Why the hell do I put up with the cold if I don’t get auroras to go with it?
Yeah it snowed here in upstate NY during that whole thing, so no aurorae for us 🙁 🙁 🙁
it was so good where I am! It went kinda dark! We looked at it through xray film even though you’re not meant to!
WATCH THE MOTHERFUCKING JINX.
We were going to start it last night. Then we watched the iZombie premiere instead. (Don’t worry we will watch the Jinx probably all this weekend).
I also watched iZombie and aside from the overly-cute CW voice-over, I found it delightful. What did you think?
I am on it! As in, watched episode 1. But it’s almost the weekend, and I have plans to rope a friend who’s visiting me into bingeing it. She’s staying over anyway, so we can make it an all-nighter if necessary.
Is there a legal way to watch it online?
OTTAWA TOASTIES: Are we still on for pastries tomorrow at Scone Witch at 2 pm?
OMG you mean I can hang out with Ottawa Toasties and leave my husband at home to do all the tidying before my mom arrives at 6? THANK YOU JEEBUS.
(Is this the Scone Witch on Elgin or the one in Beechwood?)
Yes! Eating fortifying baked goods before seeing parents is always a good idea!
It’s the one on Elgin, since it’s central.
Whoohoo! I’m within walking distance.
Me too!
I have a brown corduroy coat and a bright yellow scarf that I’ll leave on the table to avoid “scan the place awkwardly and see who else is doing the same” thing.
Yay! See you at 2! Do you want to exchange phone numbers or email addresses in case of last-minute impediments?
Sure! eight dot crayon dot science at gmail dot com 🙂 (I can email you my cell number too — just not putting it out publicly.)
i’m. the worst. i’m the worst. i took pains to organize this thing and now i am unexpectedly OUT OF TOWN AND WILL NOT BE AT THE SCONE WITCH TOMORROW
but please, all of you, go. i will join you for the next one
if you wish to yell at me in person or organize an alternative, or if you are more reliable than i am and can organize better than i, i am emailable at lalalaleigha at gmail! guysss. i’m sorry. please have the best timmeeee
Aww, that’s too bad! I totally understand — I’ve had a bail on things way more than I’d like because suddenly I have to be in one city or another. We’ll see you next time!
Hi! Sorry this is a bit late, but I’m an Ottawa Toastie and I’ll be there today!
I am flying through DCA on Sunday, please tell me where the pastry-wrapped brie can be obtained. I only have an hour layover but as I remember Reagan is pretty small, yeah?
and DRESS YAY! Feel free to post pics :))))
One time I had to fly from Las Vegas to DC with a massive hangover after a bachelorette party. I had a layover in Midway, and the Potbelly in my terminal literally saved my life. That and the biggest bottle of water I could find.
I feel like Potbelly saves my life every time I eat there. SO GOOD!
Midway also has a Ben and Jerry’s right next to the Potbelly!
I’ve flown through the Miami airport 6 times in the last 18 months, and the sheer volume of food options is overwhelming and horrible. I always end up going to the same Irish “pub” and drinking sub-sub-par bloody marys.
Online dating thread?
Toasties, I have a date this weekend! I’m actually more than a little excited – dude and I have been texting literally all week and he seems really fun so far. He has close connections to the big anime convention I attend so my cosplay isn’t a weird hobby to him! We’re going to my favorite Japanese supermarket/cafeteria that I haven’t been to in a really long time and I’m just…I’m really trying hard to not put all of my eggs in one basket and get my hopes up but he seems FUN for once.
Unrelated, one of the project managers in my office just walked down the hall whistling Sleigh Ride and I just screamed NO really loudly. I’m so over this snow.
Omg! That sounds so fun! Is the con soon and are you posting costume pics and are there any advantages to knowing a behind-the-scenes guy??
I have been posting a lot of costume pics on my group Facebook page! http://www.facebook.com/pepperpantscosplay! I am Queen Beryl and Space Dandy (my group is 4 people strong so it is easy to get confused!)
The con isn’t until June, but I definitely see us being at the very least friends so we’ll see if I get any perks!
Just remember: he’s the lucky one.
Okay, to expand on this because it’s totally the kind of thing my mom would say with the unspoken bit being “…so be nice, because his happiness is in your hands!”: if I were in that dude’s position, I would think, “holy crap, this hot smart nerdy talented cosplayer lady is totally going to go out with me, no way can I fuck this up.” So if his actions don’t suggest that that’s how he feels, man, that is all on him.
Yay, I was waiting for this!
I went on a Tinder date with a dude on Wednesday. Nice enough, but not for me so when he asked when I was free to hang out again I said that it’d be a bit, and while I appreciated the offer I didn’t really feel a spark, so I’d be down to hang out but the next round is on me (he’d said he didn’t believe in letting a woman pay for the first few dates – he wanted to be able to show that he valued her time and wanted to treat her). He texted back and said, yeah, no problem, we’ll get another round sometime. It was lovely and only kind of terrifying to send that text. I’ll admit – in the past I’ve just stopped responding to texts but I don’t want to be a coward about this anymore and I know I always appreciate it when dudes are honest with me, so I did it back. And it worked!
I have another Tinder date with a dude tonight and I’m excited about it. We’ve been chatting all week, he just got back from a business trip last night and asked if he could see me tonight. While he was gone he was texting me pictures of the food and the beach which is basically my favourite kind of flirting (“Too bad you’re not here” *picture picture picture* = “You’re horrible, give me more” in packedsuitcase world). So we shall see. Also, he’s a foot taller than me. A foot! And I am a Tall Lady, so this is very exciting.
It TOTALLY works. I’ve never gotten anything less than polite, and often, appreciation. Good for you! Some people feel it’s not worth wrapping up because you’re not seeing this person anymore, but I feel way better about myself when I do it.
Y’ALL I’m making TOAST SOUP tonight. (recipe here: http://food52.com/recipes/34484-jennifer-mclagan-…)
Also I love the timelessness of airports and agree strongly with the bartender. It’s actually pretty soothing to just give myself over to “the system” in this way?
I actually agree… I tend to arrive way early for flights and then be like “this is great, now the only thing I have to do is sit here and wait and then a giant metal tube will come and take me to my destination.”
oh man especially on whichever leg of the flight it doesn’t matter if you actually get there on time? hoo-boy, best “literally nothing matters” nihilistic hall pass.
YES! And also, I like it because I allow myself wine at any time o’clock because (TMI alert) drinking soda before flying gives me the worst kind of knife-cutting-itself-out-of-my-body gas when I get to altitude and nothing helps it at all.
It’s easier in airports that go out of their way to create a comforting space. Edmonton airport has this giant green living wall right in between two bars, and there’s a rotating list of musicians who come and do little one-man shows. Very peaceful!
The Seattle airport around the holidays is kind of the opposite of peaceful, but in a fun way? When I was traveling to see my family (at ass-o-clock, as you do) I saw 1) a one-man band and 2) Elvis on one of those really tall bicycles wrapped in red and white tinsel (the bike, not Elvis). It felt like it should have been really annoying, but I had reached that state of dreamlike nihilism justjenny & menspraetrepidans were talking about, so it was really pretty great.
Any airport capable of producing Elvis on a pennyfarthing is an okay airport by me.
San Francisco has a library tucked away in the international terminal. There’s a yoga room in T2, but a LIBRARY in an airport is pretty much the best idea they’ve had.
I’m off for a week’s vacation which is stressful as hell because:
A. I’m in the middle of a pilot experiment and if I hadn’t made this trip three months ago I wouldn’t be going and my boss is NOT HAPPY
B. I hate flying and I’m terrified I’ll have another panic attack on the plane
BUT WHEN I GET OFF IN NYC I GET TO SEE HAMILTON AND THAT IS LITERALLY THE ONLY THING GETTING ME THROUGH THE ANXIETY RN also seeing my BFF, BUT HAMILTOOOOOOOOOOOON
I WILL WAVE AT YOU FROM ACROSS THE RIVER 😀 Safe travels!!!!!
I WILL THROW BUTTERED POPCORN JELLY BEANS ACROSS THE RIVER FOR YOU
TYSM BB I APPRECIATE YOUR THOUGHTFULNESS
Arrrrrrgh I am trying the lottery for Hamilton basically every day it is feasible and have had no success so I am very jealous.
Ahhhh try again at the Sunday matinee because that’s when I’ll be there and maybe there will be good Toastie vibes for you????
Hey maybe I will! I have friends in town this weekend so I may haul them there to take advantage of the tourists’ lottery luck.
HAMILTON IS GREAT. I am now reading the bio of Hamilton it’s based on, and am anxiously awaiting the soundtrack.
HAMILTOOOOOOON!!! I’m seeing it in a month and I’m STOKED.
HAMILTON is sooooooo good. You will love it.
The most outrageously expensive airport I’ve ever been through was Istanbul Ataturk. $6 for a simit (kind of like a soft pretzel/bagel hybrid), which is easily <50 cents outside the airport. But I agree that money spent in transit doesn’t count.
(Also they had Turkish delight shops with lots of free samples of Turkish delight, and I would just wander through every 15 minutes or so helping myself to more.)
OMG proper Turkish delight would make the best airport snack. Sweet, substantial, oddly calming….perfect!
I actually had a panic attack last night at the thought of more snow coming in today. The remnants from the other storms have just melted! We had just gotten to the point where my dog was not a dirty mess every time we got home from a walk! I would wave a white flag of surrender to this winter, but you wouldn’t be able to see it against the backdrop of SNOW.
Spring Break is really late for me this year, but I am headed off on a magical California vacation in two weeks. It realy, really, REALLY cannot come soon enough. And we’re flying JetBlue, which is the only airline I can tolerate these days.
Happy SPRING!!!!!
It’s been a LONG wait here in my neck of the woods.
In anticipation of summer I’ve been learning Wing Chun from my boyfriend.
I’m just learning to perfect the basics right now but so far so good.
Fun fact: according to legend Wing Chun was developed by a woman who in turn learned martial arts from a Buddhist nun from the famous Shaolin sect. The woman decided to learn martial arts to protect herself & her fathers business from harassment from the local warlord who wanted to marry her.
Women learning self defense to ware off unwanted advances, not much have changed in 200 yrs.
What is everyone else doing fitness wise to get ready for summer?
Alternating Zombies, Run! and C25K, and the occasional beginner yoga video (seriously beginner) on YouTube. I have no idea how to stretch the four corners of my spirit, or whatever the fuck, but at least it makes my back feel better.
I love Zombies, Run! so much! It definitely keeps me distracted from the fact that I’m running/walking, although every time I get too attached to a character I fret that they’re going to get bitten any episode now (I’m only just starting on season 2)
Agreed! I’m only on episode 6, but I find it a much more enjoyable workout than C25K even though it’s basically the same thing. I’ve even managed to power through the times it has pulled a 7 minute song from my playlist to play.
Training (ha, “training”) for a half marathon in nine weeks, and tomorrow I’m going to some kind of barre-fusion class that appears to be filled with extremely thin rich women who do nothing but drink skim lattes and buy Lululemon tanks? so we’ll see how that goes.
I’m buying a bike this weekend!
Keeping on keeping on with my yoga (and weekly boxing), but I am hoping against hope that I can start Olympic lifting again by late summer.
I toyed with the idea of taking Karate classes for fitness and coordination/balance but ended up joining the local gym because I’m more of a “go at my own pace” kind of gal.
I am gonna fix the front brake on my bike so I can ride it again. I swear I am.
I’m doing my training runs in prep for the fear that I’ll actually get a lottery entry to the Chicago Marathon in October. I anticipate lots of long, sweaty runs, which are my absolute favorite.
sitting extremely still so that my sprained ankle and cracked knuckle will get their shit together and I can start exercising again. (Both injuries are the fault of MEN, I might add. I’ve been kept out of the weight room for almost two months. THANKS MEN.)
Gardening. I figure anything that makes me sweat that much has to be good exercise.
Training for my first ever half-marathon and signing up for a few other races between now and the end of summer, to make sure I stay on my game. Also mixing in some weight training and being extremely surprised to learn just how many muscles can be sore on a body at the same time.
Related: Ow.
Tried to ramp up my tiny workouts, but timed it badly with this recurring leg pain & made it SO MUCH WORSE. So I’ve been pretending I have all kinds of sports injuries and vowing to be both gentler and tougher from here on out. Stupid leg pain.
Best airport food was when I used to fly Iceland Air to London and have layovers in Reykjavik. The vodka was inexpensive but good and so I don’t remember much about the food. But there were definitely gummy candies galore… and smoked salmon.
Seconding this. Also, anytime I get an opportunity to put Brennevin in my face, I am happy. I love that stuff.
Sounds like my dinner plan
This is so good to know! Filing away in my brain….
Oh man. It was just a hot dog but I loved it. The crunchy bits! Fried onions?
Vancouver/Lower Mainland toastfolk, we never did manage a get-together in January, should we strive for April?
YES, PLEASE! April is good for those mountain folk hemmed in by trecherous
passes. My email is laurie dot merlo at gee mail dot com.
Yay, fun times in Van!
yes, let’s try!
Am I the only person who brings my own travel food? I have never purchased food (other than coffee or bottled water) in an airport.
I posted this to Tumblr and Twitter, but will share it here because it tickled me so much: This week I realized my leather biker jacket is old enough to buy booze and my Doc Marten oxford shoes could vote in November’s election.
I have made some mighty fine life/fashion choices. Yes, yes indeed.
Anyone else have some surprisingly long-lived wardrobe items?
I have a gents’ shirt that I bought and wore a lot around the age of 17. At 34 I don’t wear it as much as I once did, mostly around the house in the summer, since it’s rather thin and soft (it was that way when I bought it). However, it’s looks more or less new.
I have a sneaking suspicion (based on my own experience and the comments below) that men’s clothes wear better/last longer/are better made than women’s clothes.
Well, that would explain some of the outfits on my older male colleagues.
The hoodie I was wearing last night could be in the fourth grade by now, and I have a shirt that is actually older than me (it was my father’s but I stole it)
I wore some of my dad’s sweaters from the late 60s until they were threadbare. Yay for Dad Clothes!
I have a little black dress and leather jacket I bought when I was 15. I am now 37 and still wear both. I also still have band-autographed t-shirts from 1994.
How wow! Fifteen year old you must’ve had good taste! What band shirts?
This is me in said frock 2 years ago (I have cropped out the gentleman caller in case he doesnt’ want his face on the toast). Somewhere in the depths of somewhere, I have a pic of 15 year old me in the frock, stripey tights, DMs and the leather jacket, leaning on mum’s convertible.
band shirts still extant are Terrorvision (Monstersof Rock and Phoenix festivals 1994 and 1995), Chumbawamba, Faith no More, Alice in Chains, Guns and Roses. I wear them as pyjamas now as they were all XL…
My silver 6 hole Docs could vote too! My wingtip oxfords are about to turn 14 and are presenting a front of disinterested invulnerability in order to disguise a raging sea of anxiety.
In airports, I have been known to eat a Justin’s peanut butter pack as though it were a GoGurt.
I have been known to eat a Justin’s peanut butter pack as though it were a GoGurt
Probably a better choice, nutritionally and psychologically, than the GoGurt, too.
I thought that’s what they were for.
Last time I flew, it was from Honolulu to Atlanta, and I purchased a large and delicious chicken lemongrass banh mi to eat on the plane, and it was the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
Holy crap that must’ve been a long-ass flight. o_O
It was pretty god-awful, aside from the banh mi. It was a red-eye and I was awake the whole time. The only reason I took an overnight flight to begin with is because I was coming back from vacation and figured I’d sleep, B U T N O. I think it was only 9-10 hours, though, and I’ve been on longer, so I guess… there’s that.
I have my father’s bellbottoms from high school, as well as several of his old shirts.
The bellbottoms are in wonderful shape. I have exceeded their capacity, but they’re in great shape.
How fun! You could probably get some decent cash for them at a resale shop…
Well, I hope to lose enough weight to fit into them again. I gained quite a bit over the winter when I was depressed and eating poorly/not moving ever, but now life is good, and I plan on eating vegetables and actually moving around.
Hurray for life being good, vegetables, and moving around!
I have a Cheers sweatshirt that I liberated from my mother back in high school. She got it at the Cheers store on a business trip when I was 4. I’m now 32. The sweatshirt is still in really good shape, no holes, fading, and still fuzzy. It’s longevity is completely baffling.
I love all these stories about people stealing clothes from their parents! My mom got rid of all her amazing late 60s clothes which she made herself before I was even in middle school. THANKS MOM.
I have a sundress I stole from my mother, and which I love (black with small rosebuds on it, very lightweight fabric, fitted bodice, full-ish skirt, calf-length). She wore it while pregnant with me. And my triplet brother and sister. I try not to get too concerned about the fact that it fits me.
I’ve got two silk dresses that were mum’s in the 60s in Iran, we had them made over for me and they’re lovely.
When I was very little, at most toddler-age, I started wearing some of Mom’s spare t-shirts as nightdresses.
A couple weekends ago, my boyfriend asked me, “You know your pajama shirt has a gaping hole in the back, right?”
So I might need to give some of them up (I will never trash them until they literally fall off my body)
Maybe make them into quilts before they completely disintegrate?
But I also want to make all my summer camp t-shirts into a quilt. Naturally, I have also held on to all of those over the years.
I have an 11 year old jeans jacket, and a 15 year old cardigan, both of which I still wear regularly. I also still have the two coach bags I bought at Nordstrom Rack in 1999 with my first paycheck. I get compliments on them whenever I bring them out.
Besides that, I wear a lot of vintage, so I have quite a few clothes that are older than me, (and could tell some stories, I’m sure).
I have GOT to get myself to a Nordstrom Rack. I hear about so many amazing finds from them…
I love nordie’s rack! They’re online now, which is GREAT. https://www.nordstromrack.com/
I don’t get to go very often, but the last time I was there I got a pair of Kork-Ease wedges for $50 (to compare: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007DONFX0/ref=s… ). They are this nifty blue-gray color and they are now some of my favorite summer shoes. The last time I wore them, I easily walked the mile or so between my apartment and the train station, despite the fact that they have a roughly four-inch heel. Mr. Delperro was duly impressed.
https://www.nordstromrack.com/
Welp, I know what I’m doing with my afternoon in a dead office.
I still wear a t-shirt I got in 5th grade with my elementary school’s mascot. It’s 26 years old, and really thin now, so I limit how much I wear it..
I’m not sure which amazes me more. That the shirt is wearable after 26 years, or that you can wear something you got in fifth grade.
I stopped growing at 11 – for one brief, glorious moment I was the tallest girl in my class, only to become the shortest once everybody else caught up.
I have (and still wear) a t shirt my mom bought me in kindergarten. It has a chameleon on it which used to change color in the sun. It is 21 years old and a testament to the miracle of poly-cotton blend.
How are you people wearing clothes purchased for you before you’d gone through puberty? Seriously, I am baffled.
I have a t-shirt from softball camp when I was maybe 10 that I can wear now. But that’s just because it was way too big when I got it!
Um, no, you are not the only one. My boyfriend gets really embarrassed by me when we travel together because I INSIST on bringing a tupperware of last night’s dinner and eating it in the terminal EVEN THOUGH there is no way to heat it up and it is usually pretty pungent (not in a rotten-food way, just in a regular food-smell way). Because no I will not pay $9 for a sandwich or whatever nonsense they are selling at the terminal. If I even look at the prices at airport food stores I involuntarily start muttering phrases like “matter of principle” and “daylight robbery”.
As for wardrobe items, I’m still wearing my mom’s Frye boots from god-knows-when. At least the 80s. I had to have the soles repaired – which was my own fault as I wore them in my wanton teenage-hood and did NOT take care of them properly – but the leather is still going strong!
I realized a bottle of my perfume oil is turning nine this year. If it was human, it would be in grade four!
99% of the time, I fly out of Trudeau airport in Montreal. I don’t eat much because I’m too wound up and nervous about the flight, but I always get a Copa-Banana smoothie at the Jugo Juice past the security check.
I’m fascinated by transitional/liminal spaces in general so I love airports, even the crappy ones (except CDG, which should be nuked from orbit). I’m especially fond of the Zurich airport because it has like 2038490 restaurants and bakeries and one of them is called Gebäckausgabe which is a great German pun that never fails to fill my heart with joy.
I suspect that I am going to be spending a considerable amount of time in the Montreal airport over the next few months. I’ve never been there before. Any tips?
If you’re flying in/out and going into the city, the bus is super helpful and cheaper than a taxi. The 747 bus stops right outside the main door, runs every 20 minutes or faster 24 hours a day, and makes a series of stops downtown (and the first one’s at the Lionel Groulx metro station, so easy connection to the orange or green lines). It costs I think $10 now? But with it you get a 24 h transit pass, and a taxi’s much more than that.
The customs rigamorole is the most convoluted nonsense — it’s not terrible, just wildly inefficient, and irritating if you have to pee and are staring down a huge line of people. (There are bathrooms between the international flights and customs — use them!)
(I live in Montreal, and have flown through Trudeau several times.)
I had to navigate a transfer at CDG at 4 am from a trans-Atlantic flight, and I felt like a superhero for managing to do it on the first try. I swear someone just threw a bunch of hallways like pick-up sticks and said “ta-da, airport!”
Best airport I’ve flown through is Amsterdam, hands down. Incredibly clear signage, walk time estimates listed on lots of signs, and so many tulip shops.
Cat thread!
Saffron likes to fall over in front of the gym ball when I am trying to do my physio exercises.
I’m so glad to see that cat thread kept going when my computer basically gave up and I couldn’t get a new one!
Anne does not understand windows or hands.
Bonny just doesn’t understand.
That picture of Anne is perfection.
Minna from below:
Wow, I love that photo!
GUYS my cat JUMPED OUT THE WINDOW EARLIER THIS WEEK.
This is the only place on earth where people will (politely pretend to) want to hear the whole story, so:
I got home from class on Tuesday evening and one of our two cats (Spider) was sitting on the cat tree. I didn’t think too much about where the other one (Shadow) was, or the fact that Spider was following me around and trying to get in my lap and generally being much cuddlier than usual. But before leaving to pick up our dog from day care, I looked around for Shadow a bit and couldn’t find her in any of the usual places.
I still wasn’t that worried, but being of a fretful disposition, before I left the apartment I glanced at the open dining room window and thought, “What if she jumped out? That would be super weird, because she’s never tried to get out of the apartment and is in fact terrified of everything in the whole world.” But as I walked down the driveway toward the car, I idly looked in the little strip of grass (mostly overgrown with clover) between the driveway and the side of the house, you know, kind of superstitiously or something, not actually thinking I’d see anything – AND I SAW HER LITTLE BLACK TAIL STICKING OUT FROM A CLUMP OF CLOVER, COMPLETELY MOTIONLESS.
I freaked the fuck out. The cats are my husband’s, I was never a cat person before this relationship, so my first thought was that she had jumped out the second floor window, broken every bone in her little cat body, and crawled under some clover to die. I really thought there was no way she was not dead. I tried to call my husband, who was on his way home from work, but he didn’t answer, so I called my most cat-loving friend and told her what was up (while sobbing “I THINK SHE’S DEAD AND I’M SCARED TO TOUCH HER.”)
It was then that things started to get better, as cat-loving bestie informed me that she was almost certainly not dead, even though she was not moving and not responding to my calling her name. I got a towel from inside the house and sat down on the driveway near her, calling her to see if she’d move. At this point husband called back, also kind of freaking out (but not as much, since cat people know that cats don’t die from jumping out windows), and asked me to get closer to her. I did, and this time when I said her name she started crying! Poor little thing sounded so pathetic. From there I was able to dig her out of the clover (she was REALLY wedged in there) and carry her first to the car in case she was injured, and then into the house when it became apparent that she was not. Once she got inside she ate her weight in kitty kibble and slept a bunch. The end.
Gotta love cats getting in over their head:
“This will be a great idea!” two seconds later “This was a horrible idea!”
Poor baby kitty! I am a cat person and I would have momentarily freaked out, too.
I am SO GLAD this story has a happy ending.
YIKES. Very glad she is OK!
When Bonny was about four months old, she fell out of the kitchen window. Now, our kitchen window looks out onto our downstairs neighbours garden (our houses are weird: We technically have a zone on all three floors, but it’s only out front door and stairs that are on the groun floor. We live on the secon and third floor, our neighbour occupies the same space, just on the groun floor. We have a balcony, he has a garden.)
Now, being a cat person, I knew she wasn’t likely to be hurt. However, she was trapped, and there is no way to get into those gardens without a key. I’d have had to climb the garages either end of our block to do it.
And our neighbour has a dog.
So I was in absolute panicky floods of tears and my little cat is WAILING from the garden for her human to come and get her. It’s winter, she has never been out of the house before as she is unneutered at this point. I had to put a note through next doors door to CALL ME as soon as he got home so that I could come and fetch my cat.
When he got back at about 4 (she fell out of the window around 11) I went with the carrier, she mewed at me pathetically, and climbed inside the carrier with no fuss at all. I got her back, discovered she’d chipped a tooth and got a little graze on her face, but otherwise not hurt herself at all.
She got all the treats in the WORLD and never fell out of a window again, the end.
Aww, Bonny! Poor little kitty!
I won’t let Nina out on my (third-floor) balcony unsupervised for any length of time in case she tries to jump off. This is not a wholey groundless fear, as she once, as an adolescent kitten, tried to leap out an open window after a passing pigeon, and it was only my roommate’s intervention that kept her from learning the hard way that she cannot, in fact, fly.
This week, we moved houses. Moxie did not approve.
“MOVING IS SCARY, MUST GO TO CUNNING HIDING SPACE WHERE NO ONE CAN FIND ME”
“IF THAT FAILS I WILL GNAW THROUGH THE DOOR AND ESCAPE”
But did you leave a forwarding address for the moose?
Yes, inquiring minds want to know!
I think the moose are the thing I’ll miss most about the old place! BUT the first night we were at the new one, there was a deer napping in the sunlight in the back corner of the yard, and the apple tree has gnawed-on branches that look too high up for a deer so I’m hopeful the moose come by here, too! Also, last night we watched a big white rabbit go hopping by in the woods behind the house, so maybe Moxie will soon have a rabbit friend! I’m a little more nervous about that, since a friend’s cat hunts and kills rabbits, but Moxie is largely useless at every other aspect of being a cat so I’m hopeful he wouldn’t realize that a rabbit could be food.
I hope he finds a new wildlife-love.
Here is Asa “helping” with my sewing project last night.
Oh, Saffron is a proper rectangle and I approve very much!
Last weekend, I washed the duvet cover. Musichetta decided the duvet itself was now a cloud/her new nest.
I don’t have a picture of my cat, but: I posted yesterday about her stressful back problems. Good news! She has nothing more serious than a herniated disc! She still has to have surgery and stay at the vet all weekend, which is a little stressful, but she should be home on Monday and probably back to normal mobility within a month.
Oh good, that was the best-case scenario, wasn’t it? Hope it all goes well.
Diesel is his normal goofy self. Cross your fingers that this distinguished gentleman joins our fold this weekend:
No aft feet! So lovey and snuggley!
My dad, shrinking slowly because he’s OLD, and his hilariously enormous cat Jack who can double as a magazine stand –
Is that…real?
the perspective is a little forced, but yes. Jack is really big – I don’t know his weight, and my dad is shorter than me these days.
Yeah I figured the perspective had a little to do with it but nevertheless he is ENORMOUS. I thought my cats were big but, wow!
Toasts, my job is a shit show and potentially folding in he next month, but my coworker is driving me insane. She’s in the same boat as me (frustrates, job seeking) but she’s telling us how she’s never before applied for a job she didn’t get. Ever. Nor has she been turned down for a date or had someone break up with her.
Oh my god, I genuinely quite like her but her total unawareness of the current job searching environment is going to make me lose my damn mind.
Well, she’ll probably have a new experience in the near future.
Your coworker sounds like the volunteer we have in right now to help out around the office. She is, frankly, extremely naive. And annoying, but for the purposes of this discussion, naive. She also has never had to find a job out here in the “real world” (she just graduated and has worked in work-study jobs) and has totally distorted ideas about how to go about it. My boss and I keep trying to give her advice but she is not taking it on board at all. In addition, we just hired my replacement, who is NOT her, and she is really pissed, which is so fun and awkward. UGH.
The thing I don’t get is that she isn’t naive–she’s almost thirty and very successful at this job, has outstanding international business experience, lived in several countries–she’s just extraordinarily lucky!
Shoshanna from GIRLS spotted in the wild!
Ugh I hear that. I had a coworker that made me nuts complaining about our workplace and kept threatening to leave, and I very sagely kept telling her and others that “[our field] is very small and she’s going to have a really hard time finding anything, especially without an advanced degree,” drawing from my own multi-year nightmare of finding anything in our field.
The very week she decided to look for something else she got an AMAZING position at a very prominent place in Chicago. I was all, Welp, I guess some people just have things drop in their laps like that. *seethe*
HELLO TOASTIES. I have mostly been absent due to my new job sucking out all time, humor and will to live from the withered husk that was once my body. However! They are flying me to San Francisco next week for work, and I am staying through the weekend (the 27th-29th) to be a tourist!
I know I am meeting some of you for brunch, but I would be delighted to see more or just to get recommendations for places to go and things to see and, most importantly, food I should be eating. I’m staying pretty close to the Civic Center/UN Plaza according to Google Maps and should have easy access to BART, but I know basically nothing about your fair city other than there’s a bridge and a bay and there used to be a lot of hippies there. TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
I too am a barren husk of the person I used to be due to horrible job! I hope you get out of there soon and find something better! I am done here in two weeks, then off to follow my dreams of starting a nonprofit, dying my hair green again, writing a ton, and starting a blog wherein I snarkily recap Criminal Minds.
How far do you want to stray from Civic Center? Also, what do you like to do? Do you like to go to secret bars for expensive bourbon cocktails? Do you like to eat thai food outside on a Sunday morning? Do you like art museums with pipe organs in the walls? Do you like to take long walks through the park?
Hello! I will be brunching so I’ll see you at some point, but you should know that the part of the city where you are staying is a really interesting transitional spot. It’s historically been on the edge of the Tenderloin (which is where the SROs and homeless services are largely focused), plus it’s the civic center (federal and city government, Asian Art Museum, main library, ballet, opera, etc.), the beginning of Little Saigon (do you like Vietnamese food?), and now currently also ground zero for the tech boom (Twitter, Uber, Zendesk, etc and the businesses catering to a lot of young people with disposable income). Kind of fascinating.
Food-wise, lots of great Vietnamese and Thai restaurants just up Larkin St, two new fancy-schmancy food courts (The Hall and The Market), several lovely-if-spendy restaurants that I can give specific recs for if you like, oh the list goes on. SF has many culinary delights, including several locations serving a little something we like to call “dollar oyster happy hour” that I was shocked to find did not exist elsewhere. Lots of museums too, so if you are interested in say… the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) or the Contemporary Jewish Museum (@Jewseum), or the California Academy of Sciences (CalAcademy) and would like some company please let me know. 🙂
Contemporary Jewish Museum sounds right up my alley! And I would love specific restaurant recs, it is my vacation so I am treating myself.
Not exactly a restaurant but BiRite ice cream! The salted caramel is particularly magical.
Anyway, my very first suggestion because you’re a cool Toastie person is to get off at 16th & Mission, walk up to Valencia Street, and walk down Valencia to 24th street. On the way, you will encounter lots of browsing, including my favorite bright pink thrift store, Mission Thrift? I Think? (which has a surprisingly great used book selection–also there are some cool murals in the alleyway right beforehand), Dog-Eared Books, 826 Valencia (which we often call ‘the Pirate Store’ and which possesses a Fish Theater, Paxton Gate (in which you can find every weird thing you might need from mouse skeletons and fossils to carnivorous plants), Borderlands Cafe & Sci-Fi Bookstore. Then you can walk back down 24th to Mission and go one more block to 25th and eat pie at Mission Pie.
Um, all of this sounds AWESOME, and I am also very interested in the pipe organ museum and the secret bars you mentioned!
Not a secret, but Bar Agricole is amazing. It specializes in various r(h)ums, but also does neat things with other spirits. The food is excellent and it’s lovely inside. Next time I am back in the area, I’m determined to go to Trou Nourmand, which is by the same owner and does brandy instead of rum and also runs a charcuterie/house butchery program.
I tried and failed to get to Bourbon & Branch, but it’s sister bar across the street, Tradition, turned out to be chock full of the same bartenders and cocktails and it was pretty excellent. This awesome lady bartender gave me a secret code to get into B&B later that night, but fate (accidental shellfish allergy incident had elsewhere) intervened.
Obvious restaurant recs, but SPQR and State Bird Provisions were both among my favorite places to eat, anywhere.
Also, seconded on pirate store recommendation.
I will take the most obvious recs! I’m normally not a fancy restaurant person at all so anything is wonderful.
Bourbon & Branch was the bar. I don’t know exactly how it works, but they’ve got a speakeasy thing going on so I think you need to get a password from them to get in? Looks like Either Ada has the skinny on the bar recs.
Pipe organ museum is the Legion of Honor: https://legionofhonor.famsf.org/ and sometimes they have impromptu organ concerts. It’s fun but I realized just now, might be hard to get to without a car. The one time I went, it was with someone and in a car.
The last recommend I have is Musee Mechanique: http://www.museemecaniquesf.com/ which you can get to by BARTing or walking to Embarcadero, walking to the Ferry building (also a fun touristy destination though very crowded) and then taking a trolley to Pier 45. Bring a lot of quarters if you go. My favorite machines are the weirdly grotesque ones, like mechanized executions.
I’m sorry to be so prolific, here, but i just love telling people about fun things to do in my area!
heads up that the legion of honor is easy (but sort of time consuming) to get to without a car! you can take any east bay-bound bart or any downtown-bound muni from civic center to montgomery. then hop on a 38/38L and take it alllll the way (like 40 minutes) to geary & 39th. then it’s about a half mile walk up 40th.
Valencia is literally downhill from brunch, FYI.
WELL if any brunchers would like to accompany me on a gentle saunter down Valencia I think that would be delightful!
this would be my exact suggestion. if it’s nice outside, i like to buy some bread and chocolate and cheese at bi-rite grocery, sit in dolores and have a makeshift picnic, and then do a little walking tour before finishing off the day at mission pie. my favorite is their walnut pie. it’s like pecan, but better. if you don’t mind straying further, it’s worth walking down 24th, stopping at adobe books, and then getting ice cream at humphry slocombe. bi-rite creamery is very popular and it’s good but i think humphry’s weird flavors are better.
WEIRD ICE CREAM. This is why y’all are my people.
That sounds amazing and I totally forgot about bi-rite! I had salted caramel ice cream for the first time there and I know it’s everywhere now but at the time I thought it was amazing.
(also, I must respectfully say that shaker lemon is the best pie)
Second vote for shaker lemon (with whipped cream).
Last year I was travelling back from Amsterdam, and had loads of time to kill in the airport (which is lovely), so my partner and I went to seek out pancakes (it felt appropriately Dutch, and we hadn’t had any). We found a place serving them, ordered, and waited. And waited. And waited. The hot plate the batter was poured onto had clearly just been turned on, and was taking ages to heat up, and no cooking seemed to be taking place. Eventually they gave up, scraped it off and cooked them on the hot surface that they had been cooking chips on instead. Worth it.
toasties! two things:
1– did anyone else see the news about the remake of little women? is anyone else horribly distressed about it? i can recite nearly the entirety of the 1994 one and want susan sarandon to braid my hair and tell me about beauty forever.
2– i’m going to be living in boulder this summer! is anyone from there? will it be prudent to drive my car out from california or can a girl get by well enough with legs and buses? what can one do there?
Omg me too!!!! Excitement, trepidation, fear; so many mixed feelings. I really hope they’re not going to F it up and go with the latest crop of Disney starlets. Only glimmer of hope is its being produced by Amy Pascal (newly demoted cuz of the Sony hack) who has a history of promoting women in Hollywood. Fingers X.
But Clair Danes will FOREVER be Beth in my mind. Greatest deathbed actress ever!!!!!!
oof yes, many a tear has been shed. and also the scene where you THINK she is dead but psych she is finally drinking broth!
I am a little worried about it, but my sister (who I watch the 1994 version with every Christmas!) reminded me that if Sarah Polley is directing, she might do interesting things? So I have some hope!
You can easily do Boulder without a car. The buses are pretty comprehensive and it’s a super bike-friendly town. Plus the entire thing is about 2 miles square, so you never have to go that far.
If you’re planning to take trips into Denver or the mountains or anything, a car is definitely necessary. You can always just find a friend with a car, though.
On the other hand, the drive from California to Colorado (I-15 -> I-70) is full of pretty things, including Glenwood Canyon, Naked Canyon, and amazing desert landscapes in Utah and mountain views in Colorado. It’s a drive worth doing at some point
One time I got to fly business class NYC-Bangkok. It was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life, and it was thanks to my otherwise uneventful and resolutely “it’s okay” job, and I’m still reeling 3 years later. THE FOOD, Y’ALL. I had salmon and Perrier in the lounge, and then got on the plane and the attendant was like “orange juice or Dom Perignon?” and I was like “both, my good man, both” and there was a minibar AT MY SEAT with more juice and then it was like “I WILL have filet for dinner, yes please” and then there was a BAR in the back of the plane and little trays full of petits four and then you get to the Dubai lounge for your layover and it’s just food food food as far as the eye could see and the whole week I was working in Bangkok I was having a great time but I was also SUPER STOKED for the 26-hour return journey because the FOOD and the BOOZE they just kept GIVING IT TO ME.
Needless to say, the experience has ruined air travel for me ever since. But otherwise yes money spent on food in transit is pretend money, which is how I spent $35 on a beer and a salad waiting for my Christmas flight home out of LaGuardia.
chortling at “both, my good man, both.”
this sounds more luxurious than any vacation i have ever had. like, the vacation itself, not even the transportation to the vacation.
YES!!! We got to fly first class to Europe and back for my dad’s big retirement trip extravaganza and I WILL NEVER FLY COACH AGAIN! It was constant food and booze for like nine hours regardless of your personal time of day!
One day, when I’m a real grownup, I shall fly business class, just for the experience.
Although I was once on a flight that was overbooked, and I got upgraded to first class for free. I slept through it, though, so there was no free food or booze. Comfortable sleep, though, which was awesome.
Omg BUSINESS CLASS. Yes. I sometimes get upgraded to first class on domestic flights, which is cool and all, but business class sort of changed my life.
I got upgraded once from NYC-Frankfurt (like, the kind of upgrade where I was already in my regular seat and they came and got me and moved me up front) and it was the only time I’ve ever successfully slept on an airplane. Turns out an actual bed makes all the difference.
The last time I flew Heathrow – Toronto the flight was only about half full so I had an entire 4-seat row to myself and got totally horizontal for some sweet, sweet sleep. It was splendid.
A surprise upgrade is a lifelong fantasy of mine that I entertain every time I head to the airport, thinking today could be the day. As it has never yet happened to me, I must ask you in a very calm and detached manner to SHARE YOUR SECRETS HOW DO YOU GET UPGRADED OMG.
Okay so, full disclosure, I had second-tier frequent flyer status on the airline and had purchased an extended-leg-room type of seat already, which may have influenced this occurrence. But I’m positive it happened because I was traveling alone and was already in an extra-cost seat. It’s possible that I was the most senior frequent-flyer person who wasn’t already in business class.
Ah, that makes sense! I am sadly not the type to purchase extra-legroom seats (I wish I was, but I have the kind of shrivelled, bitter soul that begrudges airlines every last dollar they suck out of me) so maybe the fantasy will remain a fantasy. I always mention to my boyfriend that we should try to get an upgrade on flights by pretending we’re flying off on our honeymoon but for some reason he’s not into that????
Oh, man. Business and First Class. 🙁 My dad worked for a Major Airline all his life, so when I was a kid we traveled a LOT because a) free flights for dependent family and b) free upgrades to the best available seat. The downside was flying standby, so you could never really relax until the plane was taxiing down the runway (because then it was too late for a revenue standby passenger to show up and demand your seat) and having to dress up (because you were representing the airline; luckily this rule was relaxed somewhat by the time I was 12). I really, really, really miss all the sweet perks that I was really too young to enjoy at the time. (Although the upside of air travel now is my seat is my seat because I paid for it and nobody can kick me out.)
I get to travel business class for work occasionally, and YES it has completely ruined all normal air travel for me. I keep looking around for steak and complimentary socks.
I have not been able to properly access the toast for nearly TWO MONTHS because my laptop valiantly gave its life and our ‘PC’ is painfully, panifully old and cheap and slow to the point that frequently the blog just would not load.
It’s been a long time.
I’ve missed you. I’ve missed THIS.
Edit: I did not get to see the eclipse today, because RUSSIA’S POLLUTION SPAT 100% CLOUD COVER over bits of the UK. Specifically, my bit, and it cleared up an hour and half after the sun and moon did their thing.
It’ll be 28 years before I can see another one.
Oh there you are. I’ve been wondering how you are. I’ve missed you. Condolences for your laptop and welcome back.
I was just wondering yesterday where you have been! Glad you are back – we’ve missed you!
Hooray good to see you!
Toasticles, I am “stayed up too late drinking beer with a bunch of Canadians I just met” sleepy. It was a good night though. My only regret is that this evening I’m … performing? speaking? in a storytelling event, so low energy is not good. I may need to power-nap.
If anyone can spare some good wishes for the event, I would appreciate it. I will be waxing rhapsodic about the summer that I spent dressing up as a reindeer at a Christmas theme park by Lake Placid. Pray I don’t yawn in the middle.
Good luck! That sounds awesome, and I’m sure you’ll be great.
Thank you!
Good luck, that sounds awesome! I predict a power nap plus adrenaline will be just the thing.
Can we talk about wonderful ridiculous books? I just started reading a YA sci-fi, “A Thousand Pieces of You,” and the primary love interest in this book is pure gold. Originally I was kind of creeped out, because our protagonist is at most 18 and Primary Love Interest is a PhD student, but it turns out that Primary Love Interest is just SO SMART that he started PhD work in physics at 17. Also he is tall and muscular, because he rock climbs. We get a lot of descriptions of how tall and muscular he is, and also about his soulful gazing. It is glorious. What are your favorite ridiculous books?
I love ridiculous books. I just finished the third Dresden Files book and it was so bad but so good. I read it in a day which made my slow reading husband sad/jealous. I told him it was the literary equivalent of eating one of those plastic barrels of cheese balls in a day. Impressive? Maybe. Healthy? Not really. But I have no regrets. Also, I have a soft spot for Francesca Lia Block who I thought was A Genius in middle school, but now I realize her books are deliciously ridiculous in a way that I still love. As a wonderful friend put it, “In her world, ever man is still Kurt Cobain.”
Also, I’m hitting my favorite giant used bookstore so if you have ridiculous book recs, I would gladly take them.
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. It’s deliberately ridiculous to every extreme possible, and I adore it.
Every few years I re-read the The Firebringer Trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce and I love them. They’re about unicorns. Awesome, talking unicorns. And there’s a griffon. And a dragon. And I’m sorta ashamed but not really.
That sounds like a truly amazing book. Talking unicorns? I love talking unicorns! and a dragon? AND a griffon? What is there not to love. Thank you!
I really like the Dresden Files. I use them to get me out of reading slumps
They’re like comfort food. I can happily read a whole book in one sitting and just feel better. I know what you mean about the reading slump thing–they’re so easy to get lost in that even when I don’t want to read I can consume one of these bad boys quite happily.
Yeah, they keep me constantly entertained without ever making me work for it. Perfect brain candy
I am currently in my 12398723th reread (coping mechanism because I am feeling overwhelmed with grad school type stuff) of the Kushiel’s Dart trilogy, by Jacqueline Carey, and I still love them.
As soon as I finish two of the dozens of unread books I already have on my shelves, I am going to get the second book in that series.
All of the Gossip Girl series. I even refused to watch the show because there was no way they could live up to the glorious trashiness of the books.
a while ago a friend of mine and i reread the entirety of the “mediator” series, which was written by the princess diaries author under a pseudonym. there is a hot ranchero ghost. i repeat, hot ranchero ghost. it takes them 3 books to freakin’ kiss but there are so many descriptions of his deep eyes and sinewy hands and the scar through his eyebrow. and his abs. so many ghost abs.
HOT RANCHERO GHOST! I love those books SO MUCH. Meg Cabot really understands what this genre requires, imho.
QUERIDA
meg cabot really does get it, though. especially for teenagers. my friend and i were laughing at the part where suze realizes that a HOT RANCHERO GHOST lives in her bedroom and she immediately puts on her least sexy pajamas, because she’s mortified at the thought of him seeing her wear anything even slightly alluring.
Jesse! So hot.
The Pendergast series, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. They’re so, so, terrible, but I can’t get enough of them.
Also, despite the fact the early books are set at the American Museum of Natural History, the AMNH gift shop does not carry any of them (probably because they are ridiculous and not Serious Science Books) and I am forever grouchy about it.
OH MY GOD those books are SO BAD and yet SO GOOD. Have you read any of their non-Pendergast books? I don’t even know what to call their genre — Gory Fake Science Thriller? — but it’s my favorite.
Yes. Yes.
Also, I feel like a couple of their non-Pendergast books should be Required Reading for anyone planning long-term nuclear waste storage, along with a couple of Neal Stephenson books (not going to name any titles, because spoilers.)
I have! My best friend (who got me into the series to begin with) had Ice Limit and a few others that he loaned me, because he’s the best/worst.
Have you read the one set in not!Aspen with Corrie Swanson?
Yeeeeees, oh my god. I distinctly recall texting my best friend at one point while I was reading it that he had to find and also read it immediately so I could shout at him about it.
OMG RELIC. SHIT. I had totally blocked that book from my memory except for a vague understanding/theory of what a hypothalamus might do. also ICK.
All of Shelly Laurenston, who writes deliciously silly paranormal shape shifter romances, but particularly Bite Me, wherein our two protagonists are a shape shifting honey badger who plays roller derby and a shape shifting tiger/grizzly hybrid who plays professional hockey. As should be obvious, it’s totally ridiculous but really fun (her female characters also tend to be gratuitously violent in that “only the bad dudes get hurt” low-grade action movie kind of way…)
YOU GUYZZZZ!!!! i have experienced the singular pleasure that is receiving a package from another Toastie 😀
in the discussion about Things For Which You Can Find Knitting Patterns, i said i’d pay a cash money for knitted veggies and owlcat hooked me up.
<a target=”_blank” href=”http://imageshack.com/f/f0pklwIuj”>
the potatoes really started it all. so stupid and lumpy and cute. the pea pods and mushroom are so tiny and adorable and i can hardly stand it. that goddamn artichoke has real working leaves that curl back. every single piece is a perfect little work of art. OMG. i am ded. ded of cutes. i send this message from beyond the grave.
(i have more pics if anyone wants to see some close ups. i’ve not posted pics on the toast before and didn’t wanna break the intertubes with a deluge of pics.)
LOVE IT! That cabbage is fantastic.
MOAR PICS
blunderbusst beat me to it!
Two of my 9th graders ate a pot brownie during second period on Monday. The rest of the class all suspects each other of snitching (because there’s no way the Olds could have figured it out on our own) and hates the admin for banning all snacks during class time in response. I’m about to have that moment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in which Dolores Umbridge declares that she really hates children.
Time to bring back some Teenage Dirtbag stuff, yeah?
dirtbag teens. what a bunch of morons.
this reminds me that when i was in 9th grade, a girl shaved off her eyebrows during our chemistry class. like, she whipped out her safety razor and some lotion and went to town on her brows. i was impressed.
It’s really cute when teenagers think they invented pot. No, no one over 18 has ever seen the stuff or could recognize the symptoms of being high, children.
They totally forget that I went to college in Seattle in the late 90s and spent ten years living in Marin County. And that I am Mcgonagall, dammit.
I don’t even have to consciously look for it. I just experience a strong, sudden flashback to my high school girls bathroom. That’s what the smell of pot does to me.
“How does she know? Sh’es, like, even older than my mom!”
Children, it’s *because* I’m older than your mom. All of the late 70s were pot-scented.
Additional things happening: we are meeting Mr Moa, the two-pawed cat, tomorrow afternoon and maybe adopting him!
Also my doctor thinks I have chronically fucked up hormones and put me on medication that will hopefully remove some of the barriers to losing weight that I’ve faced over the last couple of years.
Fucked up hormones are the worst. I hope you get things figured out SOOOOOOOON. I’m finally getting a grip on mine (after more than a decade of working on them) and it feels so incredible to start to remember what normal people feel like! So many good wishes directed to you!
I’m on thyroid medicine and also bc for my hypothyroid/PCOS and it’s not always easy but I finally feel like my body is something I can understand. Like, if I gain five pounds it’s not a total mystery and I get to blame it on bad eating and not a lot of exercise just like everyone else. The only thing that kind of sucks is that it can be harder and slower to lose weight (and also way too easy to gain it back) but! It is possible!
Doc thinks it’s actually a cortisol/adrenal issue for me and the meds I’m starting tomorrow ought to make things much more normal, as you say. I’m so glad you’re feeling more in control now!
Yay for meds! I love living in the future.
Toastfriends, I need to not binge-watching TV anymore. I’m feeling stressed about work and writing, and losing myself in hours of gaming or Netflix is a band-aid for my worries. But it doesn’t feel good and gives me weird dreams.
Example: I accidentally watched all of Kimmy Schmidt earlier this week and I woke up the next morning mentally exclaiming XANTHIPPE’S MOM IS MARTHA STEWART. Think about it! She’s a blond, no-nonsense looking mature woman who named her daughter Xanthippe (Greek) and lives in Connecticut growing many kinds of squashes.
So what you’re saying is that you should binge-watch stuff because it leads to amazing epiphanies?
I get what you’re saying though. It feels terribly indulgent, but then afterwards you feel a little empty and spent (and sorta gross?), so I guess like binging on anything else. Moderation is best, but the problem is that it doesn’t FEEL like a lot of fun.
I will watch this thread with interest because I have the same problem and no answers for you. I try to limit myself to two episodes of something, but I’m bad at it. It’s kinda like. . .I come home in a stress brain fog and want to do nothing but watch TV, but the TV-watching creates a whole new kind of brain fog and it’s impossible to transition from there to reading or doing something productive. However, I have been dealing with my stress and anxiety and the more I do, the less inclined I am to binge watch. So maybe the only answer is to indulge the binge watching until you’re able to deal with some of the deeper issues? Idkkkk.
wooow, nice timing on this one, since I decided to check out the open thread while my stream of TrueBlood loads for me to continue binge watching.
I do feel kind of bad about it, especially since I have so. much. to do right now, like say, pack up my flat since I’m moving next week? Or, perhaps, do my citizenship app I’ve been sitting on for 5 months and I need to hand in like the same day I move? it feels so nice to have something pretty mindless to watch, especially after coming home from a customer service job. And also, it’s just…I really, really like Alexander Skarsgard’s abs and butt. Like, a lot.
I had a meal in LAX that I’ve been trying to recreate at home for years now. There’s a place in the American terminal called “Real Food” or some such nonsense, and it’s a vegetarian organic place. They have a platter which contains sesame tofu, soba noodles, kale, and seaweed, with a ginger tahini sauce in a little bowl in the center. It is the most satisfying, *cleanest* meal I have ever had in an airport (or maybe in general). The second time I got it, I may have actually gone OMPPHH NOMMMPPHH NOOOMMMPPHH while chowing down on kale (and I normally *hate* kale).
From that same business trip, here is my most prized selfie, from an art display in the physics department at the university I was visiting:
That is brilliant.
SFO has a great and similar-sounding spot in Terminal Two that you’d probably like too, called The Plant. I love their food, and I say this as someone whose first choice in airport food is smoked brisket from The Salt Lick (Austin and DFW).
BWI is a pretty great place to be stuck, if you’ve gotta be stuck at an airport; there’s a surprisingly good sushi place on one of the piers and Obrycki’s does incredible crabs.
Folks, it’s been an emotionally taxing week at work, and I thought I was doing OK until yesterday, when my depression/self-doubt kicked in full force. I’m able to recognize that most of my bad thoughts aren’t fully rational though, which is progress of a sort. I’m taking my meds, planning some exercise and visiting friends tonight for drinks and a bitchfest, but in the meantime, any advice for how to give myself a fucking break?
I like you as-is. You do not want to argue with me. And I will not stand for not giving a fucking break to anyone I admire. How dare you? Be kind to yourself for *me* if you cannot do so for your own sake.
oh man I appreciate the thought but this is not helping right now
just I’m already yelling at myself constantly about how shitty I am and how I can’t do anything right and what kind of fucking loser can’t even stop treating herself like shit
when i’m stuck at work feeling like that, i either FEELINGSBARF into my journal or go cry in the bathroom. it lets some pressure out of the system until i can GTFO of there.
I’ve been finding journaling very helpful, personally. It’s like….it allows me to get some distance from my feelings? Also, and I was dubious about this before I tried it, actually getting things written down somehow seems to take them out of my head a little bit (not entirely but still).
for reals. smashing those crazy thoughts onto paper gets ’em out of my skull and stops the horrible looping replay.
thanks all- I will keep this in mind for future events. I haven’t journaled in a while, maybe this is a sign I need to pick it up again.
Best airport food I have ever had was just outside of Puerto Vallarta’s airport, on the highway. There’s a tiny taco stand called el tubotaco, with a cartoon picture of an airplane, and the ladies made me vegetarian tacos out of all the different taco toppings, served on handmade tortillas, and they were about 20 cents each. There was plentiful cold beer, and watching the cars go by on the pan-american highway can’t be beat. Close runner up was drinking amazing wine from the bottle outside the airport in Porto, Portugal. I have amazing photos of both, but don’t know how to post 🙁
Best airport restaurant in the United States by far is Tortas Frontera at O’Hare. But I will — in a heartbeat — have an amazing and guilt-free time at any Vino Volo or the equivalent.
That place is *delicious*, which of course means that the line is always like 30 people long. Always worth it, though!
I desperately needed Vino Volo at John Wayne Airport (SNA) one time and it CLOSED AT 9PM. How? Why?
Tortas Frontera is my jam; thanks, Rick*!
*I have a friend in the food industry who told me everyone in Chicago in food talks about Rick Bayless like he’s a personal friend, so now every time I go to Tortas Frontera I obnoxiously snapchat everyone I know food pictures captioned things like WOW RICK SURE SAVED MY BACON TODAY THX BRO
I once flew to Hawaii out of O’Hare early morning New Year’s Day. The peppers and cheese and egg sandwich and large orange juice I got at that Frontera before getting on the flight was my salvation.
I’m flying back home pretty soon, and my airport (“my airport,” says the student several states away from any major metropolitan area) has meh restaurants, but YOU GUYS. DFW HAS A CANDY SHOP RIGHT NEXT TO THE GATE. It is glorious if you have the chance to go to that particular gate out of, like, 100 gates.
WHAT
I AM FLYING OUT OF DFW ON MONDAY I WILL GO THERE
UPDATE I WENT THERE AND I GOT THIS
THANK YOU
I flew home from Shanghai to DC yesterday, with a layover at O’hare. Everyone in that airport was lovely and helpful, except the giant bitch of a lady who was also flying to DC would not stop whining about the price of her beer (and asking me to confirm how much I paid, because the airport bar was clearly trying to rip her off personally). She also kept shouting/over-enunciating at the wait staff like they didn’t speak english (they could). I tried to fix it by tipping a million bucks. Good thing it was fake transit money!! Oh, I also had a chicago-style hot dog. It was wonderful.
Oh man, when I flew home from Las Vegas a few years ago, I got lunch at the Subway in the terminal. It had signs posted all over the causeway saying that there were no five dollar footlongs. The sneeze guard and the menu boards were littered with notices that prices were higher than normal Subway prices, and yet EVERY SINGLE PERSON in front of me in line pitched a fit at the register when their sandwich was a higher price than normal. The poor Subway employees.
Best use for fake transit money. I always tip 30% in airports because I hate airports and I feel bad for anybody that has to be around them all. the. time.
HELLOOOOOOOO SPORTS BUT REALLY JUST MARCH MADNESS
Hey guys! Hows ya brackets? I don’t care that mine is already busted because this:
Anyway, reaaaally hoping to see Wichita St v Kansas next round/Let’s go Terps today against Valpo (so we can hopefully have a chance to lose to Kentucky in the round of 16, thanks for the 4 seed, selection committee!)
In other sports news, Dwayne Wade turned 21, which is weird because he’s 60, Ovie has 47 goals, and all that truly matters in life is that Opening Day is getting closer and closer OH MY GOD IT’S SNOWING OUTSIDE BASEBALL PLEASE GET HERE, SPRING TRAINING IS NOT ENOUGH.
Guys, talk to me about the tourney, and whatever other sports things you feel like yelling about!
It took me a long time to figure out where to look in this gif, but once I figured it out it brought me much joy.
Haha, yes, I should have made a note I suppose (watch the coach on the sidelines, guys)
That dude who fell out of his chair, though…
Yes! That’s what that is! What’s great is, he’s in the rolling chair in the first place because he tore his achilles jumping up and down when they won their conference tournament, and the kid who made the winning shot in this gif is his son! I love this guy and how excited he gets, but I fear for his safety.
I’m prematurely laughing about Purdue being the first Indiana team knocked out of the tournament (IU and Valpo haven’t played yet, Butler and Notre Dame are playing each other next round), which will probably come back to bite me with an IU loss today. Can you tell where I went to college?
Also I went to the first ever home opener of NYCFC at Yankee Stadium last weekend! It was FREEZING but I am now happier than I’ve ever been to live walking distance from Yankee Stadium. And David Villa is super endearing and I am pleased to have an actual home soccer team.
I heard about this moment from my husband, who loves college hoop, but really, the description cannot match the reality.
i loooove this gif 🙂
Goddamn 5-year contract for that washed-up overrated rapist shitbag. Seriously, Steelers, if you’re gonna be all moralizing you gotta stop with this guy.
How much do you love the Cowboys who are like “Greg Hardy?! Sign us up! And oh boy, what we wouldn’t give for Adrian Peterson!”
Ugh they are a garbage org and have garbage people playing and have garbage in their souls.
Just what the NFL needs. More Ben Rapistberger. Grrrrr.
BASEBALLLLLLLL. I cannot wait!
I’m going to Florida soon to visit some family and they live near a spring training stadium, so my cousin and I are going to see the Mets play the Cardinals.
I also have tickets for Mets home opener.
I love the Mets even though all they do is break my little heart!
Oh, spring training games are the best. I once saw Garth Brooks play spring training ball for the Padres in the Cactus league. That is my spring training story.
I had Iowa State in my Final Four. I know nothing about basketball. These two things have added up to me making an early exit from paying much attention to the tournament.
BUT! Andrew Hammond (AKA The Hamburglar) continues to be an endless source of magic and wonder and hamburger emoji in the NHL, and is the most famous person to come out of my university in a long time, so I’m just going to keep riding that wave of pride and excitement until it ends. I won’t even mind if/when he beats my Red Wings. Also, my university has a tournament game today, but god help anyone who wants to watch it because 1) it’s hockey and 2) it’s MARCH MADNESS season, so good luck finding other sports on TV.
Also, the NFL continues to make me sad in so many ways, and the urge to walk away and not look back is growing.
Hello, fellow Iowa St-final-four-haver! Yes, that was unfortunate. I’d suggest still watching the tourney, its been rather a delight to watch so far.
If you can’t find your hockey team on the teevee, try atdhe.eu (and good luck to said team!)
Signal-boosting my “here’s our up-for-adoption office dog” post from yesterday:
This is Rachel (The picture is a link to her adoption page). She and her sister can’t live in the store, and none of us can adopt them permanently. So if anybody in central VA happens to be looking for large dogs, and has plenty of space for them to run and be silly, they’re your girls.
what a pretty girl! I hope she and her sister find a loving home soon.
Me too. They’re very happy on the farm where they’re living now, which is good. But they’re not in the office, and they’ve always been in the office for as long as I’ve worked here. 🙁
Ohhhhhhh she’s sooooo sweeeeeeeet! Hearts in my eyes! I have family in NOVA, I will post the link on Facebook and see if anyone wants a new doggie friend.
😀 !
That is the cutest face!
She’s smiling because she isn’t stuck in a too-small office with an owner who yells at her!
Oof, my heart. I’m glad she’s happy now, but I’m so mad at her previous owner.
He is, in fact, a bully and an asshole. The dogs now get more food, more exercise, and lots of love. Basically, my boss getting arrested was really the best thing that could have happened for the entire company + dogs.
Central VA resident here, but unfortunately I live in a city (population 21,000; it counts okay) and have an ill tempered cat but I will ask around. I would take them in a heartbeat if I could, I love old dogs and they look like such sweeties.
Yeah, I really, really wish I could adopt them, but I live in a smallish house and have a cat that hates other animals. Also, Rachel’s afraid of cats, because the family apparently used to have a cat that bullied them. If I could be home all day working in the garden, they could run around in the yard and it would be fine, but I’d have to keep them inside a lot, and it would be sad for them.
People keep saying that our city of ~45,000 is a “small town,” and I laugh at them. 21,000 is totally a city.
Bay Area toasties! I have arbitrarily decided that Saturday April 11 will be a meet up, to give us more ample time to pick a space! I have most of the interested parties from last open thread still archived in my email when y’all replied so any other bay folk give me a shout here.
here is a shout!
How are you getting in touch with us? Does intensedebate have a messaging feature?
yes hi interested for sure
I’m definitely interested and will come if I can!
Huzzah! You are most excellent for taking the reins on this.
I’m in! How will you get in touch with us? Can I private message you my email address?
I forget if I responded to that or not but I am definitely I interested!
I lost my Pinpal! Idk if she still reads the toast but Maya I lost your address 🙁 Message me or send me a postcard so we can get back on it!
The best “airport” food I ever had was probably the time I had a 3 hour layover in Chicago and took a cab to pick up a deep-dish pizza!! #livingmybestlife
Toasties! Potentially non-fascinating question: do people have items of jewellery they wear all the time? I’m recently engaged and can’t get into the hang of wearing the ring while I’m sleeping/showering/doing anything vaguely unpleasant with my hands. Do you get used to it? Is wearing an engagement ring at all just a trapping of the patriarchy, designed to stop me doing anything practical? Am I overthinking this? (I am overthinking this.)
I mean, aside from actual advice, I am just super-interested in other people’s jewellery tastes and habits, so tell me anyway.
I take off my engagement ring for showering, doing the dishes, and building fireplace fires. It takes some adjusting to!
Also congrats! yay!
I wear the earrings in my cartilage all the time because they’re a bitch to take out and put in. But I definitely don’t wear my engagement and wedding rings all the time. I never wear them in the shower or when I’m washing dishes for fear they’ll fall down the drain. I take them off to exercise and to do various outdoor activities (rafting, skiing, riding roller coasters) where I fear I might lose them. I also occasionally just don’t wear them to sleep, especially in the summer when my hands tend to swell up.
Other jewelry I’m lucky to remember to put on at all, though I’ll occasionally find a necklace that I’ll wear non stop for a few months.
I used to dislike wearing rings until a family member gave me one I really liked (and that was fairly thin, so didn’t get in the way). I lost it (a replacement is on the way!) and actually missed wearing a ring every day. I now wear a thin, plain silver ring I made in summer camp as a kid every day. It has my initials stamped on the inside. There’s something nice about having that ritual/routine. I don’t take it off when I wash my hands because that’s how I’ve lost countless rings, but I do take it off at night and in the shower.
I highly advise taking off your ring for sleeping, showering, doing dishes, etc. All that stuff can really damage your jewelry over the long term, plus can lead to nasty skin infections.
My engagement ring cost a lot of money and would cost me a lot of emotional pain were I to lose it. That means I never take it off except at home. That way I can never walk away from it while it rests next to the sink. That way I always know where it is: in my house or on my hand. If it’s going to be off my hand for more than a day (hospital stay), I put it in the safe at home.
Activities with the potential for ring harm: gloves. I keep work gloves in my car and in my house. No excuses.
i used to have two silver necklaces that i wore all the time. i wore them both for about 9 years, only taking them off maybe twice a year to clean the silver. then last year, i took them off because they clashed with my halloween costume, and i just…never put them back on? i honestly don’t know why.
I take off my engagement ring for cleaning with caustic chemicals, showering (mostly) and kneading dough. Nothing else. When it is not on my finger it’s hanging on my jewelry Board. I specifically got a totally plain white gold wedding band so I would never have to take it off, and indeed I haven’t since I got married.
My husband had a ring but because he’s a paratrooper he doesn’t ever wear it. It lives next to my engagement ring on the board.
I have a pair of diamond studs in my second holes that I only ever take out to clean, but usually all I wear in the first set are silver hoops. I’m lazy. And ad for necklaces, I’m so picky that basically the only things I ever wear are very delicate chains and pendants. That’s it. I am very boring edging on twee.
I take off my engagement ring…all the time? I take off most of my jewelry when I come home and especially when doing anything where I’m afraid to break/lose it. Definitely don’t shower in it, you don’t want soap scum making it dirty!
Wear it as often as you feel comfortable and take it off if the situation/your desires call for it! It’s not meant to be soldered to your finger 🙂
ETA: I do have a specific place I put it at home. If I take it off, no matter where I am in the house, I go and put it in it’s home, so I never worry about losing it.
ETA ETA: Congratulations!!!
My mom has always kept a little dish on the kitchen counter where she puts her rings when she’s doin’ whatever stuff with her hands!
That’s so smart, why has this never occurred to me? Moms are so smart.
My parents don’t wear their wedding rings, because they both do enough work with their hands that rings would probably get damaged.
I am not used to my ring either. It’s too big and I have been wearing silicon ring noodles to keep it on, so I have to take off the ring every time I wash my hands or put lotion on so that I don’t get soap or lotion inside the silicon tube, and I also have to take it off to wash dishes. And then I go back to whatever I’m doing and freak the fuck out a half hour later when I realize that I didn’t put it back on.
Luckily I’ve only ever left it on the windowsill in the kitchen, which is where I put it to wash dishes.
Definitely take it off when sleeping and the other reasons below, and know that you will get used to it. I loved my engagement ring (it’s a beautiful garnet because I don’t like diamonds because they are clear), but it has a somewhat thick band and as somebody who didn’t wear jewelry beyond pendants on thin chains, it took getting used to. Now I feel barely notice them when they are on, but feel weird when I forget to wear them. It will happen, and if it doesn’t, you can always wear it on a chain.
Also, congrats!
I wear my college ring and plugs on the daily, but I take them off before I shower and before I sleep. Maybe if you keep it in the same place every time it might be easy to remember to put it back on?
My body jewelry stays in 24/7 but that is mostly because it’s really hard to remove it.
I don’t really love having to wear my engagement/wedding rings all the time, and I used to take them off to sleep, do dishes, when I felt like it, etc. But then my finger got calluses and it became painful to take them off, so I have to leave them on either all the time or never. Sigh. What I really probably need to do is get the wedding band filed so it stops creating calluses, but that is more effort than I’ve mustered thus far.
I wear my wedding band all the time except when I’m sleeping or lifting weights. (I tie it onto my shoelaces at the gym.) It’s recycled gold, so it already has a texture and I’m not worried about dings, scratches, etc. My husband wears his all the time, even when sleeping.
I wear my engagement ring for parties only, pretty much. It’s beautiful, but it’s 300 years old and has moving parts (!) so I try not to get it wet, bang it around, etc.
Oh, no no no. You can’t leave us hanging like that. Please tell us more about your engagement ring. Or pics? That is too fascinating to drop and run. 🙂
Yessss! I love seeing people’s engagement rings! Please indulge us :))))
I wear a necklace all the time – I’ve got two that i alternate when the chain breaks on one of them. I think a ring all the time would drive me mad.
I have a stainless steel piece of jewelry in my cartilage (meant to be in someone’s eyebrow but it works really well and doesn’t get caught on things) and my wedding ring, also steel. It took me a while to get used to the ring but I hardly even think of it now. I almost never take it off because I know I’d lose it.
I have three rings I wear every day and I feel naked without them, but I don’t wear them when I’m sleeping/showering/cooking/etc. Partly because I’m not sure how much abuse they’ll stand up to (one of them has mother-of-pearl, anyone know about the abuse-standards for that?) but partly because I hate the feeling of water collecting on my finger under the band.
I have three rings that I wear every day. They are simple bands with something small on them, so probably not that similar to an engagement ring, which I’m guessing might poke out more. But I’ve had a ring or two that I’ve worn constantly since I was like 6 (different ones, not the same for 22 years), and it feels very normal to me. I think you’ll probably get used to it, but if you don’t or you don’t want to, wear it on a necklace or only wear it on special occasions or trade it in for a nice flat band or something more comfortable. It’s your engagement and you (two) get to do whatever you want.
I took my engagement and wedding rings off when I was pregnant (the second time, I waited too long and had to have one of them cut off, oops) and while the kids were still newborns. Otherwise I wear them all the time.
(My actual eat-better-and-exercise goal is to be able to put back on the ring I used to wear all the time on my right hand, which I very laboriously worked off with dental floss and a lot of swearing because I was worried it would never come off, because I miss it.)
I never got used to wearing my engagement ring-when Mr. Floridagal and I got married I got a wedding ring that had a much thinner band and I wear that all the time now without the engagement ring. I also wear a watch at all times, but that’s it. Jewelry makes me feel weird, like I’m demanding people’s attention by wearing shiny things, so I don’t.
Yes! You don’t wear jewelry for the same reason I do wear it. I *am* demanding attention. Big, shiny, unusual. That’s what I like.
I have had the same right-ear-stud situation since around the age of 16. I take it out like, once a month for cleaning.
Haha, I never wear my wedding or engagement ring, my husband has bought me a couple of REALLY nice and lovely pairs of earrings and other things over the years, which I never wear. I used to wear simple white gold hoops at all times, but when I was pregnant my ears started itching like crazy and I took them out, and now one of my ear holes has closed. Been thinking about getting it/them re-pierced all week!
I keep my necklace on 24/7 (it’s nothing fancy; just a silver chain that I periodically switch out the pendant on–I have a collection of different ones), but that’s it.
I knew a woman who had a beautiful, antique engagement ring that she almost lost multiple times while working in the garden. Her solution: put the ring on a chain around her neck. I don’t think she wore it like that always but it seemed like a great method for not really wearing it but not just setting it down somewhere, either.
Have you had it resized (if you needed to), appraised, and added to your insurance? Might give you some peace of mind!
the only time i’ve ever eaten in an airport was at shake shack in JFK airport, and it was amazing. aaaaand now i’m hungry. and think i might need to start a list of restaurants i want to eat at when i go to new york in may.
Toasties! I am a knitter getting into crochet. Someone at my local SnB lent me the Happy Hooker and I’ve made 3 round things a colleague is actually willing to use as pot holders, and this weekend I’m going to try to make this for my friend who just gave birth a few weeks ago. Or well, for her kid I guess. Wish me luck? And any tips from knitters getting into crochet as to what I should be paying attention to?
I don’t knit but i crochet obsessively, and here’s what I would say– once you’ve got the basic stitches down, try to get into lacy/lightweight projects. This is where crochet can really get interesting, but I think a lot of people don’t do it because it looks hard? It isn’t really, as long as you can get the hang of holding tension in thread or laceweight yarn. Try making a doily even if that’s not your style; it’s a good way to learn a variety of stitches. And be sure to learn how to do post stitches. That’s how you get all the cool textured hats and such.
I would also say to be careful about the instructions for joining and making turning chains at the end of rows and rounds, this is how I always get off count.
With the circle thingies the turning chain is what trips me up over and over again. I really have to change my way of thinking: with crochet you really build things brick by brick, almost, whereas knitting is more relative, if that makes sense.
For me, making the chain and the first row in crochet is 1000 times harder than anything in knitting, but everything else is so much easier. When you mess up, you can easily unravel until you get to the mistake! On the other hand, I don’t love the way crocheting looks when it comes to blankets and garments.
I have a book that’s called something like 1234 Crochet and it was really helpful.
I do love frogging! That’s definitively a big advantage crochet has over knitting. Tinking is a bitch.
I HATE making the foundation chain. When I have to make a really long one I just chain way more than I think I need and then unravel what’s left over after the first row. That way I don’t have to count. Also, word to beginners– your first row should go into two loops of the chain, just like your stitches (usually) go into both of the loops on top of the stitch you’re working into. It took me forever to realize that.
Turns out the book I have is called “10, 20, 30 Minutes to Learn Crochet”, not 1234 Crochet.
Here to put in a word for the dumplings, soup and pork over rice I ate in the Taipei airport, which were better than many meals I’ve had cooked in non-airport restaurants and certainly better than anything I’ve ever cooked myself. The only thing they were not as good as: every other meal and snack I ate in Taiwan.
The best airport food I’ve ever had was in KL airport – there’s a fake ‘street market’ place there, and the roti and curry was DELICIOUS! I was so pleased I got one final delicious meal before I flew back to the UK.
FALLEN LONDON THREAD! I forgot last week, whooops. What has everyone been up to?
Has anyone ever finished the storyline for any of the Recurring Dreams? CAN you finish them? I keep letting my nightmares get too high and then I lose a lot of Recurring Dreams progress when I return from the Royal Beth.
Also, can anyone recommend relatively painless ways of getting my Persuasive up? I’m at 181 and trying to reach 200 so I can be a Legendary Charisma but it’s such slow going. I have something like 60 CP to go before I hit 182 and the actions I’m doing now are only 1 CP per turn.
I only need two more bejewelled lenses to get my zubmarine! If anyone has any tips on where I can get magnificent diamonds apart from the Forgotten Quarter that would be awesome.
I tried getting some from the jeweler in the bazaar side-streets but it didn’t work. It must be pretty rare.
If you have the Notability and the… flexible morals, you could become a Murderer.
I got lodgings at the Brass Embassy, yay 4 cards! I am now just stealing a bunch of stuff to earn echos, because I want nice equipment.
I’ve always wanted a room at the Brass Embassy! I’m Closest To the Devils so it would make sense for me to move there… The only downside would be the return of those damnable City Vices cards.
I actually haven’t seen the city vices cards again since moving back! Which has been great. I do have some eyeless skulls though so I keep getting clogged up with those undiscardable cards, and have to do some action that clears your hand to get rid of them.
I set my Gang of Hoodlums to work and was able to grind 1250 Brilliant souls just from Thefts of a Particular character. Took a while but not too bad.
Have you done the Nadir already? I don’t think you need eyeless skulls for anything after that, so you could just sell them off to the Radical Factotum for 62.5 Echoes a pop (unless you’re categorically opposed to advancing the Liberation of Night minutely).
I haven’t yet, which is why I’m holding onto them. I need just a bit higher in archaeologist then I can do that expedition.
….and I was cross-posting with you!
I am sloooooowly inching my way towards being a person of some importance: my Watchful is at 107, but then rest of my stats are in the high 80s/low 90s.
I also finally picked up my Ambition again, which meant a few rather disturbing visits to the Orphanage.
If you can pick up some cheapish gear to get each stat over 100 you should be fine, you only need each over 100 for separate actions, not all at once.
The higher-level dream cards do sort of draw each storyline to a close (and they start intersecting!), but there’s no, like, big shiny conclusion that says “now we are done here.” The exception, of course, is What The Thunder Said, which will offer you the chance to become Stormy-Eyed at some point. That then resets your What The Thunder Said, and you can replay the storyline “from a new perspective.”
Eventually, though, if your dream qualities are high enough, it just… stops giving you dream cards. 🙁 If you ever need help keeping Nightmares down, Avis~Webb is at your service!
Leveling up is universally really grindy where you are right now, and probably the best way to do it is use your Confident Smiles from your Lodgings. Five Confident Smiles will give you a decent boost.
As for what I’ve been doing in Fallen London: I GOT AN UBERGOAT. Yes, the goatiest of goats is now mine! Now that I’m not saving up for that anymore, I don’t know what else to do with myself. Save up for the Cider, I guess?
I have all the bejewelled lenses I need for my zubmarine, and 17 of 20 of the whirring contraptions. I’m just going to keep grinding for beeswax till I get those last three whirring contraptions. Also, if you have any Memories of Light, you go to the Mirror-Marches when your nightmares get too high, not the Royal Bethlehem, and you don’t lose any dreams.
FALLEN LONDON THREAD
(i am probably cross-posting with winterbymorning right now)
This week I became an uppity society lady and got myself a salon, I’ve been throwing my doors open to the wise and the wicked, it’s like Open Thread 24/7 in there (I tell myself). Also pursuing the case of Jack of Smiles though I was way too chicken to pick up the knife. Has anyone else done it and become Jack?
Also hung out in the Tomb Colonies doing as many scandalous things as possible in the vain hope that a Tomb Lion would show up. Not so much!
What have you been up to in FL?
At jFK, I had a burger and onion rings from the Pat LeFrieda stand, figuring that with all the buzz their meat blend gets it would be good. It was not. The Cheeseburgerx2 stand is pretty good though.
My landlady has invaded again. I was tired and grumy before she got here, now it’s take me now sweet death time.
South East Michigan toasties! I know there are at least a few of us! Is anyone interested in a meet up? I could use a little more misandry in my life.
I’m out west here in the mitten, unfortunately.
I am northern 🙁
Toasties, I would like to do some prideful gloating, if you will pardon me. I hope you will read on and see that it is allowable.
Every year, my industry has an awards ceremony and all my department has to go. It’s ok, kind of long. Two years ago, at one of them, one of our long-time most important clients (we invite lots of freelance clients who work in the industry each year) offered to share a cab home. I said sure. Well – it was an HOUR of hand-grabbing/thigh-touching and one plea to hold his dick. I did not punch him as I was terrified and also he is my boss’ most important client (obviously that is why he felt he could get away with it).
Last year, I went to the awards ceremony kind of dreading it. I made sure that we didn’t invite him as our guest but was anxious about running into him all night.
This year, I AM NOMINATED FOR AN AWARD! So I get to have my headshot taken by a professional photographer at work and my name and nice things get read out about me at the ceremony and get to have people congratulating me for making the shortlist and get to be proud that I’m good at my job and I can focus on THAT and not that idiot dickbag. Hooray!
Congratulations! It’s wonderful to have your skills and hard work recognized.
Here’s a thing on the internet that made me laugh: We Want Plates
1. Is this actually a thing? I can’t recall ever being served food on anything weirder than a wooden board, and that was pizza or a sandwich so, it worked. Where are all these hip foodies getting things on shovels and in SHOES???
2. The spaghetti one looks fun, though I wouldn’t want to explain to those kids that they can’t eat like that every day at home.
3. I bet the servers and dishwashers hate this stuff. You can carry a few plates on one arm, not so much HATS FULL OF FRIES.
OH MY GOD, the tiny little shopping cart, WHAT THE FUCK.
I know, it’s so adorable like dollhouse furniture! And then you realize how few fries it can hold 🙁
The only time I have had food served weirdly was at The Wicked Spoon in Vegas – everything came in little saucepots or fry baskets or tiny dishes – it was cute, but very impractical!!
A&W has these little fake deep fryer baskets now, though they only seem to use them about 25% of the time. Also I never expected a plate at A&W anyways. But that might be evidence for this being a thing.
Are the shoes for beating the hell out of whomever thought serving food in them was a good idea?
i hope so! How does serving food in a shoe work, anyway? Even with a little paper liner or whatever, that shoe must get GROSS so fast. How much money am I spending on this dang restaurant buying NEW SHOES?
When I was a kid, there was a restaurant that would serve kids’ sundaes in little mini baseball helmets, and you got to pick which team, but I think they were designed for that purpose. And I think I also once got fries served in a little mini fryer basket, but they were on the plate.
What instruments do you play? Which instrument should I play??
I was a violin major and it wrecked me as a person, and now as much as I miss violin I literally am incapable of playing it ~for fun~, so I’m looking to pick up something with less emotional trauma associated with it (hahaha seriously when people say, “don’t go to music school”, what they mean is, “DON’T GO TO MUSIC SCHOOL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD”) — I’m leaning towards the accordion or the concertina, maybe? The musical saw?? Hurdy-gurdy??? The possibilities are limitless!
(three separate people independently told me I’d make a good accordionist, so that’s definitely #1 in the running)
Clarinetist here! I also went to music school, which got me absolutely nothing. I try to look at it as one step on a journey, albeit a long and kind of useless step? I took many years off from playing because solitary practicing was torture without an end goal in mind. However, recently I joined some ensembles and it has been WONDERFUL.
I definitely support the accordion thing. It’s so versatile! And the sound can be so enchanting.
I played the flute all through junior high and high school and regret not having played it since then. I was pretty good, enough for private lessons and all-state and all that jazz but I was too embarrassed to play it in college and in apartments because of all the racket. Now that I have a house I should try again, even though I know my embouchure is a wreck.
The nice thing about the flute is that if you learn it, you can pretty much also play the saxophone and the oboe. I never could figure out the clarinet, though, mostly because my ring fingers bend towards my middle fingers and I can’t quite cover the tone holes. Tone hole flutes come with handy little corks so I could cheat.
Fellow flautist here! I haven’t played much since college, but I would also love to get back into it! The problem is I have always found it really difficult to practice without a goal or some piece I am required to learn. I wonder if there are any pieces that would be good to learn just for fun?
If I remember correctly, I thiiiiiink we’re in the same city. Do you know the Old Town School? You should go talk to them and see if you can sit in on an accordion class, if you want. Then see about volunteering so you can watch concerts for free, meet rad people, and earn points so that the expensive classes drop down to $20!
OH DANG I definitely didn’t even think of that!! I have been meaning to start volunteering again, too, so that would be a win-win all the way around.
I mostly play mandolin, guitar, bass. Plucked and strummed string instruments rather than bowed. I want to buy a lap steel guitar really bad–waiting for tax returns to get that. Pedal steel sounds better but that is a huge expensive piece of furniture. I just moved my drum set from a friend’s studio space back into my storage space and I’m bummed I cannot bang on things in rhythmic noisy stress releasing sloppiness. But yes the accordion sounds so good when someone can play it well. I don’t have the patience but you should get good at it.
Why do you want to play a new instrument? That sounds mean- I meant do you want to play in a group eventually? Or perform by yourself? Have a weird talent to pull out for friends? Or just for the sheer joy of playing? I’d think about that, plus what kind of music you enjoy playing and what instruments you actually have access to and go from there.
My vote is trombone. Hear me out! It’s completely different for you so no bad associations. If you want to eventually play in a group you can go band, orchestra, jazz, chamber, whatever. Plus these kind of groups are usually hurting for trombone players (and low brass in general). And the trombone is fun as hell to play!
Mandolin is fun, and it has the same fingering and tuning as violin, so that’s a bit less to learn.
As an oboist I have had several former studio-mates pick up the ukulele in the past couple of years. I bought one myself but it was such a cheap crappy instrument that won’t stay in tune for more than 2 chords that I have given up on learning it. I attempted to teach myself violin in high school using the Suzuki method but after developing an intense hate of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star gave up on that as well. If I wasn’t married to my ever forgiving husband who already has to put up with my reed-making/exercise in cursing, I’d be learning to bagpipe.
ETA – Oh hey all about me! Let’s talk about you!
Go for something completely out of the box (i.e. no string instruments). Try learning a wind instrument so there’s no chance of triggering string related trauma. I vote for flute or a brass instrument so you don’t have to deal with the hassle of reeds but that’s me.
I support accordion, that sounds awesome.
I am a fiddler but I gave up on taking it seriously in college. So I guess I get it and also took that advice. I recently purchased a cheap ukulele (it’s green!) and had a lot of fun playing with it and learning pop songs in very simple uke arrangements. I would guess with your music education you’d pick it up even quicker than I.
I play the c flute, and also the alto flute, tin whistle, piccolo, and ocarina. It really helps increase lung capacity, and it’s the only wind instrument that doesn’t require you to buy valve oil or reeds! You don’t have any nasty spit valves to empty! You can carry it anywhere! It’s way less annoying for the people who hear you practicing! Not as expensive as huge brass instruments! Already in a key and register violinists should be used to! There are tons of flute-like instruments you can pick up by association! Basically get yourself a flute ASAP.
My number-one recommendation is bass guitar.It’s super easy to pick up and play (especially if you already know the fundamentals) and it’s the easiest one to use in a group setting, too. I played guitar for A WHILE all sad and alone, and then got an electric bass and was playing in punk bands, like, the next week. So.
I’ll also echo the comments of the others who said mandolin, because the fingering is the same. It’s also great for parties and bluegrass jam sessions.
And you can’t go wrong with the piano. So good for honing those aforementioned fundamentals.
If you can still stomach a stringed instrument, I’ve been learning banjo on this awesomely low-effort wooden instrument from Backyard Music. It’s awesome bc it’s small, lightweight, and so easy to pull out and noodle around for 20 minutes. Somehow it’s easier to use this than the normal full-sized guitar I also have (that I never touch.) They also have dulcimers and harps.
http://www.backyardmusic.com/Welcome.html
Well this is timely, as in 24 hours I will be on a plane to Long Beach, en route to Catalina Island! It’s going to be a weird trip because I have a ton of work to do but also a scheduled zip line excursion and massage so work hard play hard?
Have any Toasties ordered from Herroom.com and needed to make a return? They get 1.5 stars on yelp for returns – any tricks to get them to take mine back?
Re: airplane food, when I was flying back from Norway, my meal choices were mixed-cheese salad or salmon mousse. Scandinavia is a magical place.
International flights are UNREAL. Flying out to Korea = free (?!?) bibimbap and noodles, plus hot towels (?!?!?!), blankets (!!!!!) and individual TV screens (which, admittedly, are all probably necessary to keep people from revolting during a 17-hour flight, but was still a thrilling experience for someone who travels semi-regularly and as cheaply as possible).
CHEESE SALAD
I mean, it looked pretty good when my seatmate got it, but I had a delicious salmon mousse sandwich. It had dill in it. The bread was even good!
the best thing i have ever heard said in an airport [4pm on a monday, jfk]
“i got FRIED FISH. i got SHRIMPS. i got FRENCH FRIES. i got FRIED TILAPIA. i’m takin SHOTS!”
i now know that i have been doing travel wrong my whole life.
That person is living the dream.
last week i traveled alone and unsupervised and for the first time in my life, i hit a restaurant in the airport before boarding. i had 3 pork tacos and a bloody maria. i was full on comatose before the plane even got off the ground. best flight ever.
on the way home, i had boozy drinks on an airplane for the first time. drink, nap, drink, nap. second best flight ever.
Tournament of Books!
Pretty much every book I’ve read is out already. If All The Light doesn’t make it, I’m hoping Station Eleven comes back as the zombie pick.
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/
Also, new How Did This Get Made? podcast is up now and it’s once again a June-less episode! Goddamn it! PFT is there so that should help ease the burden.
http://earwolf.com/episode/deep-blue-sea-live/
Nooo, June is what makes it magical!
ToB! ToB! I’ve read all the quarterfinalists aside from The Bone Clocks, so I’m excited to read all the upcoming decisions because this is the first year I KNOW ALL THE BOOKS (until the zombie round, at least, because I haven’t read Station Eleven and I assume it’ll be zombie-ing spectacularly). Looking forward to Nicole’s judgment!
I’m sad the Bone Clocks now appears to be totally out. I didn’t care for the Paying Guests but I haven’t read the other book in today’s decision yet so I’m not sure how to feel.
Since I made the lazy decision to read ToB books that were short before ones that were long, almost nothing I actually read is still in. Annihilation and An Untamed State are the ones I’ve read: and one of them is going to go on Monday. So, Toasties, if I were hypothetically to try to read a long ToB novel this weekend, Sarah Waters or Marlon James?
I’ve been waiting for Open Thread to let you all know your Good Apartment Thoughts worked–the gorgeous apartment I talked about last week is now ours! The move-in date is June 1, so we have lots of time to wait before we take it over (also, to figure out whether we want to splurge on movers or just bribe friends with beer and pizza), but it’s so nice to know we have something locked down.
I’m already designing room layouts in my head; it’s terrible/the best.
Splurge on movers! Sooooo worth it. And congrats!
The first time we splurged on movers it was SO WORTH IT. It’s their job, so the best thing you can do is let them do it. And then you can thank them, pay them (we tipped 20% but I don’t know what’s customary) and THEN go out for beers with your friends to celebrate!
SPLURGE ON THE MOVERS. So so so so worth it. I can’t tell you how worth it. SO WORTH IT.
MOVERS ARE THE BEST. If you can swing the money for it, DO IT.
Movers are always worth the money, if you have the money to spare. I would pay for movers even if it meant 2 weeks of eating rice and beans afterwards. I will never move my own stuff again, especially if the building has stairs.
Gaming thread!
I just got Ori and the Blind Forest after hearing about it on the Indoor Kids podcast. It’s pretty great! Absolutely gorgeous artwork / style and pretty challenging side platformer game play.
I also didn’t realize Hotline Miami 2 has been out for like a week so now I will probably play that all weekend too.
What has everyone been playing?
I just bought Tales From Borderlands here, since I love Borderlands 2 and enjoy the Telltale formula. I’ll regret this when it takes 8 months for the next episode to come out.
Ori looks do damn pretty.
I really need to play Borderlands. And then all those Telltale games.
I’ve only played #2, but it’s like the epitome of awesome, stupid fun. So! Many! Guns! It’s awesome for co-op if you’ve got someone else to wrangle into playing with you as well.
Nice, I will for sure be checking that out.
Borderlands 2 is SO FUN. I have a gun that, when I reload, I throw a replica gun that is a grenade?! I am so into this stupid pistol, you have no idea.
I’m a fan of the gun which passive aggressively yells at you whenever you reload, shoot, or do anything else.
Man, I really need to level up my Gunzerker to the same level as my husband’s Zer0 so we can finally take on Tiny Tina’s Keep!
Yes, I love that one. I also love the one that you get from the robot who wants to be a human that has all the untrue stats. The Fibber, I think?
Yessss, Ori and the Blind Forest. I knew the beginning was going to be sad, between the Indoor Kids podcast and Ashley crying on The Patch while trying to talk about it so I waited until I was alone when I started it and I cried a lot. But it is awesome, it’s got the Metroid style open world I love plus some challenging Guacamelee platforming. And it’s so beautiful!
I SHOULD be playing the new games I’ve gotten in the past few months (Captain Toad, Majora’s Mask, Bravely Default) but I just keep going back to Fire Emblem. I am on my fourth playthrough of the game in nine months, which is strange to me since I’m the type of person who only finishes games 50% of the time, nevermind replaying them multiple times.
Do other people have games they just can’t stop playing? (they must, I want to hear what they are, tell me!)
I was stuck on Oblivion, then Skyrim, for years and years. They were my beloved and I would cleave to no other.
Then Dragon Age Inquisition came out.
It has taken my soul.
At this point I’m not sure I want it back.
I always end up playing Starcraft 2 because I have a friend who likes to play 2v2 with me, and I have like no other gaming friends to play coop games with (or otherwise) anymore. Plus SC2 is still pretty fun.
Every couple of years I’ll do a run through of Final Fantasy Tactics, what a great game. I’ve been debating doing another play through of FF6 as well.
Fallout: New Vegas
I don’t even want to talk about it tbh. It’s… it’s a problem.
IT’S NOT A PROBLEM
The problem is that no other game can compare. You and me, we’re a couple of problem-solvers.
Yo is this where I can talk about how I totally ship Boone and Arcade Gannon? Is this my safe space?
Brutal Legend is my forever game, the one I will always go back to. I just love the setting so much, and the music, and I only wish it weren’t so damn short.
<3 that podcast SO MUCH.
Currently obsessed with Injustice after discovering a) WONDER WOMAN and b) that I am supreme lord commander of that game and no one can touch me (sorry, boyfriend: back to Pokemon for you). Liked it so much I made a PSN ID just for boyfriend’s PS4.
About 45% done with Majora’s Mask. I went on a side-quest spree after the Snowhead Temple and I think I’ve acquired most of the items that can be acquired at this point in the game (10 heart containers, what?). I never played the original version (there’s a whole, like, decade of gaming that I missed while I was learning how to be drunk in bars), but I am enjoying it A LOT.
Downloaded Pokemon Shuffle for 3DS and LOVE the gameplay but really, truly, violently hate the microtransaction aspect.
And I was missing some Square Enix in my life so I also tested the demos for the 3DS Final Fantasy rhythm games. Those look fun. Does anyone have either of them and like them?
Still plugging away at Dishonoured. Still killing everyone despite my best efforts. I’m thinking about getting a nintendo 3DS though – I kinda half broke my ye olde DS (it still works, because nintendo, but the hinge is broken). Has anyone got one? Are they any good? I want to play OoT again.
Yes, I have one! You’re in luck too: the new 3DS just came out (possibly some games will only work on this 3DS, but I’m hoping it’s more of a DSi to original DS type of thing) and apparently the 3D is less annoying on it. I guess it depends on the games you like, but there are in my opinion a good number of fantastic games in the 3DS library. Off the top of my head: Fire Emblem Awakening; Animal crossing; Fantasy Life; Majora’s mask; A Link Between Worlds; and Super Mario 3D Land. There are several games that are supposed to be great (Kid Icarus: Uprising, Bravely Default, and more) that I want to try that I haven’t yet because money.
Basically, I bought my 3DS nine months ago and have had no shortage of great games to play. It actually got me interested in gaming again after having been meh on the whole thing for a couple years. Money very well spent in my opinion.
Have I sold you on it yet? If not I can go on more about how I love my 3DS and take it with me everywhere I go.
can you still play ye olde DS games on the new 3ds xl? I think you can? I still haven’t finished castlevania and I will never stop playing elite beat agents. I’m not super fussed about 3d one way or the other, but I gather you can turn it off if it makes you motion sick. I really want to give Majora’s Mask another go. It baffled me when I was a teenager and I never finished it (just finished ocarina of time again and again instead 😉 ). If only they would port some old sega saturn games too!
Yes, you can!
I am in the camp of people who owned a Genesis and Playstation One during the SNES/N64 era of gaming, so I have never played MM or OoT. I’m really loving that I get a second opportunity to try these games that I missed the first time around. I haven’t gotten far into it yet, but Majora’s Mask is great on the 3DS so far.
Best airport food: bibimbap at the Seoul airport. also best bathroom – one of the ladies’ rooms plays music as you walk in, it has bidets, an option to release a pleasant scent if you want, and a garden.
I don’t fly much, and have only recently started to realize that airport food doesn’t *have* to be pastries hastily grabbed from Au Bon Pain. I don’t know what I will do with this information.
What are your terrible airport stories? I have two:
Summer 2013, I fly out to LA to spend a few days with my friends. I get it into my head that my flight home departs at 1:50 am. Despite the common wisdom that you should arrive 3 hours before your flight, my friends insist that I really only need an hour; I’m not even checking a bag. So with time to kill in downtown LA, we spend a few lovely hours at the Library Bar (exactly what it sounds like). Something tells me I should check my flight time. I open my email aaaand….my flight is at 12:50 am. It is 12:45 at that moment. We booked it over to LAX but obviously I’d missed it. Cue a hysterical breakdown in the empty airport, my (saintly) friends insisting on staying with me until 4 am, when I can get another flight.
Winter 2011: I’m flying back from a semester abroad in Israel. My friend and I are on the same flight, so we book a sheirut (basically a bus-taxi-shuttle thing) together. I drink too much the night before, oversleep, and miss the sheirut (yes, I realize that all of these problems are 110% my fault). Again, total breakdown, I end up leaving half my belongings in my apartment, and paying full price for a taxi to the airport – it’s Israel, you’re supposed to haggle but I was so desperate I couldn’t be bothered. Upon arriving, I get detained at every step of the way. I get questioned at every turn, my suitcases are unpacked and repacked, and I get put in some kind of “special line” and no one would explain why any of this was happening. It was fine; I made my flight, but I never figured out why the tiny white girl in a Hebrew University sweatshirt was cause for so much suspicion.
I got stuck in JFK for 8 hours waiting for a Jetblue flight that kept delaying by another 30 minutes. Then, for no discernible reason, Sarah Mclachlan performed live in the terminal. I have never been more convinced that I was actually in hell.
Summer 2011: I was briefly detained in London Heathrow and almost missed my connecting flight because there was a weird stamp in my passport from the previous time I visited. I don’t know why they gave it to me, nor do I know what it means, but it has not gotten me in any trouble since. I think I cried enough.
I had a long (3 hour?) layover in Detroit on my way home from studying abroad. On Christmas Eve. Detroit is about 4 hours’ drive from my hometown, so the connecting flight I was waiting for was less than an hour long. That was the most miserable I’ve ever been in an airport.
I don’t remember this all that well, but when I was six or seven we visited family in California for Christmas and New Year’s. On the flight home we got delayed at O’Hare for over 12 hours. I vaguely recall my dad amusing me by throwing pennies into the light fixtures. What really sucked though, was that they lost our luggage. Which was filled with Christmas presents.
I once flew Ryanair from Marrakesh to Paris (not even Paris, actually, but Beauvais, which is a remote place in the countryside where Ryanair actually flies to when they tell you they’re flying you to Paris) and I remember that the flight left Morocco at 7 or 7:30 in the morning. I was arriving in Marrakesh on a train around midnight and wasn’t sure I would be able to get a cab after a 3- or 4-hour nap at a hostel in the city, so I left my friends and went straight to the airport in the middle of the night to wait. I was sick with food poisoning and I spent the whole night alone, not sleeping, half-delirious, sitting up in a chair and, for God-knows-what reason, trying to read a French history textbook while they cleaned the floor of the deserted Marrakesh airport with these really strong-smelling chemicals. Nothing was open and all the bathrooms were locked and I remember time just sort of…stretching out around me.
I had to spend the night in the Atlanta airport last month (on my way back from beautiful Key West). This is the first time I’ve ever had to do this and it wrecked me, but everyone I spoke to was all *shrug* about it. The first thing the Delta ladies announced after “THIS FLIGHT IS CANCELED” was “OH YEAH, AND THERE ARE NO AVAILABLE HOTELS WITHIN AN HOUR AND A HALF OF THIS CITY SO DON’T ASK STOP ASKING”.
Worst part was when I FINALLY got on a plane home 24 hours later, we sat on the runway because there was 1) ice on the runway of our destination and 2) the reverse-thrusters(?) weren’t working. When the pilot came on to tell us we might not be able to “get in tonight” I had to shove my ponytail into my mouth with my fists to keep from screaming.
I kissed the airport terminal floor when we arrived home. I have never been so happy to see snow in my entire life.
I got stuck in Newark for 25 hours once just before Christmas in 2009. I was flying to Newark from an airport that only had one flight to and from that destination, so when a big winter storm came through Newark the day before my flight, it delayed the outbound flight to my airport about 10 hours, which meant that my flight back to Newark was also seriously delayed. I actually would’ve been fine catching the flight I was connecting to because I already had a lengthy layover (there being, again, only one flight from Newark to my destination) even before the connecting flight was also delayed, BUT…
They’d closed security at the terminal where my connecting flight was and stuck me on a flight the next evening instead. And it was delayed about four hours, I think. I’d been awake for like 40 hours at that point, so everything’s a little fuzzy. Newark is a pretty terrible place to spend that much time in.
In 2013 I was flying out to Hawaii to spend some time with my fiancee who was there for work. I was flying out of a small, regional airport, connecting through another small airport to LA, then LA to Hawaii. The first flight was cancelled, so they loaded us on a shuttle bus to a larger airport an hour away, for a flight that was leaving in just over an hour. Obviously, I missed that flight. I don’t know what they were thinking. Because phone customer service had been no help, I tweeted at the airline for help, and they re-booked me to connect through SFO. While on the flight to SFO, with my phone in airplane mode, that flight from SFO to Hawaii was delayed and then cancelled, and I was re-booked to leave the next morning, not to arrive in Hawaii until after the scuba lessons I had saved up and (non-refundably) pre-paid for. I found out all of this on arrival in SFO. Another hour or so of wrangling with the airline, and I was placed onto standby for the last flight out of SFO to Hawaii. I was eventually the second-to-last person who made the final flight on standby, and ended up (all 6’4″ and bad knees) in a middle seat in coach for the 6 hour flight to Hawaii. Obviously it was all worth it in the end (because hello, Hawaii!), but it was a definite nightmare all the way through the 21-hour experience.
First, LOVE the Library Bar. Second, I had a red-eye once that left at like 12:05am. I got confused, and missed it by an entire day. I didn’t even realize it until the morning AFTER the flight left and I got an email that the rest of my flights were canceled. I then proceeded to call up the travel place and yell until I realized that I was the one who’d messed up. I had to cancel my trip, and I cried. This was only a couple of years ago, too, when I was a SEASONED traveler and a grownup – I couldn’t even use youth as an excuse.
Ohhhhhh noooooo!! I can totally understand that though! Things that happen at or just after midnight are so confusing (can’t tell you how many “so….wait, WHICH night is it?” conversations I’ve had about midnight showings of movies)! I’m so sorry, what a horrible experience.
I think at some point my brain went from “the flight is at 12:50 am which is basically 1 am” to “my flight is at 1 am” to “my flight is at 1:50, yeah, there was definitely a :50 in there so it must be 1:50.” I remember emphatically declaring that I was going to die in LAX because that’s what I deserved.
At some point recently it dawned on me that I could have Airport Drinks! I don’t know why this was SO exciting to me, but maybe it was because I was hanging out in the Atlanta airport (BOOOO) for a couple hours and the one beer I had was AMAZING. Usually when I’m flying places it’s to see people I love very much but see infrequently, so an Airport Drink (using Airport Money!) on the way home is nice and makes me feel Cool while traveling alone and being sad about missing people. I’m going to visit some people next weekend and will probably do the same while I’m chilling in the Charlotte airport (ugh) on the way back.
Also, I always try to fly through DCA when I can because it’s lovely, small, and on the metro, and plus I always call it National. (SORRY NOT SORRY.)
Atlanta Airport is probably my least favourite I’ve ever been to. I felt like there were no chairs anywhere to sit on and time went slower than normal.
It is TERRIBLE! It’s huge, full of people who are varying degrees of stressed and carrying too much stuff, and there is nowhere to sit at all. Time dragged. Beer helped 🙂
That and it still has those sad smoking rooms. I don’t use them, but just walking past them is depressing. Cages of Dooooooooom. My family lives in GA so I spend a LOT of time at ATL.
You should never be sorry for calling DCA National!
It is by far the best airport in the area, and has the nicest TSA staff I have encountered, besides maybe at St. Louis.
GOOOOOD. I will never stop calling it that. Once I called it Reagan in a moment of great confusion and my mother was HORRIFIED. Old DC democrats 4 lyfe.
BWI is okay, some of the time, but it’s too big to be on the same level. I love the Asheville airport, it is very small and all the people who work there are very nice.
The Situation (of the Jersey Shore) bought one of my colleagues a drink at the Miami airport. This was a few years ago, during the height of his “fame”.
The #1 thing I miss most about having a job that involves travel is regularly getting drunk alone at TGI Fridays in the airport.
ALSO: I don’t know who it was but thank you thank you to whoever recommended “The Enchanted April” in the books thread last week. I am having so much fun pretending to be in Italy with these hilarious women.
Have you seen the movie? I’ve only seen the movie and I LOVE it. Is the book is even better, I will be in seventh heaven.
I didn’t know there was a movie!! YAY. Yes, the book is completely wonderful.
It has also been adapted for the stage, which if you can find a way to watch it, HIGHLY recommend. The bath scene is hilarity in the flesh.
The movie is simply delightful. I didn’t know there was a book! This is exciting!
I’d also recommend “Elizabeth and Her German Garden” by the same author (Elizabeth von Arnim). It’s extremely relaxing.
MORE YAY
And now landlady has gone after randomly looking at my cookbooks and telling me that one of the next door neighbors wrote a book about “becoming a lesbian”, and then predicting my Dad’s imminent death.
Because she has no sense of boundries, that’s how. (IDK about how my cookbooks said maybe gay. But I mentioned that my Dad’s birthday is coming up, and she chirpily told me that her husband died younger. And my dad is fat, so….)
Oh, I wanted to thank everyone who gave me advice last week on finding a new therapist. I went on PsychologyToday’s website, contacted several therapists who accept my insurance, and I have an appointment tomorrow with a young female therapist (no more old white men hearing about my mental health!) who communicates via email and has appointments on Saturdays. It feels weird to say “I’m excited to go back to therapy,” but I am. I feel like I’ve been thinking/talking in circles about a lot of things for so long and never actually working through any of them.
Again thank you all for your suggestions <3
email? i think you’ve hit therapy nirvana! Good for you, I hope you click with her and things start moving along.
I want to talk about disability and shame and closets. (I’ve posted about this before, if this feels deja vu)
I’m bisexual and have a same-sex partner. This isn’t shameful at all for me. I’m closeted sometimes, but only for practical reasons (like, I’m talking to someone in a position of power and I’m suspecting that they are a little on the conservative side), and I have literally zero problems staring down people who get the deer-in-headlight look when I mention my partner. Even the few times when people have been rude about it, I don’t feel bad about being who I am.
But my disability feels like a terrible secret, or like a personality flaw. When I tried to describe it to my girlfriend she summed it up for me with “so you’re gay in the 50’s”, and that’s EXACTLY how I feel. Mostly because of the responsibility thing. I have ADHD, which people think of as childish and irresponsible anyway, and there’s also this idea that now that you know about your diagnosis you can make the symptoms go away by finding the right medication and coming up with a couple of lifehacks (=live a life in celibate or marry an opposite-sex partner??). Many people with adult ADD apparently manage that, but it doesn’t work for me – well, it helps, but it doesn’t get me to the level of a non-ADD adult. I do everything I can, but I’m still not fully able, and there’s just no vocabulary for an adult with uncontrollable executive function disabilities.
I was diagnosed with ADD coupled with a moderate anxiety disorder in my early 40’s and man, oh man, I FEEL you.
“I do everything I can but I’m still not fully able and there’s just no vocabulary…”
THIS! Thank you for letting me know I’m not alone.
Well, I hate that you can relate to it, but I’m happy we can be less alone 🙂
So how do you frame it? What do you tell yourself, your family, boss, friends…
There should be a word, but there just isn’t (or if there is, I haven’t been able to find it)
I’m mostly straight up about it, as in “you’re gonna have to call and remind me of “x” (family events, doctor’s appointments, hair stylist, etc.) because I have ADD and it affects my organizational skills”. It took me a LONG TIME to own my ADD and there are still times where I white lie about it (as in, job interviews, sigh) but if I can keep reminding myself of ADD strengths (multitask-er extraordinaire, super creative, good with animals/small children) the haters can stay firmly in my rear view mirror.
Sent from my iPad
(Missed the edit window, replying to myself instead…)
Oh! I forgot to say that I want to discuss shame, not my personal symptoms! I want to talk about fear of failure that stems from ACTUALLY FAILING a lot at stuff that is considered normal. Being ashamed of your mind or emotions. Feeling like you’re not as in control as other people. Fear of being exposed (and actually having something to expose, not impostor syndrome). Having to have those “uh so I fucked up/I can’t deal with this totally normal level of responsibility” conversations as a regular part of your life – at work, in school, etc. The shame when you create work for others or annoy them, by being late, missing deadlines, not being able to predict your ability, needing accommodations, etc. Getting back up, trying again, having to apologize again. Saying sorry over and over. Fearing that no one believes you actually are sorry (if you were, wouldn’t you change?).
How do YOU deal with this, Toasties with disabilities? How do you handle doubt and disappointment (from others and yourself)? Or did you find a way to come out of the closet? Specifically, how do you bring it up with your boss? Stories please! Let’s support each other!
I have/had/have feelings about this. Kind of. It’s a weird parallel to draw but I think it’s drawable. I have a minor physical disability. Either people are mostly polite or I mostly pass as able-bodied. But there are things I can’t do. Sometimes it feels like there are lots of things I can’t do. The overwhelming cultural narrative around disabled folks is that we should be inspirational! And we can do anything if we try hard enough! So yes, there’s that shame when no, I can’t do some things. And having to tell people that I can’t do something sucks a lot. I used to worry a lot about when to disclose my disability. There are tasks at work that I can’t do so disclosing to coworkers is a necessity. For a long time I felt so much shame about it that I felt like it was something I had to disclose to new partners before the relationship got serious. And I’ve gotten a range of responses from coworkers and partners- the vast majority of them have been positive and supportive, one or two have been well-meaning but tone-deaf. The greatest response was one dude who said, “Oh, ok. I have this other thing and here’s how it effects me.” Because everyone has something. Like society is so shitty that I think everyone has something that they sometimes feel shame about and it’s completely unfair.
I think people will take your lead on how you deal with a disability. If you present it straight forward as “this is what I’m dealing with, it’s not a big deal, but it’s better for me to x but not y” people generally accept that it’s not a big deal and are okay with x and not y. And sometimes it feels like downplaying my disability is playing into the cultural narrative that disabilities shouldn’t be a hindrance but it’s easier for me to use those narratives to make everyone more comfortable when first discussing it and adjust later. Obviously you’ll need to be more diplomatic at work. It’s probably a bad idea to say “Hey boss, I have adhd so please don’t expect me to do things fully and on time.” (Not that you’re saying that!) Maybe figure out what works for you in an ideal world. A more flexible schedule? Weekly progress deadlines rather than one giant project deadline? Group work rather than solo work? Your boss may not be able to fully accommodate you but it’s a least a step in the right direction.
That is… a lot of text… And no easy answers unfortunately. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about disability lately- clearly!
We need the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to come out as ADD.
As for practical advice about how to manage the workplace… well, I’m jobhunting now after a while out of full-time work (after getting fired twice in one year). Partially the firings were due to my ADD (I’m sorry that I can’t handle all the shit that apparently neurotypicals can, like having to answer the fucking phone at random times of the day while I’m concentrating on my actual job); partially the firings were due to the fact that the workplaces were overburdened with work for the number of staff and my organization skills go from adequate to shit when I’m under a lot of stress.
But. I know that I can succeed in a workplace that’s appropriately structured–I’m not great at creating structure, but I can follow it okay. So the first job offer I get, or at the first second-in-person-interview I get (whichever comes first), I’m going to follow the advice a state job counselor gave me and a) ask for an official list of essential job duties, and then b) come out as ADD and either request specific accommodations for whatever essential job duties, or say “I realize this may not come up, as X isn’t on the list of essential job duties, but (problem with handling X task in situation Y). If X does come up, may I (opt out, or have X scheduled at certain times I can plan around, or do X in a closed office, etc)?”
I have not yet had the opportunity to run this experiment, so I don’t know what it will result in. I think it also helps that I’m on medication that I wasn’t on during the Year From Hell and can mention that I’ve made improvement (Strattera: It doesn’t give me the ability to remember a list, but it does help me remember that I need to make the list.)
I dunno, aren’t there a number of CEOs with ADD already? I feel like there’s a stereotype of “fun ADD” out there that gets associated with rich people. Like, ADD means being so energetic and creative you can’t stand a regular job, running off to invent something awesome or find yourself or whatever, and becoming successful enough that other people handle the boring logistical stuff for you. It’s like there’s “rich & fun ADD” which only has the good parts, and “poor & bad ADD” which only has the bad parts (acting out, school failure, trouble staying employed, lack of impulse control, getting into fights, being bad with money, substance abuse, mental illness, and generally just lots and lots of super negative stuff), but nothing in between?
I’m trying to crawl my way out of bad ADD but I’m not rich enough to have fun ADD. I think we need (I definitely do!) more portraits of ADDers in between, people who aren’t CEO:s or famous but also aren’t in prison or trapped in terrifying poverty. Just regular blue collar and white collar people, but with ADD. And other disabilities as well! I think these stereotypes of either being amazing or being a disaster extends to all mental disorders (and then there’s inspirational vs sad for the more physical disabilities?).
Basically, I’d LOVE to hear about plumbers with autism, teachers in wheelchairs, office workers with visual disabilities, nurses with bipolar disorder – and you, when you find a job that fits you! I know Years of Hell and I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve learned from Ask A Manager to say “I was dealing with a health issue which has since been resolved”, is that something you could use? It’s completely true, and no one can pressure you to reveal more about your health. If there’s anything this disorder teaches its sufferers, it’s how to bounce back from anything…
All I have is a recommendation to watch No, You Shut Up. Paul F. Tompkins’ TV show on the station Fuse were he has muppets as guest panelists. It’s really funny and mocks news shows so so well. http://fusion.net/show/no-you-shut-up/
A few years ago I flew out of a Slovakian airport, and there was a very fancy, white-tablecloth restaurant where I had some kind of delicious local meat dish (served on a sizzling platter!), potatoes, and wine. Everything about the place felt very early-1970s, and it was wonderful.
Also, for a long time, I had this weird, puritanical “no drinking in airports! you will get dehydrated and age 5 years during the flight” rule. But I’ve abandoned it for bloody marys and the occasional whisky sour and couldn’t be happier. Frankly, the constant weeping I generally succumb to on flights is probably more dehydrating than liquor.
Hey! Is there a Portland Toasties facebook group or something? I’m new in town and while I do have one close friend here, I’d rather not smother her with my need for an active social life.
Did you end up in Portland, then, not Seattle? Exciting!
There isn’t an FB group that I know of, but we could like—totally—start one. There was a hairpin group for a while that (much like the hairpin comment section) kinda died out.
So the other day my partner said something baffling. My super-loving, kind, caring great-with-animals-and-kids-and-family partner said he doesn’t know if he’s “capable” of feeling love. Is this a case of unrealistic expectations and damaging messages from the media and society?
More to the point: how do you all define love, in the context of romantic relationships?
I don’t think love can be objectively defined. The whole “love languages” thing is pretty cheesy, but it’s not entirely useless. Everyone experiences love differently, both giving and receiving.
The fact that he said that to you, though?
I’m not sure whether it’s how anyone else defines love, as how he does? In terms of decoding that statement?
Yeahhh some conversations need to be had here.
I am curious in what context that statement came up? What were you talking about at the time?
It was a Serious Feelings Talk and I actually asked him if he loved me, because I have told him I do once or twice before. So, well, I did ask.
Speaking as 100% a non-professional, that sounds like a possible depression issue? I know I feel like that when I’m depressed and I don’t have the energy to take care of myself, never mind think about other people. But at the very least, it sounds like it’s time for a conversation about Things.
Not a definition, but important components: putting another’s needs ahead of one’s own, and giving consideration to another’s needs before making decisions that affect them.
Well, my partner has said something similar earlier in our relationship, so, I have lots of opinions but no idea if they’re right or delusional. In my case, after we talked about it for a while, what he was defining as “love” was a kind of Hollywood, all-consuming, can’t-breathe-when-you’re-around love. Maybe it’s his depression, but he says he just doesn’t think he can manage that kind of depth of emotion. I’m sure internet advice columnists would say this is settling, but I’m ok with that. Frankly, I’m a lot less emotional than some people and I don’t think I’m capable of that kind of love either. But I don’t need that kind of love. It seems exhausting and I have shit to do. So my approach was to figure out what I actually need emotionally from a relationship, and what I need is someone who enjoys my company, appreciates my personality quirks, supports me, is kind and generous to me and our pets and our families, and cares deeply for my well-being and happiness. He does all those things, so I don’t worry about whether it meets the definition of love because I’m getting what I need emotionally and so is he.
This is super helpful and applicable to us. Aah. Thank you.
Playing off both CleverManka and MilesofMountain:
My partner and I had a VERY similar conversation early in our relationship. Both of us had been in the cups one night and I said “I love you” and he said, I don’t think I can feel love. So that was totally great. But I kind of realized over time that we really were speaking different love languages, as corny as that is. I really value snuggling and expressing my feelings. But he shows love by doing things for me. So concurrent to telling me he wasn’t sure he could be in love with someone, he was fixing little things around my house while I was at work and helping me with errands when I was stressed. I know now that stuff like this was his way of saying “I love you” before he felt comfortable saying it.
Now we’re a few years in and he says I love you on the daily. BUT I will say that it is very difficult at times for us to communicate. And I think it stems form these same sorts of issues with how we express ourselves. So this difference between us is definitely not something that has gone away, and it has to be contended with and struggled through often. We both recognize that its a struggle and we agree that it’s worth it for us to work through, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier.
This makes so much sense. Your partner sounds so similar to mine. Thank you!
Also, I’ve felt that all-consuming passion sort of love before and as time went on I realised later that it was much more superficial than the quieter, less Hollywood, but ultimately deeper sort of love I ended up feeling. The former sort of love was based on the delusion that my partner was absolutely perfect in every single way and I could never find anyone ever to remotely touch his magnificence if he left me. I didn’t love him, so much as an idealised pedestal version of him. The latter sort of love was based on actually knowing him with all his flaws and loving that person wholly.
The Southwest terminal in the San Diego airport has a Counter, which is a custom-burger restaurant. While the menu is severely abbrevaited, it’s a welcome site every time I go through there (surprisingly often). The bar in that terminal has a beer menu that has only San Diego craft brews, which is a very good thing. I have spent many a layover standing up in that (usually packed) bar getting inadvertently sloshed.
Phoenix, a city normally known for being a giant suburb, has a surprising amount of outposts of beloved local restaurants in the airport, including Lolo’s Chicken and Waffles, El Bravo (one of my favorite mexican restaurants in the whole country–they are tamale wizards), Barrio Cafe and La Grande Orange.
Without a doubt, the best meal I have ever had in an airport was a chicken breast sandwich I had in 2003 in a now-defunct cafe in the Charlottesville airport (a tiny regional airport in central VA). Imagine a spiced-up version of a chick-fil-a sandwich, with fresher ingredients.
Toast– my new fav lunch is “Vegan Tikki Masala” bought frozen from Trader Joes. WHAT IS VEGAN TIKKI MASALA? there is a meaty component, dressed in a creamy red sauce? WHO KNOWS. Also, Im in my 1st wk of being gluten free and my stomach feels FANTASTIC. But if I ever start raving about bulletproof coffee come for me, ladies. I will have gone too far.
eeeek I know I am very late to this (can’t toast at work anymore), and I had that for lunch today! super delicious…I hate to tell you this but the vegan tikka masala has a lot of gluten in it (that’s the vegan protein substitute). Sorry!! Not trying to burst your bubble! But thought you would like to know! They also have one with paneer that might be gluten free, but it’s definitely not vegan.
IDK if you’re celiac or trying a life without gluten – but if you feel better without wheat, check out other sources of fermentable carbohydrates (FODMAPS is a good google term) – could be that not eating beets or artichokes or -my personal issue- garlic could also improve your general health.
I had the WORST DRINK OF MY LIFE in an airport bar. I mean, I should have known better than to order an “Italian Margarita,” but I was having Airport Brain. It contained: Italian tequila (?), triple sec, sweet & sour mix, probably something else, and amaretto. It was probably the worst thing I have ever put in my mouth.
I just made the WORST face. I’m gonna go get a candy bar to get the imagined taste out of my mouth.
Candy bar probably won’t be as sickeningly sweet as that there described “margarita.”
“Italian tequila”
I have a suspicion that this was actually Cynar, the artichoke liqueur favored by elderly bocce players.
This is when being a bourbon drinker is best. I drink it unadulterated by anything but ice or a tiny splash of water. Not even a college town bar can fuck up that drink order.
I know I’m like a year late, but I just watched Fargo (the series) on British Netflix and now I want to talk about it. Spoilers below!
I thought the series overall was really great, but I’m a little let down by the finale. I’m glad Malvo and Lester got their comeuppance and I’m fine with that being death instead of prison. But I’m disappointed that after piecing together this case over ten episodes and being the only one to cotton to what was going on early on, Molly never got to go face to face with Malvo or see him and Lester arrested for their crimes. I didn’t need a tense standoff. I didn’t even need her to be there for the arrest. But I really wanted her to get to talk to Malvo and for him to know that she was the reason he was being arrested/dying/whatever. Instead she spends the episode in the police station while Lester flees and Gus finds and kills Malvo by sheer luck. Which, do they really give commendations now to postmen for shooting and killing unarmed and injured men? Because we all know Malvo is evil, but I don’t think that stand up in a court of law.
I still think it’s a fantastic show and I’m excited for the next season. I just wish Molly had gotten a more personally satisfying conclusion to the case.
I liked that show overall as well, I’m glad it got to showcase how good an actor Allison Tolman is.
I LOVED Fargo. I had some of the same feelings at the end of the season. There were MANY interviews with Noah Hawley (creator/writer) where he addresses that issue. What he said made a lot of sense to me because sometimes you don’t get the resolution you want and that’s just life. Molly was super pregnant at the time and it wouldn’t be realistic if she was the one to “get” Malvo.
I just love how it was clear that Noah Hawley had a vision and knew exactly what he wanted to do with the season.
Side note: Martin Freeman was just so incredible. His acting is flawless.
I agree that it wouldn’t be realistic for her to be the one in the field bringing him down at 9 months pregnant, but I wish she could have spoken to him. Just so he could know that she was the one to figure it all out. I know you don’t always get the resolution you want in life, but that’s what TV is for!
Martin Freeman was really great, as was Allison Tolman. And like everyone else too. I’m very excited for Cristin Milioti in the second season but I’m already prepared to spend the entire season worried about if and when she will die.
The most difficult time I have ever had in an airport finding food was recently, when my husband and I had a stopover in Chicago Midway (great airport, terrible food options), I was six weeks pregnant and the nausea had just kicked in, and I was kind of desperately trying for something that a) did not smell and b) would help me poop, as I was fantastically constipated. (I ended up finding a smoothie store, w00t!)
My most airplane-food experience was on a flight from Chicago O’Hare to London. I was originally supposed to take a later flight, but they bumped me up to an earlier, mostly-empty flight because of an oncoming snowstorm, before I had time to buy any food at the airport. I had originally requested kosher food, but I was pretty sure this flight wouldn’t have any prepared, so I flagged down a flight attendant pre-meals and explained that while I had requested kosher food, I would be fine with a vegetarian meal, or anything they had as long as there was no meat in it.
She nodded, said she’d do what she could for me…and then returned several minutes later with a couple of pieces of fruit and several margarine packets. “I was looking and these say ‘pair-vee’ on them, can you eat them?”
Slightly flummoxed, I indicated that yes, I would be able to eat the parve (pronounced “pahrv”) margarine packets, but they were still margarine.
Later on, I received an opened vegetarian meal, which was fine as long as I imagined it wasn’t someone else’s rejects.
FRIENDS! A person in my area is selling the spinning wheel I want to buy for a price I can afford! I’ve messaged her and am awaiting a reply to see if it’s still available and if I can MAKE IT MINE. Fingers crossed that the Patron Saint of Wool blesses me and smiles upon this match.
Well, according to Google, Saint Blaise is the patron saint of the wool trade (also throat problems) so it seems like he’s your dude.
Incidentally, I love why he is the patron saint of those things: “He saved a child from choking and was tortured with wool combs being used to rip off his flesh.”
SHE WROTE BACK WHEEL IS STILL AVAILABLE! I’m going to go see it Sunday and hopefully bring it home with me. Thank you St. Blaise the badass. I’m sorry you got tortured with wool combs (and yeeesh what a way to go) but thanks for looking out for me.
Oh, that’ll be nice, you can get some weaving done.
Also Toasties! I just found out Azie Dungey, one of the writers for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, was *also* the creator of Ask a Slave. Also, I just found out that there’s more Ask a Slave than I thought. Yes, weekend viewing set!
Buffalo’s airport has a surprisingly nice local beer selection at the handful of terminal bars.
If any has any Doha airport tips I’d love to hear them. I have a layover coming up, too short to leave the airport but long enough to get sort of bored.
My very last spring break week is nearly over! (I am done with grad school at the end of the summer so goodbye, school vacations) I have just been loafing around my mom’s house, eating free food, drinking free booze, and watching 30 Rock reruns on the giant television.
I do not have any food allergies (that I know of idk) but I *am* allergic to cut flowers, which requires all my admirers and well-wishers to send candy, cash, and/or check instead.
It is the vernal equinox and it is fucking snowing and freezing-raining outside. This is not okay.
Urghh that Kenneth Goldsmith “poem” debacle! Basically a white male poet with reputation for avant-gardism and who has been feted by establishment performed a “massaged” version of Michael Brown’s autopsy report (which among its other flaws — like the fact that he did it in the first place –had been edited so that it ended on and thus gave more prominence to the line in the report about his Brown’s penis…cos yeah it’s not like there’s a rich history of white folk fetishizing black men’s penises…) Link: http://flavorwire.com/509987/kenneth-goldsmiths-t…
Currently feeling particularly sick of so-called ‘radical’, ‘anti-establishment’ literary/artistic circles which are more white and male-dominated than the bloody Houses of Parliament.
PS – Anyone know how to hyperlink texts in intensedebate? I googled but to no avail.
That is legitimately the grossest, most offensive thing I’ve seen today. Oh my god.
Share with me your jet lag management tips! Trying to drink lots of water and force myself to stay up and get on the right schedule. But this is rough going, help!
If it’s still daylight where you are, get outside. Get sunlight on your retinas. Initially, it feels like hell because you’re so tired. But it really helps reset your body’s clock. Walk around a bit in the daylight and you will feel a little better, I promise.
Eat! Even if you’re not hungry, force yourself to eat normal meals on a normal schedule at your destination. Eat whenever they serve you anything on the plane. If you’re hungry at other times, eat then too. Food is so important in helping you feel stable and energized, even if your sleep schedule is a little messed up.
Oh hey, the other office dog’s adoption page is up!
They’re sisters, believe it or not.
So I got my free (ish) cable trial on Tuesday, together with a free PVR rental trial (so, a PVR loan). So far I have recorded or set to record:
– Star Trek: Voyager
– Star Trek: The Next Generation
– Stargate: Atlantis
– Stargate: SG-1
– Marvel’s Agents of Shield
– M*A*S*H*
– Grimm
– Once Upon a Time
– Chopped
– Total: At least ten hours
I have actually watched:
– The last two rounds of an episode of Chopped
– One episode of Voyager, plus five minutes of a second episode
– Ten minutes of one episode of Stargate: Atlantis
– Roughly five minutes of M*A*S*H*, total, from about six different episodes, because for some reason it’s always on when I turn the TV on and I get distracted for a bit before watching what I was actually planning to watch.
– Total: About two hours
So I think I’ve got this “having cable” thing pretty much down. It’s the same as not having cable, I make a list of things I intend to watch someday and then I don’t actually bother watching them.
I just realized I have a great JFK airport tip! In Terminal 4, there is a “Made in NY” store that sells all sorts of local beer and wine. You can purchase individual beers, non-refrigerated, for like $3, which compared to all other options for beer-purchasing in airports is fabulous. (You can even bring them on the flight with you because you’ve already gone through security, though I think that is against most airline rules. I did it anyway.)
I don’t usually eat in airport since I’m usually rushing to a connection, but there are two memorable meals.
1. After telling my mom more details about my divorce, we cried, she said she loved me, we got off the plane at her city, I staggered into a bar and said “I have 6 dollars is that enough for a beer?” It was. Then I got on my plane and cried for the entire flight home.
2. During a 2 hour layover in Denver after I’d already been traveling for … I have no idea how long, I started in Charleston and had already had one layover. But I was starving so I ordered food, then halfway through I realized I could not sit for ONE MORE MINUTE so I took my plate and luggage to the bar and stood there eating. The bartender was like “??” and I said, I don’t want to sit any more. He left me alone. I think I looked like a crazy person.
This introvert can attest that looking like a crazy person is an excellent strategy for getting others to leave you the fuck alone.
My backpack is an ungodly combination of bright-ass colors for exactly this reason.
Did you know you can bring little nips of alcohol through airport security? Just put them in a plastic bag like any other liquid!
Now, you cannot legally serve yourself on a flight. However, you CAN purchase a Coke or ginger ale or whatever and go to the bathroom and fill it with the nips and no one will be the wiser.
I do this all the time. I’ve also been known to put booze in those travel-size bottles made for shampoo or whatever (but not ones that have actually contained shampoo or whatever).
I was amazed when my friend told me a couple years ago. Like, it seems like it should be illegal for some reason? But I’m glad it’s not!
you have changed my life.
I’ve also seen savvy businesspeople buy bottles of beer in the airport, then carry them on the plane and put them in the seatback pocket. They are often cheaper than in-flight beers, and the selection at the airport cafe may be better. No one will stop you between the terminal and boarding, which seems insane.
(Had a Very Scary Emergency last year that required a flight, and I will be forever grateful to the flight attendant who gave me a beer and said, “The first one’s on the house.” Flight attendant, wherever you are, thank you for your kindness.)
I do this too! I was nervous about the “illegal to serve yourself on a flight” thing, but no one has ever seemed to care.
Toasties, I’m going insane. My job right now is, frankly, ridiculous. I work in a research clinic, and to spare you too much of the details, our unit is on year 2 of a 5 year grant that they have no idea how to manage, I have four coworkers total, and three of them are, in order, paranoid with a persecution complex, a complete mother hen, and eternally absent. We just replaced a previous supervisor who fucked it up so badly that she tasked the nurses with putting together our billing information for the year (and not telling us how to use the software), but the new supervisor is 7 months pregnant and constantly in meetings, so she may as well not be here.
The icing on this cake is because of a massive fuckup Old Supervisor did with our vacation time, coupled with a massive fuckup New Supervisor caused by making my sick leave last month count towards vacation and not sick time, I GOT DOCKED ALMOST SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS THIS MONTH, and we only get paid monthly. New Supervisor is trying to get a hold of HR and fix this, but my fuse is getting shorter.
I’ll be honest, there are jobs I want ten times more than this one, but my family has booked an extremely expensive weeks-long trip to Disney World this August, and while I know I’ll have enough vacation time to take it, I don’t know how much longer I can stay at this job while I get walked all over by a bunch of people with no goddamn clue. The worst part? Even with all of this bullshit, this is the best job I’ve ever had (I’m an RN, so I consider any day I’m not screamed at for narcotics a fucking blessing).
Thank you for the opportunity to vent.
Anyone have recommendations for kinda obscure 19th/ early 20th c. authors? (I’m particularly fond of people who were famous in their day, but who’ve fallen by the wayside in the modern era).
Preferably available for free on Kindle, I guess?
I know you said preferably free kindle but the amazing publishing press Persephone Books basically does exactly what you ask for: “Persephone Books reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction by mid-twentieth century (mostly) women writers.” http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/ They’re the ones that republished Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day which is one of the most lovely, soothing books I’ve ever book. You can get their (really beautifully produced) books on Amazon. (And if you’re ever in London you *must* go to their beautiful bookshop.)
Also, I haven’t read her yet but one neglected-author-who-used-to-be-famous I have on my reading list is Pamela Hansford Johnson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Hansford_John…
Great suggestions, thanks!!
Not sure how obscure she is, but I read Jalna by Mazo de la Roche (available through Project Gutenberg!) a couple of years ago and loved it.
Thanks! I hadn’t heard of her before- sounds intriguing.
Speaking of series by semi-obscure Canadians, I highly recommend Donald Jack to everybody. (His “Three Cheers for Me” is the first in a hilarious series, set around WWI). They’re some of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but I don’t know a single other person who’s ever heard of them– Canadian or otherwise.
I think this might be available for free elsewhere, because I definitely read it on the computer, but I absolutely adored Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer. It’s like online dating! But with telegraphs!
edit It is available for free! http://www.amazon.com/Wired-Love-Romance-Dots-Das…
Downloaded, thanks very much!
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. by Somerville and Ross was written by two Irish lady cousins and is free on Kindle.
A Day Off by Storm Jameson maybe, but she also has a collection of novellas called Women Against Men, which sounds intriguing.
Novel with Cocaine is a Russian book that was published in 1934 with a mystery author. It isn’t on Kindle but is available for sixty cents used. It contains this quote: “To a man in-love, all women are merely women except the woman he loves, who thereby becomes a human”
I will second Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and also recommend Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, which is sadly not on Kindle, but there does seem to be a 2010 print edition. I think the copy I checked out from the library when I read it was from like 1958.
Thank you, I’ll check those out!
I have a copy somewhere at home here of Women Against Men, but haven’t actually gotten around to reading it yet. I’ll have to report back if it contains enough delightful misandry to entertain an audience of Toasties.
Charlotte M. Yonge! Enormous Anglican families, girls who read Greek better than their brothers but feel guilty about it, croquet drama, Sins of Pride, and probably the first infant drug withdrawal death in literature. (Start with The Daisy Chain.) I keep meaning to pitch a Toast article about her.
And Mrs. Humphry Ward who takes on feminism and Catholicism and lost faith and quite a lot of other issues in a morally nuanced way. You honestly never know what will happen next in her novels or who she favors because she is so even-handed to all sides. She is brilliant at dramatizing the way conversations can start one way and tip over in some unexpected direction.
We had to put one of our catfriends down this week, Toastfolk, and the house is really empty and sad now. :’-( She definitely had the biggest personality of any of us despite being physically the smallest.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
Oh god I’m so sorry. I hope you’re getting plenty of hugs, tea and wine. x
Oh, friend. This is such a horrible feeling. They take up so much space in our hearts for such bitty wee beings. I’m so sorry.
It’s always tough these first few weeks, just the absence of them. But I know down the road the pain of her being gone will be slowly overtaken by the joy that she was here, and she lived, and was loved.
Oh no! I’m so sorry. Fare thee well, catfriend, and godspeed. <3
I am so sorry. It was hard to do, I’m sure. But you did the right thing. You know that. She was a lucky cat to have your loving care.
So sorry that you lost a catfriend. It is really hard to say goodbye permanently to someone who has been such a big part of your life.
Oh no, I am sorry.
What a heartbreak. I’m so sorry to hear this. All the sympathy.
I am so sorry. Take care of yourself. It’s a big loss.
So sorry for your kitty-loss!
I made potatoes fried in garlic oil with prosciutto and burrata for dinner tonight. It is proving to be a good choice.
This comment inspired me to have garlic smashed potatoes with my dinner and I thank you.
This week I received an email inviting me to a baby shower in another state. It actually began “Hey Ladies,”
So far the email chain has been pretty reasonable but I’m just waiting for Ali to pop up.
Just read Nicole’s ‘Trapped in the Stairwell’ and I found that bit about she and her husband marvelling at the midwife’s beauty really, really sweet. Is it just me that loves stories like that? — maybe cos it’s a heartwarming show of how secure the relationship is and also there’s something quite nice about people admiring other people’s beauty in a non-sleazy, aesthetic way?
Anyway wondering if anyone else had any similar stories?
I’ll add a couple below if other people share.
It’s not my story to share but someone I love very much was in labor for a very long and terrible time, like 72 hours, until she got a cesarean. She is still kind of traumatized by it.
I thought it was lovely too! I am always so happy that my partner and I can discuss other people’s hotness – I find it sexy!
I was once on holiday to Turkey with my boyfriend and I got acute tonsillitis and ended up in hospital. The doctor who came to see me was this impossibly beautiful and glamorous woman whom we both agreed looked like she was starring in some TV series less realistic than ER.
Aaaaaargh, I have been interviewing for a job in LA at the same time that my best friend here in NY’s boyfriend has been interviewing in San Francisco. He just found out he got the job, so they’re moving. My next-closest friend in NY already moved to LA this year. Of all the jobs I’ve applied for in LA, this is the only one that I’ve gotten an interview with so far, and I still have to do a four-hour ‘assignment’ tomorrow before I’ll hear anything.
PLEASE TELL ME I WILL NOT BE TRAPPED IN NY WITH NO FRIENDS FOREVER I AM FREAKING OUT and can’t bitch to my friend about it because she’s excited and it’d be mean.
Argh indeed! It stinks having to tamp down your happiness/sadness/whateverness with one of the people you’d usually share such things with. And job-hunting sucks all on its own. You’ll be fine! Obviously a California job front is moving through your area, so it’ll be your turn next. And then you’ll have to send all of us goody bags with lemons and asparagus and sunshine.
And you have to do homework on a Saturday? Get thee to a TGIF happy hour, stat! And good luck!
Thanks very much for the kind words! I am feeling a little better now, because I have also been full of terror and back-and-forth indecision about the decision that I want to move to LA and now I feel like, well, obviously I’m going and that is exhilarating. Even if I don’t get this job I will find a way to go, that must be my new mantra.
Yes, you can do it! I moved halfway across the country last year (to New York, actually – just not NYC), and am still temping while I job-hunt. It is lame, but it is a paycheck. It can be done! And finding new favorite restaurants is SO MUCH FUN.
It’s going to suck for a while, but the best part of living here is that other waves of friends will turn up before long. This city is a gigantic revolving door. Friends of mine have moved away and moved back. Some have left forever, while others showed up out of the blue.
Very sorry you’re losing your best friend to the West Coast. It’s rotten. Wishing you lots of good new-friend luck. (And a cross-country trip to visit both of them, if you can!)
I’m leaving for Disney World on Sunday!
This is a family trip, so basically I’m tagging along with my mother and my sister and her kids and husband and have no real idea of what all is going on since I didn’t plan any of it. But I’m told we got a fancy-pants suite onsite for four days and also something about a character breakfast for my nephew.
I haven’t been anywhere near Orlando in over a decade – what should I see? What fancy relaxing thingies should I convince my mom and sister to do with me?
Toasties, I just found out my college indefinitely suspended the men’s rugby club. I’m so bummed that the guys on the team thought their insanely violent, misogynist chant was okay. It is the place my feminism bloomed and it just really upsets me that this came out of my beloved school.
However, I am happy with not only the suspension, but the fact that every player on the team must take training sessions on sexual assault and violence.
That part about the training I really do like.
I took today off just because, and it’s working out great because I have the unexpected bonus of having the house to myself!!
Which is extra important because my roommate can’t fucking stop talking if there is someone else in the room, and I had some financial business to take care of, which sounds important but it’s basically a bunch of rollover and transfer shit.
I mean I guess that is important, but mostly I just sit here like
trading stocks
LIKE A BOSS
I have had some long, long layovers in the Zurich airport! They were during my student years, when unfortunately every single penny counted, even those spent in airports, so I tried to eat as little as possible. I spent most of the time window-shopping and trying to sleep at the gate.
My best layover was in Vienna, where they have a train to the city center, so I ate Viennoiserie and had a cup of hot chocolate and watched snow fall gently on the cobblestone streets. It cost like 25 euro including the train ticket, which is expensive for a snack but cheap for a trip to Vienna.
I am also an “everything ever” person, because I use my giant bicycle messenger bag as my work bag. Thank you for making giant bags, Timbuktu.
But now I need a real work bag, so I’m probably going to hit up Timbuktu for a smaller one that only needs to fit an iPad (just got one for work today!!!) and not my stupid big laptop.
BELATED FASHION THREAD because I am in Fort Worth! It is awesome! I am at a conference for art librarians because I am the coolest person alive. (If you are reading this and you are also here we should hang out, I think a combo of art + libraries + Toast is probably unbeatable in my books.)
I HAD BARE LEGS TODAY BECAUSE IT IS NOT TORONTO. I took a photo and it’s on my twitter if you’re really curious but I am super pale and pasty and kinda lumpy and also I took a respectable chunk out of my skin while shaving so that was not actually super pleasant.
I have had several conversations with colleagues about how we wear all black. And then I took their photos because I’m taking photos for this blog: http://librarianwardrobe.tumblr.com/
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR STYLE CHOICES GO ON DO IT
I bought this vest on eBay this morning because JUST LOOK AT IT.
OH GOD waiting for it to get here will be torture.
ahahahahaha that is so perfect for you. I am cackling IRL.
I realized this week that I have seven shirts in varying shades of army green. Gotta find stuff to go with them!
Hm. I am making a colourful knee-length sleeveless dress for my birthday next week, and I have a nice white cardigan to go with it, but will I be smart to also have white tights (not sure it’ll be warm enough to go without, even here) and white shoes of some kind? Does that balance out the zig-zags of colour?
I promise a photo, btw.
A PROMISE HAS BEEN MADE
I have a ZIGZAG PART today. As in I parted hair zigzag-ily instead of straight. And I kind of think it looks chic? Like it’s a very wide zigzag and everything else I’m wearing today is very understated and I like it. It’s such a small thing but it makes me so freaking happy every time I catch a glimpse of it.
Went to the thrift shop today and they were having a 60% sale off everything to get rid of winter stock! I bought:
– Cute cotton top with red and white Breton stripes, boatneck, and 3/4 sleeves
– Beautiful V-neck sweater the color of red wine. 100% extrafine merino wool, made in Italy
– Basic Zara top – bought because a) I need more tops to layer under sleeveless dresses and b) it’s olive green which I like, and makes a change from my other layering tops which are all black and navy blue. Also 100% linen which is nice.
(AND resisted buying another top that I really really liked, because the neckline was cut just a little too wide and my bra straps showed. There was a time when I would have bought it anyway, worn it a few times, felt uncomfortable about the straps showing, then given up wearing it and just let it sit there in my closet making me feel resentful whenever I saw it. But today I had willpower!)
This all came to a whopping $5.64 total. As I was waiting to pay I saw this gorgeous black leather skirt – 100% real leather, looked very well made. When I saw the price tag said $20 I put it aside, but then as I was walking home I realized that with the sale, it would only be $8! So I might go back tomorrow and try it on.
Ooooh, I have only ever shrunken my merino finds horribly and immediately upon purchase. Good luck!
(And get that leather skirt.)
I love clooooothes. I’ve always worn feminine clothing (colourful patterns, lots of silk scarves/ liberty wool scarves, hats) and I’ve generally ended up with quite a vintage-y look. But lately I’ve been wanting to try a more androgynous butch look and to that end, I’ve bought ‘coated’ black skinny jeans and dug out an old black leather jacket I’d forgotten about and I wear it with lots of dark red lipstick and I stride around feeling tough! I’d love to pursue this look more but alas lack of money prevents me at the moment… Dying to get my hands on a fitted skinny black tuxedo.
Edit to add:
My big beef with airport food is when the appropriate time for you to get to the airport is mealtime, so you think “I’ll just eat at the airport” and then you end up at the terminal that has no food except either a full-service place (that you don’t have time for) or a newstand that has some pre-wrapped sandwiches of questionable quality.
DCA is pretty great because it has a Five Guys AND a California Tortilla (and a Potbelly).
I don’t know if there’s a running thread already that I missed, but in any case, I have only 2 more weeks until my first half-marathon ever! I’m still completely dumbfounded at my ability to run long distances, and even more at the fact that I (for the moment) feel totally confident that I can do this. We’ll see how I feel in two weeks, but WEEEEEEEE feeling confident in my own abilities!!! ??
How is everyone else’s running coming along?
Good luck! I’ve only been able to run outside twice this year so I’m still getting used to being on the road rather than a treadmill. It is way harder.
It IS so much harder, isn’t it?! All my friends warned me, but I thought they were just being dramatic. They were not.
However, on Saturday I managed to successfully travel 10 miles outdoors propelled by nothing by my own human legs, and I must say it felt like an incredible accomplishment. Aside from the fact that it’s the furthest I’ve ever run, it was way more satisfying than my long runs on the treadmill.
Good luck to you, too!
NPR had an article the other day about melatonin use in ICUs that suggested that it can bring on weird dreams. So that explains why Clive Owen was fucking me the other night. Melatonin.
I tried bare legs this week, and the Tall One asked whether I was wearing white tights.
From Democracy by Joan Didion, which I’m currently reading: “In fact Dwight Christian tended to interpret anything said to him by a woman as congratulation.”
I had my eye exam today and, after they dilated my eyes, I left the building and ran straight into a street sign.
So I went daydrinking.
GET IT GIRL
Kind of random and super late, but does anyone have experience with drag and drop templates for WordPress? I have no experience with web design but am in charge of redoing the website for my office. We need super simple single page website with tabs for contact, about us, faq, and that’s pretty much it. I’ve done a little looking and think Emulate looks ok, but don’t want to make the wrong decision and have it be too hard for me to customize and make work. We don’t have the money to pay someone to redo the website so I’m on my own, but feel way not prepared to do this.
Most of the paid themes (and many of the free ones) I’ve encountered are SUPER simple, and designed to basically just type in your info without really having to worry about the formatting stuff. As long as your people aren’t going to be too fussy on the details (i.e. can we move the links to the side/change the motion effects/decrease the margin between the header text/etc.) you should be totally fine, though a lot of themes nowadays will have easy ways to change a lot of those too.
Today I took a deep breath and then used my voice to advocate for another woman. She will never know I did it, but she’ll be happy with the result and it should have lasting effects on her career. I’m enormously pleased with myself right now.
GOOD FOR YOU. That’s awesome.
Good for you. You did good for her. And for the rest of us. On behalf of all the women on the planet, THANK YOU!
I just love seeing/reading what’s in everyone’s bags.
unrelated to anything except the open thread picture, I realized recently that I’ve gotten much heavier over the last two years than I’d like to be and have just switched over to a ketogenic diet. So far, so good. I’m a salty fatty things person over sweets any day, so it’s been an incredibly low stress way to change up and try to eat a bit healthier/get in good exercising shape (like, I could eat everything in the open thread picture except the bread and MIGHT actually go out to the store in a bit to make that happen)
has anyone else found a framework like this helpful?
((caveat: it feels a bit wrong talking “ugh! weight! diets!” on this website and the whole thing makes me feel like a Cathy cartoon…but I think maybe for like the sake of my knees, etc, I need to just get over myself on this one.))
I am in the same boat, I know a lot of it was the depression meds and being unable to walk. But that was, like, 5 years ago, and even though recovery is still touchy (my hips will go out unpredictably always and forever now), I’m single, and dammit, extra belly weight on a belly that’s had 3 10-lb babies is NOT PRETTY and makes me sad. I can’t not look at myself in my undies, so I have to diet. My problem is my serotonin tanks when I go keto and I’m allergic to milk/cheese. I’m thinking about doing it post-lacrosse season, when I should have more sunshine and more time to counter any time-related bad food choices.
Hey! I finished the baby owls sweater and will post photos maybe next week. I got a super cute matching gift bag and my co-worker went gaga for it. Most hilarious part: When I gave it to her, her entire office stopped by to see it and one of the women was wearing a sweater with a sequined owl on it.
I also started the spoon workshop! You dig out the spoon part with this hook shaped knife (I KNOW) but they’re all right-handed … with a sharp blade side and a dull side for resting your finger on sometimes. The instructor — who looks like a nerdy hipster Elizabeth Moss, *adorable* and has been wood-carving for 17 years! — seemed mortified they didn’t have left-handed tools, but I was like, “It’s okay, neither of my hands have ever carved wood, so they won’t know.” Apparently, they don’t really make real left-handed hook knives, with one sharp and one dull side. The ones lefties can use have TWO SHARP SIDES. Which even the instructor thought sounded insanely dangerous.
Now my right arm is crazy, crazy sore. I have a blister on one finger and I rubbed the skin on a finger joint off. I have such princess hands.
Here’s a super filtered photo of my spoon-in-progress: https://instagram.com/p/0cs0RTMs4Z
OMG YES I have been wanting to learn how to carve spoons! How did you find this workshop?
I think it was a local blog! Or I Googled “spoon carving Toronto.”
This is the specific place; they have all kinds of classes!
http://theshoptoronto.ca
Hi toasties!
Holy cow 14 year old boys and springtime. If they aren’t faking injuries they’re eating leftover snowplow snow and then puking when I tell them what was in what they just ate (maybe I shouldn’t have added the “anything dead your parents’ cars ran over and stuck to their tires all winter”?). Also they want to spend more time watching the track girls in tights than the lacrosse ball. So far I’ve avoided a “don’t objectify women” rant but it’s been close. Usually I just have to say “you’re in lacrosse your focus should be over there” and threaten pushups. We’ve had to practice in the parking lot because of sexist high school athletic director not letting us use the turf, and we’ve had to cancel games for the same reason. But since they are being louts I don’t feel guilty, just relieved, because they have been so mean to each other we are making them run sprints and burpees most of Monday. Like for 2 1/2 hours on a hill, bad.
My one surviving female team member BROKE HER WRIST doing pushups. And she wouldn’t go home, and even participated in all the running/conditioning while holding ice on her arm. And this is a week after her grandma died and she hasn’t missed a single practice. (the wrist was previously broken and healing badly, which is why it broke again. I still feel horribly guilty).
Best news? Boys were skipping practice to go to the high school–because middle school boys think they are adults and want to hang out with the high school football players doing (mandatory for high schoolers pre-football ) “workouts”. They tried to use the football coach as an excuse, and I called them on it, and sent home letters to all the parents saying “no practice, no play in the next game”. One mom got pissy and forwarded it to the football coach!!!! HE not only responded to her, he responded to ALL the parents, saying he supported me 100%. He also took the time to email me and tell me “Don’t you dare accept that behavior from them”. THAT was awesome.
middle son spontaneously joined the school play crew. My entire family (seriously, all of us, except I don’t do costumes anymore for a job) does theater, as in, sis: Tech director for the Wynn, brother: props manager for several broadway theaters, sister in law: broadway and movie actress, brother in law, rigger for cirque de soleil, brother: edits stage light and sound magazine and playwright, other sister in law: actress. We’ve been text battling over what crew job my kid will do, and I’ve been hiding all my giggles very badly from my kids, who are getting annoyed. I couldn’t be more pleased that he’s getting out of his 13 year old boy hiding in his room playing video games stage, but I have to contain my glee.
11 year old girl is devastated that she may be “developing”. (mom there’s this bump under my nipple, it feels weird). The girl is 66 pound dripping wet and 4′ 6”. Nobody in my family got a chest that needed a bra for anything other than nipple control until their mid twenties. She doesn’t really need to worry!
I am worried that as a coach I’ve been relegated to “doesn’t know much about the game but can punish us so is really a babysitter” status in front of the boys, which means I should probably watch tons of videos over the weekend to catch up, and maybe practice my stick skills outside. But my 40s bifocal need has emerged in the past 2 weeks and I have no depth perception at all. I am embarrassed and sad and need to see the eye doc.
However, all the parents are happy because I’m on top of 30 kids’ injuries and sore muscles and have been sending emails home with yoga links and helpful tips like “maybe he shouldn’t be practicing lacrosse in air jordans, cross training shoes would help protect his knees” !
Also, boys? sticks? Guess how many times I day I have to give them the “mom” look because they have a large stick between their legs? My go to comment has become, “Do you know how much that will hurt if (the kid next to him) bumps into you?”
That football coach is awesome. And you are awesomer.
Thank you! I haven’t been feeling awesome, this is definitely challenging. But I do love challenges.
OK SO WAIT eating snowplow snow is a thing?? WHYYYY
(I mean I guess the answer is “middle school boys” but still.)
I love your football coach friend.
It totally won’t let me reply to the Clive Owen comment, but I feel the need to go to the drugstore RIGHT NOW!
Thank you! I haven't been feeling awesome, this is definitely challenging. But I do love challenges.
Terrible. But I'm sure you already know that whatever goes on in his head is dumb and boring anyway. The only answer to 'why?' and 'what is he thinking?' is 'who cares?'
Here's a list from a fantastic website called A Mighty Girl: http://www.amightygirl.com/books/social-issues/pr…
Hello, Gorgeous! And the dress is lovely too.
My most often quote is "leading the glamorous life" from A Little Night Music, whenever I'm describing some annoying/boring/embarrassing/ eye-rolling detail of my work day.
Somehow "DWARVES ARE VERY UPSETTING" comes up at my house a lot as well.