I used to volunteer at a nursing home when I was a teenager, and one of the residents was this spicy old demented lady named Florence. Florence had a real mouth on her, and I would try to charm her, and get nowhere. Once she looked at me and said “you look like you got a mouthful of hot shit”. I got over my intimidation and began to speak more freely, and once when she was trying to hit people with a flyswatter she found, I was trying to talk her into giving it to me, and I said “Florence, don’t you love me anymore?”. And she said “Well I love you, but from a distance”, and whacked me a good one.

I’m getting there with my coworker although I wouldn’t quite call her conservative; she voted for the NDP in Canada where we live as we are both union members and that’s who we vote for, but she loves Trump, but in this crumbling hellscape of the last few months and the tariffs he’s hollering on about on Canada, she doesn’t like that because she can’t cross border shop. She says he’s gone rather loony although she still likes him.

However, she isn’t stupid, and she watches all sorts of news from all over and doesn’t just blindly believe in the cult. The last few days I have explained dark money to her, and how it fuels elections in the US for both parties and how basically the Koch brothers and all the Tanton network groups fund Trump. I gave her some articles to read, and she’s starting to get it. I didn’t put it from the perspective of hating trump, just that she should know how these things are funded for everyone (the Democrats are no stranger to dark money either and just because the groups they funnel it in under sound sunnier and less racist doesn’t make them any less sketchy), and how the political landscape is manipulated that way. I am finding she’s listening to this, and coming away with a better perspective, rather than trying to explain why he’s totally wrong. Dark money is a topic I recommend to everyone to learn about, because these elections in the US are being bought by dark money.

I went vegan and bitch is skinnnay now, although it’s not why I did it. Also low fat high carb, NOT keto, but just paying attention to your carb intake, and having a diet high in healthy fats will keep you full. Keto is for specific genetic epilepsy syndromes and not good for anything else no matter what people tell you.

I just switched to Deezer because I’m Canadian and I’m abolishing all American products that I can. I was a YouTube Music person for years though, and I absolutely loved Google Play Music, but YTM is trash. I will not use Spotify because of Joe Rogan, and I tried Apple Music and it’s not what I want because their classical music selection is different from all other platforms and it is missing stuff I want. I like Deezer so far.

This reminds me of how my coworker’s little girl wrote Santa a letter and wrote out the Amazon links of everything she wanted in much the same fashion.

Aww I didn’t know you included me until now. Bones of the Moon is the title of a book about a magical kid named Pepsi actually, but space skeleton is cool.

The Facebook groups. They’re so batshit. I’m going to PM you a screenshot I took because I can’t share photos on this community for some reason.

My parents ostensibly chose each other, but it’s really more like my mother preyed upon my father. He’s a bit younger than her, not as educated, was shy and not overly ambitious, and perfect for her campaign of modeling someone into what she wanted. My aunt says he used to have a great group of buddies back in the 60s when they met, and one by one she weeded them out of his life and replaced them with people she thinks had higher social status. This tape has recycled itself routinely throughout their lives as she discards someone and finds someone new to glom onto for a while and try and be them. She has him totally under her thumb, and she’s a vicious monster who regards other humans like furniture she rearranges.

People didn’t know much about borderline personality disorder in the 60s when they met, and he’s too shy and unable to defend himself, and while they do squabble, she always wins. He has very little insight into how toxic she is, and goes along with all her psychotic shit, like how nobody can use a bathmat and you can just slip and slide on the wet floor, or how you can’t keep the toaster or kettle on the counter and have to put it immediately back in the cupboard burning hot, because her narcissism means everything has to look like a museum.

He dated some woman before her, just a girl really, who was chubby I guess, and my mother spent one dinner with extended family joyfully insulting this woman, who he last laid eyes upon probably 40 years prior, and asking him repeatedly with vicious gleeful delight if he remembered “the ball”, meaning this chubby girl. My spouse wanted to clock her in the teeth. We were all just kind of numb to her behavior then and tried to ignore it, but not long after I awoke to who she really was and haven’t seen them since. It’s sad, but she regards me as a piece of lost property really, and I don’t think there’s a good enough therapist in the world to wake him up to how dangerous she is.

This weird box that apparently once held candy that I think came from my grandmother but am not sure, and it’s full of buttons. It says Blue Bird Confectionery on the bottom, and it’s full of an assortment of buttons that I have no idea of the origin of. It’s just sat on my shelf for decades.

I worked there back in the early aughts. It actually was a cool retail job that paid reasonably well, a few dollars above minimum, and you got company stock, benefits, a free pound of coffee a week or box of tea, you were invited to company meetings, free drinks on shift, and we did all sorts of cool volunteer stuff, like with the food bank and habitat for humanity, and we would do coffee tastings at events, all sorts of things. It honestly was a fun job lots of the time. It’s so sad it’s turned into trash.

There was this mommy blogger in the early aughts who decided to have an “unassisted birth”, which is a thing where you just don’t have any medical care at all. She pontificated often about Big Obstetrics and how they always pushed you for C section because they got paid more, she called midwives “medwives”, and all sorts of other crunchy shit like that. She clearly was not terribly confident but was terribly obnoxious and holier than thou. Fine. I think she had NPD or BPD because of her behaviour personally. Just the nastiest person. She did all her own pregnancy care, which apparently was just writing weight down and taking vitamins and that’s about it.

Well at 33 weeks she went ripping into early labour, phoned her old midwife and while telling her quite rudely that she wanted an unassisted birth also asked her what to do. The midwife told her to go to ER and that she couldn’t help her because it was out of her scope. So she went screaming to ER, could feel baby sitting right at the perineum. The OB takes a look and tells her they have to do a section because baby is breech and obstructed. She began screeching at him that she only wanted to have a vaginal birth and told him he was “birth raping” her, and acted like a hysterical hyena. He managed to convince her how bad things were and that she needed to be delivered RIGHT NOW, and she finally consented and they took her up, and put her under general anesthesia.

She later wrote this vague blog birth story, baby had died because of congenital defects before she woke up, and she wrote a very long set of blog posts about All The Ways The Hospital Was Wrong without really going into why her baby died, and everyone fell all over themselves pitying her and telling her that she was so right about everything. She blogged about how the nurses were so terrible for trying to connect her with social work or grief groups, and when they offered her medication to dry up her breast milk she screeched that they were not supportive of her breastfeeding her 3 year old.

But later on the story came out that baby had a rare condition called sirenomelia, or mermaid syndrome it’s sometimes called. It’s a birth defect where the legs are fused together into the appearance of a mermaid tail. They have a lot of other defects, including no kidneys, no genitals, heart defects, etc. Sirenomelia is caused by untreated gestational diabetes. So not having prenatal care probably killed her child. That was damn deceptive, making everyone pity her when it was just her own obnoxious ignorance.

I go to church now for the last few years so I’ve retrained my choice of words to a degree so not to offend, but I still curse loudly.

The dog and the cat came in at the mid point and sat down next to the bed and watched us like we were an episode of Wild Animal Kingdom and it was a mating scene, I swear to god the cat looked amused. I could no longer concentrate.

Fax machines. Government and medical offices would grind to a halt without them. That’s just reality.

Bluesky, usually I’m having very pleasant conversation over there so it’s usually nice.

Surprisingly my city has a community here. Not very active but it is here!

Nobody should feel bad for using Reddit to deshittify Google searches. That’s just what has happened.

I do look at r/opera sometimes because there’s no community here, but only once in a great while, and I do look at the monthly list that the ban pit bulls subreddit keeps of pitbull attacks/deaths, because it’s absolutely frightening every month how long if is.

I use this one: https://www.thespruceeats.com/homemade-sourdough-starter-recipe-1446595

Also get the interceptor cups for the legs of your bed and couch. They cannot travel into the furniture when they’re in place.

And run everything clothing and bedding wise you own through the dryer over and over. Before you leave for work or anything, run your clothes through the dryer so you don’t have any on you.

Potage au bonne femme.