fribble
2d ago
"having a kid out of wedlock is a bad idea" is left-coded
... when it presupposes one is having lots of sex with lots of men outside of marriage.
I'm going to make the wild suggestion that both sex and children should be within a marriage.
fribble
2d ago
My kid is an only who started daycare at 3 months old. If she tried to be a trad wife she would be figuring it out from scratch. I bet that's the position a lot of them are in. Toss in a tendency towards perfection or desire to compare your life with someone else's social-media-curated version of their life and you get a mess.
fribble
2d ago
Getting pregnant is not that big a deal. While I am glad my daughter did not have a baby at 16, there are so many other things that would have been worse. Her getting sucked into the alcoholic party culture was something I was significantly more concerned about at the time. Given a choice between my kid being an alcoholic or a teenage mom I am choosing the latter. She declined both.
fribble
2d ago
Why would natural family planning mess up my daughter's life?
Setting aside the apparent assumption she would be having sex out of wedlock, if she came up accidentally pregnant she would deal. (But if you're having sex pregnancy is a known consequence so it's hard to think it's accidental.) Just like if she lost a leg. Or had some other things happened that threw a spanner in her life plans. She's already dealt with things not going as she might have chosen. Pregnancy and children aren't some uniquely awful thing that destroys your life and it's weird to act like they are.
And I say that as someone who was one-and-done. Had I had subsequent pregnancies/kids I would have dealt. Life happens to us all.
fribble
2d ago
The gloves were finger/palm saver. My hands are bruised to bits but no blood was shed.
Auto work is a reminder that men are so much stronger than women. The recommendations that a particular task might take a little force really means I need to use all my strength.
fribble
4d ago
Thank you for the recommendation. The Chilton manual also recommended gloves!
My lasting memory of a car door fix is when I was a kid I was a second pair of hands for my dad replacing a window in his Datsun Z, and when he tapped the last bit of trim into place, he accidentally shattered the just-replaced-window. The second replacement went faster.
fribble
4d ago
I drive a 2010 Honda Fit and recently the driver side door handle started feeling "soft." I assume something broke due to age but the door handle and lock still work. I decided not to wait until it fails completely so if the new door handle gets here in time, this weekend I will pull apart the inner door so I can get to the handle hardware and replace it. I have access to the Chilton manuals through work and it doesn't look too impossible. Famous last words.
fribble
4d ago
I recently started on hrt and as someone who has been an insomniac her entire life, the progesterone gets all my love. Sure, the estrogen may be helping with aches and pains and vaginal atrophy but the progesterone is letting me occasionally fall asleep before midnight and sometimes sleep past 3am. It's magical! (My mom had a mild peri/menopause and mine was starting in that direction too, but when I read some women found progesterone helped with sleep I had to give it a try.) I will probably stay on hrt for the bone benefits. I recently got a weighted vest to try out. I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!
fribble
11d ago
I have had several different programming jobs, as has my spouse, and they have all been different. I am betting you are a good programmer within your niche but your isolation is eating at your confidence.
Faking it until you make it is legit. Also, maybe direct your workplace time wasting to something more productive - do you have industry relevant certs? Work on any open source code so your GitHub looks decent? Have a spiffy resume site showing off some stuff your proud of/working on?
And. Get away from the computer a bit. My daily lunch walk is crucial. I also set an alarm to get up and move every hour or two. Let your eyes see something further away than the monitor.
fribble
11d ago
Yes. I enjoy it for one but I also ended up with a baby who hated being in the car. Music and poetry recitation got us through so, so many rides in the car. And when she got older it was handy being able to recite on command on boring road trips, at bedtime, or just for fun.
I am old enough that one junior high school English teacher said we needed to be able to recite 100 lines from Romeo and Juliet from memory so we would have something to focus on when we were held hostage in Iran. It stuck, I guess.
fribble
11d ago
Do you find it bad difficult or just difficult? I love solving problems that I first saw and thought, there's no way, it's too hard. Then banging my head against that wall and thinking I am the biggest idiot who ever was. And then finally getting a glimmer, or a thread to tug and then ... Boom. This can be done! A lot of my programming life has involved a lot of that, also because it self selects. I will grab the impossible over the mundane because I find it more interesting. There are also plenty of keep-the-lights-on programming jobs. That VB6 app that the company needs and also doesn't want to pay for rewriting? Someone has to be willing to baby it and surround it with as much protection as possible. And then there are folks who are in between. But if all this sounds awful, it might just not be for you. Is there other stuff in computers you like? Don't limit yourself - I (think I) got a job offer because I bonded w/one of my interviewers about hours spent making patch cords in my early career. The job has nothing to do with patch cords, cabling, and the only networking was virtual. If something interests you, give it a shot!
You sound stuck. Dust off your resume. Think about perfect world jobs. Could you, or someone who really believed in you, make your resume look ok for one of those jobs? If not, what are you missing and how do you get it? Just do one step today. One more tomorrow. You can look for and even apply to jobs just for practice. You have a job. You're in good shape. Just poke your head out, see what other opportunities there are, see if there's something you would love to grow into.
One of the benefits of looking for a new job when you have a job is when you get an offer, you can decide if you want it. It's safe. (OTOH it is a tough job market right now. My kid is a new grad and she's made it through more 2nd and 3rd round interviews with no offer than is reasonable. Since when does a job suitable for a 21 yr old with the ink on the diploma still wet need 3 interviews?)
fribble
14d ago
I asked it last week. My husband has a highly tuned llm (granted, he buys access) and we have an ongoing friendly argument about how useful (him) or useless (me) they are. So whenever it comes up I ask chatgpt some dead simple question to see if it gets in the right ballpark. In this case (and often) it didn't - it gave me bodyweight stuff like deadbug. Don't get me wrong, deadbug is useful! But the whole point of LIFTMOR is that us oldsters need to be lifting heavy (safely) to increase bone strength. Stretching and bodyweight is helpful but not enough.
fribble
14d ago
These days, outright hallucinations are quite rare, but it's still worth doing due diligence for anything mission-critical.
I asked chatgpt what the 4 core exercises of the LIFTMOR routine were and it didn't get a single one correct. It's a simple question to google so I am not sure how it got it so wrong. When I changed the question to specify the LIFTMOR routine to help counteract osteoporosis, it got it right. Google doesn't require the additional context.
fribble
22d ago
So, I don't know what my response will be in every scenario because humans are messy, but I do know at this stage of my life I have responded to violence with passive resistance successfully and not felt like a doormat (regardless of the outcome - though in my world the end result has generally been positive). The line excusing violence isn't very low, it doesn't exist. But that's not simply a rejection of violence as its own thing. It's because violence is a failure response. It cannot be successful (there may be a perception of short term success like eating poor quality food might feel good or like it silences hunger, but it's not an optimal solution). My husband doesn't have and does not agree with this framing, and on some level views it as the excuses a weaker party tells herself knowing even if she engaged in violence she would lose (usually). I think that's not uncommon for non-pacifists, and why many think "doormat." But I don't think they're considering longer term consequences or "win" states beyond the most obvious (if "winning" is even a thing).
fribble
23d ago
I am a pacifist. I taught my daughter to walk away. My husband is not. He taught her to throw punches like she meant it.
When one of her roommates had a guy come over who wouldn't leave when he was told to, my daughter talked him out of the apartment. (Pacifism wins!) And then she bought a baseball bat. (Sigh.)
Amish-style pacifism includes no violence in self-defense. I don't see that as being a doormat; my husband does. When our daughter was little, I agreed to engage in violence should her safety require it - it's one thing to choose pacifism for one's self, another to cause harm to someone else through that choice. Where is your line?
fribble
1mo ago
Have you talked to your mom? My college aged kid has been making food-in-house requests that we have taken seriously ever since her middle schooler fruitarian phase. For example, today she specifically asked her dad not to buy her a diet Coke when he runs errands - she will drink it if it's in the house but she would prefer not to. Maybe your mom would happily share the cookies and cake with neighbors or a social group. Or portion and freeze it. Hopefully your mom would like to support you in your goals.
fribble
1mo ago
Which sort of begs the question: how in the world do volunteer fire departments exist, especially when there are non-volunteer departments in the same area?
I live in area with volunteer and government supported fire departments. I have been told it is almost impossible to join the government supported fire department without experience. So a lot of young folks join the volunteer fire department as a way to get that experience. Same reason a lot of young folks become EMTs because they plan to apply to med school. Of course, many people change life course so people who intended to move on from being EMTs or volunteer fire fighters end up sticking with it rather than moving on.
fribble
1mo ago
I have a daughter and a horror of many gas station bathrooms. We traveled (5-9 hour trips. Bathroom stops were required) with her training potty until we could be assured she could hold it long enough for us to find an appropriate bathroom. A girl sitting on a training potty on the side of the road with two car doors open is pretty much invisible to passers by.
I was taught to pee outdoors similarly to my older brother. Walk off the path / away from the road. Drop trou, squat and pee, paying attention to where your shoes are. If you need to, use a tree for balance. The annoying bit is packing out toilet paper. You really aren't exposing all that much when you do this. But if it really bothers you keep your daughter in dresses or skirts and teach her to squat, pull aside her undies, and go. Nothing gets bared. Girl swimmers are fantastic at this because taking off a wet racing suit is annoying.
fribble
3mo ago
In the 1980s in Fairfax County, Virginia, I took wood shop and metal shop. I was on the college track, so I couldn't access other vo-tech classes because they conflicted with foreign language and advanced/gt classes. But they existed in the same school.
fribble
4mo ago
We have chickens. 4 is the max we are allowed legally. It would be cheaper to buy the eggs. But labor is pretty easy. I give them fresh water daily and need to top up their food about twice a week. I check for eggs when I give them fresh water. I clean the coop once a week and do a more thorough cleaning every other month. They're in a chicken tractor that has worked to protect them from predators and I move it during the weekly cleaning. So less than half an hour a day on average I would guess.
fribble
4mo ago
In my experience, you need to get your daughter to be ok with getting things wrong. It is uncomfortable to be wrong and it seems a lot of girls shy away from it more than boys do, but if you're going to keep going in STEM-y stuff you're going to be wrong. You're going to be confused. You're going to not get it when other people do. She needs to be ok with that and if possible even embrace it.
We celebrated our daughter trying and failing and trying again. And again. Music actually helped with that because she hit the limits of her natural talent at a younger age than she did with math. So we could remind her how she wasn't able to sight read a particular piece perfectly, how it required thoughtful, diligent practice. But then she got it, and yadda yadda. We may have done this a bit too much because she perversely seeks out things she really has to work at and almost neglects areas of natural talent, so maybe keep an eye on that.
Also, we found co-ed STEM activities were likely to be at a higher level than single sex ones (more participants? Less focused on achieving consensus? More competitive?) but our daughter had to be comfortable with failure and trash talk to enjoy them, especially at the middle and high school level. Keep an eye on girl focused activities though because they can be a great introduction or place to get comfortable.
fribble
4mo ago
I could not sleep train. Listening to my baby cry was ... Impossible. She's grown now and fine, for what it's worth. If we were going to sleep train I would have had to leave the house to maintain my sanity. There was just something about my small creature crying that burrowed into my brain demanding immediate attention. I didn't react that way to toddler tantrums or little kid whining or teenager tempers. So, can you send your wife away or put her in a sound proof room? I would have agreed to that because my husband and I were capable of agreeing to a version of sleep training but we didn't have the ability to protect me from the sound. It didn't help that I nursed our daughter and a nursing baby Knows when her mother is around. Babies are cagey.
I wish you sleep, soon. It's crazy making.
We label turn off valves. For us, this has been sharpie on walls, but I would go for a nice label option in a home I built. When the house is flooding a nice label with an arrow pointing to a handle you last looked at when you moved in 5 years ago is a good thing.
When we do repairs we add turn off valves if possible. I would rather turn off the water to one room than turn it off for the whole house, if possible.
When I was a kid my parents tried to build but there was weird neighborhood approval of plans required and they eventually gave up and sold the land. Hopefully you don't run into anything like that.
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