fribble
3d ago
To back this up, I bought a low mileage 2010 Honda Fit in 2016 for 9K. I just sold that car to carmax for 3.5K. While I had it, I only had normal car maintenance costs (oil changes, brake pads, the occasional tire). 5.5K for 10 years of car ownership seems reasonable to me.
And I probably could have bought it cheaper if I haggled - I don't, I'm bad at it. And I probably could have sold it for more if I'd done private sale, but I'm dealing with other things and couldn't be bothered.
fribble
21d ago
If you completely fall apart, come back here. I can listen and maybe help you find some handholds to claw your way back out.
I'm pragmatic, so all the stupid logistics that have to be dealt with are keeping me on track for now. Can't fall to pieces today, have to sell the now-extra car. Can't fall to pieces during the week, have to pretend to be functional at work. Can't fall to pieces on Friday, have to open the estate... I expect the practice of just putting one foot in front of the other will start to feel doable without the "have tos" soon. You're, fortunately and unfortunately, getting plenty of practice with this now through caregiving - you're not falling apart so badly you can't pull it back together. That's a skill. Trust yourself.
fribble
22d ago
I am so sorry for what you're going through.
My husband just died suddenly. Went from going to the ER because he wasn't feeling right, to diagnosed with cancer, to being told it was terminal, to dying, in under a month. My daughter (new college grad, in first job, so a few years older than your brother) flew back to the east coast once we got the cancer diagnosis, so she got about 2 weeks with him before he died. Those were incredibly important weeks.
She's quit her job and is currently in the process of packing out her apartment to come back home. Even as her parent, I feel very limited in what I can do - grief is so intensely personal. I hate to think she's blowing up her life. But I remind myself that's catastrophizing - she's young. Even if this makes it harder to find another job, and she has a bit longer path to follow to ultimately get where she wants to be, that's ok. There is time. And I'd rather she manage her grief in such a way that she has a future she wants, than that she succeeds-for-the-goal-of-succeeding and loses herself in the process.
So I guess, from also being in the middle of this, I'm letting you and me know that there is no out but through. If through looks messy or hard, well, it often is. Be patient with yourself and your brother (and your dad). Don't let your focus on taking care of them prevent you from taking care of you. All of you are likely to make decisions that look suboptimal from the outside. They might even be suboptimal. But when you're living in a horror show, you can only do what you can do.
My thoughts are with you.
fribble
5mo ago
Culturally I am suburban middle class. Economically upper-middle. Though I live in a working class neighborhood which isn't particularly a suburban middle class thing to do; I should live in the nicer neighborhood. But I am cheap and not at all into conspicuous consumption (and my husband is culturally working class and distrusts the middle class, especially suburbia). Paul Fussell would argue with where I place myself culturally.
fribble
6mo ago
I am trying to convince myself that I can recover from a hysterectomy in a week. Two if I am a complete wuss. I need to start doing planks like a crazy person I think. And make sure my surgeon does the surgery in a surgical center because I will lose my mind if I have to spend any time in a hospital. I hate being "sick."
fribble
7mo ago
I second the 80's Cricket magazine. Also the old Analog and those sorts of magazines. The old Boys Life magazines were also good if she's not sensitive to the title. Used bookstores used to have them.
Around that age my modern kid read/we read with her the Little House books, Boxcar children, Trixie Beldon, Three Investigator, (the old) Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Chronicles of Narnia, Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit, Susan Cooper, Peter S. Beagle, the color Fairy books, Edgar Eager, Wizard of Oz books, Chronicles of Prydain... So I guess I am saying if you can't find some easy subscription thing like Cricket, do a do it yourself book subscription and send a "keeper" book or 3 every month. (In contrast to the Magic Treehouse and Rainbow Fairy books which will slowly drive you mad and you will gleefully pass along to another child as soon as your kid lets you.)
fribble
7mo ago
- Under 10 miles.
- No idea. Women's fashion shops with custom alterations under 15 miles.
- Nearest I don't know. The one we get our dairy from around 30 miles and same distance for a different one we get fruit from. Vegetables... Probably further away but they have a drop off under 5 miles away.
- Around 5 miles.
- 1 mile, but I preferentially go to the one around 8 miles away.
- Around 5 miles.
fribble
7mo ago
In your position, I would pursue it. You can gather information without doing anything. You can take the babiest of steps as you want to. It can be really weird what works with kids.
Does your kid react to all demands in the same way? If I told my kid she had to put on sneakers before we could go to the park, she would lose her mind. But if I said we could go to the park but "the rules" said we needed to put on sneakers, that was different. She also loved racing, so we would both put on sneakers and see who could do it the fastest. Or race against a timer.
This sounds like a real tough situation. FWIW, ADHD meds worked wonders for my kid and in retrospect I wish I had gotten her started on them sooner. I waited til middle school, figuring scaffolding her environment and plenty of physical activity were working. They weren't. Her self esteem took a beating.
fribble
7mo ago
I loved Agatha Christie as a kid and she's how I learned-and-it-stuck that adults really under estimate kids. I was in the gifted and talented program and my 4th grade teacher still publicly accused me of plagiarism for my book report on one of her books. Not that he ever explained who he thought I was cribbing from, but apparently 8 year olds aren't supposed to be reading and writing coherently. After he quizzed me, right then, in front of the class, he stopped. No apologies were made.
It amuses me that 3? Of my foundational childhood memories involve her books as a critical element.
fribble
8mo ago
How does one get better at riding a bike as an adult?
I rode my bike a lot. It became my primary mode of transportation over COVID. I rode it to the store, for exercise, anywhere that was less than 3-5 miles away by roads that didn't completely freak me out. And I had a couple mile route that I did pretty much every day I didn't have an errand to run. I still wouldn't say I am comfortable in terms of riding in traffic or on unfamiliar roads (identifying and dodging road debris or potholes at speed makes me nervous) but I am comfortable with signaling and stopping and starting. I don't feel like I am constantly at risk of randomly falling off my bike. OTOH there is no way I would ride on a mountain bike trail or even do a more than 10 mile ride on a nicely paved surface, so you may be looking for different advice.
fribble
8mo ago
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.
fribble
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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.
Thinking of you.
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