auntlada

I vaguely remember reading when my son was small that kids can handle a lot more spices than people think they can if it's something they've always had or if it's something their mothers ate when they were pregnant/breastfeeding. I have no idea if that is true or not, but I definitely remember reading that children do not need to eat a completely bland diet. That leads to one of my pet peeves: people who say acronym when they mean abbreviation or initialism. If it doesn't spell out a word (or something that can be pronounced as a word), it's not an acronym.

It's probably related to how people seem to talk louder on video calls (and possibly phone calls). I never knew this until this year when my husband, my son and I all had work and school in the same room. My husband told me I yelled during Zoom meetings. I said, "So do you." Maybe we talk louder when we think people don't understand, without regard to whether or not that's because they can't hear us. To bring this back to peeves, I get peeved with myself when I feel I am talking too loudly in virtual meetings, but I find it very difficult to stop. Also, I alternate between feeling like I can't get a word in because everyone tries to talk at once (it's hard to see nonverbal cues when everyone is online not in person) and feeling like I'm talking too much. It's a fine line, and I feel like I don't find it enough.

I used to hear this a lot as a complaint about Americans (usually made by other Americans), but during various seasons of "The Amazing Race" I noticed that other nationalities do it also. It doesn't make it any less annoying, but it does make me feel better that it seems to be a (mostly) universal human reaction. Having been in other countries where I couldn't speak the language well, I'd say slowing down is more important than speaking loudly. I often have trouble separating spoken words in languages I've learned only a little of. It's a fine line between slowing down enough to maybe be understood and sounding as though you are talking to a 3-year-old, though.

We have one that started (I think) Nov. 1. That station does it every year. I'm not sure of the exact day because I don't drive a lot any more (I took up bicycling during work from home and now get to work that way) and because it's not a station I listen to a lot anyway. Now it's a station I actively avoid -- at least until after Thanksgiving.

They did call it an alliance in season 1, episode 2. When they were getting into their vehicles, Joe (of The Guidos) said, "I feel very comfortable with the three-part alliance ..." regarding the teaming up with Frank and Margarita and Rob and Brennan. It didn't last very long on anyone's part, but it was an alliance that at least one person called an alliance. @SVNBob is right, though: All alliance on The Amazing Race should be transitory and mutually beneficial. When teams forget the transitory part is when it gets sticky. Even if the one who spoke French has learned some Spanish, it's probably all stored in the same part of her brain if she learned both as an adult so when she tries to say something in a foreign language, she grabs at the first thing that comes up and says it even if it's not what she means to say. It probably happens even more under the stress of being in a hurry during the race. I don't know what season it was or what team (but it might have been the clowns from 4[?]), but I remember one racer telling his partner that "rapido" didn't mean "fast" in every language. I think they were in South Korea at the time.

I think they did last time. I may be wrong, though. It's been a while.

I think you're right, that people have always been that way, just not so visible, but I think people didn't use to talk about politics and other divisive subjects even with their actual friends and neighbors so much. I think it might have been possible not to know the opinions of your friends and neighbors. As I was a kid, though, I don't know what the adults did talk about on the summer evenings when they gathered in a neighborhood driveway. We were all too busy playing games.

I've been rewatching season 1 and just finished the episode in India in which the ticket seller at the train station would not sell tickets to Nancy and Emily because they were women. They were asking men in the station to help them, and then somehow they had tickets. I may have missed exactly how they got them, but I didn't see anyone buy the tickets for them. Does anyone know how they got tickets? (I wondered if at some point, the crew with them bought the tickets for them because they weren't going to get them any other way, they were so far behind already, and it was circumstances outside race control that made them unable to get tickets.) I googled it, but couldn't find any answers.

Freddy Mercury/Queen. No question. I love watching the Live Aid performance on YouTube.

Also, Smarties make a good quick Halloween costume. Just tape them to your pants. I'm tired of the wind. It's really not that windy (comparatively speaking probably -- it's not that windy for here), but the wind is strong enough that it keeps blowing Halloween decorations down the street. I'm going to have to try something different to keep them in the yard.

Except for that woman who your family thinks is your fiance but who you have never actually met.

Are these the tube packages with three Whoppers in them? I always squeeze below the top Whopper, pushing it up and out of the package. You do have to be careful where you are pointing the package when you do that, unless you don't care about picking up the Whopper off the floor and eating it anyway.

#1. I've always lived where we don't get much snow.

Unless it's a crime show, and the detectives have five minutes to stop the crime. Then it's password protected, but the computer geek detective will get the password with one minute left, and they'll still be able to stop the crime even though it's across town.

I love Arby's curly fries, but I have to have the honey mustard sauce to dip them in. I vaguely recall that KFC had potato wedges/fries, but I don't think I ever ate them. I always got mashed potatoes and gravy. I haven't eaten at a KFC in years, though, because I've known too many people who got food poisoning from the one here, and the one in my parents' town closed. (We wondered when it closed what people would do for food to take to families who had someone die. We had so much KFC after my father died that my mother froze some of it and (I think) eventually threw out some. It was good, and it was very thoughtful of people to bring food especially since the whole family was there for several days, but we did get a little tired of fried chicken.)

I still wouldn't like them a lot (in the sense that I would never wear them), but they'd be a lot better if they had any kind of support. I don't understand designer clothes that make women's breasts look saggy.

I think that outfit could have looked as good on that model as on anyone else (which in my opinion is not that great -- I don't care for it) if only the skirt fit her. I think it would have benefited from a wider waistband as well as one that was a touch bigger around so it didn't look like it was squeezing her too tight.

I vaguely remember one or two kids with the jacket, and there were a few girls with bits of Madonna's look, but just bits: mostly jewelry or hair, but toned down. No one would have been allowed to wear most of her look to school. The Coca-Cola shirts were the ones I was talking about when I said rugby shirts -- and others that had the stripes, but not the logo. Oh, yeah. Not that I ever had any, except for the hand-me-down Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I loved the fit, though. Mostly, I wanted Levis. But, from 1980:

I graduated high school in 1986. I remember a lot of guys wearing pastel polo shirts (including some who wore them layered, usually pink and turquoise) in the early to mid 80s with Levi 501 button-fly jeans. Also very popular were button-down shirts, particularly in vertical stripes. I remember having a few of those myself, in stripes and solids, and wearing them with sweaters and what we called baggy jeans. Baggy sweaters with a bigger knit were popular when I was in high school. And the Cosby sweaters were very popular in high school and college. In college, people also wore the striped rugby shirts. I was also fond of wearing my dad's old shirts with suspenders. No one else I knew dressed that way, but I liked the look. No one I knew really wore much new wave or punk or dressed like Madonna or Michael Jackson in real life. Those looks were for dress-up days during homecoming week. (Yes, my high school had a different theme for every day of homecoming week.)

That's how my wedding reception was -- in the church's fellowship hall. No alcohol. For that matter, no dinner. It was an afternoon wedding with cake, punch, mints and nuts. It was what some wedding book described as an uppity Baptist wedding: You serve those things, and everyone stands around talking to the people they came with. My mother made my dress, my maid of honor maid the bridesmaids' dresses (she was a good seamstress and volunteered), my mother-in-law made the cake, and a friend of my mother's asked to make the groom's cake. The biggest expenses were probably the flowers and the photography, and they weren't that expensive. Me, too. I graduated college in 1990 and got a job, as I had expected to do. All my friends also got jobs (or continued their education), and most of their mothers had jobs. I've known groups of women over the years who didn't have jobs but did a lot of volunteer work in the community. They were a much higher economic class than anybody I usually hung out with.

What if the person spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder?

When we needed to get rid of an old (heavy) TV that worked (sort of) but had a weird thing at the edges of the picture, we gave it to a college student who was willing to come pick it up. It would have cost us to take it to the recycling center or to have it picked up for the dump. At the end of the college year, though, the city has a weekend when they will pick up college students' furniture and electronics for free. Of course, sometimes you can get rid of stuff by setting it out by the curb, and someone will come along and decide it looks good and pick it up. (Possibly we have a lot of rednecks here.)

That's a peeve for me. We have virtual meetings once a week. Every time the same woman gets a call on her phone or her grandson pops over to tell her something, and she has a conversation on the phone or with her grandson every time without muting herself. And the host of the meeting apparently doesn't notice and doesn't mute her (or possibly doesn't know how to mute her).

I'm pretty sure that the change in my sofa is from my son trying to do magic tricks and not picking up after himself.

I can make myself say "on" differently, but I can also hear myself saying "on" and sounding the same as "awen" (where "awen" is one syllable, not aw-en). I also don't hear a difference in Mary, merry and marry. You may, but I don't. If I try, I'll pronounce pen different than pin, but only if I try. If I'm not thinking about it, they sound the same. The same is true for our and are. I know the difference, but in casual conversation, our becomes are. The peeve for me, as it probably is with everyone else, is people telling me I'm wrong because I don't pronounce those words they way they do. I'm willing to let them pronounce things differently; why can't they let me do the same? Heck, I don't even correct people who mispronounce my name any more even though almost everyone outside my family does.