Caoimhe

I have a lot of “stuff” for sewing and crafts. I’ve made it clear to my husband that if I die first he has my blessing to chuck it all in a skip and have it hauled away. There is enough to deal with losing a spouse without suffering guilt over finding people / places willing to take all the crap and dealing with all the hassle of distributing it. I’m very lucky that he doesn’t collect things the way I do!

My husband outsources that task to me. He walks away and says to let him know when it’s time to be shown which buttons to push to operate it.

My first Discworld book was Going Postal nearly twenty years ago. While I enjoyed The Color of Magic (and loved the video adaptation with David Jason) the ones I reread most often are the City Watch and Witches books. I still have a few that I haven’t read including the Tiffany Aching books, and have been collecting the audiobook versions when there’s a sale on.

Absolutely! But my husband plays golf with people who have found as time goes on that they (or their partners) don’t want to make the trip, don’t want to be away from new grandchildren, or have health issues that make it difficult to travel or be away for months. Plus as @shapeshifter said it’s a lifestyle that not everyone can afford. Husband has mentioned going “home” for the winter. Except that while “home” might not normally see snow the winter is comprised of soul-sucking darkness accompanied by constantly damp and chilly weather. On balance I’ll keep the somewhat longer and brighter days with the snow rather than the darkness I have always struggled with.

I've decided there is nowhere on earth to live that I'd be comfortable year round. I love the summers in New England (spring is nice and early autumn is acceptable) but there aren't bad enough words for how much I despise November through March/April.

Same here, that’s brown bread to me (except I don’t use oats in mine). The soda bread I grew up with was made without all the wheat bran / germ and other grains, it could be whole wheat flour more often it was made with white flour.

Delia Smith’s was one of my go-to cookbooks. I had it out recently to do a lamb tagine!

I try not to eat bread any more but my old brown bread recipe uses whole wheat flour along with added wheat bran and wheat germ to give it the right texture. I’ve made it here in the past and it’s a decent substitute. (I did succumb to the McCambridge brown bread on the flight back here last month! My husband doesn’t like it so I got his slice too.) I only bake scones once a year or so. One thing I really miss are the packs of assorted smoked fish that I always used to make a seafood pasta. There just isn’t the same sort of thing here. I have made seafood chowder but these days I just don’t cook enough to bother with it.

That’s what is served to American tourists. There is such a thing as spiced beef but it’s not all that popular, I think I only had it once in my life!

There aren’t that many decent foods to make! Aside from when the family sends us a breakfast box (rashers, proper sausages, black and white pudding, brown bread) we eat the same stuff here that we did back home. I might bake some brown bread or scones once in a while but that’s about it.

Tourtière filling stuffed into a turkey and roasted. Heavenly.

Holidays and grief. Thanksgiving this year is going to be sad, it was the last holiday we had with my brother. He insisted on cooking a whole turkey and even managed to carve it though he wasn’t able to eat any. My sister-in-law is talking about having something simple and not a lot of food which I’m completely on board with, I offered to have it at our house but she prefers to have it at hers. It’s tough so whatever she decides she wants to do I’ll just say yes.

I ironed shirts until my husband took early retirement but they weren’t the no-iron sort! The $200 iron is apparently very popular with quilters but I’m not convinced it’s worth it. I’ll stick with my $25 iron since I have ruined several and at that price I don’t feel guilty. On the other hand computers are where I’m happy to spend a bit extra because I use them so much. I installed a 8TB hard drive in my desktop PC last year just for my media files. I should probably delete some of it but the drive wasn’t that expensive so I’ll just continue my digital hoarding 😁.

I never iron clothing unless I’m making it, quilts are my hobby. I was motivated to look up irons just now and there’s one that has a 30 minute shutoff which is three times longer than my current annoying one! The downsides are that it costs $200 and has a weird system where it rises up when your hand comes off the handle. I’m not sure that would be easy to get used to. But for the moment my sewing machine had to go back to the manufacturing company for repairs so an iron is the least of my current concerns!

I have three right now and none are as good as the Rowenta and TFal I left behind when I moved. Both had NO auto shutoff, the best I can get here is 10 minutes sewing time before the iron gets cold and I have to wait for it to heat up again. I have a small one I can use to fuse things inside an embroidery hoop and a cordless one that just doesn’t seem to get hot enough.

That sounds delicious to me! Unfortunately my husband hates both sauerkraut and pork (unless it’s ham or bacon) so I wouldn’t even attempt it. Finding a decent sauerkraut isn’t easy though, every time I find somewhere that has a good one they stop carrying it.

My husband had side effects from the shingles vaccine but I had none! I had flu and covid vaccines together last year and wasn’t too bad so I’ll do it again this year.

This is why I hope I never need the surgery, right now I can thread tiny needles easily and stitch anything with my glasses off. I feel like I’d have to give up sewing because I would be infinitely frustrated after losing my close-up vision.

Yes. Besides what Safari offers I have another app that used to be fantastic at wiping out all the garbage Facebook inserts into their website (I don’t use their app). Of course they found a way to get around it and now I only look at “my groups” or search for particular family members if I want to see what they’ve posted because there’s a ridiculous amount of trash that appears otherwise.

I know someone who got married on the day there was a big playoff game. As both the bride and groom were huge fans of this team they arranged for it to be shown at the reception (apparently it was playoffs and when they chose the date they had no idea if this team would be in them). It’s still talked about as one of the best weddings ever among their friend group!

My wedding felt like it was never going to end. I wanted a civil service but my husband, his family, and my mother wanted all the Catholic stuff so I was basically forced into it. Let’s just say that while it’s been a happy marriage the ceremony was nothing short of an ordeal for me and I do NOT remember it fondly AT ALL.

I agree, we’re traveling again so I need either the adapter or a pair of usb-c EarPods. I really wish that they would include them (as well as a charging cable) this year because of changing the charging port. Then again this is Apple so “we didn’t raise the phone price but you will need to buy these accessories”. I will only use my older AirPods outdoors because the battery life has declined to the point I won’t be upset if I lose them. The newer ones stay in the house.

It couldn’t have been worse than Apple’s site. When the store came back up the app couldn’t find my saved order information, it took 25 minutes for my MacBook to get access to the store and then it finally went through. There was no pickup option for me but I was lucky because half an hour later the phone I ordered was shipping in November. I hate losing the physical sim slot but my last phone still has one and I’m keeping it since my Irish phone provider has said they would offer esim in 2020/2021/2022/2023 and I expect shortly it will change to “coming in 2024”.

A cousin back home died recently and her funeral was live streamed. With the time difference we didn’t get up to watch, but it’s the first time I’ve seen this.

Mine is behaving mostly okay, battery is struggling, but I’m hoping for an 11” OLED screen next year. Whenever they’ve announced new iPads there haven’t been enough improvements over my 5 year old (working) device to convince me. Last time I changed my phone it was simple to transfer everything to the new one, I just started the transfer and left them next to each other for a few hours.