Caoimhe

Not to mention that people who post these things were a lot younger then! I can look back fondly on the 1970s and 1980s but I was young enough not to worry about most of the bad news stories. I still wouldn’t give up today’s conveniences to go back.

I’ve no idea how or why I had it but went on holiday with Barchester Towers (in the early 1980s) and still remember how I laughed and enjoyed reading it. I went on to read the entire Barsetshire series and the Palliser books as well. I’ve seen the television adaptations of both but always go back to the books and audiobooks. At the moment I’m listening to The Way We Live Now audiobook and have He Knew He Was Right up next when I finish that.

This is what my parents did. (My siblings weren’t unhelpful but regularly asked them for money.) Every time I came to visit they paid for many things and when I objected they would say it was to make things a bit more even.

I once pushed back asking what “potential” this was and how they determined that I was not working up to it. Never got an answer.

Mine’s going to say “never worked to her potential”.

In my younger days I never left the house without foundation, mascara, eye shadow, eyeliner, and sometimes lipstick. Always wore nail polish too. I even started coloring my hair for a short while in my 40s when I saw a few little grey bits. (I stopped before 50 since my mother said she regretted having to go in to get hers touched up and wished she’d never started.) Now in my 60s I don’t do any of it, I think the last time I had makeup on was my niece’s wedding in 2018. As for haircuts the hairdresser I knew and liked retired just before Covid so I never found another. Right now it’s the perfect length where I can pull it up and clip it out of the way so this is how it will stay. I have my hair cutting scissors and little clips so I’ll trim when it gets longer, I used to do a shorter cut but would spend the following month trimming little sections that I didn’t think were even so this time I just let it grow out to where I can cut it in front of my face! Things have been weird around here. We always talked about having apartments in the US and Ireland so we could move between them as we liked. Recently a beautiful three bed condo in a secure building came up for sale, many of the residents travel quite a lot so it would have been perfect. We were ready to put an offer in and the next morning my husband asked if we’d made the offer in a really odd voice. I told him no, our realtor told me we should sleep on it. It turns out that now he doesn’t want to give up our current house. He says now he’s recovered from all his health issues this year he can handle the outside work. Which is great of course, but you can’t walk away from a house in New England for multiple months at a time so I told him this means no apartment near his family. (My family are all dead so it matters less to me.) I feel like he’s changed the goal posts, but one of the things I need to work on is just going with the flow until there is a need to change something. I always feel like I need to limit risk and control things so I’m just afraid we’ll have another year where he can’t do the work and I’ll be in panic mode again. He calmly says we’ll deal with it if it happens. I need someone to make a pill that will shut my brain up!

never mind!

The combo machines ARE terrible, at least the ones I’ve used. As soon as we had a house where we could put them in a utility room and not in the kitchen I celebrated! I’ve never lived without drying racks in the house until we lived in the US.

I see an overlocker very like my Brother 1034D in the background! That’s a great solution for the ironing board.

It was also a good way to jump the queue and get a table sooner if you asked for smoking!

I prefer cooking with grams / milliliters and measuring ingredients on my food scale rather than using measuring cups. I can convert oven temperatures easily enough too but that’s the limit of my metric. Weight (ugh) I still think in stone / pounds or just pounds, height in feet and inches. Everything to do with sewing and quilting is all inches, feet, and yards but my embroidery machine does metric so I have to swap back and forth between them to see if what I want to embroider will fit. I think we figure out what we need to as it becomes useful!

Adestes Fideles is one of those that I always remember being in Latin! We had to pray at the start of the school day but that was it (other than religion class, especially in communion and confirmation years). After escaping religious education in my teen years I was happy to check the “no religion” box in the census and my views haven’t changed.

Neither my husband’s nor my family ever had a prayer of any sort before a meal even when we were children. None of our friends did either (though we were marched off to mass every Sunday). My husband eventually got out of the long Good Friday service by being ill (he didn’t fake it either) so they let him skip that one going forward!

My husband does this too. Earlier this year he had a minor surgery and was still a bit out of it when the nurse offered him a snack. He ate a NutriGrain bar and I could see him reaching for the empty wrapper just as the nurse came in and picked it up. I couldn’t stop laughing because I just KNEW he wanted to tie it up the way he does at home.

The former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was pronounced that way. Facebook has been destroyed there is so much “suggested” trash there now that I tend to bookmark my Groups page (sewing/quilting/crafts) and go to that instead. Often with my FB friends I have to search their name if I want to see what they’ve posted recently. I’m trying to get past the hurt seeing photos of events posted that I wasn’t even invited to, I’m just very weird because if I *was* invited I’d be stressed about it and not want to attend anyway. Maybe I feel like I “should” want to be more social? I’ve often said that if mental health diagnoses had been a thing when I was young I’m sure I would have one. I don’t really have friends and one thing that struck me in the NYT article was the woman who posted about having no one to call in an emergency. It’s one of the huge battles in my brain about “where should we live”. We’re very fortunate to have a choice, I know that no place is perfect, but the anxiety is always there. My husband would be happier leaving here and moving back but doesn’t believe I’ll settle back in well - and he is most likely right about that. I would really miss the happiness of warm sunny summers. There have been a lot of moves in my life as well (14 schools over 12 years) and bullying in my teen years that still affects me so I understand some of where you’re coming from. I don’t expect I will ever figure it out, but at my age it’s less important so I just concentrate on the present moment and try to let the rest go.

Husband has been watching the ladies’ golf this weekend. There’s a young amateur playing whose first name is Asterisk, I thought at first they were saying that as noting she was playing as an amateur. No, her name IS Asterisk. It makes me wonder what her parents’ thought process was!

Because I’m already so deep into Apple’s ecosystem I’ve purchased the “box sets” of some shows I love to watch over and over again. We’ve also bought some shows from Amazon’s Prime Video because the only other option was subscribing to a streaming service my husband didn’t want (though when we got to the end of one series the videos are ONLY on streaming so I ended up buying the DVDs).

Years ago I remember watching Olympic figure skating on Eurosport. They showed EVERY skater who was there. There wasn’t all the “fluff” about the skaters’ lives off the ice and whoever was doing the commentary didn’t constantly chat to each other. American coverage was a rude shock, I gave up watching entirely.

I did too, but in IT. We went from “terminals” that connected to the mainframe to eventually have PCs on our desks. The department secretary had one of those Wang terminals! Tech is where I admit I overbuy. If my embroidery/sewing/quilting programs would run on MacOS I probably wouldn’t have a Windows machine any more but I found BootCamp and Parallels didn’t run them very smoothly so decided a big Windows desktop was the answer. I like the towers because I can easily swap out the drives when I need more space and my 32” monitor is good for digitizing embroidery designs. In fact my five year old MacBook really needs replacing but it will have to wait because I’ve just upgraded my six year old iPad!

I couldn’t stop thinking that it’s been ten years since I had a mother. Then I saw photos of my aunt surrounded by my cousins AND my late sibling’s partner. While I am happy that they’re considered part of my aunt’s family it makes me cry that I’m ignored. My husband hasn’t been well and I feel like I’m totally alone in the world except for him, with the rest of my family gone I just can’t figure out why I’m still here. Anyway it was a bad day and I’m glad it’s behind me for another year.

I even know all the lyrics to sing along to it. That and Lunatic Fringe were played regularly in the middle of the night when I was young and turned my radio on because I couldn’t sleep. My favourite novelty song though is Star Trekkin!

I didn’t even know it was being filmed, started reading these a long time ago so I’m looking forward to this!

My smart watch finds my phone for me! One of its most used functions sad to say.

I’m the same. I have a number of watches including two really beautiful expensive ones but all I wear any more is my Apple Watch. Edited to add: I have a Swarovski crystal surround and bling-y strap on it but it’s still a big clunky smart watch

If Ireland had a half-decent climate we’d probably have moved back by now. At the moment most of our family members are in Spain, Italy, and Malta escaping to warmth and sunshine!