isalicat

Lets make this perfectly clear! There is only ONE team in London! ⚽😺

Yes, this is the way I feel about the L.A. Dodgers (I'm a lifelong SF Giants/Warriors fan so my hate extends to the Lakers as well and is further fueled by LeBron joining them...). Its just one of those impenetrable realities of life - regional sports rivalries are the most fraught and passionate, if you care at all.

Back on top of the league, for the moment...a nice little display against the Wolves and its always good to see Chelsea lose (even to ManShitty). There is only one team in London!! 😸

To answer your last question: That is a robot call - they are set to hang up after several rings and go on to the next number in the list. It is not a live person (a live person only comes on spam calls if an actual human answers). Don't answer!

Yes, its not an absolute (the person initially reviewing your resume may not think it is important if you have all the "other stuff" the company wants, or may have not even noticed there was no date...) but in my experience the people I knew that did this, got an interview and went in clearly being, say over 50 years old (this was pre-Covid when interviews actually happened in person *all the time*) was given very short shrift, as they say. That is why I tell people to forge a consulting career or self employment if they get laid off after a certain age - its just such an uphill battle to get hired permanently, even if you know you have another 10-15 years of full effort to give.

And frankly, if you leave that information (your degree dates) off your resume, the person reviewing your resume is most likely going to immediately "roundfile" it (i.e. throw it in the trash). During the last big recession, when I was still headhunting full time, a lot of my candidates were leaving that off in order to "conceal" the fact that they were over 40 (or over 50 in many cases)...its a red flag unfortunately and its best to just be forthcoming and trust that if a company is going to discriminate up front against middle aged potential employees, then you don't want to work there anyways. Yes, it will eliminate you from consideration at a lot of places (tech companies are notorious in this regard) but from what I can tell, just sending out resumes is really not working for most people these days - you have to get some sort of inside contact going and worm your way to the hiring manager or a decision maker directly. It is clearly very discouraging outside service jobs right now 😿

I get a rotisserie chicken from my go-to market about every three weeks - there is enough for three dinners plus two lunches (there is just me at my house) at $8.98 and they are delicious! Saves me so much time and effort on the nights I have rehearsals and its really very economical given the price of everything else.

Yes, that is what I felt like at the time - quite indomitable! I could not do that again now for all sorts of reasons (the digging out to the wood shed every few hours all day and having to get up every two-three hours every night to put another log in the wood stove was a bit hard even then - 12 years ago) but at the time I realized how little you really need to sustain yourself and why actual printed books were and still are my primary entertainment resource. And a cat...having my big tom as company also was invaluable. 😺

I was snowed in by myself for five days many years ago; my husband was out of town and no one anticipated that it would snow five feet in three days and take down all the power lines. Since I was on a well (this is in the mountains) no running water either (besides losing power for lights and heat, you lose your well pump!), but I had the best wood stove and lots of food in the fridge (that went out in a cooler in the enclosed unheated porch) and freezer (out in the snow!) so I melted snow for water and washing, cooked on the stove and dug like crazy to keep the tunnel to the woodshed open enough to go get wood. Read and did cross words by candlelight and stove light with my cat on my lap. Other than really wanting a shower after the second day and yes, flush toilets are really best, I was really enjoying myself. You can take away everything but books I haven't read yet and pretty soon I won't miss whatever at all.

Or they had an internal candidate that they were ready to move into the role or promote into the role, and needed to interview outside candidates to justify the internal transfer/promotion....or there were personal characteristics that are not in the job description that they were looking for that you don't have...there are lots of potential explanations. Or they have not approved the budget that includes the salary for this position, but if they get a candidate that is truly a perfect fit, the hiring manager will use that to "go to bat" to fund the job. All these things happened with candidates of mine when I was a headhunter so I know the possible explanations in this situation are more than you might imagine.

I feel ya! Rent is so expensive here in coastal central California that you now need to make about $50. an hour to afford a basic one bedroom....The house next door to me is two bedrooms and one bathroom and no pets allowed: it goes for $2400 per month! (no I don't live right next to the beach or anything...about a mile away from the surf). There is a major university nearby (Cal Poly SLO) and they are having a really hard time recruiting new faculty because the incoming people can't afford to rent or buy a house, despite quite reasonable salaries, academically speaking. And they wonder why people are leaving California in droves!

Why can't you end eating with your parents several times a week? Do you know anyone else who does this? If it is stressing you out, they are interfering with your parenting decisions and influencing your son to think wrongly about what he can and cannot eat (and anyone with any teeth can eat carrots, for God's sake!), then just tell them its not working out to continue this situation and scale back to one or zero dinners a week with them. Seriously - you are going to teach your child that being a grown up includes being bullied by one's parents in addition to possibly gestating food disorders down the line for him with the tension around food at your dinner table. Protect yourself and your OWN family (son, husband) first. You don't need this - life is full of obstacles we can't anticipate, so why endure that which we can change?

Well thank you Salah for the equalizer in the Man U/Liverpool game....so Arsenal (due to goal differential) is still top of the league!! Go you Gunners!

Well I agree with many here that ultimately this series was pretty awful, although I was willing to watch it to the end, so clearly something was holding my attention. By the fifth episode I was playing a game of "what does this remind me of?" in reference to all the significantly better versions of some of the plot points and such. Do you remember "V"? My favorite take on anything involving aliens invading earth is the classic Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man" from the story by Damon Knight - that really scared me back in the day. 400 years away plus here right now all at once is a bridge too far - I won't come back for series 2 if there is one.

Age discrimination has nothing to do with whether you are a man or a woman, in my experience in being part of the hiring business for 40 years, unless you are a woman in a business that has to do with appearance (cosmetics, fashion, etc.). Its all about the younger managers feeling psychologically uncomfortable with being able to successfully direct people with significantly more experience in their field than they have, and the perception that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". The latter is unfortunately often true (I think we have all been part of a situation where people in a role for a long time say stuff like "well, we've always done it that way and its worked for us so...."). There are some great (software driven) assessment tools now out on the market that can vet potential employees and their potential hiring managers for these difficulties in advance and mitigate these often unwarranted assumptions through technology. But if you are over 50 and definitely need to keep working, you do yourself a favor by constantly expanding your skill set and always have a second or third option in your "tool kit" for which people might pay you. And again, let me reiterate that the multiplicity of interviews now required are a direct result of our very litigious culture here in the U.S. - once you make a permanent hire, firing that person "for cause" often opens a firm up for a lawsuit, no matter how specious. And even if the person let go doesn't sue, its very expensive to go through the interviewing process and "on board" people, so companies are influenced by their financial people to *make sure* they have the right person (like that is an absolute possibility) before extending an offer.

Well if Bastet isn't, I am 😸. Born in Cali and I've been through two really big quakes (one when I was in high school that wrecked some freeway overpasses and caused some apartment buildings to collapse, and the big one in the Bay Area in 1989 - the Loma Prieta quake - 6.9 on the Richter - while I was at the World Series baseball game (yes, really!). So your little NY shaker is probably disconcerting but compared to what the people in Taiwan just went through...not a big deal. Stay safe! and make sure stuff is never able to fall on your head.

You guys are so funny! (The commentators on this thread, I mean) I've been reading science fiction for literally 6 decades, starting as a young child in the 1960s with Heinlein, Asimov and then Bradbury...and I love it to this day. But of course this series (and I presume the book behind it) is ridiculous from a scientific perspective. Yet it fits right into the tradition of "aliens invade Earth" that is a mainstay of scifi. I'm entertained by the current show but I'm not expecting anything revelatory. Wanna read a great scifi book? Try "Embassytown" by China Mieville.

Yup, this is why I qualified my recommendations depending on one's health and well being. However! Once you can't get around easily there are still lots of things you can do - if you can get out at all, tutoring kids (or even adults that are learning English as a second language or learning to read, for instance) is still possible, or they can come to you if conducive. Once you get to the point where you can't get out or don't want people that you don't know coming in, you can still write letters to members of our armed forces serving abroad (you can Google this - it is tremendously appreciated) or send greeting cards of the season with a personal encouraging note to people living in care homes that don't get any mail. There are endless ways to be of service to others in this life and my aim is to do something each and every day until my last breath. 😸

If you are still reasonably mobile and in decent health, this is your time to "give back"! And it will be more fulfilling than you can imagine! Go volunteer at a local food bank/pantry (either to stock the shelves or fill bags), go volunteer to tutor local kids that can't afford private tutoring (contact your local elementary for more info), go to your local library and sign up to read to kids or help kids read or do homework after school, go to your local animal shelter and walk the dogs or hang out with the cats to keep them socialized, and definitely not least, go to your local care home and adopt someone who never gets any visitors and show up regularly to just hold their hand and listen...or read to them if they prefer...the opportunities are endless.

So, so sorry - I wish I could give you a hug and some sympathy tears simultaneously. But 20+ years old means he had a good long life that is the main thing on which to focus. You'll see him again some day on the other side of that bridge...and he'll be purring up a storm.

Well now you will have the pleasure of watching "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" which is the Guy Ritchie movie that sort of defines this whole genre. It is remarkably good - some would say even better than anything he has done since...there is a good sequel too.

Yeah, I saw the movie some years ago (I think right after it came out because I'm a big Guy Ritchie fan) and thought it was too short! So I was really glad to see this version as well. I do recommend them both though the movie cast is hard to beat.

I eat a late breakfast when I can...often around lunchtime actually if the cats let me sleep in...but then I have breakfast food because I love breakfast (scrambled eggs with lots of cheese, or fried eggs with two-three strips of lowered sodium bacon...) and skip lunch, or just have a simple salad mid afternoon. Those days I only eat breakfast and dinner I am guaranteed to lose weight so its my easy go to when I gain an unneeded pound or two these days 😺

Yes! only though, in my opinion, if you are going to finish the whole stew the day/night you cook it. Squash gets too soft/mushy (at least the kind I would use - something without tremendous flavor, like butternut or whatever that yellow type is called) in reheating, whereas turnips, like potatoes, are starchy enough to stay as distinct chunks or cubes or whatever. Stew is so lovely for playing add and subtract with...I experiment with herbs a lot and also using different kinds of wine.

Unfortunately I am still entirely unimpressed by this Trina and find her devotion to the currently absent Spencer (of course he is not really dead, he'll be feeling much better whenever the writers need the character back) truly boring. The OG Trina had spark and tenacity and would not be moping around like this; she might be furious at the loss of her "great romance" but not to the extent of abandoning all her personal goals or drifting from place to place getting sympathy from all and sundry. Send her back to Paris or find another way to write this character out for good - she has no purpose really as she is currently, IMO.