isalicat
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Posts posted by isalicat
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3 hours ago, Blergh said:
Today May 5th is celebrated in Mexico (and Mexican restaurants outside that nation) as their National Holiday.
Frankly, not so much in Mexico at all. Cinco de Mayo is primarily celebrated in the U.S. southwest, as it is not the national day of Mexico's independence (that is September 16th) and is not a national holiday in Mexico.
The small-time Mexican holiday was promoted heavily in the United States in the 1960s by activists who, in part, “identified with the victory of Indigenous Mexicans (such as Juárez) over European invaders during the Battle of Puebla,” History.com says.
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For those of you, like me, that love a good mystery - I just finished the first in a series of three novels by the Icelandic author Lilja Sigurdardottir - this one is called Cold As Ice (the next one is Red as Blood and the last one is White as Snow). Incredibly well written and twisty tale of a young woman who pursues financial criminals as her career and has traveled back to her home country of Iceland to find her missing, estranged sister. This is not cozy (I've never found a Nordic mystery that is) but not terribly gruesome and exceptionally engrossing.
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Just to share some good news! Had my diagnostic MRI last week (I had breast cancer, diagnosed in October of 2022, followed by a lumpectomy in November 2022 which was not entirely successful so then a full mastectomy in January 2023 of the right breast) and I'm still cancer free!! I am not sure if that feeling of dread about the test results will ever go away but the feeling of relief that they did not find anything is quite wonderful. Finished my herceptin infusions a few weeks ago so now going on some sort of anti-hormonal pills for the next ten years (or not...my doc has assured me if I don't like the side effects, I can just quit them anytime - he is so understanding with my position that its my body, my decision on everything, which is why I successfully nixed chemo without much argument). I've named my port Brad and my fake breast (not an implant...its one of those that fits in a special bra) is Barbara, and they are now in a cozy relationship, so I've opted to keep Brad and just need to get him flushed out every 8 weeks, which is no biggie. 😸
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1 hour ago, topanga said:
I watched the movie after watching the series, and I didn't enjoy it as much. Of course there isn't as much time for character development in a 2-hour film vs. an 8-episode series, but I definitely liked the tv series more.
I would agree with you as far as "The Gentlemen" the movie vs. the tv series goes. On the other hand, "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" has it all, as far as I am concerned...give it a try!
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7 hours ago, shapeshifter said:
Although social media exposes children to horrible stuff, at least they are less likely to be physically harmed by other children when none of them are supervised.
Uh no....I respectfully and entirely disagree! First of all, social media encourages on line bullying, which is far more harmful than physical bullying, since it never stops (it follows the bullied kid home from school, so they never have a break or safe place - thus the spate of adolescent suicides), and social media also teaches bullies new ways to torment their victims they would have never thought of on their own. I am convinced, from my own experience as a parent and from observation, that giving smart phones or any access to the internet for those under 10 should be considered child abuse, and for those over 10 it should be very, very strictly monitored and limited to educational needs only until the kid is 18 (or off to college, whichever comes first). Worked with my son, who was physically bullied in middle school but at least spared the other stuff.
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18 hours ago, Cloud9Shopper said:
So, for those of you who have been there, and don’t have the option to just quit, how have you managed in the meantime? I just don’t know how much longer I can keep going like I am.
Well, I think each time I have felt "at the end of my rope" I considered the alternative: not being able to pay rent/mortgage, not being able to buy food, etc. etc. - ultimately as a self-supporting adult you just have to suck it up, or throw yourself on the mercy of others (which isn't always possible and certainly, unless in case of emergency, not very desirable). I think it is crucially important in life to have sources of joy and refreshment outside work - you have mentioned in other threads singing in your church choir, which for me was a great place of nourishment; it seems like that is wearing on you as well. Perhaps you need to take up a new hobby or find something like hiking or swimming or something else physical that takes you "out of your head" - I also like to put on some really loud EDM and throw myself around the living room to get the cobwebs out. Inner fortitude is something you are going to have to find for yourself but it is the final stage in growing up, really.
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4 hours ago, PRgal said:
I need to take my son to Disney. I don't want him to be like me, and didn't have a Disney experience until the age of 12 (almost 13)! Only question is whether to do the theme park or a cruise...
Theme park!! Nothing against cruising (I'm getting ready to plan my second cruise next summer) but there is nothing like having this huge adventurous park to explore with all the rides and the characters to meet! Take at least two days so you won't mind the lines so much and can go back on the second day to stuff he loved.
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On 4/29/2024 at 3:14 PM, Cloud9Shopper said:
Honestly, if he just made copies of everything ahead of time, handed them out before practice, and people would keep their binders organized…maybe it wouldn’t all feel so frenetic. I hate that I have to sit there and be annoyed because other people can’t keep it together and he never has the copies made that he needs and it’s a constant up and down to hand stuff out and check binders.
Why not channel your annoyance into action? Volunteer to help! Ask the choir director how you can assist to get copies made, music handed out at the beginning of practice and who within the choir could use a little TLC to keep their binders organized. Consider it part of your ministry (as choir is a highly valued ministry at most churches!) and earn some more gold stars on your crown in heaven? I took over handing out music and putting away music almost immediately in my church choir when I joined 12 years ago and it lets my choir director concentrate on coaching specific bits of music without having to deal with yet one more thing...
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Lets make this perfectly clear! There is only ONE team in London! ⚽😺
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7 hours ago, Bastet said:
Exactly. I, on the other hand, hate the Dallas Cowboys with every fiber of my being, as nature intended.
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.
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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!! 😸
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18 minutes ago, annzeepark914 said:
I love landlines. Almost everyone who calls me on cellphones sounds like they're in a cave, or in an echo chamber, or holding a hand over the mouth. They all have different brands. We have caller ID and use the NoMoRobo call service. So the spam calls usually ring once. Occasionally we get a spam call that rings the 4 times before voice mail picks up. They hang up by the 4th ring. Jerks. What kind of lowlifes make these calls?
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!
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7 minutes ago, partofme said:
I’ve managed to get interviews without my graduation date on my resume. Getting hired is another story.
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.
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16 hours ago, Yeah No said:
I've also seen applications where they make you tell them the years you attended college or whatever schools you've put down, which pretty much gives away your age. And again, there was no way to leave it blank and move on to the next question.
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 😿
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1 hour ago, chessiegal said:
I didn't feel like cooking the other day, so picked up a rotisserie chicken. There was enough chicken left over to make chicken noodle soup, so that's what we're having for dinner tonight. It made huge pot, so I'll freeze some.
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.
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On 4/14/2024 at 9:43 PM, ECM1231 said:
@isalicat, what a pioneer woman! 👏
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. 😺
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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.
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On 4/11/2024 at 7:18 AM, Yeah No said:
I had that happen a few times either after interviewing or just submitting an application. It always pissed me off because I would see the same jobs posted over and over again, so they were rejecting everyone on a continual basis. WTF were they looking for? I had all the qualifications and then some. Of course I was also over 60 when this happened, so that didn't help.
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.
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1 hour ago, Bookish Jen said:
Ugh. I'm so pissed. My rent is going up again. And no, this won't include any improvements to my place. If I asked to get some updates to my kitchen (everything is so old), my rent would jacked up even higher.
Rent has gotten ridiculous in my neighborhood. I even saw a studio for rent for over $2000 per month, in Milwaukee. WTF?
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!
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6 hours ago, PRgal said:
It's to the point that they stress me out, but I can't end our several times a week family dinners (they live in the same building and will eat with us).
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?
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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!
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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.
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14 hours ago, Yeah No said:
Age discrimination is a real thing, especially for women. Don't let anyone tell you it isn't. I've had friends that work in HR tell me that!
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.
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4 hours ago, EtheltoTillie said:
I did not feel it on the Upper West Side, but many neighbors did and friends all around town.
@Bastet probably laughing at us
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.
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A Case Of The Mondays: Vent Your Work Spleen Here
in Everything Else
Ahem: a "headhunter" is a professional recruiter that works (either on contingency or for an agreed-upon fee, or sometimes both) on behalf of a client company to find perfect candidates for a particular, usually hard to fill, opening. Headhunters do NOT help people find jobs as rule, except as a rare favor, and then the best they can do for you would be to keep you in mind within their area of recruitment (i.e. I was a technical recruiter, so I would be no good to people in the legal field for example, as I recruited only scientists and engineers). If you are looking for a job and need help, you go to an employment agency and generally pay a fee up front for them to help you search. In my experience employment agencies are great for finding temp jobs and terrible for perm jobs, particularly for anything professional (non clerical). And your fee is also generally non-refundable so if they can't or don't help you, too bad.
To be honest, as a headhunter for 38 years, I considered that my time = $$, and the source of money was the hiring company, so I gave time to people looking for jobs only if they were a good prospect for one of my client companies. There are less and less headhunters and employment agencies out there since the internet has replaced a lot of those functions (see: LinkedIn and Indeed).