isalicat

My brand of Christianity follows the example of St. Francis on this issue: "Preach the Gospel always, and when necessary, use words." (i.e. words are rarely necessary if you are actually living the Good News)

I know I am a "broken record" here...but if you like sci fi, try "Embassytown" by China Mieville. Its not 800 pages! and its a great sci fi story about a woman who returns to her home planet which is actually the planet of a alien species who have very specific "language requirements" (I won't say more for fear of spoiling it) and the humans are tolerated as guests...until. I thought it was brilliant, both as a great sci fi work and as a meditation on the nature of language itself.

Unfortunately although I am capable of taking advantage of the extra hour, my cats "take after" you - their time for breakfast has nothing to do with what the clock says. 😺

This is now my schedule as I still have one breast left (the left one!). So a bit of angst every six months but I can take it. No gynecological stuff though as I had all my inside lady parts out 17 years ago due to fibroid tumors (figured I would have them take everything, and SO glad I did).

Klay! Mon Capitaine! WAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRIOORRRRRRS! Dray to Klay right after Klay's winning shot: "I'm always looking for you!" 😍

So its Agatha Raisin in the Orkneys? Plus Posh? 😸

I hereby bequeath my lifetime allotment of all manufactured candy bars to you all. I only like plain dark chocolate (preferably 70% cacao) and nowadays gravitate to the kind that is eco-friendly when I buy it at all. When I was a kid, frozen Three Musketeers bars were the bomb and I had a ritual around eating candy corn (bite off the white part, then the bottom yellow part and then you eat the orange center), but nowadays anything with corn syrup tastes too sweet to me and since I am quite vain, I follow Kate Moss' edict ("nothing tastes as good as skinny feels") within reason (because fanaticism is boring).

Oy vey. 😸

Okay I know "curiosity killed the cat" (well not any cat I've ever been around) but I need to know: What are "Chick Tracts"? (given the name, my mind immediately went to some sort of make up or hair styling instruction manual 😸, but I guess probably not...)

They freeze quite well. The pantry at which I work just had our 50th Anniversary celebration (50 years of feeding our neighbors in need!) and we got four giant boxes of crumbl cookies (the smaller size - in lemon, chocolate, and chocolate chip) for dessert. I found them much too sweet although textural and flavor-wise they were very good. We had so many left over we froze them, and then repackaged them a week later in groups of eight to give out to our clients for dessert. Everyone working had another one and they were just as good as before freezing. In my opinion, freshly home baked cookies with less sugar are better, particularly given the cost of crumbl!

Huh? How much is "too much"? I have lots of friends with Ph.D.s that don't think abstractly much at all (they are engineers and scientists, and very much grounded in physical reality). People are people, whatever their level of "book education" - many are incapable of common sense whether they have read a lot of books or not (see: my brother-in-law).

Yes, many shelters will not allow black cats to be adopted in the weeks just before Halloween because people take them for cruel reasons I won't elaborate. 😿

Just curious...why does this drive *you* crazy? I would let her do her...maybe there is a chameleon somewhere back in your family tree that you have not yet learned about? 😸

This is clearly *them*, not you. Happens due to rotation of the earth vis-a-vis the satellites that are transmitting...My husband was a beta tester for Dish when Dish first came on line so he used to explain these things to me...not that I understood 1/4 of it. 😸

My surgical oncologist moved out of town a few months ago, so now for follow up I am seeing a nurse-practitioner while they are searching for a replacement. Apparently it is incredibly difficult to attract doctors to my neck of the woods due to our housing prices; so you know its crazy expensive when even doctors can't afford to live here. My first mammogram since my mastectomy came back all clear last week so I am still doing the happy dance of joy. (Gals: silver lining to a mastectomy - your mammograms take half the time :) I have a separate, medical oncologist for everything else whom I see every three weeks after they do a blood draw and then he sends me on for my infusions (which I keep insisting are just H2O, given that I have experienced zero side effects despite being quizzed assiduously each and every time). This will go on until May with alternating MRIs and mammograms every 6 months. Bring it!! F**k cancer! (Get your mammograms!!)

Yeah, I'm doing mine about every 2 months - the water where I live is so hard that you pretty much have to use a dishwasher cleaner to get the lime residue out of the hoses or say adios to your dishwasher way before time.

Once upon a time, I was standing at a bus stop in San Francisco (by myself...it was in a neighborhood about mid-morning and no one else happened to be waiting for a bus at that time) and a guy about 18 or so walked by, and then came back and grabbed my right breast, and then walked away. I spun around and at the top of my lungs yelled "What the f..k, f...khead!", and then made as to pursue him. I am all of 4'11" and was then around 100 lbs. but I can be way fierce and he looked quite scared and start to run...HA! There was no one else around but it was pretty satisfying nonetheless. Another time I was walking to high school on a major L.A. boulevard and a guy (in a raincoat, how cliched) walked towards me and then opened his raincoat to expose his withered little man parts. I don't know what he expected, but I dissolved in laughter, and he quickly closed up the coat and skittered away. Apologies to any men persons on this forum, but really? What possesses you sometimes? 😸

I'd like to make a general comment, not directed at anyone posting here specifically, but just inspired by 40 years of being in the recruitment field (thus vetting resumes and interviewing people non-stop for what felt like a lifetime, because it was!). There are some things that factor in on decision making on the part of the hiring person or persons that aren't readily quantifiable or necessarily obvious to the applicant. One of them is a general sense of well-being and self possession, which is not something that comes from the job (unless your job is your vocation, which is unfortunately rare in life). People who are "comfortable in their own skin" and are not desperately looking for affirmation from others, or expressing entitlement or unhappiness either verbally or with their body language, are going to be perceived as much less "high maintenance" by a prospective employer. An example: If I interviewed someone who brought up company PTO policy right away, I took that as a real red flag that this person valued their time away from the job more than they were interested in doing the job (and that may have been unjust, because everyone deserves a life away from work, but there it is). As a hiring manager, you don't want to bring someone in these days unless you are *absolutely sure* they will be a "happy camper" because employment laws make it so difficult to get rid of permanent hires (thus the ever growing penchant for filling jobs with temps or contractors). This is also why internal candidates have such an advantage, because they are already vetted for their personality issues, unlike someone coming in from the outside. People who already have purpose and meaning in their lives are more confident and successfully communicative during a job interview process; you can just tell: by posture, by eye contact, by facial expression, by composure when you ask something they had not anticipated. Just some thoughts...

Being an old (I'm 67...so not very old, only somewhat old 😸 ), I kinda subscribed to that myself back in the day (as in, stick and stones...). If a guy was just blatantly rude and forward in a sexual way, I always either ignored him or had a snappy and hopefully withering comeback, so it just never mattered to me. But NO touching! without consent, ever. That was my line in the sand.

Amen to that. Once my son, as a toddler (who had been forewarned about what cats find threatening behavior), got his face right up into the face of my big tom, who was trying to take a nap on the couch, and my tom gave him a good swat across the nose (just enough to draw a tiny bit of blood, but no lasting damage). That "learned him", as they say. 😺

No, but from this I would suggest the SS's father have a sit down talk with him about respect for all creatures including your doggie and if that has already happened and hasn't worked, its on to family therapy. Really...I'm not being glib, because a lack of physical boundaries around animals quite often turns into the same behavior around humans and you really, really don't want this escalating. Good luck!

For those of you who are both lovers of language and enjoy science fiction: one of the very best scifi novels I have ever read! Just finished "Embassytown" by China Mieville, published in 2011 (I am making my way through all his books now because every one has been so excellent - read "Perdido Street Station" first, which takes some dedication as it is very dense and the first third is all set up for when things really get going, then "City vs City" which is probably his most well known novel). "Embassytown" is about a human colony amidst a very, very alien species on a planet in the far reaches of a distant galaxy and an incredible meditation on the power of language itself. It is extraordinary!!

Good for you! Remember if you encounter someone or something that "puts you off" that churches are not hotels for saints, but hospitals for sinners. 😺

If the toys are still brand new (preferably still in their boxes/plastic wrap), find a shelter for abused women (who generally flee with children in tow) - they would love to have toys to give to those (often traumatized) kids when they arrive to make them feel welcome!

My family has a cheesecake tradition for Christmas: I make cheesecake (from scratch!) on Christmas morning, and we have the first piece at tea time. Then another piece for dessert after Christmas dinner, and then more for breakfast the next day (its great for breakfast!). I usually make (made - this whole tradition actually died when my husband passed on 4-1/2 years ago - I don't do it anymore as I don't see my only child at Christmas since traveling over the holiday became so fraught - we see each other via Zoom on the day to open presents and in person other times of the year) at least two - one with a crushed walnut crust and another, either with a chocolate graham cracker crust or a choclate chip crust. Plain old graham cracker crusts got too boring!