Mondrianyone

Seriously? She's trying to pass herself off as a religion? The Church of Kim? You have to admire her relentless quest of unearned income.

My husband started keeping a Word document called "Food Inventory" to track what's in our downstairs freezer, and that was working great till he started being passive-aggressive by bullet-pointing items he wasn't allowed to use. (He's not allowed to use them because he never tells me when he's used them up.) And then he just stopped adding new items to the file. But I can assure you that if I ever found leftover brisket in my freezer, I'd know that the ghost of my grandmother was sneaking things in there. So I'm very jealous of your fabulous finds.

You are always finding the most wonderful stuff in your freezer, @biakbiak. And then making even more wonderful stuff out of it. I dig around in my freezer and find a bag of frozen-to-dust hot dog buns and a tube sock filled with rice. I'm living my life all wrong.

Plus, there are all sorts of cultural, religious, ethnic traditions that we either leave behind or abandon once we enter a new culture that doesn't include those traditions. Such as female genital mutilation, arranged marriage (with someone who disgusts you), honor killings, infanticide of baby girls--maybe these are the worst examples, but still. You don't have to cling to it in spite of how the tradition affects you negatively just because "that's the way we always do it." You wouldn't be posting about how badly your sister treats you if you wanted to continue the tradition of being abused by her. So don't.

Or in Michael's pants.

And he's only uncomfortable with poopy diapers, not wet ones. So it's the stink and the mess, not the private parts, which he'd see in either case.

There's also this: https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/garden/pest-control/insects/70728-therapik?item=EM502 Whenever I link to Amazon, it links to my account, so I don't do that anymore. But they have it at Amazon for about a buck more. We've had one of these for years, and it works great. The quicker you treat the bite, the more effective it is. It works by burning off the venom, so you have to tolerate increasing heat on the spot for about fifteen seconds, but most of the time that's all it takes. And it's French, so ooh-la-la.

Treesh Trash. (I was takin' a bath.) Sorry.

Oh, gosh! All these years later and I'm finally getting my first groupie!!! That's very sweet, @Stats Queen, but I think you actually have to win before you start giving out autographs. It was fun competing, though, and meeting all the other geeks. You should do it--I think they still have the regional tournaments, but I could be wrong about that. I sliced open the tip of my finger using a mandoline (the cutting kind, not the musical instrument) a few years ago. It bled like a stuck pig. I was on a deadline to finish what I was making, so I put on a tight nitrile glove to contain all the blood, and afterward I used one of those butterfly Band-Aids that hold the cut sides together. It worked really well, and now I can't even see a scar. Maybe something like that would sub for stitches. Or maybe that liquid bandage stuff. I guess it depends in part on where the cut is. Hope you're able to get help with this.

I'm not sure it's something you ever learn by having it explained to you. I spent one whole summer apartment-sitting for a friend and going through all the cryptic puzzles in a huge stack of New York magazines she had. I kept doing them till I got it--not that you really get it if you're American. I think the Brits have a genetic propensity for the cryptics. That and the teeth thing. The Guardian (online again) has a big array of different puzzles, most of them cryptic but not all. No subscription needed. You can start with the easier ones, and if you haven't eaten a bullet, you can graduate to the insanely hard ones. I've been going backward through the Times acrostics. I'm in 2014 now. I love those.

Embarrassing fact: I used to compete in the Games magazine crossword tournaments. Not a lot, because I didn't want to become more of a crossword geek than I already was, but enough to have some street cred. (One of my friends didn't believe me--I had to bring my 7th-place trophy to dinner to prove myself.) I haven't done one on paper in a very long time, so maybe you won't like my online suggestion, but . . . The Atlantic has a daily puzzle that gets harder as the week progresses, and the references are very contemporary. It's free, too. (I do the NYTimes and WaPo puzzles, but I'm not sure if they're free, since we have subscriptions to both papers.) If you really want to go crazy, you could learn how to do the British-type cryptic puzzles. A whole different beast. But only if you're a masochist.

Me either. I always hear people saying that cake is just a delivery system for frosting. I think frosting is just an insulating system for cake.

This. So now gifts only have value if a bunch of strangers give them a thumbs-up and are shitty if they get a thumbs-down? I've gotten some pretty crappy gifts over the course of a lifetime, from people I loved, but I've never submitted them to a panel of experts to determine their worth and then trashed them or gave them away (and let the giver know I did!) if they didn't pass somebody else's muster. I'm finding this kind of shocking, and I can't stand Mike on his own merits, or lack thereof.

Willage of the Damned, Ukrainian edition. You're velcome.

A deep well of cultural memory, no doubt. You're carrying our American heritage forward with your smart mouth. I salute you.

I love that you called her that. There's really no comeback, because how can anyone know if you mean it to be snotty or affectionate? You've inspired me. I'm going to start calling everyone "toots." And I'm going to learn how to crack my gum and wear stockings with seams. Maybe I'll throw in an occasional "ducks," just for variety. 🦆 🦆 🦆

I've been wondering if there's a stylist who dresses the patients for their final reveals or whether they do their own wardrobe. The woman who removed her breast implants and then had them replaced was dressed so badly for her figure, with that tight, short white skirt that made her look six months pregnant. If there is a stylist, s/he needs to step up their game. Some of these wardrobe choices make the people look worse rather than better.

She kind of is their superior. She's an executive producer of the show, so in that capacity she's their boss.

Our late lamented cat Mora would only drink out of a water glass, too. Our current princess has a fountain (CatMate for whoever above was interested in fountains). We got it for her because about a year after we adopted her she was diagnosed with feline stomatitis, which is a chronic gum inflammation. We brought her to the vet for what we thought was going to be the extraction of a single tooth, and she ended up having three teeth removed. Plus, the vet said there wasn't an effective treatment, so we could look forward to eventually having to have all her teeth pulled. We were horrified. So we hit the Internet and came up with a very simple treatment that has actually been so successful that our vet now recommends it to her other clients who have cats with stomatitis. And the fountain figures into that treatment. She seems to sense how important it is, and she's incredibly possessive of the fountain. Whenever my husband changes the filter, she jumps up onto the counter next to the sink and doesn't take her eyes off the whole process till it's done, and then she escorts him back to the spot where he replaces it. We call her Inspector 748. And her gums and teeth have remained fine. Knock wood.

I thought Clitorius was the Roman emperor who came after Nero. But then would he still be on fire? Questions, questions . . .

It's the uneven weight distribution that kills you. If you sprinkle the heaviest stuff around among all the bags, it's easier to deal with than having it all in just one bag that weighs as much as a Buick.

Except I can remember numerous times she's filmed in her house--at least once pretty recently when Jeff sent her a box of meat to advertise his new business and she opened it in her living room. I know the "sanctuary" premise seems somewhat reasonable, but I'm just not buying it.

This for sure. There's some reason she didn't want to let them film in her house, and I don't think health or COVID had much if anything to do with it. But now that's she's made such an issue of it, she's kind of locked herself into that position and out of the studio (although she had no problem filming that Easter basket competition show indoors with total strangers). So today she froze bags of tea and squished cookies and premade pudding into cups till they overflowed. She really brings a lot to the table.

I'm married to the Clipboard King of America. He has clipboards all over the house (and magnifying glasses, but that's another story for another day). The one that hangs in the kitchen is the grocery-list clipboard. He used to print out a new one in a new font back when we still went shopping every week, but now we don't get a new one for a month or more, whenever we shop. We pencil in every item under its appropriate category as it runs low. (Or I do--that's where his organizational genius seems to stall out.) Grocery checkers and shoppers in line behind him ooh and aah over how clever he is. I'd be happy if he just didn't use things up and not tell me about it till I need something and find it isn't there anymore.

Unless it's a grand jury appearance, there's always the option not to attend. Tell them the health of your child matters more to you than this party and send your regrets. For real. I wouldn't go under these circumstances.