aramis87

What level magnification are you getting, and is there much distortion when using it to read (or to examine objects)? The only thing I know about Fresnel lenses are lighthouses!

In my defense, I actually did have to get my prescription medications, but I didn’t buy anything else.

You might consider splitting it into two separate containers, one with first aid components (bandaids, etc) and the second with medications (Tylenol, etc).

I’d consider: a tiny packet of crazy glue. Ultra-thin 2-inch blade . A small pair of tweezers. A couple restaurant packets of sugar, for diabetics.

This actually feeds into another thought I’ve had, which is covid. We manage our lives, and have time to spare for ourselves and others, because others have had time to spare for us. My job kept me late but my neighbor who works at the grocery store can grab me some baby formula since the sale ends today; her kid is sick but I have a WFH day so I can keep an eye on him while she goes to work. I have an endoscopy but my retired aunt can drive me to and from the medical plaza; she needs someone to check out her roof so I make time on a Saturday afternoon. We all have these little pieces of (what I’ll call) “grace” in our lives, things that make people’s lives easier. But the grace comes from pieces of other people’s lives.

Then covid hits. Something like 1,300,000 Americans die from covid. Yes, a number of them were elderly, but way more were still productive in small ways, providing bits of their time to make other people’s lives easier - the neighbor who picked your kid and hers from the same school, the guy down the block who shoveled your walkway when it snowed, your mom who came and took care of the house when you broke your leg, all helping each other.

Another 13,000,000 Americans, many of them in their very productive years, have long covid. Their focus is now just in getting through their daily lives. Not only do they no longer have bits and pieces of time they can spare to help other people, they require more bits and pieces of time from the people around them.

In my original scenario, if I have long covid, my elderly aunt still drives me to my appointment, but she has to either find a willing helper from a much smaller pool, or pay for repairs herself on a increasingly small fixed income. I don’t have the energy to watch my neighbor’s sick child (or risk getting sick again myself); she needs to work overtime to make up the pay and can’t get to my baby formula. My neighbor with long covid no longer clears my walkway, my mom died so getting help when I break my leg is harder and more personal.

Mr. Rogers said, “Look for the helpers,” but most of us were helpers in our own way, at different times of our lives. But so many people lost those bits of time we could spare other people, lost people who could spare time for us, and it all happened at the same time. [Well, over a couple years, but still … ]

Normally, if you lose a helper, you can find someone else to help; it may be a struggle, but you adjust. But everyone lost their helpers at the same time, and at that exact same time, everyone also ended up needing additional help.

It feels like a less kind world because it is less kind. We’ve all lost bits and pieces of our social support network, and we can’t afford to give away as much time or effort as we used to, and we have yet to acknowledge how much this loss of spare time, of grace given and received from others, has cost us on both an individual and a societal level.

And this loss of grace, especially unacknowledged as it is, has increased the amount of stress that everyone in our society is under. And where there’s increased stress, there’s less opportunity for nuance.

I’m actually going to say: stress. In economics as well as education, we’ve gone from a bell curve to a U curve. But regardless of which side of the curve we’re on, we’re almost all of us struggling in some way: rent, food prices, job security, worry about our kids, the environment, politics, end stage capitalism, whatever. And over the past decade, those stressors have built up.

People who are worried about how they’re going to pay rent/mortgage, what they’re going to eat, whether their car will last till next pay period, don’t have the luxury to spend time thinking about nuanced positions. I mean, they will if you push them, but it takes time and energy away from more immediate concerns, and there’ll be an undercurrent of resentment for you taking them away from important things.

People who are on the bottom or much of the right of the curve have niggling insecurities (is my job going to have layoffs, where I can get decent affordable childcare, why are electricity prices rising so much). They may be struggling, but they’re not constantly struggling like much of the lower classes. The hollowing out of the middle class isn’t truly visible to them yet. They hear complaints from the lower classes, but they seem very similar to what those complaints have always been. They know that those complaints have grown louder and more disruptive, but they assume it’s because it’s the same people it’s always been, just being louder and more disruptive. They haven’t realized it’s louder because there’s more people on the other side. And they haven’t realized that they’re at risk of moving to the bottom of the U curve - or even ending up on the other side.

Because of their assumption that it’s the same old group of people being more disruptive, they’re more dismissive of those complaints. And they have enough of their own stressors to deal with - food banks always say they need more (and more nutritious) food, but their primary concern are choosing a healthcare plan or childcare place that covers their needs without bankrupting them. It’s extremely stressful for them and they don’t have the time to spare to consider matters in depth either.

[I have another thought on the matter, but I’ll put it in a follow-up comment.]

Aesthetics may draw my attention to something, but I’m mostly a form over function person.

Rousseau, one of the architects of the Revolution.

My farmer, [74][279][337], emphatically agrees with this statement!

A friend of mine’s cat does a less aggressive but similar thing. They now have a ritual every morning and every night, where she gets out a paper towel, the cat jumps into her lap, and she rubs/scrubs away at her ears for a few minutes. My assumption is that my friend’s cat has a mild allergy of some kind.

Assuming that it is an allergy: My personal philosophy on this sort of thing is that I’d rather prevent / minimize the allergen from reaching the cat, rather than letting the allergen reach the car and then treat the symptoms: allergic reactions cause inflammation, which can increase your risk of other health issues later on.

My personal suggestions, in the order I’d make them, due to the effort or side effects involved:

1. I’d try gently rubbing the inside of your cat’s ears once or twice a day, maybe with a tissue or paper towel. Hopefully this will help reduce her desire to scratch while you’re working on diagnosis.

2. Cats can be allergic to their litter, particularly the dust, clumping agents, or fragrances. Don’t switch to a corn-litter, as that’s a common-ish food allergy in cats, plus if you have one allergy, you’re likely to have others. There are litters marketed as hypoallergenic, but I’m not sure how truthful those claims are. You’re looking for one with no fragrances, no clumping agents (an older-style fragrance-free clay litter might work), and minimal dust. Note that some cats get annoyed at litter changes, so you may need to mix old and new litter in increasing percentages over like a week for her to accept the new litter. Once it’s full switched, give that a couple weeks and see what happens.

3. If the litter-change doesn’t work, try transitioning your cat (transition over a week or so to avoid stomach upset) to a hypoallergenic cat food. Give it a couple weeks and see if things are better. If it is, then it’s likely some kind of food allergy; you can look over the ingredients between the hypoallergenic food and her regular food, to try to determine what she’s allergic to so that you can switch her to a less expensive or more readily available food. [You’ll want to check wet food, dry food, and all treats.]

4. If it’s not a food allergy, it could be an environmental allergy (the litter is an environmental allergy, but it’s also the easiest thing to change). Does the problem get better and worse at different times of year? In that case, it might be something like a pollen allergy (indoor cars can also have pollen allergies). You can get the cat tested for those, not I’m not sure it’s worth it because I’m not sure what the allergist would recommend. My suggestion would be to vacuum and dust the house thoroughly, especially the areas where the cat spends much of her time to get rid of any allergens currently present. This does include things like cat trees, cat beds (wash it if possible), etc. Once that’s done, I’d put pillowcases or similar small pieces of cloth in her favorite nesting places, and wash those weekly using a fragrance-free laundry soap. I’d install HEPA filters on your HVAC system, and consider one of those room-purifying air circulator units if needed. Doing one thorough cleaning, putting down a washable barrier layer that gets washed regularly, and limiting pollens getting into the house should significantly reduce environmental exposure, particularly if she’s an indoor cat.

I agree that Benadryl is an option, but I’m leaning against it being your first option because it doesn’t work in all cats and, like I said, I prefer addressing the cause and not the symptom. But if it is an allergen and you can’t figure out the root cause, then Benadryl may be your best option. If you go the Benadryl route, check with your vet for dosing, frequency, safety and side effects (or they may have a recommendation for another allergy medication as well).

Good luck, and please let us know how you get on!

While I like the idea of challenges to get them used to computers, I’d also suggest balancing these with challenges that may help them outside the digital/technological world. Maybe challenge them to write a short story or a letter to their grandparents in cursive. Maybe hand-stitch a running hem, mentally add and subtract numbers, walk a quarter-mile every day. Later on, maybe have them plan out and cook a really simple meal, or do some kind of simple repair or put together a flat-pack table or something. Solder or glue something.

I dunno, it just feels like so many skills aren’t being taught to kids and they graduate with little knowledge of skills that make your life easier and less expensive - simple repairs, being able to research stuff, being unafraid to do things on your own. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud your kid’s drive and your desire to make them ready for the digitally-focused world they’ll live in, I just see too many kids graduating and needing a massive amount of hand-holding for even the simplest things.

That happened to me a few years ago, just tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. One day toward the end of this horrible run, I called my best friend to remind them of something random, like “remember it’s X’s birthday this weekend” or something. Friend wasn’t home, her mom said she’d have Friend call me back. No worries.

Anyway, my friend gets home, and her mom is in the dining room having tea with a neighbor. Mom says, “Oh, hey, Aramis called, I told 'em you’d call back,” and the neighbor immediately exclaimed, “Oh my God, what’s happened to that poor person now?!?!”

I was driving along these narrow backcountry roads once, the ones with little drainage ditches on either side of the road. It’s dark out A deer comes bounding across the road in front of me. Knowing that deer travel in packs, I stopped.

Some asshole fucker in a lifted truck or SUV, speeding toward me way over the speed limit on these tiny backcountry roads, did not stop. Another deer ran across the road and the truck/SUV hit the deer and catapulted it right into my car, then kept speeding off into the night. My car was mostly totalled, as in it (extremely unhappily) managed to limp me home at about 3 miles an hour, screaming the entire way. [It was a back road and I was afraid of another asshole coming along and driving right into my car before a tow truck could possibly get to me. And there was no place on the side of the road where I could safely wait for a tow truck.]

All my friends were like, “Oh no, did you get the plate number of the guy?” And I’m like, “Initially they were too far away, then their headlights were blinding me - and how they missed seeing the deers with those lights is beyond me. And by the time they were close enough for me to see a plate, there was a deer in the way.” Then they’re like, “Did you call your insurance company?” And I’m like, “Why in the world would I do that? What world do you live in? My car is 16 years old, they’d give me $500 and then raise my premiums a thousand dollars a year for the next decade.”

I hope that fucker in the truck/SUV wrecks their next five cars in ditches and bogs and gets stuck in snowbanks in the middle of winter for the next decade. Fucker.

Story time?

Ask your company if they can do matching funds for your donation.

One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario’s shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn’t seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole “Leap that went wrong” thing from the very beginning. I’ve never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.

Came here for this!

A lot of them end up culling the believers too in the end.

Robespierre was killed by the Revolution.

A tuna hoagie and some chips.

Buccee’s is incredibly awful to their employees.

I remember during the later part of the Troubles, one group set up an exchange student program, where junior- and senior-year Catholic and Protestant kids were sent to spend the year in the US, like regular exchange students. Except every host family took in two kids, matched in sex and roughly matched in age, one Catholic and one Protestant. Living together for a year in an alien country, they came to see each other as human, and friends.