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Anniversary Blog Post.

Twelve years since my first (paid English) publication.


Announce that with pride. In all your glorious pride.


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Sometimes the generational differences between Gens X and Y are pretty staggering. Since we're older parents (we had Impus Major when I was 33), we deal with a mixed bag of other parents; some X's and some Y's.

So, one of Impus Major's friends was having a birthday, and their mother invited everyone to an afternoon in San Francisco. She arranged to have Impus Major help drive, then took them to an "upscale" restaurant for lunch (unfortunately, it was Original Joe's, which is basically a tourist trap that pretends to be "fine dining" when it's really "mediocre dining with a fine dining price").

Imagine Impus Major's surprise when they finished lunch, everyone ordered whatever they wanted, and then Mom handed everyone the receipt and her phone with her Venmo information. He was a bit taken aback that he was suddenly out $70 after being invited to a party and even agreeing to drive the extra guests. He even paid for his own parking, so all in all he was out just under $100 for helping out with a party.

I can't imagine anyone in my peer group doing that: If you're the parent generation, and you invite a bunch of kids to lunch, you tell them before you even get there that you expect them to pay. Otherwise you're pulling a bait-and-switch.


Damn, I forgot about Daylight Saving time rolling back.


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Here I thought I woke up a bit later then I usually do and it turns out it was earlier.


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Fantasy Monster: Treeraffe

A giraffe palm tree walking around.

Grand Lodge

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Somehow I woke up later than usual today. And we don’t even practice DST!


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I do enjoy the fact that you used the word "practice" there. Like we're still trying to figure it out.

Wait...


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If people finally figure DST out, it will go away.


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Once again doing a dog's-eye-view housecleaning binge because we are supposed to sign adoption papers and bring home our new furry family member tomorrow night.
Afraid to get my hopes up after last time.
Please send prayers/grisgris/positive vibes this way. This one completely melted my heart when I saw his picture.


Waterhammer wrote:
If people finally figure DST out, it will go away.

... to be replaced by something worse...


Drejk wrote:
Waterhammer wrote:
If people finally figure DST out, it will go away.
... to be replaced by something worse...

You gave me a chuckle, so thanks for that.

:)


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Drejk wrote:
Waterhammer wrote:
If people finally figure DST out, it will go away.
... to be replaced by something worse...

For example…


Shiro: You know, beef jerky is just cow raisins.
GothBard: I like it. But rabbit raisins are something totally different, so color me skeptical.


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Getting accustomed to the Cranky Calico's absence is jarring. We put the carpet back in the living room... and nobody's using it as a litterbox. We can leave our clothes on the floor without them getting peed on. GothBard just ordered a new runner carpet for her bedside. The ability to put textiles on the floor without having them used as a bathroom is a novelty we haven't had in 5-6 years.

And then there's the "haunting" aspect. I'm so accustomed to her being around that I keep catching her out of the corner of my eye, then realizing that no, she's not around, and there isn't anything there. It's purely psychological, but it's impressive just how often I'm "seeing" her -- I can absolutely see all the ghost tales arising from losing a close loved one and then constantly seeing/sensing them where you expect them to be.

Ah, well. All will change when we eventually get kittens, though that'll take longer than I like. She wants to get another ragamuffin (I cannot object to this), and processing and shipping typically takes about 6 weeks once you find one you like and order it. And she hasn't even found one yet.

EDIT: And just like last time, we're doing one purebred and one stray, because strays need homes, too. But we're not buying a year-old stray again. That was a disaster.


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When we lost our kitty he actually HAD come back from the dead once (he was a 20+ year old outdoor cat that had been missing for 10 days till they turned up at the vet and was thankfully chipped)

The next day there was SOMETHING running around my room knocking things over and making noise. I was gettting very tempted to pull a benny from the mummy before hearing TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE with the volume set to 11: the unmistakable call of a carolina wren.

They regularly come into the house now that there's no cat. They seem to have figured out to wait in bringerofbirdseeds room and he'll remove the force fields.


How spoiled is the FlufferNutter? She's taken to jumping up onto the bed and meowing loudly until I make it so she can lie on a nice smooth comforter instead of a wrinkled one.

On the one hand, I understand her cat brain: The sun is farther north so we're getting direct sunlight onto the bed starting by 9 in the morning and lasting almost the entire day.

On the other, we're at the final dregs of Summer/Fall, with an unusual warm streak this week so temperatures are in the high 60s/low 70s. She should be enjoying the last of her "warm outdoor" time for the next 6 months; instead she's lying in the sunlight on the bed, which she'll be able to do all Winter. On the other other hand, lying in the sun on the bed all day really doesn't sound bad right about now...


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BigNorseWolf wrote:
When we lost our kitty he actually HAD come back from the dead once (he was a 20+ year old outdoor cat that had been missing for 10 days till they turned up at the vet and was thankfully chipped)...

I always wonder whether our neighbor did in our wonderful black-and-white cat. Similar to yours, she vanished without a trace when she was 16. When she came back she was gaunt, could barely walk, and lasted only a couple of months after that. We thought she'd had a stroke. Eventually our neighbor admitted that he'd "accidentally" locked her in the crawlspace under his house for a week. I did not kill him. I am impressed with this simple fact.


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Offer him a free Cask of Amontillado? Its a very good year!


>.>


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WE JUST BROUGHT OUR DOG HOME!


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Yay puppy!


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...and dealing with new home anxiety and going for a walk in the middle of the night. Poor little guy.


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NobodysHome wrote:

She should be enjoying the last of her "warm outdoor" time for the next 6 months;

Has her staff set up a perfectly leveled comforter outside in the sun

?


*a wild Orthos appeared*

lisamarlene wrote:
WE JUST BROUGHT OUR DOG HOME!

*chuckles*


How is Sophie?

She's a new puppy... Right? Right?!

...

It's been how long again?!


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Sophie just turned 5 a couple weeks ago, meaning we've had her just over four years.


Orthos wrote:
Sophie just turned 5 a couple weeks ago, meaning we've had her just over four years.

Glad to hear she's doing okay.


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I was rained out pretty early so I took Crookshanks to vote then I came home and voted myself and took a nap, it was raining again so I've been playing Elden Ring ever since.

It's my coping game.


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It's times like these that I deeply regret taking great fortitude and dwarven liver twice.


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Chose a hell of a time to come out, I did. -_-

I can't really words right now.

Liberty's Edge

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Without pushing the boundaries too hard... I'm hopeful that this will serve as a lesson that people who try to stand in the middle of the road in order to reach a compromise with the opposite side will only ever end up being run down and that offering a seat at the table to your enemies means that you never wanted it to be your table in the first place.

Compromise with the enemy isn't wise and won't make you a populist, it's self-harm.


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Yeah, I'm still starting Animal Farm with the sophomores next week. They can draw whatever parallels they want.


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Scintillae wrote:
Yeah, I'm still starting Animal Farm with the sophomores next week. They can draw whatever parallels they want.

Hope this helps.

Hope this helps get through to the younger generation. My favorite hip hop telling of Animal Farm.


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Honestly, I teach it because I'm a history nerd, and it gives me the chance to talk about the Russian Revolution/rise of Stalin. That is the explicit parallel I draw every year.

I can't wait for what else happens every year. Pointing out that the animals are very insistent on being free while they are visibly not, and asking if they can think of a country that does that (like, y'know, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea). Every year, without fail, a kid says the US.


It's still a great song.


Further proof I'm insane. To distract myself from vague gesture at everything, I spent my plan period writing a proposal for an elective I want to offer - just a Shakespeare survey. Because clearly, I don't have enough to do.


Freehold no sleep.


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So yeah, GothBard couldn't sleep and woke me up at 3:00 am to discuss the election results. I normally force myself to stay in bed until at least 4:00 am, but I decided I might as well get up and start the day early. At 3:45 I checked Impus Minor's flight information and asked myself, "Wait a minute... why don't I recognize the airport code?"

So, the little bugger scheduled a 6:15 am flight out of Sacramento, a 90-minute drive from the house, instead of Oakland, a 25-minute drive. And he didn't bat an eye when I said, "Well, you need to be at the airport at 5:15 am, so we'll leave the house at 4:45 am."

Cue frenzied banging on Impus Minor's door and getting him up and out of the house at lightning speed, so we were on the road by 4:00 am and in spite of a horrific windstorm through the coastal range (thank goodness I was in the Celica) and having to do the airport loop twice (Sacramento airport has a road that forks and one sign says, "Parking" and the other is blank. You have to take the Parking exit to get to the terminals), I dropped him at the terminal at 5:16 am, *almost* on time. I started home into the teeth of rush hour traffic, had to stop to get gas because Impus Minor had left me with under half a tank last week... and the gas station ran out of gas. It took 10 minutes to get 4 gallons of gas, but that'd get me home.

Home by 7:00 am and right into my second meeting of the morning, because I missed the first by half an hour.

In short, my day was, "Get up at 3:00 am, talk politics for 35 minutes, panic, drive for 3 hours to Sacramento and back (160 miles), and work from 7:00-3:30 pm."

I'm a tiny bit tired. And I'm in Tomb of Annihilation tonight. I'm so going to die.


There's always an interesting question of, "Where does parental responsibility end?"

A childhood friend of mine woke up one morning to be told by his mother, "I'm selling both houses and using the money to retire to Holland. You're not getting a penny and you won't have a house as soon as the sale goes through. Better prepare yourself!"

It was her version of "tough love". In his case he needed a swift kick in the pants, but that kick meant he never had any kind of career (he worked part time in book stores and video stores for his entire life) and died at 53 due to poor health brought on by a horrific diet of fast food and diet sodas, since that was what he could afford to eat.

So, something similar is happening to one of the Impii's friends, but it's almost worse. After years of drifting between jobs, he finally realized what he wanted to do and went back to community college to get enough transfer credits to get into a 4-year school. He finishes in mid-December and already has a job, an apartment, and everything he needs arranged for January 1.

So his mother just canceled their lease and is moving out... November 30. Leaving him homeless for December with no place to stay while he tries to close out his transfer credits. She's not on the edge of bankruptcy; she's just sick of paying Albany prices and decided to "pull off the Band-Aid" without any concern for anyone else in the family.

And I wonder -- how hard is it to consider your other family members when you're making a life-altering decision? If GothBard and I didn't have kids, we'd already be well on our way to moving to Europe. Because we have kids, we want to ensure they're well-established in their own lives before we go. It just seems like part of your responsibility as a parent to not leave your kids homeless.


In Tomb of Annihilation news, my character's alive, but it's only a matter of time. We have a fighter, a ranger, a warlock who has some ludicrous ability teleport out of danger as a bonus action and get damage resistance for an entire round post-teleport, and my run-of-the-mill cleric who was built to be a GMNPC so who doesn't have any particularly special abilities.

And yet everyone else wants to metagame, so we're exploring the city of Omu, checking every building, and for one building the GM brings up a map and puts our PCs on the map. My character has no reason to believe the building is any different from any of the other buildings, so I start walking her through a normal search pattern because it's what she would do.

Every other player keeps their PC out of the building waiting to see what befalls me.

Last night I got lucky and the GM rolled 1d3 for the assassin vine ambush and got a 1 so my character survived the ambush. But I'm only a high GM roll away from when she doesn't.


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NobodysHome wrote:

There's always an interesting question of, "Where does parental responsibility end?"

[snip]

And I wonder -- how hard is it to consider your other family members when you're making a life-altering decision? If GothBard and I didn't have kids, we'd already be well on our way to moving to Europe. Because we have kids, we want to ensure they're well-established in their own lives before we go. It just seems like part of your responsibility as a parent to not leave your kids homeless.

My parents were always 100% on the "once you're an adult, you're responsible for yourself" train. Me moving back in with them for the years I was stuck in Tennessee was treated as them doing me a favor - one I was expected to pay back by essentially being free on-demand labor. (Most of it was reasonable stuff - mow the lawn, help keep the house clean, etc. - but there were extra things demanded from time to time and it was very much all "my responsibility" because I was "living there for free" and if I "didn't like it" I "could start paying rent".)

When I left TN, they had been making arrangements to sell their house and move to a rural lot they'd purchased and started building a new house on. They've since moved, living in their trailer for a while before the new house was finished, and I imagine they're now in the new place. The whole time they were discussing it, there was not one mention of what I was going to be doing once they'd sold the house - I don't know if it was just expected I'd move to the new place with them, if they expected I'd be gone by then which is what actually happened, or if I'd be cast to the winds again.

Every time they've given aid or assistance, it's always come with the expectation of payback, be it directly financial or through some other kind of exchange of labor, possessions, or responsibilities. And also with an expectation of maintaining the family's expectations of behavior, morality, faith, and politics, which is why we haven't spoken in five years.

If my parents decided to bail on the country - they wouldn't, they're too rabidly American, especially NOW - I have no doubt their plans would be exactly like the first mother. Maybe a few months' prior notice. After that it would be "you're an adult, be responsible for yourself".


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"Alright, get out your pens; we're flowing LD today. The resolution-"
"Uuuuuugh I don't wanna do work today."
holds up hand to ear "Shhhh... do you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"The world's smallest violin playing a sad song. Anyway. Resolved: rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in criminal justice systems. Get your flow paper out."

I love being able to be sassy with my kids.


Orthos wrote:
NobodysHome wrote:
There's always an interesting question of, "Where does parental responsibility end?"
My parents were always 100% on the "once you're an adult, you're responsible for yourself" train.

That's really common, and I obviously don't have as much of a problem with it as I think I do because the guy in question has been paying rent since the moment he turned 18. "You're 18. You're an adult. Pay rent or get out," is surprisingly common.

Orthos wrote:

When I left TN, they had been making arrangements to sell their house and move to a rural lot they'd purchased and started building a new house on. They've since moved, living in their trailer for a while before the new house was finished, and I imagine they're now in the new place. The whole time they were discussing it, there was not one mention of what I was going to be doing once they'd sold the house.

And I think right there you have the critical difference. There was a months- or years-long discussion that this was what they were going to do.

My objection is when it's dropped on the child with little to no warning. In my first friend's case, he literally enjoyed a free, childlike ride until he was 26, pulling down an allowance, being cooked for, cleaned for, and living as an eternal man-child. Then he was told, "In a month you're homeless." SOME warning or transition period should have been in order.

Similarly, in the current situation my kids' friend told everyone in the house he needed through December and they agreed. Then the mother got a lead on a place that was "too good to pass up" and she didn't want to pay double rent, so suddenly he's homeless with under 30 days' notice. And he's been working and paying rent this entire time like a responsible adult.

Thanks for letting me sort this out in my head out loud...

EDIT: And honestly, I think my life reflects a much better, now-extinct approach:
4-11 years old: Weekly chores. I didn't get my allowance until my mother inspected my chores and made sure they were all done to her satisfaction. 2 hours/week.
12 years old: Got a paper route. The money I earned replaced my allowance. 7 hours/week.
16 years old: Got a tutoring job. Supplemented the paper route. 10 hours/week.
22 years old: Became a TA. My first real "live on your own" income. 20 hours/week.
27 years old: Became a teacher. A career. 60 hours/week.

So I wasn't suddenly thrown to the wolves: I worked for my entire life, working the hours upwards. I don't like the whole modern, "You're a child, now you're an adult" approach I see so many parents take, at least around here. The problem is that jobs for kids from 12-16 have pretty much evaporated. Even baby-sitters are expected to be at least 16.


In Wisconsin we abolished labor laws so 90% of the restaurant staff in the state is now between 10-16 years old.


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Impus Minor is in Fargo, North Dakota. His girlfriend convinced him to buy a fleece-lined denim jacket. I have never seen anything so upper Midwestern.


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NobodysHome wrote:
Impus Minor is in Fargo, North Dakota. His girlfriend convinced him to buy a fleece-lined denim jacket. I have never seen anything so upper Midwestern.

There's a reason syracuse university looks like it was sponsored by north face...


Damn insects keep lunging at me, but I'm never more than a few steps away from a mallet. So yeah, not the smartest way to go about it.


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NobodysHome wrote:
Impus Minor is in Fargo, North Dakota. His girlfriend convinced him to buy a fleece-lined denim jacket. I have never seen anything so upper Midwestern.

Speaking from experience, he should avoid smoking pot and then talking to anyone, the Fargo accent is next level as far as inciting the giggles.


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captain yesterday wrote:
NobodysHome wrote:
Impus Minor is in Fargo, North Dakota. His girlfriend convinced him to buy a fleece-lined denim jacket. I have never seen anything so upper Midwestern.
Speaking from experience, he should avoid smoking pot and then talking to anyone, the Fargo accent is next level as far as inciting the giggles.

Pretty much the *only* benefit of being an alcoholic during the kids' formative years is that neither of them has any interest whatsoever in mind-altering substances.

Go figure.

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