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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Oh we have the worst, most starved public transportation, half the buses run only every hour, and on the bike to work - only to work - I do occasionally get there faster if there is traffic but there is no bike lane, I either use the sidewalk if no pedestrians, or the road if people are using the sidewalk. Traffic has to be pretty damn bad before I can move faster than the cars, I still have to stop at the same lights.

    We have the most generous annual E bike voucher raffle in the nation, I believe, and the city is working on bike lanes, but really, the road between my house & work has no bike infrastructure at all. The public transportation problems are because that’s funded by the county not the city, the suburbs don’t want to pay for it. But inside the city we need it.



  • I fly a pirate flag here for Gasparilla, then usually nothing. We don’t have a whole flagpole though.

    My kids put a rainbow flag in the window.

    American flags on flagpoles left up all night just crack me up. Dudes wanting to proclaim they are so patriotic but then not following the etiquette requirements for that piece of fabric they put so much emphasis on. At school there were routines we had to follow, to put it up each morning and take it down each evening and fold some particular way.

    If I had an actual flagpole - I’d make it a Maypole in spring. At Christmas make it a Christmas tree made of string lights. At Halloween put a skeleton stripper on it. At Gasparilla the pirate flag and in the summer use it to help anchor a shade cloth stretching to the house. I don’t think I’d usually use it for a flag.




  • Four days with a migraine is the longest I have gone. Even if I put a spoonful of water in my mouth I’d puke. That was back when they would give you opiates to break the migraine, they don’t work as painkillers for it but make you high enough to finally sleep - pain felt so far away - and I would wake up with no headache. It’s happened about 7 times total in my life, now they won’t do that but they do IV fluids to prevent damage and some antihistamine to make you sleep but it doesn’t break the migraine. Hopefully it never happens again.

    On purpose I have fasted 3 days but would NEVER purposely fast without water. Water with electrolytes if going more than a day or so.


  • I dunno - my ex burned all the skin off his hand once, the first question at the emergency room was “how are you paying?” and we waited there 5 hours before they saw him, during which time it got so much worse he ended up needing more treatment & therapy. No we didn’t have insurance or money back then. They eventually arranged temporary Medicaid for him as he couldn’t work with the hand so burned. Which left us without his income (I had just given birth too) so without much food.

    Anyway - this was in the 1990s but I am absolutely sure we had to wait because we could not pay, even though it was an obvious emergency.



  • We are all our own worst critics. Like, when I look at myself all I see is the flaws, right? It’s a kind of dysmorpia.

    There are literal good days & bad days of course, bloated or bad hair day, or bad skin day, but they aren’t as extreme as you see them. Nobody else would notice or care.

    I was anorexic so I always look fat to myself, it doesn’t matter my size really. You can’t trust the mirror and you don’t see what others do.








  • That’s not as profoundly bad as I was, nor my nearsighted child, and I had a work colleague with -12 who got her vision corrected with Lasik.

    I had the Lasik in my 20s for a -6 prescription and got, not perfect, but good enough vision to only need thin, light glasses.

    When I was profoundly nearsighted I got really good correction with contacts, hard contacts gave me supernaturally good vision, but glasses never did. Even now I can’t get perfect vision with glasses, it’s just good enough.

    You are farsighted? Two older ladies at my work had to get cataract surgery and in the process, their vision was corrected. Do get a second opinion, but it is true that you may not be able to see perfectly through glasses, I never could. Well enough to work, to read, and to not get headaches from squinting all the time, though, I don’t feel disabled by my sight.