I guess we could use a little ice age right around now, and it would also be nice to have a Renaissance around the corner.

Someone said inns and taverns, and yes it’s a missing piece of housing here - long term hotels with food, bars/restaurants with rooms to rent above.

Not much though, it is not a time I’d visit.

Orville Peck - C’mon Baby Cry

Every time this plays at my house everyone is belting it out. Nobody can hit the high notes.

I grew up without AC in Florida.

Sit in the shade with a fan, be still. If in the shade and a breeze, and not moving around, a pretty high temperature is comfortable.

Go to places with cold AC or to cold springs to get cold, it will last awhile after you leave.

If it gets cool at night, open your window at night to let in the cold air, close it in the morning to keep that air in for the morning. But once it heats up inside, you are better off with ventilation - open windows on both sides of the house and run fans, to move air throughout the house.

If it’s dry where you are (it doesn’t work here) get wet and let evaporation cool you. Even here you can get wet and stand naked in front of a fan you will get cold.

STAY HYDRATED.

I don’t think this has been mentioned, but it is also used to hide age discrimination. HR can’t say you are too old, so they say overqualified.

Orange soda.

With my third baby, she did not want to come out (in stark contrast to her sisters, who all seemed to want to give me about one hour of advance notice before getting born) and the midwife said, before trying induction, try castor oil, sometimes it will kick the labor on. Not a spoonful, no. A whole bunch. And don’t puke it out. I chased it with orange soda because I liked it but figured I could certainly manage without it.

Oh God. I couldn’t even look at orange soda without nausea for several years. And it didn’t even work, I still had to get induced!

Well, a cocktail of course!

I do like sweets sometimes. Ricotta cake with raspberries is the house favorite; tiramisu is amazing, cheesecake is great, ice cream, or a fruit salad. Those are all so good.

What a good question! No, most of the time I feel I am stuck here with everyone else, in this timeline. Sometimes what I perceive diverges from those around me, other times it converges. But I think of those as different filters overlaying the same reality; although I don’t believe this is the only reality in existence, it does feel like a ride we cannot get off.

I have heard it said (this might help you) that love is a verb; it is an action, can be something you do more than something you feel. You can show love, without worrying about what you are ‘supposed’ to feel. Also if it helps - I am, as far as I know, pretty normal, and the feeling is not a bash you over the head certainty. It is more like a decision, in a way.

I think of romantic love as what follows infatuation, if you get there. The continued slow burn of lust, affection and respect for each other.

Friendly love is care, when you would let yourself be hurt to save a specific other person from being hurt, and are willing to be inconvenienced to do things for them, and trust enough to inconvenience them if you need something.

Agape - love, love for the world, is both easier and harder to feel. It’s easier to not be annoyed by things and people you don’t personally know, but hard to care so much about them. That universal love feeling , the joy of existence and care for the natural world is also love.

So yeah English in this regard just doesn’t have (or doesn’t use) different words for different types of love but they are different.

Well, mine are dead but my mom kicked me out at 17.

My first set of kids, I gave a little money towards college (they got scholarships and aid that paid most of it, we were quite poor) so they didn’t get student loans, and the younger ones I am letting live at home and feeding them and all as they are doing school locally but no cash, they have jobs.

As adults? No, not financially, but since they helped me with the younger ones I do have some indebtedness towards them. So sure, when they need something I try to help.

They all say they’d be happy to have a big ol family home with everyone in it, but if we ever do that I wouldn’t think of it as helping them at this point. Would be everyone helping each other.

Honestly I would like to try microdosing LSD, not mushrooms. Something that can be measured, and my youthful experience with these, the tripping is more comfortable/happy/open.

Also it’s the only drug I’d ever try again as far as recreational drugs go. Well, I tried cannabis but hated the high, so I guess not the only one but the only remaining one that I would like to try again. In particular the very, very minimal microdosing but might be willing to also trip. Since I am hella respectable now, too many degrees away from being able to get the drug, especially in a format I could divide up to microdose, not sure it will ever be possible. But other than the legal considerations leading to lack of access nothing else makes me not want to - other drugs I think physically unhealthy or bad for your cognition as you age, or too addictive. I don’t have those concerns about LSD. I think, like coffee it’s more likely to protect your thinking in the long run, and certainly almost nobody wants to trip often.

Pixel 5 is my new phone, lol. I had the original Pixel, now the 5. One of my kids used the original one for a few months after I upgraded too.

I do miss headphone jack :(

It’s ok, and getting better. My big problem with it is (like you) that Google Play Music was incredible, so good, and they discontinued it in favor of the much worse and awkwardly named YouTube Music.

Whoever convinced them to give up the branding of “Play Store, Play Music, Play Movies” should be drawn and quartered.

I think populations will crash, either gently through fewer kids, or violently through war and disease. That will likely throw us backwards technologically, maybe not.

Or, who knows, maybe the population will stabilize and we get everything going in the right direction, then an asteroid hits.

Our Kimchi is working so hard on this and I don’t usually think of her as clever. She knows the knob opens the door so she bats at it, hangs on it.

Neither cat has been messing with the toilet paper lately though.

I got a new laptop at work and everything, every file I worked in, was creating a second copy of itself on OneDrive. It was so annoying and took awhile but I found instructions on deleting the duplicates.

It took all the files off my local machine and left the ones on OneDrive.

Aaaargh!

Emmylou Harris wrote two that are so beautiful and so sad, if you need to cry, Boulder to Birmingham:

"I don’t want to hear a sad song full of heartbreak and desire

The last time I felt like this, I was in the wilderness, and the canyon was on fire

And I stood on the mountain in the night and I watched it burn, I watched it burn"

And also in the same song she sings - “well you really got me this time, and the hardest part is knowing I’ll survive” wow.

If that somehow doesn’t work, Red Dirt Girl might.

"She loved her brother, I remember back when

He was fixing up a 49 Indian

Told her, little sister gonna ride the wind, up around the moon and back again

Well he never got farther than Vietnam, I was standing there with her when the telegram come for Lillian

Now he’s lying somewhere about a million miles from Meridian "

Beebop-a-rebop-a-rhubarbar!

You told it well here, I enjoyed this story.

You might really enjoy the short story ‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’ by Kij Johnson.

Florida too. Even with the influx of racist northerners, it’s mixed politically here, mixed in every way imaginable actually but you’d never know it looking at the legislature.