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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2025

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  • Pro tip: Starting in mid summer, take each string of lights and stretch it out, hang it across a backyard or along a hall or even just put it up around a room. Let the summer heat, soften the plastic and when you take it down and pack it up after the kinks and coils have loosened, carefully coil it in loops that are 12 to 14 inches across. Tie off with cable ties or pieces of ribbon and lay the coils flat in a box. When you go to use them later, you can hang the coil off an arm and just carefully spool the string out as you go. That way, there’s no spinning, unwinding ball of kinked and curled lights to deal with. Just nice loose coils.

    Sause: Art director/decorator for a handful of stores with a background as an IA stagehand… (…whose specialty was working with lighting directors…)





  • NGL, dad probably totaly forgot about the event. If it’s one of many “blow ups” they seems to gloss it all over and it fades away.

    My own dad separated himself from his family, ran off to California to “find himself” in the early 90’s and died there. Alone. I went out in 2018 to see him one last time and spent 4 days cleaning his filty cottage while he sat in front of his computer and played games. We went out to dinner one of the days I was there and I realized that I no longer knew the man sitting across the table from me. Odd feeling that.

    All the love I’d had just had faded away over the years - even before he left, he was notorious for promising to spend time with me and then not showing up. It was always some excuse that he couldn’t make it… 9 times out of 10 it was him just forgetting. It was depressing to be on the end of that indifference, to say the least.

    Said my goodbyes and knew that it was the last time I would see him.

    Tried several months later to help him get admitted to the VA for medical care and even offered to go out and pick him up and bring him back east to a VA hospital nearby and he made all sorts of excuses. Oh well, I tried.

    I miss the man I knew when I was little before my folks got divorced and my mom took me out west… THAT man was long gone by the time I went to live with him for the last three years I was in High School.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is okay to be ambivalent or have no feelings whatsoever about your parents after they die. It happens to a lot of people.

    Of all my relatives now dead, the ones I cry over mostly are my grandparents. They were way cool and I spent time with them - into my 50’s - so I got to know them as adults, as peers and equals, which is an amazing experience.




  • …your insurance provider is likely to only cover the schedule from the government…

    Honestly, I doubt that. Insurers have the actuarial tables which represent the unvarnished, apolitical, straight numbers.

    If the actuarials show that there is increased mortality and more importantly for them, increased morbidity (sickness) from not getting vaccinations on schedule, they’ll offer clinics to their members.

    (The insurance that comes from my husband’s employer offers vaccine clinics for influenza and covid still, in spite of what the government is spewing.)

    They’re not paying attention to the nonsense coming out of the beltway as they’ve got the actual numerical proof of what works and what doesn’t.

    Insurance is the ONE industry that doesn’t deal with political fairy tales and governmental opinions.

    They don’t give a shit because the numbers don’t lie and their profits are completely tied to them. That is all they look at.

    I got a measles booster last spring since I’m old enough to have gotten the older non-viable vaccine from the mid-60’s. The insurance covered it no questions asked.