Mine has a setting for sound off, which is great because it is a horrific loud beep, three times that doesn’t stop even if you try to interrupt it with a button or by opening the door. Anytime we have a power outage, it resets and I turn that damn beep off before I even change the clock because it annoys me so much.

…why don’t you just go to Wikipedia to begin with? I’m honestly asking. URLs still exist.

Pretty much how I am with all of my neighbors anyway…

According to the folks on the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, it’s a learned behavior. My 11 year old son has started mimicking my husband’s ridiculous sneezes and his voice hasn’t even dropped yet so… yeah might be.

Hell yeah V-Tech. Pretty sure I had one of those blue phones in my room when I became a teenager. Or it might have been in my dorm, can’t remember.

As a kid I remember commercials for a local injury lawyer during daytime tv in the summer. His commercials were very memorable, just in the way he passionately talked. Now I see billboards for him and his son, and recently he was a sponsor at a college basketball event I attended. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug because I’m actually rather fond of him, in a stupid way.

In my area, he’s the only lawyer I see on billboards, or at least that I notice. When I visited Vegas, there were so many. (In my area, billboards are all nonsensical and if you look up what it’s supposed to be for, it’s always AI. Can you guess where I live? Sigh.)

For real. As a kid, I was enamored with the idea of Nessie, so when I went as an adult a couple of years ago, I just figured it wouldn’t live up to my childhood ideal. Little did I know that the area around Loch Ness is totally gorgeous. I loved every bit of it and would go back in a heartbeat to spend more time there.

My husband and son get the worst, most painful full-body hiccups so when I heard about the straw I thought, why not? It does work. However, it’s stupid expensive for a plastic straw so it stays at home all the time and sometimes they get hiccups when we’re out. We’ve found that jamming a regular straw flat against the bottom of a cup and then sucking really hard will pretty much work. The trick is making it hard to suck the liquid up the straw, so that your diaphragm is really working for it, and it’ll help reset things.

That’s a great teacher.

My kid last year in 5th grade (or maybe even the year before?) and his classmates figured out they could use shared Google Docs on their school accounts to have chats with each other, during school. The parent side of me rolled my eyes but the 80s kid in me was legitimately proud. Did I narc on them? Hell no.

The one hilarious thing is that all sorts of new social issues arise with this kind of workaround. Document names get changed, someone deletes something that someone else thinks is important, etc., and they have to work it out. So it’s a learning experience, for sure!

Mine are probably lasting about as long as previous non-EV cars, but I’m also terrible about getting them rotated when it’s not combined with an oil change.

As someone who works for an arts nonprofit: thank you!

Godspeed friend

I can force myself past Costner’s accent. It’s Slater’s hair that yanks me out of immersion! I do love that movie though, I just wish they’d cast someone other than Christian Slater.

I know right? I’m desperate for the recipe

Yeah this is what I was thinking too. I worked for a mom and pop hobbyist store, and Starbucks. Obviously Starbucks was worse. But would it be worse than, say, a mall clothing store or Target or Walmart? Not sure.

Man I went to a party last week, had one glass of red wine and no other alcohol, and woke up the next morning with a killer headache. I’m 42 and not much of a drinker but this kind of reaction made me think it was specifically the red wine. I ain’t doing that again for a long while, if ever.

Okay so in our case it’s very California-specific. We managed to buy a house (hooray!) after the housing crash. Because of the way California handles property taxes, we will never move unless we decide to leave California for good. If we take a job that is not close to us, too bad, we’re factoring commute into the offer, because we can’t move. My husband seriously considered a job that would require either a 1.5 hour drive or train ride because the money was amazing but ended up taking a much lower-paying WFH job, and the commute was a huge factor.

I was a big fan growing up. Really liked Achtung Baby and of course Joshua Tree is a great album. I even liked Zooropa and Pop. Went to see them live in the 2000s but by then the shine was wearing off; I was getting older and being a fan of things wasn’t as important to my identity anymore. But I was curious recently, so I looked up when their partnership with Apple started… Yeah, it was exactly the time I stopped liking them as much. It was both validating and depressing to make that connection. I’d always nodded along when people talked about bands selling out, but U2 was my band and they weren’t supposed to do that! Now I feel like they’re the poster child of selling out.

Doesn’t go far enough for Schenker.

(But you’re right.)