I’ll preface this by saying I understand it might be hard to get into this mindset, I’m not trying to be patronizing or reductive of your feelings.

I try to appreciate tiny little things in my day. Pleasant smells, seeing the beauty of everyday items, the warmth of tea, how pretty the sky looks when I happen to notice it.

Along the years I’ve collected little things that bring me joy to use, like nice dishes and mugs, a pretty pen with a color I love to write my notes in, clothes I feel cozy in. I don’t acknowledge them every time I use them, but they bring me little moments of appreciating what I have and the beauty of everyday items.

This is one of those chicken and egg things, I don’t know which causes which, I can tell you I consider myself quite happy with my life, I’m very grateful for where I am in life, even though my family and I have been heavy a rough year in terms of circumstances.

As for passions, I love learning and crafting, lately I’ve been focusing more on sewing, but I haven’t had much time to dedicate to it. I like spending time with my husband, just doing boring grown up stuff like buying groceries is better with company :)

I hope you get better soon!

Just in case you’re serious, taxidermy is not a good option if you want a faithful representation of how you look like. Taxidermy often results in not exactly the same look something had when they where living because replicating exactly the bones and cartilage to put the skin over is not easy.

This is OK for some random wild animal you don’t care about representing the individual it once was, but for pets it usually results in unsatisfactory results, and for people it’s just very uncanny because our brains are very good with human faces.

Play the NYT wordle, mini crossword, connections for the day. I have some small simple games that can be stopped at any time. My most played ones are cake sort, water sort, sudoku and sometimes minesweeper. Also scroll lemmy sometimes, it’s small enough that it doesn’t take long to see everything that is new, so there’s no risk of getting sucked in for long

That’s so interesting! I wonder if some immigrant took it from one country to the other, along with the story

Chorizo is the Spanish variant, our neighbors. Chorizo and chouriço are not quite the same, but similar. AFAIK they have different seasonings.

Out of curiosity, is the soup similar?

From Almeirim in Portugal, there’s “sopa da pedra”, translates to “soup of the rock”. It has several kinds of meat, beans, potato, and it’s usually eaten with bread (some say even a specific local bread type, but I’m not picky on that). It used to come with a stone in it traditionally, but for higiene reasons restaurants are not allowed to anymore. Some people at home still do it, I believe.

With it there is an old tale:

There was once a poor friar that was traveling. Once it came time to rest, he knocked on someone’s door and asked for their hospitality in exchange for a soup. His hosts let him in and they see the friar pulling an old smooth stone from his pocket and putting it in a pot, along with water.

“Some seasoning would make this soup better… Do you happen to have any chouriço?” [best translation I’ve got is “meat”, or maybe “sausage”] asks the friar. And so his hosts find him some chouriço that they throw in the pan.

“It’s looking great! Now this soup would really improve if we could thicken it up a little. Do you happen to have some potatoes or beans leftover from yesterday?” And some potatoes and beans have indeed been leftover from yesterday. The friar adds it to the soup.

The friar asks for a few more spices, olive oil, and soon there is a delicious smell coming from the pot. What a nice soup!

They eat and once the soup is finished the friar fishes out the stone, washes it and puts it back in his pocket. Tomorrow he’ll knock on someone else’s door along the way ;)

That brings me back! When I was a kid I did mostly good in school, but I despised history, so my mom would take the manual and make small test like question and quizzes that I could then consult the manual for to answer (but not copy). Just the change of format made it a search information task instead of reading a huge dull bunch of text.

History was always my weakest subject, but the help my mom gave always kept me from having terrible grades

This varies by person, and he best person to talk about this is your girlfriend.

With that said, I’d do half what she paid in rent for mortgage (of half the mortgage payment, whichever is smaller), and all other expenses split down the middle. She would pay rent if she lived elsewhere, the way I see it, her contributing to the mortgage is a deeply discounted rent.

This might not work for you, you need to talk. Me and my now husband when we first started setup a joint account, and each sent half of an agreed amount there every month, or as needed. We didn’t make similar incomes, it fluctuated back and forth through the years for both of us. Some people would think it was unfair for us to pay the same. It worked for us, and both of us were happy with the arranjement, it might not be the best option for you.

As a follow-up on the shower thing, have you considered/tried showering with the lights off or low light? If you haven’t, I’d advise you to keep some form of light you can easily reach and turn on in case something happens.

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It’s really tiring to just exist inside your own head.

I’ve described it before as a box filled with a bunch of bouncy balls just bouncing off on every direction, off the walls, ceiling and floor, all the time. Every one of those balls is a thought, it’s really hard to hold onto just one, it’s hard to keep one once you’ve caught it.

When I’m resting usually I just put in some youtube video/TV show/audio book and play some mindless game for a while. On the outside it looks like it just played solitaire for 3 hours straight, but on the inside I’m just trying to follow one line of thought while keeping the rest of my brain occupied and quiet for a second.

Not about money in my case, but similar stuff happens too. I just stand my ground and say as calmly as I can (with varying levels of success) “I’m sure X happened this way” we don’t discuss it often, my dad usually just keeps up believing stuff happened his way, and we leave it at that.

I see a lot of people here advocating for peeking over the shoulder, but to me that is insane. The only times I peek over my shoulder is if the car is not moving or going really slowly.

I’m not taking my eyes off the road for long enough to look over my shoulder. How fast are you guys moving your neck? A slight tweak of the steering wheel can veer you of course in the time it takes to look over your shoulder.

In the motorway I peek at the mirrors frequently to have a general awareness of the cars around me and where they are. If it’s day I have a general idea of the color and build of the most relevant cars to me, so I can know if a car is suddenly missing (probably in my blind spot), I should wait a bit for it come into my vision again (though the front or the mirrors)

When I decide to change lanes I look at all the mirrors and assess if it’s safe and if I’m aware of all the cars around me. Then I signal my lane change, wait a second, check the mirrors again, and start to change lanes gradually and predictably, to give any other driver that sees a dangerous situation plenty of time and space to react or signal to me in any way that the lane change is not safe.

To me this is the safest way to go about it. Newer cars have extra sensors to check the blind spot for you, which is great and gives you another degree of certainty, but I drove like this before I had a car that had this feature.

What helps me with those kinds of things is to focus on enjoying the thing, whatever it is. Especially digital stuff that occupies no space in my home, I accept that it’s ok to do something as long as I enjoy it, and when it becomes repetitive or boring I can just stop.

Of course sometimes you need to push against this a bit when you know there is a slightly unpleasant section blocking more enjoyable content. The big takeaway is that it’s ok to stop if you’re not enjoying yourself anymore. No one is gonna check or care.

Doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try:

If you had the thing in your hand right now, and you had to put it away where would you put it?

Think of a few options and check those.

If you eventually find it and it wasn’t in the first place you though of, put it there when you put it away next.

I do believe a lot of landlords don’t care and will make decisions based on what makes them more money versus the well-being of the people living in their property. But I don’t agree that landlords as a concept are bad, and that they all should sell their extra properties to reduce the crazy prices we’re having.

There are plenty of reasons someone would prefer to rent than to buy, and if there are no landlords or rental houses what happens to those cases? I personally have attended university not at my home city, and I rented an apartment with other students. It makes no sense to buy in that situation. People who intend to live somewhere temporarily would mostly prefer to rent, what would happen then?

There is a problem with regulation, big companies owning whole apartment buildings, and generally small greedy landlords what will make their tenants life hell. But cutting out the whole concept is trading one issue with another.

Stargate Universe, Alphas and Dark Matter. All left on cliffhangers. Sometimes I wonder if the writers see the writing on the wall on the cancelation and pull this shit to see if people get a petition going to have their show come back.

This depends on where you live in. AFAIK, in Europe dishwashers are not even hooked up to hot water, just cold. In America their standard plug electricity is weaker and therefore it’s not enough for a dishwasher to heat the water hot enough to sanaitze.

This is the reason electric kettles are not a big thing in America (they take significantly longer to heat the water) and “home electrification” is a bigger deal there.

And as always, to anyone interested, Technology Connections talks about this in his videos on dishwashers, induction stovetops and kettles.

Not able to checkout, but my local library has a tiny maker space you can go in and use. It includes some crafting supplies, a sewing machine and a 3D printer. For using the 3D printer they have a stamp card you pay for at the start for hours of printing. It’s not expensive, it’s there mostly to help pay filament and prevent people from doing super long prints without thinking about it. For checking out they have movie and series DVDs and board games