I feel the same about Paris, there’s nothing romantic or magical about it. It had easily the worst air pollution I’ve ever seen in Europe (but I understand that’s improved a lot in the last decade), it’s overcrowded and smells like sewage everywhere. Not a place I’d ever care to visit again. That said I use a number of French services and I really like a lot of their cultural exports, and I’d love to explore other areas of France.
Had a guy in one of my grad school courses who always found a way to shoehorn in the fact that he’d summited Everest not just once, but TWICE! 🙄 Climbing Everest just strikes me as rich person bragging rights, and it isn’t even that impressive given that a lot of the people who do it pay porters to carry their supplies and dig their latrines.
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Food bank in the US. Food drives and individual donations of food don’t really mean shit to food banks and they result in overwhelmingly low quality food. Your local food bank isn’t hurting for your expired cans of coconut milk or your forgotten boxes of Kraft mac & cheese. Sugary junk and expired food will be sorted out and tossed. Most staple foods at food banks are distributed by the federal government or purchased by the food bank. Most other foods are donated in large volume by supermarkets and manufacturers. What food banks really need from you is donations of money, not food.
Another thing about food banks is that some supermarkets and manufacturers abuse them to dump their spoiled, expired or overproduced goods and get a tax write-off on them. I worked at a medium sized food bank that would throw away multiple pallets of sugary bakery items from Walmart every day because they didn’t meet our nutrition guidelines and Walmart had been told repeatedly not to donate them, but they did it anyway for the tax write-off. Ever walk into a Walmart and wonder how they can have so much bakery crap on display and sell it before it expires? Yeah, most of that stuff will be marked down multiple times and then trucked to the local food bank where it will be thrown away. Trader Joe’s also does this with their returns (most of their donations are unusable). Whole Foods on the other hand is really amazing about donating tons of high quality stuff on a daily basis.
Hard water vs soft water.
So many times we’ve been in a hotel room and I’ve taken a shower and commented on what soft water it is because it feels like the soap never rinses off and I feel slippery all over. She always tries to correct me by calling it hard water. She grew up in a desert city that has naturally hard water, so she’ll always say, “I know what hard water is, I grew up with hard water!” when the “hard” water she grew up with was softened by some means. It doesn’t matter how many articles and blog posts and ChatGPT sessions on the topic I show her, she always insists they’re wrong and she’s right. We argued about it a few times in the past, but now it’s a running joke between us.
You add it before cooking! It actually doesn’t get mushy at all, and brings out the banana’s sweetness.
Curry powder! I’ve never tried curry leaves or curry sauce, but those sound delicious too. Whichever way you add the curry, I highly recommend trying it!
I discovered that combo when I was living in Sweden where it’s a fairly common one that most pizza places offer. I believe the pizzas are usually called Bahamas, Afrikana or Tropicana and they always feature pineapple, banana and curry, and usually either ham, shrimp or peanuts.
Pineapple, banana and curry, optionally with peanuts. Now that’s a real pizza!
I’ve been on a similar coffee journey. I used to drink it nonstop throughout the day, like 5-6 cups of black coffee most days. Then one day I was physically assaulted and chased by a drugged out guy at a train station (never take transit in Denver, it’s a total fucking shitshow). I thought I was going to get stabbed or killed that day and I guess that event caused some trauma because I started getting panic attacks shortly after. I realized that my panic attacks were more frequent and lasted longer on the days that I drank more coffee, so I quickly cut all caffeine out of my life. Now I’ve been without caffeinated coffee for over a year and don’t miss it at all, although I still enjoy a decaf espresso most days.
Same thing happened with weed. I used to love weed and smoked/vaped it pretty frequently, but started getting panic attacks from it around the same time so I cut it almost entirely out of my life. Every few months I’ll buy a pack of pre-rolls to enjoy, but it literally takes me like five days to finish a single joint because I smoke one tiny puff at a time to avoid panic attacks.
Honestly though, even if I didn’t deal with panic attacks, I’m probably better off having no caffeine and only a tiny amount of weed.
Central air conditioning all summer long.
But before I had AC, on hot nights I’d put a cold damp rag on my feet to fall asleep easier and that really worked. I’d also put a box fan in one of my windows pointed outside, and I’d also open a window in another room so that outside air would be sucked in through my home.
Use them in salads!
Same, I was a DDG user for years and switched to Qwant a month ago. Qwant results are a step up from DDG, and Qwant takes the same approach to privacy as DDG but it’s based in France so it wins in that regard as well. I’m in the US and Qwant still does a great job of providing localized results.
I do the exact same thing, except instead of paying monthly for hosting, I pay $12/year for addy.io. Super reliable service and I can easily manage my email aliases with their phone app.
Haha, they just told me in a normal voice, but obviously I had to play along if I wanted to get back into the country. The experience was a bit dramatic, like something from TV, but it wasn’t actually scary because I had nothing to hide. They also asked if I had anything in my car they should know about, so I said I had a stash of liquor and explained that I was moving and wanted to bring my booze – but they didn’t care and didn’t touch my alcohol.
I was moving from Alaska to Boston, so I had to pass through Canada. Everything I owned was crammed into my Honda Element and I was driving it solo across North America.
I re-entered the US at a border crossing in North Dakota. I pulled up to the window and without saying anything else the officer pointed at a detached garage and told me to pull into it. As I slowly pulled into the garage, there was only enough light to see the outlines of the walls. When I turned off my car, super bright lights were switched on and I saw 6-8 heavily armed border officers with bulletproof vests on either side of the car. One of them instructed me to get out of the car and give him my keys. He also took my passport and took me into a small room in the garage that had 1-way mirrors (so they could observe me and I couldn’t see out) and then he locked me inside. There was nothing inside the room except a few folding plastic chairs – nothing to read and nothing to look at, nothing aesthetically pleasing at all. I could hear them going through my car, removing my plastic totes full of shit and searching through them. After what was probably 20 minutes, they opened the door, handed me my keys and passport and told me, “You’re free to go, welcome home.”
Done! Wouldn’t have bothered voting if I hadn’t read your comment, so thanks for sharing. Voting was really easy, just had to enter my member number and zip code.
Excellent service, highly recommend! I pay for the “Lite” plan which is dirt cheap and allows me to create aliases under my own domain. So my accounts all have unique email addresses and I know when a company sells my contact info because I start receiving unsolicited spam to that alias. I use aliases for temporary needs too, like RSVPing to events, and I deactivate them afterward if I never want to hear from the organizers again.
It also recommends a Chinese browser which IMO is a lot worse than using an American browser.
Doubtful the UK will be first choice for many Americans after it neutered itself with Brexit.
I forgot my wallet the other day and only realized it when it was time to pay for my grocery purchase.
My state’s driver license app works flawlessly, but I can’t get any of these crappy wallet apps to work with Android on my S22 Ultra due to unresolvable errors with each of them. Hopefully PayPal can finally give us both a working wallet app.