I have a couple pear trees in my back yard that I planted for my son when we was a baby. When my wife and I had a miscarriage on our 2nd and 3rd try we burried what we could with the pear trees, when out best cat died we burried him there, when my lizard that I’ve had for 12 years and went through hell with me died we burried her there, when my grandma died I burried some of her trinkets there.

I don’t mow much back there and let the grass grow, just keeping the base of the trees clean. Sometimes I like to go sit in that overgrown grass under the trees. It feels safe and comforting, the bugs keep me company, one time I had a garden snake sliver over my shoes and just sit there for a while.

I’ve never thought about it but I keep my phone in my left pocket. It stays on dnd most of the time and I hardly use it especially when I’m out. The right pocket it for the stuff I’m likely to pull out and use.

I’m much better off financially than my mom ever was, and my grandma even though she did pretty good when she was working was on disability for the last 20 years of her life fighting renal failure and after paying her bills had a couple pennies to rub together each month.

My grandma couldn’t do much the last few years and didn’t really need money, so I put quite a bit into fixing up her house and making her home dialysis situation as comfortable as I could. New floors, fancy chair, big TV, I even redid her whole lasndscaping outside even though she never really got to enjoy it, she felt better knowing it looked nice.

My mom on the other hand gets about $300-400 on a normal from me for random things for her and my sister, going out to eat, clothes, nails, extra food. Which is essentially the only thing that let’s them live a live outside of total poverty. They live in the projects but they can buy things when they want or don’t have to worry about how they’re gonna get their next meal.

My whole life plan revolves around getting enough land to put a second modest home on for my mom. I’m almost there, which if that wasn’t the case I can say with certainty she’d die in those projects and not from old age.

I’ve never really thought about not taking care of my elders. I guess my situation is one of those exceptions.

I’m pretty good at the whole interacting thing when it’s one on one, but put me in a room with more than one person and I freeze up, completely fall apart.

I used to love these. I always wanted to be the last one running. One year another kid and I ran so long the bell rang so we ran some more and got to skip the next period all together.

I got my first dishwasher a few years ago and decided to go sort of all in and get a solid mid range one instead of the cheapest option because I was so excited to not have to do dishes.

The fucking touch buttons are the worst fucking god damn bullshit pieces of shit I’ve ever experienced. From the jump even when they worked ‘properly’ it just felt weird, but a couple years later and half the time the touch doesn’t register. Sometimes there’s the slightest but of crud or water on there and the thing goes crazy and becomes super sensitive all of a sudden, usually I spend 5 minutes loading the dish washer and 10 minutes trying to get it to register which button I pushed.

I want real physical buttons.

Also while I’m on the topic I was highly disappointed to learn that you still have to wash food and stuf off of dishes before you put them in. I don’t know why I thought I could throw a plate with crusted lsagana on it the dishwasher but I did. I thought all dishwashers had some sort of garbage disposal thing built into it. They do not.

Those people stealing carts to sell them on the street are a god send.

We had a guy in my old neighborhood who would come around once a week with various necessities that most people couldn’t afford otherwise. Sure he made decent money, but babies got fed, pantries got replenished, feminine products were given out if you bought stuff from him regularly.

That might seem grimey to you, but that’s fine.

I had to go to urgent care the other day and the only way to check in was to scan a QR code and fill out a god awful, half broken form on a random third party website. There were no error messages. The site would timeout if you spent too long on one page, so you’d have to start over. The amount of people who had all sorts of issues is nuts.

This was “an upgrade”

I grew up below the dirt poor, like oodles and noodles were a treat poor, with no adult supervision for a good portion of my childhood. My mom was on basically every government program that existed, that didn’t mean I got anything out of it. The only reason I survived was by people looking the other way as I fed myself.

As I got older I had no life skills whatsoever and couldn’t hold down a job, friends, or any sort of meaningful relationship. So again, dirt poor, a little better off than I was before because there were a few ways to make money. But still I only ever got food at a store, and probably would have starved if too many people said something, or had to do even worse stuff than I was to feed myself.

Hell even when I got myself together a bit and held down a shitty job for a while I still couldn’t afford to feed myself after the bills hit, it was even worse when I started making just enough to get kicked off state insurance and stamps.

There are a lot of people out here just trying to survive, they shouldn’t have to steal to eat but they do and in my eyes that’s a human right.

Side note: food stamps are a fucking joke. What they’re giving to a family of 4 wouldn’t feed a single person, from my experience at least.

Ahh I think I had it mixed up, in the states at least rice contains a lot of heavy metals so when my son was young we avoided giving him too much rice, which was difficult since basically every kid snack is rice based.

A quick google search says washing it ‘could’ get rid of some of those metals, but not really. Makes me feel a little better about not ever washing my rice but it does cook a lot nicer after washing which makes sense.

I love cooking and I’ve gotten pretty good at making a lot of stuff completely from scratch. But my rice has always been awful, it seems so simple.

We got a $20 rice cooker a few months ago and its been a game changer. Perfect rice every time.

Also I just recently found out your supposed to wash rice before you eat it. Apparently its covered in a lot of heavy metals or something.

I put up a bird feeder and few months ago and now we constantly have at least 20 birds all around our yard. My son likes to throw bird seed all around now so its really cool to see them just walking around and pecking.

I absolutely fell in love with morning doves

Hope your pipe situation got resolved easily.

We had a pipe burst right at the entrance of our crawlspace a few weeks ago and it took a bit to realize. It was a nightmare and now we have to get some foundation work done.

I don’t know, it doesn’t seem far off.

Years ago when I was on Medicaid I spent about 2 weeks in the hospital. They took my appendix out and after looking at it and running some tests found out that I had some rare parasite. I was in excruciating pain at the time, throwing up blood a few times a day and just withering away. There was a pill that I was waiting to get that would’ve killed the parasites which could’ve been given to me after my 4th day there when they confirmed what I had. I spent the rest of the 2 weeks being doped up on morphine and an array of fluids until I couldn’t take it anymore and left the hospital ‘AMA’.

I went to a different hospital and got the medicine I needed almost immediately.

I did throw up again though when I got a ~$60k bill from my 2 week stay at the first hospital. Again they took out my appendix, ran some test, and pumped me with opiods for 2 weeks without treating my actual issue.

As a clean shaved man who doesn’t shave because he can’t grow any sort of facial hair I feel personally attacked.

To add to this, most companies in the us have a waiting period before certain benefits kick in, like health insurance. So if you want to switch jobs for whatever reason, you better be extra careful for the first 3 months of your new job. Unless of course you want to pay $1,000 a month to keep your insurance through cobra, or go through the cluster fuck runaround of getting insurance on your own. So especially when your insurance cover your whole family, it’s a nightmare.

If you don’t mind me asking what do you do? I’m always curious since truthfully the $200k/y fang jobs sometime make me think I’m the odd one out who’s not gonna retire by 40. And as primarily a perl developer on a team of 2 I feel like were in our own world most of the time.

When my title changed from web developer to software developer I got a 60% pay increase, but my job hardly changed in reality. I still only make just enough to do doordash on the side as an extra safety net and not as a necessity to afford food.

But when anyone asks what I do for work and I tell them, they immediately assume we’re absolutely loaded and I’m picking up the check everywhere we go.

Cutting a piece of your baby’s junk off for no other reason then everyone does it is a really weird thing that I’ve never been able to wrap my head around.

I’m not religious but I at least can understand if it’s for religious reason, there’s a point to it, even if I don’t agree with/understand the point. But people seem to just do it for no reason aside from it’s what people do. It’s forced genital mutilation anyway you look at it.