My pup hates the elevator but hates the stairs more. When we were in an apartment he’d lead me to take the stairs down and the elevator up, until his arthritis got worse and he’d be team elevator each time.

When he comes to work with me, we take a glass-sided elevator up to my office. He can see that we’re going up and he hates it. It doesn’t matter if he stands on the ground or is in his crate, he shivers. He’d much rather I carry him up the stairs.

Good call asking. It just clicked that my glass pots wouldn’t work. I mean, of course they wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t think of them while stove shopping because I only rarely use them.

5 am rambling about why I have glass pots: I keep them around for a friend that keeps kosher and visits. My non-Jewish understanding is that different folks keep kosher differently based on different traditions. Her tradition is that glass doesn’t pick up meat, dairy, or non-kosherness, so the same pot can be used for meat, dairy, or non-kosher meals, with washing in between of course.

I suspect it was https://workadventu.re/ because IIRC they self-hosted–my friend showed me the mothballed, just-moved-off-of version, so he wouldn’t run into co-workers. But, I could be wrong.

A friend of mine works in a wicked neurodiverse, geeky company. They telecommute from all over and have a virtual campus with proximity audio and rooms you can move your little character to encourage the spontaneous conversations that happen IRL. He said it really worked for him. He demoed it for me and it was adorable, pixel art, iirc.

The all day meeting idea sounds like hell.

Grief is complicated and doesn’t always look the same. When my dad died, he’d been in the hospital for a month for a surprise illness, so I had time to get used to the idea he might not make it out. His older sisters hadn’t seriously considered the possibility. I’d done some “pre grieving” and they hadn’t, so my reaction was a bit less dramatic? outwardly intense?

A friend of mine says grief is an ambush predator. You can be going about your day and suddenly something triggers you to suddenly drown in emotion. When that hits, I just swim in it, feel my feelings, all the complex emotions that come up–anger, loss, regret.

And as time goes on, I’ve gotten ambushed less often, but it can still feel just as intense. I have more practice swimming in it, so maybe I don’t have to excuse myself and hide in a work bathroom to cry anymore, I can just sit at my desk and focus on drinking my coffee.

(It’s after my bedtime, so I hope this all makes sense. There’s also the Grief Box analogy, which feels accurate to me.)

My bad. I should have linked directly to the one in the Miskatonic University archive. (it takes a while to load, but it does load for me, all the pages)

Am librarian. Here you go

My middle school home economics teacher told us the story of her cooking lobster for the first time. She thought they killed them for you when you get them at the grocery store.

She got home and opened the bag to find two live lobsters. The only pot she had big enough was glass. She watched those two lobsters boil to death and never had lobster again.

My partner’s in the same boat.

What’s wicked sad is he loves garlic but it doesn’t love him. He can have garlic oil but that’s about it (something to do with FODMAPs).

I’ve broken that habit. I get 6 calls a day telling me I’m pre-approved for some financial scam. I’ve tried blocking it, sending it through filters. Nothing has worked so far. They leave voicemails and now I don’t check that because it’s just 20 voicemails about a loan I don’t want.

If I don’t recognize the number I don’t answer.

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I have a soft spot for cabbage food, so I’d happily celebrate St Patrick’s with some corned beef cabbage rolls/gołąbki.

I stopped eating almost any beef after discovering the cute cow gifs subreddit. They can be so puppy like! They’re also huge methane machines and having fewer cows would be good for the environment.

On the other hand, I crave a good pot roast maybe once a year.

Edit: and I can name my mother’s favorite childhood cow and the cow my grandpa let me name because we shared a birthday.

I’m trying to square my instinct that

1. snails aren’t bugs (because they’re squishy without the shell) with the feeling that
2. crabs are bugs (because they’d go tap-tap if you tapped on their exoskeleton with a finger) but
3. hermit crabs aren’t bugs if they’re in a shell but are bugs if they’re naked

My old manager used to take his team out to a Szechuan Chinese place and order for us, family style. It was awesome.

I’m white AF and it was the first time I had actually spicy Chinese food. He’d also order a few mild dishes for the pair of no-spice folk on the team.

Thinking back, manager was a Chinese immigrant, most team mates were Indian immigrants, and the spice-free teammates were both white. (I mention immigrant because my Indian teammates with kids would complain about their American-born kids’ low spice tolerance.)

Native English speaker. What I got is “His guts were fucked up in these technical ways so we did magical medical stuff. He went home, came back a 5 months later with sad butt symptoms and we did this other medical thing to treat it.”

So yeah, I have no desire to understand more details

IBS, medication with “surprise diarrhea” as a side effect, and occasional almost–passing-out on the toilet (overactive vasovagal reflex). It’s not a fun combination. Fiber only helps so much.

I tried different prescription meds until I found one that worked for me without bad side effects.

I’m honestly bad at taking my meds, but I take them when I really need to focus on something. But, my current job lets me flit from task to task, so I usually have something novel to work on and so don’t need the meds. I do still take coffee, but only about a large cup a day.

Sorry that’s not more helpful.

I tried that route, but it turns out my folks left the Poland before it was modern Poland, so never held Polish citizenship. If only they’d sucked it up and stayed through World War I. /s

What’s he drink?

(Btw, I have you tagged as the person that learned loufas are a vegetable. Hi! 😊)

Edit: oh, right. Canonically he both is and drinks wine.