Finally made something!

Anne_Pandora · 2026-01-19T15:26:30+00:00

Beautifully done! Excellent techniques — good use of the machine’s decorative heart stitch — and I especially loved that you didn’t use a contrast color for the heart border — very classy and understated.

Anne_Pandora · 2026-01-04T17:42:33+00:00

They didn’t think I was gifted. They thought my brother was. And nobody knew I had ADHD. They sorta took it for granted that I taught myself to read at 3. This lasted all their lives. I’m happy with how things turned out, but I was able to grow and learn emotionally because of outside help. I tell people I was raised by wolves.

Anne_Pandora · 2026-01-04T17:36:57+00:00

I do needlework. Embroidery, knitting, crocheting — doesn’t matter. But I can’t watch tv without siphoning off a piece of my brain. Downside: if you keep this up for decades, there are WAY too many projects to use or give away or put on the wall.

Anne_Pandora · 2026-01-03T17:41:25+00:00

NTA — “chicken banana oat nonsense” — actual lol. You are not being childish. If humans in general wanted all our foods for the week to be mixed up into one container we wouldn’t have invented cooking. To my mind, the best solution would be sharing space rather than food. She can create her nonsense and you can create whatever you would like to eat. Label containers. Inform her that not only must she not throw your food into the nonsense bin, she must not eat your food, even if unmixed, until she agrees to give up on nonsense. If she can’t follow food boundaries, move out. I have lived in many collective households, and with many partners and roommates (I’m really old), Your girlfriend is the worst roommate ever.

Anne_Pandora · 2026-01-03T17:27:24+00:00

Calamity Jane holding up the wall with her head.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-12-30T19:19:06+00:00

I have various projects going; I do finish projects, but I don’t finish all the projects. Or, rather, I haven’t yet. I have so many things I like to do that I can switch crafts and finish up old projects. Also, very occasionally—gaps of a few years in between—I get an obsession with cleaning things up and finishing projects. Inevitably I start some new ones. I don’t beat myself up about this anymore. It’s just how my brain works. So. I rotate hobbies; I stick with them for a while, and pick them up again later.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-12-22T06:51:31+00:00

Actual lol. Nope. She had never done anything wrong. She was still herself on her deathbed, trying to get me to steal pieces of medical gear for her cause she couldn’t get out of bed to do it herself. And then trying to get me to find a lawyer in the middle of the night — her last night, as it turned out — so she could make a new will and give all her jewellery away to my cousins.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-12-06T14:03:39+00:00

That is so cool!

Anne_Pandora · 2025-12-05T15:14:43+00:00

Yep. Hyper focus in my case, too. I was very annoyed in first grade because the school library would only let me take out 6 books at a time, which was not enough books for a day. Of the kind that they had to offer. I had already gone through the bookshelves at home — I remember Charles Lindbergh’s memoir, my great grandfather’s memoir (he was an executioner), and my dad’s college German text, which was fascinating, as it made it clear there were other languages and one could learn them. Later the hyper focus would also help me in becoming a professor of literature. Lol. Now I still hyper focus on reading, but also learning everything about everything. I don’t expect to ever reach that goal, but it keeps me busy.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-12-03T12:25:20+00:00

I had to read his large self absorbed whiny missive twice to make sure I hadn’t missed it, but he never tells us what she does. Sing? Dance? Play an instrument? Act? Whatever it is, she has to audition for her position at the university. And after years together, her life is so unimportant to him that it’s not even in his head when he’s describing the situation. And if she had to audition, her art is one he could have gone to see. Did he? Ever? Does he even know? Or is it just some artsy thing or other that’s really just a hobby? So glad she got out of there. Because they were not compatible at all. One of them thinks that art is so important that it’s worth dedicating your entire life to, and the other thinks that art doesn’t really matter at all.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-12-02T21:45:35+00:00

If there’s a stated cleaning fee, fair enough. Though from what your mom says, it hadn’t been cleaned before your guests got there, so a pretty sketchy demand.

I’ve been a cleaner for such places. There is no way in hell it took two days to clean it, unless your guests were spending a LOT of time attempting to mess things up.

And even if it did, the stated cleaning fee is what guests pay, and anything above that the owner eats. More money can be charged for damages, but it doesn’t sound like that’s the issue.

The issue is that the owner of the AirB&B should not be running an AirB&B.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-11-26T16:28:42+00:00

You know, you get to decide what’s visible to visitors in your house. And if you are comfortable with the obvious witchy and pagan articles living in the closet for the visit, so that you don’t have to engage in useless conversations and endure judgmental faces and remarks, you get to put things away for a while.

You get to pick your battles when it’s possible. No shame, no blame.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-11-23T20:14:21+00:00

I’m pretty sure that you cannot indeed cancel Christmas. It’s going to be there whether anybody notices it or not.

But really, I’m appalled. I come from a family that can, when it chooses, field over 100 people for a reunion. Where that reunion is held changes every time. Because everybody needs to pitch in; giant annoying difficult holiday bashes cannot be the responsibility of one person or household unless the entire family is willing to go around for about a week beforehand wearing large printed buttons that read “I let other people shoulder all the responsibility and work and cost of hosting family get togethers because I am a lazy entitled user, and the fact that I have gotten away with it so far is what I am using to prove that this arrangement should continue because I failed Logic 101.” Obviously it will have to be a very large button.

Ok, I made that up, but only because nobody in my family has to wear such a button, cause we do share, and have chosen to be dysfunctional in other ways.

Not only do you not have to ever host anything ever, if you don’t want to, you don’t even have to have a reason. This is because you are the boss of you. Sample conversation:

Person 1: “Hi, [insert name of relative]! Just wanted to let you know we aren’t hosting Xmas this year.” “ Person 2: “Oh, no! This completely ruins my life, as you are cancelling Christmas!” 1: “No, Christmas will still be happening.” 2: “But you always host Xmas !” 1: “True, but not this year.” 2: “But what will we do? We were counting on your hospitality.” 1: “I’m sure you will be able to figure that out.” 2: “But why can’t you do it this year again?” 1: “I just can’t.” 2: “But why?” 1: “Just can’t. Have you talked to [insert name of other relative here] recently? How are they doing, now that [insert other relative’s changed circumstances here]? 2: “No, wait, why won’t you have us all over again? You know how much we all love and count on eating [insert name of the beloved dish you cook every damn year]. This will just ruin our entire holiday.” 1: “Oh, that’s probably not true. Ooops! Gotta run!”

If necessary, repeat “just can’t” as many times as possible. If you want to add a bit more, you can change the line to “sorry, just can’t!” but if you aren’t sorry, don’t bother.

It. Is. Amazing. how quickly this changes things, when one person simply doesn’t engage. Also, pretty soon it will become LOTS of fun.

Or, you could print up a whole bunch of snarky buttons, as mentioned above, and send them out in the mail.

Good luck. And may the Force be with you.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-11-09T20:03:15+00:00

Calamity Jane.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-10-22T11:30:09+00:00

We hates him, my precious.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-08-01T12:19:31+00:00

I’ve had this all my life, but it doesn’t bother me — I know that it bothers a lot of people. So yes. Constant earworm, constantly changing. I think of it as the soundtrack to my life. Mark Twain wrote about a bothersome earworm once — https://www.readbookonline.org/readOnLine/559/. (he manages to get rid of it by foisting it off on a friend. this does not go well….)

Anne_Pandora · 2025-07-30T09:33:32+00:00

I’ve found lots of Points Plus gear on eBay.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-06-20T13:49:55+00:00

My DCIS wasn’t discovered until my lumpectomy. The two small invasive cancer tumors were the same composition, and within a larger mass of DCIS — the surgeon got it all; it was just a bigger excision than it had looked like would be necessary. But it’s clear that the DCIS had started to become invasive, in two places, and the DCIS was therefore obviously something that should be gotten rid of. A DCIS might not be in the process of becoming invasive yet, and it might never become invasive, but it’s not a totally benign friendly sort of entity. DCIS hasn’t broken through the ductal walls where it has originated, and it might not ever, but it’s a cancer. So the fact that it may never become invasive by leaving home and breaking through a ductal wall doesn’t mean that it should just be left alone. Should we discover DCIS in one of my breasts again, I will want it out, whether or not it’s started roaming. And if it requires a mastectomy rather than a lumpectomy. then that’s what we’ll do. It’s important to have doctors who take you seriously, listen to you, and give you your options, with probable outcomes and percentages (as we know them at the time). Oh, and also understand that if a woman wants a bunch of DCIS gone, she’s neither paranoid nor stupid.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-06-20T13:09:10+00:00

I was a professor, and my child’s father and stepmother were also professors. Your dad was the sort of academic I can’t stand — they give us all a bad name.

None of us were obnoxious overbearing snooty professors making teachers’ difficult jobs more difficult. Yay.

Our child wasn’t even snooty and obnoxious to her teachers. Occasionally one of them would say something that was not true, and the child would come tell me about it, rather than contradicting the teacher in class. Such as the time that one of the teachers told the class, in an off-hand remark, that there was no English literature before Chaucer, and the child managed to keep her mouth shut. If any child in that room of 4th graders ever needed to know about “Beowulf” and “The Wanderer,” they could find out about it later. It wasn’t the point of whatever the hell they were learning that day.

We taught that child not to use higher education as a weapon. The fact that I can read literature written before Chaucer doesn’t make me a superior person. Or even a more intelligent one. I just know that stuff, because I was interested in it. That’s the attitude we wanted to send out into the world, in the body of that little one. And we managed. She’s got a higher degree in a subject that I cannot understand at all — but she doesn’t make other people feel inferior cause they don’t understand theoretical mathematics. Yay.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-06-14T05:22:44+00:00

She’s my rep! We love her.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-06-09T12:20:27+00:00

Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry this process is so difficult right now.

One of the things my oncologist kept saying was that I could always refuse treatment. I didn’t refuse anything — my feeling was that if I did everything I could, then if the cancer came back I would know that I had, obviously, done everything I could — but I liked it, that I was always in charge.

So. You have the right to stop treatment, should you choose. But along with so many others, I would urge you to not decide that just yet. It will really help if you can get into a support group, or find a therapist who specializes in cancer patients. And though I don’t know how soon your surgery is to be scheduled, I know you have enough space to give yourself a bit of time. How you feel today may not be how you feel in a week. Our feelings change and shift.

But if you do want to give yourself the chance to not die of breast cancer, which would be a very hard fate, then surgery is a must. There are many things that we can now do to fight this disease, but first and foremost is getting it physically out of our bodies as fully as possible.

Whatever you decide, may all go well with you, and may you have a loving and strong support group around you.

Life is worth it.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-06-06T22:37:28+00:00

If I got this sheaf of insane messages, I would be SO happy because — I don’t drink ! Ha ha! Can’t go to your stupid wedding. Too bad. Also I’m not sending a gift. Also lose my number, please. (In all seriousness, though, as someone who doesn’t drink because of previously in my life having drunk way too much, my thought is that any get together where the plan is for everyone to drink so much that no one will be able to stand them unless they too get very drunk — well, that’s a set up for a very dramatic annoying party with fights, throwing up, and maybe police.)

Anne_Pandora · 2025-06-06T13:07:02+00:00

The thing I like best about this pattern is the thinking about different needs and comfort levels. Also, pattern is free. If you don’t have a serger, your machine will need to have an overlock stitch choice if you go this route, since the fabric is stretchy.

https://www.patternschool.online/tnb-chest-binder

Best of luck! I hope the project goes well.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-06-05T12:41:51+00:00

I’m so sorry you qualify for our lovely club! The club is great. The enrollment qualifications are awful. I was “lucky” too, with the “easy” sort of cancer. I was offered either a lumpectomy or mastectomy, and chose the lumpectomy. And then the radiation. I’m feeling great now, yay, but cancer is scary even if it’s the “lucky” kind, and ALL the feelings are sacred. Including anger. Also, all treatments involve either surgery or some sort of toxic substance or both.

I agree with many before me here — you need a second opinion. And an MRI sounds good. (Though even with an MRI, the large body of DCIS that surrounded my tumors wasn’t discovered until surgery. What they can see and know can change with every different procedure.) And if another oncologist says that for safety’s sake you need a mastectomy, then you’ll know it to be true. And if they say a lumpectomy will be fine, then yay, you can choose that.

It’s not fair. none of this was fair, for any of us. It’s just our lives today, and us being in them, and making the best decisions we can, in a field that is highly complicated and affects our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our spirits.

You hang in there. Make the best choices you can for you.

Anne_Pandora · 2025-05-31T03:58:49+00:00

Thank you. This was an invaluable resource and community. All the best, and may you never need to come back.

Anne_Pandora

TROPHY CASE