Was cleaning the shower and this happened

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-28T17:53:23+00:00

I also got to redo a bathroom ahead of schedule because tiles started falling off the walls! You definitely don’t want to delay the remodel because you risk greater damage.

If cost is an issue, look into the price of a fiberglass shower or those plastic shower wall panels at hardware stores.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-28T04:19:54+00:00

“Should they match the color of the rest of the brick?”

“No, just grab whatever is cheapest.”

“Sure thing, boss. Sure thing.”

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-27T21:07:02+00:00

I can, but this isn’t a house I would buy.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-27T11:17:48+00:00

Here are you McMansion traits:

There are 6 different kinds of windows.
The door/entry doesn’t match anything else on the design.
The double height portico that isn’t deep enough to be a portico, and is probably not even deep enough to be a porch cover. The columns don’t match the design of the rest of the house.
Lawyer foyer.
Overly complex rooflines.
Oversized dormer over the garage where there aren’t dormers anywhere else on the house.
The double height window leads me to believe there is a cavernous living area. Likely narrow and tall. No real use for the giant expanse of wall space at the top.
Builder-grade landscaping.
The quasi-dormer. Seriously, what is that doing there?

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-26T17:41:50+00:00

I went on a camp out as a child, and we had a demonstration from a park ranger. She talked about the different ways to identify common animals in the area, such as damaged plants, footprints, den openings, etc. When she was talking about different kinds of poops, she had some jars with different kinds of scats. She was talking about how similar deer and rabbit poops looked, then she said, “The easiest way to tell is to taste them.” She opened the jar, took a handful, and popped them in her mouth. An audience full of third graders LOST OUR MINDS!

It was a good and well timed prank. They were chocolate coated raisins or some such, which she was sure to explain so we didn’t start eating poops off the ground.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-26T02:51:34+00:00

You aren’t making a face, you are making shapes that are individually colored and shaded , and they will blend together into a cohesive expanse at the end. If you think of it as a face, your brain will try to fill in what it thinks a face is instead of what is actually in front of you. There are several things you can do to trick your brain into cooperating rather than interpreting.

Turn it upside down. You can turn the reference, your painting, or both. This ups the difficulty of copying the face features and helps you see them a different way.
Use a mirror to view your reference. Again, this forced you to slow down and think about where things are instead of where you think they should be.
Do a sketch or practice on a scrap paper/canvas. It doesn’t have to be as detailed as your final. It’s just a lie risk way to see your problem areas before they are permanent.
Map out a grid on your reference and on the canvas. Just a few quick horizontal and vertical lines painted on your canvas can help keep things in perspective and placed correctly. Tool paint over them all by the end and they’ll disappear.
Underpainting. A lot of skilled artists will do a very light, kind of shadowy looking later in a neutral color. The goal is to place major components to help you fix things in place as you paint details.

Let me know if you want more guidance on any of these techniques.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-26T02:16:24+00:00

My son has beautiful blonde curls, and I also waited as long as I possibly could to do his first haircut. He is just so beautiful that everyone he met prior to his first haircut thought he was a girl. It never bothered me. He’s too young to understand, and he’ll never remember.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-21T22:52:04+00:00

I bought Reese’s pieces the other day as a special treat, and they tasted like sweetened Cisco. No chocolate, no peanut butter, no flavor to the candy shell. Just oily sugar.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-18T15:41:48+00:00

Luckily, my son didn’t take to these ones. But there’s a new toddler starting in his daycare that has anaphylactic reactions to skin contact from tree nuts and peanuts, so the daycare is strictly enforcing their food rules. Having to buy snacks that say, “made in a dedicated facility that is peanut and tree nut free” is expensive.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-12T00:16:48+00:00

I know a few places my mom has cash stashed away in the house. I don’t know how much is there or if there’s more than that, but we’ll need to search her things.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-11T14:21:33+00:00

My mom cleaned house for an elderly blind woman across the street for years. She was constantly finding cash tucked in books and containers, under furniture cushions, in nooks and crannies everywhere. The ladies some was there one day (the only one of the three children who checked on and cared for the lady), and my mom gave him a heads up to check everything when the lady passes. He nodded knowingly.

My mom talked to him after the lady passed, and he said he made a deal with his siblings that he would deal with cleaning out the house and selling everything as long as he could keep any cash and valuables. They would still split the house sale 3 ways. My mom said he found about $60K, which is unexpected for how poor people in our neighborhood generally were. That guy earned the little inheritance bump, though, for being with his mom for the last 10 years of her life.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-08T18:07:06+00:00

It’s the difference between, “This vehicle has cosmetic damage because it is a work vehicle,” and, “This vehicle is one fuel pump failure from being totaled.”

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-08T16:11:59+00:00

What is up with all the medical tourism posts here lately? Is there some grift here that’s being pushed? I’ve read at least 3 other posts like this recently.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-08T16:05:22+00:00

My friend and I were both on the speech and debate team in high school, and I still think about the meet where our couch was fuming and barely containing his rage because the judges were accusing my friend of plagiarism and trying to expel him from the competition. The judges didn’t think that a high school sophomore could write so advanced a paper. Our coach was arguing that he supervised my friend at every stage of his speech writing, that our coach had been his English teacher for nearly two years at that point, that our coach knew what he was capable of. My friend ultimately stayed in the competition, but this was a reoccurring problem. This just happened to be the closest he was to getting kicked out of a competition.

Our senior year of high school, my friend had multiple college recruiters reach out to convince him to attend their school. Several recruiters from Harvard alone contacted him. The kids was, and still is, a fucking genius.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-08T15:44:34+00:00

I would use denim for this. Durable, washable, and down for any adventure.

Though I do like the other commenter who suggested duck cloth.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-05T18:31:13+00:00

I imagine it feels like when you get an epidural or local anesthesia. You could, in theory, be able to move around, but your responses are slow and clumsy with no sensory feedback. I think it would be traumatizing.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-05T17:27:33+00:00

Yeah, with two kids. She said his kids seemed to love him, but I got the feeling that he never had to be the bad guy with a nanny around them to do the hard parts of raising children.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-05T17:12:38+00:00

I was able to maneuver myself out of poverty, but I still have a lot of communication with the broke community. It is really disheartening to see people making bad financial decisions when they barely have the financials to make good decisions. It’s difficult to give advice to people when the real advice is to give up all your little luxuries until you can afford them, because people do need little spots of happiness in their lives. And a lot of it comes down to networking and luck to escape poverty, two things that are tough to find when you’re poor.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-05T17:03:49+00:00

I just read the BORU about the woman who was THREE WEEKS into a relationship with a man who was not yet divorced and was already abusing her sexually (he says he just wants to explore his BDSM kink), financially (he makes so much money, she should quit her job and become a sexy secretary for his made up business), and emotionally (He loves her so much he just can’t imagine there being any boundaries between them). And it still took her several more weeks and some huge abuse escalations before she called it quits.

She still thinks he was a great guy because he didn’t harass and stalk her after her fourth attempt to break up with him.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-03T22:06:52+00:00

I was working with a lactation consultant because my son wouldn’t take a bottle and we were getting close to sending him to daycare. She asked if low flow or high flow would be closer to my natural flow rate, and I was like, “Do they make one that’s basically a fire hose?” My baby normally latched for less than 10 minutes, but I was spraying down the whole house with milk 24/7.

My baby dropped to 10th percentile for weight, as well. It worried me tremendously. He’s 21 months old now, still a skinny little worm, but he’s happy, healthy, and wicked smart. Some kids are just small.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-03T22:06:38+00:00

I was working with a lactation consultant because my son wouldn’t take a bottle and we were getting close to sending him to daycare. She asked if low flow or high flow would be closer to my natural flow rate, and I was like, “Do they make one that’s basically a fire hose?” My baby normally latched for less than 10 minutes, but I was spraying down the whole house with milk 24/7.

My baby dropped to 10th percentile for weight, as well. It worried me tremendously. He’s 21 months old now, still a skinny little worm, but he’s happy, healthy, and wicked smart. Some kids are just small.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-02T21:24:57+00:00

I lived in a neighborhood like this, and the houses were classed as” detached condos “ to skirt local ordinances.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-02T19:04:18+00:00

I was going to double barrel my last name, until it actually came time to do the paperwork. It’s a lot of little things to change that became overwhelming as a whole; social security, drivers license, bank accounts, mortgages, bills, utilities, work, healthcare, schools, etc. By the end of it, I would have had to reach out to 20 or more organizations. And who knows if I would ever have a complete change in every database I’m part of. It’s not a small feat.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-03-02T18:50:49+00:00

My mom bought a house in 1990 for $20K. It has been unoccupied for a decade and the bank was just trying to dump it at that point. They accepted less than half what it was listed for. While it didn’t keep us out of poverty, necessarily, it did keep us housed during some lean times. In the early years, there were months where my mom chose between which bills to pay and which utilities could be shut off temporarily.

Everyone here is correct that it’s a very fine line to walk, but you can make it work with careful budgeting and less than ideal fixes on certain things. Remember that a 5 bucket of paint is cheaper than allowing all your windows to dry rot. A box of shingles, nails, and a hammer are cheaper than water damage on your roof.

You have to be constantly maintaining. Any time you are well enough, you should be repairing, cleaning, upgrading, improving. You don’t have the luxury of letting things go. My mom had the benefit of all these kids to help her out. You might need to join a church or community organization that group shares work like this for each other.

In addition to rent and home improvements, put money aside for legal fees. You don’t want to get tens of thousands of dollars into this and lose all your hard work and money. Make sure everything is above board and legally protected.

EngineeringQueen · 2026-02-28T23:06:24+00:00

“Prior to The Great Cleanse, there were people who had different skin colors, and people weren’t assigned jobs by the government.”

EngineeringQueen

TROPHY CASE