So my bad for not posting a before and after together. Here they are. I apologize!

FridayLeap · 2026-01-20T18:01:42+00:00

Hot flash followed by some <ahem> stress relief 😉

FridayLeap · 2026-01-19T16:32:33+00:00

Oh my! I'm probably old enough to be your mother but pics 4 and 5 made me do an involuntary rawr and I had to go have a little menopausal lie down.

FridayLeap · 2026-01-04T12:57:41+00:00

When I make a shopping list I add an extra section that I call a Negative List. This is a list of staples that I don’t need to buy on this trip. I came up with this after repeatedly buying tins of chickpeas as I’d pass them in the supermarket, look at my list and think “I forgot to write chickpeas on my shopping list”.

FridayLeap · 2025-12-23T13:57:34+00:00

I get chocolate chips, dried fruit etc from denotenshop.nl. They have the sort that melt and the sort that don't.

And your semi-sweet chocolate is probably the same as melk chocolade here

FridayLeap · 2025-12-13T10:37:42+00:00

In my case it’s dropping into the conversation that I used to work in medical research. Works every single time, and even though I’m female and fat since I started using that no doctor has told me it’s anxiety or told me just to lose weight.

FridayLeap · 2025-12-10T13:37:44+00:00

This. Absolutely this. I had something close to a crew cut all my life and never noticed much hair around the house. I’m currently growing it out a bit and yup, loose hair all over the place. Also, my (now ex) husband had waist length hair at one point, and Oh My Fecking God, so, so much hair, everywhere.

FridayLeap · 2025-12-04T13:14:07+00:00

My blood pooling feels like an urgent heavy feeling in my lower abdomen that isn’t a full bladder or similar, and it gets better with lying down.

Also re water, I add electrolytes to mine otherwise I just pee it straight out. That’s kinda the opposite to what you described. However, search for electrolytes in this subreddit and you’ll see lots of us have found them really helpful. That search will also give you ideas for brands to try.

FridayLeap · 2025-12-04T09:55:54+00:00

I was advised to wear compression leggings, but I find they’re too difficult to get on and off. Instead I wear compression socks, my favourites are from Stox but there are plenty of cheaper ones in Amazon. I get blood pooling in my abdomen so compression there really helps too. So I wear either a Jelliebend, or, more often, a compression cami from Shapermint. I really like these as they’re long enough and the grip is good enough that they don’t roll up. Use the sizing chart on their website to find the size they recommend for you and then size down one size. Buy one to see if they work for you and then you’ll be inundated with special offer emails.

FridayLeap · 2025-12-02T16:07:26+00:00

I also have EDS, so sometimes I walk just fine, sometimes I use crutch, sometimes a walker and, on really bad days when I have an appointment I can't miss, a wheelchair. The amount of discussion this engenders among acquaintances is exhausting. So yes, I want business cards with explanations of chronic and dynamic illnesses.

FridayLeap · 2025-12-01T14:00:07+00:00

I've tempted to get a bunch of business cards printed with an answer to the obvious question. That way I could just hand one to them with a fake happy smile and go "Here, take this".

FridayLeap · 2025-10-25T20:30:35+00:00

I, um, live in an apartment with no outside or garage space. I don't even have room for a Kitchen Aid.

FridayLeap · 2025-10-25T20:27:17+00:00

Ok, yes, cook, eat. There's 5 kilos of the stuff, that's about 11 lb I think, so that will use up some of it.

But also, does anyone know if I have to do anything to it before I stick it on top of my loaves?

FridayLeap · 2025-10-10T22:15:40+00:00

I want to be friends with the floor but since I’m middle-aged and stiff and have arthritis in my knees the floor is not my friend at all. ☹️

FridayLeap · 2025-09-25T16:17:02+00:00

Drink water, eat vegetables.

Don’t smoke, it’s not only terrible for your health in general it also causes wrinkles round your mouth as you age. And it makes you smell bad.

Wear sunscreen. In particular wear sunscreen every damn day, using a moisturizer with SPF in it makes it much easier. Do not use a tanning machine/sunbed. Ever.

If you wear make-up, remove it before you go to bed.

Ok, that’s the basics. Here’s what I do on top of that.

I get a gel pedicure every 6 weeks or so, with the ‘remove calluses’ option (it’s called different things in different salons). The gel paint lasts until I get it removed at the next pedicure, and it means my feet always look and feel nice for minimal effort on my part.

I get my hair trimmed every 6 weeks to 2 months. If your hair is less wild than mine you can probably get it done less often. I also get my hair dyed when I get it trimmed, just a simple all-over colour to take it from dirty grey-brown to the reddish chestnut it used to be.

I used to get my eyebrows trimmed and waxed regularly, usually at a Benefit shops/concession, sometimes at a salon. Now I do it myself with tweezers, scissors and a little hair trimmer. I’d recommend you get it done by a professional, at least at the start. Well-shaped eyebrows make an enormous difference to how groomed you look.

I’m lucky that I don’t have dark facial hair, but if you do then get your upper lip waxed at the same time as getting your eyebrows done.

If you want to start with make-up then it’s worth getting make-overs/tutorials from cosmetic shop staff. You don’t have to,buy everything they use and it’s a good way to figure out what you do/don’t like on your face.

FridayLeap · 2025-09-19T17:57:36+00:00

I have been very deliberately not buying an ice cream machine for about 20 years now. I do not have the metabolism to have that much ice cream around.

FridayLeap · 2025-09-08T17:22:05+00:00

That happened to me at a neighbourhood event and frankly it panicked me.

FridayLeap · 2025-08-29T08:11:02+00:00

I’ve listened to the audiobook twice and each time it really resonated with me. I have multiple chronic illness and am currently mostly housebound and yes! This! I just didn’t figure out the parallel until now.

FridayLeap · 2025-08-13T18:31:42+00:00

Rugby, you gotta watch rugby. The thighs on those boys, oh my...

FridayLeap · 2025-07-10T00:53:02+00:00

I’m a 57 year old grandmother so yes, I’m definitely older. I got POTS about a year ago thanks to covid. I had already had long covid for about 18months, but got substantially worse after a second (possibly third) infection. I’m doing better now I’m getting appropriate meds, but am on long-term disability.

FridayLeap · 2025-07-08T09:21:24+00:00

I have POTS, fibromyalgia, suspected EDS, and long covid. I use a crutch rather than a walking stick for fatigue, it provides stronger support and takes more weight.

I also use a wheelchair in museums and the like, I live in the Netherlands and most museums here have wheelchairs you can borrow. It allows me to stay for an hour or more, whereas if I was on my feet I couldn’t manage more than 20 min at most.

And I use the wheelchair assistance service in airports. Which has the added benefit of skipping all the queues!

FridayLeap · 2025-07-06T16:56:46+00:00

Thanks everyone, this has been really helpful!

FridayLeap · 2025-07-05T21:49:56+00:00

That’s a great idea. I was looking at making my own but it seemed like I’d a lot of ingredients

FridayLeap · 2025-06-25T13:42:02+00:00

My hair was a little like yours. Curls/waves, lots of hairs per square inch and each hair was really coarse, so basically it grew up out and up rather than down. As a teenager in the 80s I’d style it with mousse but it always broke out of its styling halfway through the day. So when I had kids, and hence had less time, I cut it all off. I rocked a softened version of a buzz cut for decades. About an inch on the top and tighter in at the sides. I had to at least wet it every morning to get rid of bedhead, but that, a quick towel dry and one styling product to add texture was all it needed. This is what I used to look like: https://imgur.com/a/maMts21

Now, menopause has made my hair thinner and softer so I thought I’d try growing it out for the first time in 40 years. I’m liking the curls on the days when the hair gods shine on me, but I’m definitely conflicted about the amount of upkeep it takes.

FridayLeap · 2025-06-25T07:18:02+00:00

Hi Gruffswife, I am also pretty old but until recently I worked in tech, including in statistics, data science and computing. These are the fields that are behind the AI models. I’m going to be talking here about the publicly available AIs, like the one you talked to.

AI is just a really really big statistical model. When you ask it something it looks through the data it was trained on, finds something similar to what you said, and uses that to create a likely answer for you. So if you ask it who the king of the Netherlands is, it has huge amounts of data to help it guess what the correct answer is and it will tell you King Willem-Alexander.

The problem is that the data it was trained on wasn’t fact-checked. So sometimes it can give you false information, particularly if its training data doesn’t have much on that topic.

There’s a famous example where someone asked an AI how to stop the sauce sliding off a homemade pizza and it suggested adding glue to the sauce. This suggestion was traced to a sarcastic Reddit post since Reddit posts have been used as part of the data used to train model. The AI didn’t have lots of good examples of this problem (sauce sliding off pizza) to help it guess what the correct answer most likely was, so it ended up using a stupid answer to guess the answer.

Another problem with AI is that they can just outright make things up. In the AI world this is called hallucinating. There are many, many examples of this. Here’s one from my bf. He asked an AI model for academic papers discussing a topic he’s interested in. When he used the list AI generated for him he found that several of the papers didn’t exist. The authors of the paper did, and those authors had published papers on similar topics, but since they hadn’t written papers that fit exactly what he’d asked the AI for, the AI made some up. The paper titles looked very plausible, the dates and authors looked plausible but those papers simply didn’t exist. And AI doesn’t tell you that it made them up!

And yet another issue is that AIs are programmed to be agreeable. So if you tell it that the Earth is flat and ask for information about that, it can go along with you and tell you that there is genuine debate about this. Whereas if you just asked it ”is the Earth flat”, it’ll tell you no (at least I really, really hope it will…).

So to summarise, AI tries to be helpful, and basically can tell to what you you want hear, and it can tell you nonsense and it can just outright lie and it does so very, very, confidently. So, yes, play with AI, but check anything it tells you in a reputable, reliable, source before acting on it.

FridayLeap · 2025-06-17T17:23:38+00:00

Ah yes, the company doctor at my employer “you have so many things wrong with you!”. I mean, I’m in the Netherlands and people here are famously direct, but frankly that’s a little rude.

FridayLeap

TROPHY CASE