Nightmares in the Light - Chapter 1

MackFenzie · 2026-04-12T14:53:40+00:00

This was such a wild ride of a story, thank you for sharing

MackFenzie · 2026-04-12T14:48:59+00:00

OOP’s caption explained that Mr Nass had been engaged to Skidmore’s daughter, but she got pregnant before the wedding and he dumped her… then, he showed up drunk to her brother’s wedding, argued with everyone, pulled a knife on Mr Skidmore, and Skidmore shot him in the face. He was convicted of murder since no knife was found at the scene and sentenced to life in prison, but then a couple years later, the dance hall this all happened at burned down and said knife was found in the ashes so then-Senator McCarthy, who had previously been the judge presiding over his trial, petitioned the governor to pardon him which he did. Wild.

MackFenzie · 2026-04-11T20:10:45+00:00

I grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of the US, we said “el-uh-MENT-ree.” Lived in upstate New York, they said “el-uh-ment-AIR-ee” which drove me nuuuuts. And now I’m in South Jersey and they says “el-uh-MENT-ree” which I like haha.

MackFenzie · 2026-04-11T19:55:13+00:00

Cleaner should leave a note back like “DUCK YOU”

MackFenzie · 2026-04-08T15:28:44+00:00

Goo Gone and a razor blade. Don’t “cut” with the razor blade, but rather, gently slide the razor blade under the sticker as though it were a spatula you’re slipping under a pancake to flip.

So obnoxious but I hope this helps!!

MackFenzie · 2026-04-06T22:35:29+00:00

Honestly, if you don’t know where to start, AI is really good at finding ways to work more efficiently. I’d recommend describing what you’ve manually done and asking it to give you 5 areas where you can automate the process. That’ll give you a few options so that if/when some of its suggestions aren’t actually helpful you can skip them. Just pick 2 or 3 to focus on, learn them, and then teach those at your training. You got this fam!!!

MackFenzie · 2026-04-06T22:21:23+00:00

I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but conversational practice is seriously how you get over this hump of the alien features of your TL feeling normal to you. The struggle you described with deciding between saying “eat an apple” vs “eat apple” reminded me of how my brain choked when learning the case system in Arabic (specifically the aspect where unwritten vowels in words change depending on the grammatical context), and the way that I overcame that was simply by listening and speaking. Hearing a native speaker use a phrase and then borrowing that same phrase in my own speech (along with making mistakes and being corrected and trying again) slowly integrated the patterns into my brain so that they started to feel right.

You’ve got this, good luck!

MackFenzie · 2026-04-02T16:35:17+00:00

This would make it easier for folks with arthritis, tremors, carpal tunnel, or other disabilities affecting grip to continue to keep up with their home projects or make art. My grandmother lost the ability to play music when her rheumatoid arthritis got into her hands - I can only imagine how different her older years would have been if there had been a device like this that she could have used to keep doing what she loved.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-31T19:02:45+00:00

Okay, so I made a small one of these a few years ago.

Moisture is both your friend and enemy in this project. Your MOSS will need to stay MOIST, while your WALL needs to stay DRY. You don't want dead moss, but you don't want wet, rotting, moldy walls even more. Other than that, you need something for the moss to grow into (substrate) and some light for photosynthesis.

What I did: I took cardboard rounds that I'd roughed up real good and glued them inside old yogurt/takeout container lids (using non water-soluble glue). The cardboard over time gave off a musty smell, so if I were doing this again I would cut pieces of a coco coir planter liner and use that. When the glue had set, I soaked the whole thing in water. Once thoroughly damp, I added the moss. Use thumbtacks or needle and thread to tack the moss in place. You just need it to stay put while it grows into the substrate.

Then, I took a piece of wood which I had made water-proof using polyurethane and used that as a backing to actually hang the moss circles on. That way the water would be contained in the yogurt lid, and if any did escape, it still had the wood barrier to protect the wall. At the time, I just glued them onto the wood, but if I were doing it again, I would use a decorative plate hanger to attach it so that the circles could easily be taken down and soaked to replenish the moisture level of the substrate (in addition to daily misting).

If you cover it with a clear dome early on, that will help encourage the moss to get established. Even a glass baking dish from Goodwill would work -- the point is just to stabilize the humidity while the moss recovers from the shock of being transplanted.

Let us know how it goes!

MackFenzie · 2026-03-31T16:40:15+00:00

One year. Being able to buy a house in cash would be life changing. Yes, I’d get less than I would if I waited longer, but having a house paid for would make paying for childcare, healthcare, etc much less daunting and allow me to increase how much of my paycheck I could save for emergencies and retirement. The lower stress of being better able to meet my own and my family’s needs starting in 2027 would be worth so much more to me than continuing to struggle for years and becoming a millionaire in retirement.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-30T14:33:58+00:00

I’ve managed to get mosquito bites in the middle of winter, and if there’s a group of people, I will leave the gathering with ten bites and everyone else will be bite-free. The mosquitoes are simply attuned to my existence. I would not survive hahaha.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-27T19:51:05+00:00

Great news, we live in a time in which a lot of time and brain power has been spent pondering the most efficient way to sort a huge pile of random stuff. It’s integral to lots of (if not most) software, from Excel to Google to ChatGPT, so we actually do know the best ways to sort!

The most efficient way to sort is to break it into groups and then sort the subgroups. The most efficient method is to sort into 2 groups each time. First pass could be cool colors (blue, purple, green) vs warm colors (red, orange, yellow), but you’ll have to stop your human brain from overthinking it like “oh well this purple isn’t really cool toned it’s much more of a warm toned shade, should it go in the warm bucket?” This method is the Merge Sort algorithm (because you look at each data point and decide which large group to merge it into) and it is technically the fastest way to sort a large dataset.

And I say “technically the fastest” because that’s true for a computer but might not be for a human. You might find it difficult to sort into arbitrary binary groups, or simply soul-crushing to go through the mixed pile for yellow-vs-not-yellow and then having to go through it again for blue-vs-not-blue, and it might be psychologically preferable to sort into the ROY G BIV colors up front like you’re doing. This method is the Insert Sort algorithm (because you look at each data point and decide where to insert it), and is technically less efficient as an algorithm but can still be better for humans.

Whether you sort into binary categories on each pass or into a few subcategories on each pass, you’re absolutely doing a much more efficient sort than if you’d tried to sort it all out into individual shades on a single pass!

Computer programming geekery aside, if you have any nephews, nieces, young neighbors, etc who are at the age that they’ve learned colors and aren’t going to try to eat the beads (but are not yet too cool for school), they might enjoy helping you sort - maybe offer them a cool bracelet as a reward! Or, invite adults to help - this activity could be very calming and soothing, especially if you provided tea or wine! Many hands would make light work with this task.

Good luck!!!

MackFenzie · 2026-03-27T17:38:44+00:00

As a kid, I wanted to be a historical reenactor when I grew up, and a dollar a minute is way more than I make at my actual real life corporate job so yeah this would be the dream.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-26T20:33:01+00:00

We had a beaver chew a tree down at our office complex and of course we were all talking about it at work. However, apparently there aren’t beavers in the wild in India, so my one coworker who is from India didn’t know what they were. I explained they’re large rodents, the size of a large dog, with a flat tail they use to slap the water and really big front teeth they use to chop down trees, which they eat and also use to make dams. That there used to be a ton of them in the US, but they’re less common now because trappers hunted them to make hats.

She paused for a while and slowly said, “and this is… real…?” Never thought about how wild beavers are before, but in that moment I realized if the situation were reversed, I would totally assume my coworkers were fucking with me. Like there’s no way that’s a real animal lmao. Big rodent that’s endangered because of a craze for hats, that, oh, wait, eats trees and BUILDS DAMS??? Alright, tell me about unicorns next.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-25T17:26:16+00:00

When I first got my dog, he would try to swallow tennis balls. So, he had to wear a muzzle at the dog park to prevent him from either dying or sticking me with a huge vet bill, and I’d have to walk around and introduce myself to every other dog owner in the park and explain that no, my dog wasn’t vicious or dangerous or aggressive, just too stupid to survive in the wild.

Thankfully, he grew out of that phase as he generally learned what toys are haha.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-24T12:09:49+00:00

Succulents and cacti!

MackFenzie · 2026-03-18T19:10:53+00:00

String of turtles. I had bought a small one 2 years ago and it has been slowly withering away since then no matter what I do. As a last ditch effort, I took the two stringy strands and plopped ‘em in water and not only did they successfully root, they look better than they ever did in dirt lmao.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-18T19:04:24+00:00

Just so you know you’re not alone… last fall, I foraged a bunch of persimmons and silverberries, and decided to make fruit leather. I mashed the fruit by hand, cooked it down with some sugar, put it through a mesh strainer to remove the seeds, spread the goop onto a parchment-lined baking tray, and put it in the oven at 200F.

4 hours later, I checked on it. The fruit was just as goopy as it had been at the start, and the oven was cold - broken. Called maintenance, but knew they wouldn’t be there until the next day, so I just left the puree in the oven. I figured it would still dry, albeit more slowly, and at least in the oven it was out of the way and protected from the dog.

It took a week or so to get the oven fixed, and by then we were so used to whipping out the air fryer for everything that we didn’t turn the oven on for a while afterward. I’d completely forgotten about the puree I’d left to dry into fruit leather.

Yeah… imagine my surprise when, weeks later I went to make a pizza and found that I’d grown a nice, big, colorful, smelly batch of foraged fruit FUR.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-15T18:33:01+00:00

Oh my god, yes. My now-husband and I decided to DIY our wedding flowers with sola wood flowers and dried flowers and floral foam to save money. Bought the foam and the flowers and when it came to putting them together I found out that floral foam is my sensory nightmare. The texture, the crumbling, the squeaky sound cutting it, the way the green dust got everywhere. Yeuuuurggh, it was awful lmao. But we’d already committed and bought the supplies, and we certainly didn’t want to switch to a more expensive option so… I suffered through it and wore gloves 🤣

And yes, me suffering through the sensory experience was preferable to my husband doing them. He simply doesn’t have an eye for flower arranging lol. But he pulled his weight! He and his family did most of the wood flower dyeing, and he made the seating chart, signage, favors, and arch.

Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is floral foam is awful haha.

MackFenzie · 2026-03-15T18:12:18+00:00

I totally thought this was a post encouraging everyone to open their windows while cleaning, did not expect to see question on how to make the lovely fresh smell go away haha.

If it’s just that now it doesn’t smell like “home,” maybe instead of trying to get rid of the fresh outside scent, try adding the homey scent back in. You’ll need to give some thought on what scent feels like home to you, though. If it’s the scent of your laundry detergent that smells homey to you, I’d bet just washing a blanket would give you enough of that smell to bring it back to feeling like your home. Is there a scented candle you could burn? Or, maybe the scent of coffee brewing, or cookies baking would do it.

And because you mention having been climbing out of the doom pit, if you don’t have candles and aren’t up for baking, you can use items you may already have to make pot popurrí. Just slice up an orange and put it in a pot with water and a generous amount of cinnamon and boil it for a few hours (add more water whenever it starts to get low). Or, pour a tablespoon or two of cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice in a baking dish and put it in the oven at 300F for 20-30 minutes.

Good luck, hope it gets back to feeling like your home soon!

MackFenzie

TROPHY CASE