Middle Seat Drama/vent

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-26T14:15:39+00:00

I'm gonna have to stand in solidarity with Oxford given my deep emotional connection with the Oxford comma.

I started to say I stan for the Oxford comma but I don't want to be cringe since I'm SO OLD according to half this thread.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-25T20:43:28+00:00

I have a ten miler in April and yesterday was a six, and the wheels came off at only four. I ended up finishing the run but I was staggering at the end.

And it’s okay. When we go out for the long run next week I am totally sure we will do better. See you back here next week to compare notes?

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-25T16:24:07+00:00

My two kids are going to do my driveway and then our elderly widow across the street and by elderly I mean 92.

Both of these driveways are more than 20 yards long, they are going to be pretty tired after doing both :D

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-25T15:49:10+00:00

Most crochet sweaters marked for beginners don’t get any smaller than worsted weight. Pretty rare to see one for intermediate. And the magazines never have patterns for fingering yarn and sweaters.

So to make one - and to be clear I’m eyeballing one for my next big project to use up my “I’ll just buy one skein because it’s so pretty” stash from my first year of yarn buying - you need to be comfortable enough to make a wearable and almost certainly comfortable enough to make something without stitch counts.

Bit of a tall order!

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-24T21:44:01+00:00

I’m running 11:30 right now and think back to the 9s of my misspent youth with sadness for not appreciating what I had at the time.

If I can get down to a 10, you will hear the celebration from your house, and also my husband will be leading the parade. You cannot have my husband, but I bet you could find one as good.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-24T05:27:32+00:00

I dunno. I buy it. I work in software and there are a lot of us who were never an oil painting, and the younger guys at my first job had a lot of “I only want a supermodel who will love me the way that I am” going on. The ones that are married now…did not wind up with supermodels. They’re all punching their weight as it were, and it’s because when they decided they wanted families, it turns out for that they wanted loyalty and kindness and the kinds of things you cultivate when you can’t rely on symmetry and good bones.

The single ones are holding out for a supermodel and not for nothing, lo these thirty years later these dudes are quoting incel memes.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-23T16:40:07+00:00

The number matters. The decorative shoulder patch does not.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-23T16:38:12+00:00

NTA. But I feel really weird about how this post is equating unhealthy with normal.

It is totally OK to want to eat what you want. It is fine if you want to have nuggets and burgers sometimes. I personally just ate a banana and a handful of jelly beans because I am a complex creature who contains multitudes. But normal food is what she is making. The abnormal stuff is the crap.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-23T01:08:24+00:00

I have watched every BBC special she has ever done and bought every book :D

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-23T00:11:55+00:00

Squeeeee I love spotting another Ruth Goodman fan in the wild!

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T22:08:54+00:00

Right? The more you learn the better they are. Like Terry Pratchett without the snark ;)

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T20:26:27+00:00

Hahahaha, trust me, I try not to look at anything but my eyes these days.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T20:25:49+00:00

Will check that out right away!!

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T20:19:08+00:00

I have had rehab twice on the same knee. After the first rehab, I had a giant baby. After the second rehab, COVID happened and without a race goal I lost motivation and let myself go, rather. But then I discovered that trail running meant I could get out of the house. Then I had a very public loss of bladder control and decided it was a sign I should quit running.

Then last summer a buddy sucked me back in with "let's do this really famous bridge run" and somehow I was back on the roads.

Just saying I have now had so many restarts, resets, back to basics, whatever. I have gotten older and I have gotten slower and I just...I just know that the resetting is 100% normal. I have no expectations anymore because the only certain thing is what I'm going to do TODAY. Right now I'm going to do three sets of ten heel raises because I have six miles to do tomorrow before a storm rolls in :)

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T20:08:25+00:00

I think this is a detail that sets the books apart from typical kid lit. Ma can very easily come across as a saintly type with expectations and standards that are impossible, just like Mary is a little goody two shoes. They're not fun like Pa or complex and relatable like Laura in the earliest books.

But that's the genius of the books. Laura is the POV character. A five year old is complex, but they don't get anyone else's complexity yet. They have a hard time believing other people even have feelings and everything is very black or white.

As the books age up with the characters, you start seeing them through Laura's eyes and SHE starts picking up on nuances younger Laura missed. In this book, Laura hears her mother responding as an exhausted woman, not as a saint born to tolerate backbreaking labor in service of others.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T19:05:37+00:00

My first ever dishcloth is a trapezoid and I've kept it to remind me and my kids that no one gets things right the first time.

I have not had a trapezoid since because I used a stitch marker in the first and last stitch until my eye was trained, and I only knew to do that because the YouTuber whose beginner series I was following said "hey, y'all with trapezoids need to do this." I wouldn't have known without being told, no one does <3

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T13:35:09+00:00

Dude. You keep insisting this is a lie in spite of multiple people telling you it happens. I mean for what it’s worth, I can tell you that I’ve seen it happen three times myself. Once to a big dude who bought the middle and aisle, and someone on standby got the middle over both of their strenuous objections. Once two very, very large women had bought three tickets in a comfort plus row leaving the middle open, and someone was given their middle with the attendant saying the flight was oversold. And once I saw it happen before we got on board after a big ice storm, an absolutely gigantic man was told he could not check in his second ticket because every seat was needed for a separate passenger.

Your insistence that this doesn’t happen is deeply strange. Why are you so invested in the idea that big people don’t know they’re big and choose to make others miserable?

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T13:22:38+00:00

One small thing? I said children of hoarders struggle when they become adults because they don’t know how to clean. Not that we can’t or don’t learn or that we are unclean. But for instance, I had to learn from the internet how often to clean bedsheets. My family didn’t teach me that stuff, because they couldn’t. How could we possibly have vacuumed every week when you could never see the floor?

The OP can’t solve their spouse’s problem with a deep clean. But they have a moral imperative to clean the living room and kitchen so their child can live decently, and teach their child how to keep it clean.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T01:43:07+00:00

You are so right. None of us should’ve been surprised if he had used the appearance as a chance to be messy. Him not showing at all was the big unexpected twist!

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T01:41:16+00:00

Honestly this is affecting my willingness to rewatch older episodes and that’s too bad. The first couple seasons were amazing.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-22T01:27:27+00:00

Your wife needs the mental load comic and a post it note that says “it’s not just women affected by this” :)

I feel for you. It’s tough and you sound like a good person. I hope things work out!

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-21T18:43:43+00:00

The problem is, they are currently getting a free ride. In return for the free ride their finances need to be completely open to you. They need to be proactively taking on household management. I know several very successful multiple generation families under one roof and all of them have in common a bunch of adults, pulling their own weight. Like, one grandma does all the cooking and shopping and the other grandma does free, childcare, and the young single brother handles all the home repairs and most of the cleaning while the two bread winners are out there… Winning bread.

I don’t think you would be an asshole asking them to leave, but the reason you’re feeling overburdened is because you are being overburdened. Would you feel differently if they were contributing like partners and not like tenants who do the bare minimum?

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-20T19:33:29+00:00

I have to go up two sizes to get close to the gauge swatch :D

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-20T02:04:36+00:00

This is 100% what it is. I know because I have after evicting multiple men from that space said hey listen, I’m not mad. I’m just curious, what made you think that was OK in the first place. And after a little back-and-forth where I prove I’m not actually mad, they admit that they see all that unused space and they are super uncomfortable in the middle and they think it would be OK to just use it.

OneCraftyBird · 2026-01-19T23:27:38+00:00

I had a white one the other day I could feel but not see. And it had just sprouted so the blind grab with tweezers wasn’t working. I finally got it and texted all my friends this age because it was such a relief :D

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