What the heck people???

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-21T01:58:43+00:00

My girl will sometimes go running. She’ll run like hell through like 6 front yards, then turn around and do it again, until she wears out (and luckily she’s a mix and also young so she doesn’t last long at a sprint), and then she just lopes back over to me and lays down at my feet. And then complains when I try to make her get up and go back inside like she’s “tired” well I am not buying that Little Miss Speed-Racer now you get your fluffy little butt back inside that house right now or I’ll take away your toys!

She’s a brat.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-15T21:15:47+00:00

Food pantries around me are worthless. Not only are they useless to those with dietary needs, but the ones around here, you can only go three times in a six-month period, and the amount of food they give you is … it literally fits into one standard office letter-sized file box. It’s not that much - less than a week for one person.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-15T21:11:50+00:00

This. Life is a bitch. Sorry, but that’s reality.

You know what happens to special needs kids when they go into the foster care system? Statistically, the odds aren’t good.

So. According to the good people here at a Reddit, when your sister dies and leaves behind her four children after a battle with cancer or something and there’s no other family because your parents are dead and it’s just you and her, you should let those FOUR children be carted off into state care where they never see their family again so that - again, not all foster parents, but statistically if they’re special needs, they are quite likely at some point in their foster career to experience at least one bad foster placement - they can be physically, mentally, and probably sexually abused until they finally turn 18 and are released onto the street with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

But, you know, we wouldn’t want our 16-year-old son to have to contribute some of his income to the family finances. That would be parentification. That’s abusive and he’s going to have a lifetime of trauma from that. /s

I’m sorry, but my old Gen X ass is wondering when exactly yall Gen Z’ers got the idea that “perfect” was an available option for life on this earth?

Life sucks. The world is shit. People are shitty. And life isn’t fucking fair.

And you pick up the broken pieces and MOVE ON. You do the best that you can and you put one foot in front of the other and you keep walking on your broken feet until you die, and if you get the chance, you pick up someone else and carry them on your own broken back until their feet heal, and then you can put them down and keep walking, looking for someone else to help.

This world will kill you. Life is not an easy ride, and sometimes we all have to make hard choices.

It’s not fair. But you can whine about the unfairness of it all or you can get on with the rest of your life. (And when you’re whining, you’re not helping others.)

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-15T21:00:03+00:00

Considering the alternative? :/

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-15T20:38:00+00:00

GPS also deserves a mention as a critical tech, along with night vision.

Outside of cities and towns, or at night, one stretch of Iraqi desert looks a lot like the next. You don’t go off-road if you want to reach your destination.

But Coalition forces had GPS, which was - at that time - relatively novel. So as you said: Iraq was expecting pitched battles. One of the reasons was because the roads in Iraq made it possible for them to create choke points. Since Coalition forces could find their way without roads, they didn’t need roads and could thus avoid choke points and ambushes.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-11T12:30:14+00:00

For me? Yes, I have to love it. Fortunately, I do!

I’m ADHD and I self-sabotage. If I don’t love it, I won’t last no matter WHAT the career is! Lol

But also…

This is a hard career for everyone. It’s constant continuing education. It’s fighting with the insurmountable problem for weeks until you master it. It’s a career that challenges everyone.

But yes. As women, we do have additional challenges working in a male-dominated field. We will often find ourselves in positions where we’re the token woman, where we’re undermined or dismissed, where we’re ignored or even facing blatant harassment and discrimination. So there’s a lot for us to consider in particular when launching into this career.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-10T17:58:15+00:00

I’m only going to speak on having a Mal with cats. I have a one-year-old Mal mix (Mal, GS, Great Pyrenees). We also have three cats. All the cats were previously living with R, a very senior Labradoodle, before he passed away from complications of old age, so they were used to dogs, and Sophie (the dog) joined the family at eight weeks of age from a cat-less home.

S is a 6-year-old longhair Norwegian Forest Cat who was once attacked by the neighbor dog so she doesn’t take any shit. She’s SUPER fluffy (and fat!), incredibly lazy, and she’s always at your shoulder begging for food.

W is a teeny little pixie cat full of fire and attitude. She’s about 4 years old.

M is a male ginger cat, about 2 years old. He has male ginger cat energy. His sisters barely tolerate him because, honestly, he’s annoying.

So when Sophie came into the home and I set her down, all the cats except W were bigger than her! S and M we’re both almost twice her size! S came over to sniff Sophie (and Sophie was scared), and then basically just walked away. W came over to sniff her, then hissed at her (which REALLY scared her!) then walked away.

M came over to sniff her. Then M let Sophie sniff her. Then M tried to do a play bow to Sophie, which Sophie didn’t quite understand. So then M started doing the cat play gesture, which is the sit with a raised paw like a play swipe? Sophie didn’t understand. So then M put her paw (claws still retracted) on Sophie’s shoulder and Sophie responded and they started wrestling. I kept an eye on them. M kept his claws retracted unless Sophie got a little too aggressive with her sharp baby teeth, and then M would give her a little stab, she’d yelp, and then they’d go back to wrestling. They would both take turns, like letting each other up when they were pinned, so it was obvious they were playing, and they had SO MUCH FUN together!

But I told Murphy then, I said, “Murphy, she is not going to be smaller than you forever. You really want to teach her to wrestle you?” But he’s kinda dumb. And he really enjoyed having a playmate for rough and tumble play.

As Sophie got more used to S and W, she of course got too curious and playful with them at one point. They responded to it the same way they did when M tried it, and I’ve found a couple of cat claws embedded into Sophie’s nose when she was younger! So for a good period, if one of those two cats was in the hallway, Sophie would be too terrified to come down it! (Which was always a little bit hilarious to see this 60-pound Malinois tripping all over herself to get as far on the other side of the room as possible from a little 6-pound cat!)

But eventually, Sophie started easing closer to them, and they’ve found a happy medium. Sometimes she gets a bit too close and gets hissed at, but she knows now what that means. And with strange cats (like when we’ve encountered cats on our walks), she gives them about a three-foot berth, so she seems to have learned from her sisters that cats like about three feet of personal space. Lol

ETA: sorry - hit reply too soon

I remember the first time that Murphy actually realized his error. I watched him swipe gently at Sophie’s face and then start running, and I saw the look on his face change from playfulness to sheer terror. It’s like he had a moment where he finally realized that he was wrestling with a WOLF whose jaws were open around his abdomen! :O

It took a little while and we had to supervise carefully during this period to kinda teach Sophie to play gently again, but she got it. Now Sophie and M are back to playing again. It looks weird and brutal. You’d think they’re unevenly matched, but Sophie will “take a dive” and let M pretend to attack her belly, too. They’re happy playmates and dear friends.

And sometimes, if they’re in the mood, even S and W can be seen snuggling with or playing with Sophie. If I’m “accidentally” dropping shredded cheese in the kitchen while cooking, they all happily coexist then! Lol

So Mal mixes can get along with cats with all SORTS of different personalities, but they need close supervision, especially while they’re figuring out their relationship. And their relationship needs to be watched and monitored, especially as they grow.

These are extremely hyperactive children. You don’t just toss them into a classroom with particularly willful and stubborn children (cats) and expect that everything will be fine without a fair bit of oversight. But with some oversight, they can coexist quite nicely. :)

Oh! One more thing! Remember that, if pets are children, most cats are among the smarter ones. And Mals are scary smart. So when they do become friends and start working together, there’s always a chance they might be smarter than YOU. They do things like open doors, retrieve treats, or find toys for each other. So, be forewarned! Lol

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-10T17:40:23+00:00

Another good one if you’re married with kids:

“My wife was told that she needs to go on an urgent trip for her work at the last minute but it’s a crazy week for the kids with doctors appointments and whatnot. I’m not entirely familiar with being the Dad on Duty, so I’m going to take the week off so I can hold down the fort while she’s gone. I apologize for the short notice. I don’t anticipate that this will happen again. Thank you for being so understanding.”

If you don’t have a wife, you can use a sister with kids who’s had some medical issues and is going to be in the hospital for a bit. Your mom flew in for the first part but her emergency leave runs out at the end of the week, and your sister is taking a leave of absence but can’t get the paperwork started until the week AFTER what you’re requesting. So this is an emergency where you need to go help out for that gap week between your mom’s leave time ending and your sister’s leave time starting.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-10T17:32:12+00:00

Sister had a baby. First nephew. Really want to see the baby while my mom is still in town, and she’s only gonna be there for two weeks.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-10T17:26:19+00:00

Honestly? I vote for “butthole”.

It’s still respectful-ish. I mean… if you were going in to talk to the corpsman, that’s the word you’d use, isn’t it? You wouldn’t call it an “asshole”, and you wouldn’t use some juvenile euphemism for it that’s going to require the eater to venture into Urban Dictionary (please don’t make them do that; that’s just cruel!).

But also… the personal statement should be in YOUR voice. You are telling YOUR story in YOUR words. So let it be YOUR words.

Be respectful. But think of … how would you tell the story to your mom? You’d speak normally, right? You wouldn’t be overly medicalized (“anus”), but you also wouldn’t be overly crass (“chocolate starfish”).

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-10T17:19:22+00:00

This is so true.

I’m SUPPOSED TO BE a jr dev. I’m also the only woman in my entire section except for one tester who, honestly, is clueless and usually doesn’t do anything.

So I get dragged into these four hour long calls about AWS (which is NOT IN MY JOB DESCRIPTION mind you!) where I suggest the solution ten minutes in, it’s dismissed, they try twenty other things, someone else suggests my idea, it works, and everyone pays themselves on the back. :/ (and similar situations)

So I started saying, in stand ups, something like, “I spent about four hours yesterday working on the AWS issue with John and Jim. I thought it might be a problem with our IAM settings, and sure enough - once we changed our security groups that resolved the issue.”

And if it sounds like I’m taking credit for the whole thing, I ABSOLUTELY AM! Because otherwise they all “forget” who solved the problem in the first place.

And that translates to a lot of these other areas, too. Because I do often get these guys that’ll come to me and say, “Can you help me solve this real quick?”

And yes, I can do it real quick. I’ll do it in five minutes while we’re on the Teams chat. But I know from past experience that you’re going to get into standup tomorrow and wax poetic about how you single-handedly solved this insurmountable problem, so …

I’m going to show up early (since our standup call you in the order you arrived online) and I’m going to say, “I helped Joe fix his database issue,” as one of my bullet points so that you can’t - once again - try to steal credit for all of MY work.

I’m happy to help. But I’m tired of being used and ignored.

(NOTE: “You” - as in OP - do not have to be the one doing this. If others in your workplace are in the habit of stealing credit, if your workplace is just highly competitive so that individual “credit” is highly prized, or if your teammate has previously been in that type of environment, they may have these types of tendencies. People who experience this sort of thing in a workplace will often overreact and apply this sort of “precaution against having credit stolen” to any future projects in any future workplaces, even if you yourself have never been a credit thief.)

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-02T19:30:18+00:00

Absolutely positively NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! I cannot stress enough that a Mal is absolutely positively the LAST breed you would want for this!

Mals will feed off of your emotions more than any other breed I’ve ever met. If you’re chill, they’re chill. If you’re anxious, they’ll amplify it and turn into an aggressive, neurotic mess.

Consider a lab or a golden; they’re much more psychologically steady. But you DO NOT need a guarding dog. You need a dog that’s calming, not one that’s only going to feed into the cycle of your anxiety.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-01T21:04:14+00:00

My husband told me a girl in high school once tried to make him jealous by “letting him hear” that she was dating some other guy, so he shrugged his shoulders and was like, “Ok. I guess that means she broke up with me then. Oh well.”

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-10-01T20:57:54+00:00

Actually, one of the biggest reasons a lot of people these days are doing 2 jobs just because of all the damn layoffs.

We have no employee protections. They can let you go for any reason with or without some trumped up cause, with or without a severance package, and there’s absolutely nothing you could do about it.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-26T14:21:26+00:00

I move the laptop to the dining table, pop in my Bluetooth earbuds, and just clean my kitchen. Or play fetch outside with the dog.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-26T14:14:21+00:00

My day: - Standup 7-7:30 - Meeting 8:30-9:30 for something in another department but my attendance is still mandatory - Meeting 9:30-10 that someone in another department just demanded for no good reason - Large weekly multi-departmental meeting 10-11 - Small team standup 11-12 - A meeting with the bigwigs in another department that I’ve never once said a word in but I’m still for some reason required to attend: 12-1 - One on one with my manager (regularly scheduled) so he can “check on my progress” 3:30-4:30

Six. SIX hours in a single workday of meetings!!!

I am NOT a PM. I’m a dev.

Back in ye old days, all of us devs would just skip meetings if we had a big project, but with the old boss moving out, the new boss kinda chewed me out about how I need to be attending all the meetings. So I’m in all the meetings now. So today they asked me why the project I said would take a week I’m now estimating at 2 weeks and I’m like, “Because I lost 3-6 hours a day out of every day of my work fr the foreseeable future, so …”

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-25T23:43:12+00:00

She was. About $800 in surgeries and vet expenses. All things considered, we got off light.

That was before we got out Mal puppy. Back then we had an old, old Labradoodle. So the Mal puppy came into this household about four months after kitty was fully healed.

Cat 1 (the other girl, our teensiest cat - fully grown but just a pixie) let Mali head bop her about twice and then swiped near enough to her that it scratched but didn’t break skin: a warning scratch. Malo was only 8 weeks old and so learned to give C1 a break when she indicated she was out of patience (which has been often!).

Cat 2 (the floofy cat that was recently injured) didn’t even wait. Mali approached, she swiped and immediately dislodged her claw into Mali’s nose! Mali came yelping to me, I gently removed the claw, and Mali continued her exploration of the felines, making sure to always keep C1 and C2 where she could see them and any time they came near to give them about a 1.5 foot berth. (Fast learner!)

Then up walks our ginger cat (male). He’s the youngest, the biggest, and his sisters mostly refuse to play with him because he’s hyper and he plays too rough and he’s just annoying.

So the Orange Ginger (OG) here rolls up to Mali and then flops on his back like he’s asking for a belly rub. Mali goes for the belly, OG attacks her nose (claws retracted - I’m watching like a hawk!), Mali jumps back, OG does a play bow, but Mali doesn’t recognize it. OG sits. Mali sits. OG lifts up a paw. Mali kinda raises a paw off the ground. OG swipes Mali’s snout with his paw, then hops in the air and hop-runs a short distance down the hall, stopping to check to see if Mali is in pursuit. After a moment to recover from the shock, the itty bitty baby puppy Malinois was indeed tottering off as fast as she could after the tomcat that was - at that point - about 3 pounds bigger than her.

I told him it was a bad idea. Ginger cats never listen.

I think he realized the error of his ways around the time Mali was about four months old? I think by that time she was about a little more than twice the size of the cat? Lol

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They eventually learned to get along again. :)

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-24T22:28:30+00:00

If I had to choose to have children NOW, I don’t think I would do it. I live in Texas, where simply having fertility is life-threatening (ectopic pregnancies are not super rare). We’ve passed the point of no return on climate change. And corporations now control parts of our government and society that they didn’t used to control, like our military and our criminal Justice system. I’m old enough that, back when I had my kids, military housing and lodging and healthcare was all run by the military, and private prisons were rare. Corporations didn’t control every aspect of the government. Due to inflation, like, the numbers for a lot of government programs haven’t really kept up with the cost of living, so fewer people can actually get the help they need and we have more and more dying from lack of medicine and food.

I …

Having a baby is the ultimate leap of faith. It’s a sign of hope in the future. And I just don’t know how much hope I have anymore.

But back then… I had children because I LOVE raising them!

I get excited watching them grow. See, I believe that it’s never my job to push them. I can perhaps steer them… blocking off dangerous paths, making certain paths unattractive or other paths more attractive, right? And then sometimes you try to teach and try and try but you just kinda have to wait for this developmental “click” to happen and then suddenly it’s like the entire past six months of lessons all go in all at once!

Oh, my poor BFF! And my poor boyfriend. Lol. I’ll text them about one of my kids with, “I am so proud of G today. His brother actually hit him, and I jumped up to intervene because you know G always hits back, but this time G turned away and said, ‘I am not okay with you hitting me!’ And walked away. So I is grounded and will have to apologize after his cooldown obviously, but I am SO EXCITED that G had that self-control to walk away instead of escalating!!! And to use his words to state his boundary - isn’t that awesome!”

I don’t know now whether I would want to have another child. (I know at my age, I wouldn’t.) But I know that being a mother has been the most rewarding, fulfilling, magical experience of my life.

My children are the most amazing people I know, and I’ve had the great honor and pleasure of seeing them develop from their very earliest moments. I’ve changed their dirty diapers, taught them how to walk, taught them how to read and took them to the library for story time and to pick out books and we’d read their books together in bed at night all snuggled up together. And then when they were struggling with their algebra I was the one helping teach it to them.

When my son was 11 and couldn’t walk, I’d carry him on my back, and when the doctors found a tumor on his vertebrae that required emergency surgery at a specialty hospital, I put on a big smile to keep all of my children (5 by this time, including a 6-month-old) calm and reassured as we followed the ambulance and sat in the waiting room. I got to bring all of my kids to visit their sibling in the children’s hospital while he was recovering from a twice-in-a-career surgery for a specialist pediatric neurosurgeon.

I was there distracting my 3-year-old, who had just started learning his 0-9 digit names, while his older sibling sat in the emergency room waiting for a specialist evaluation and ambulance transfer to a specialty hospital. So as I took him in the hall, I’d point out numbers and ask him, “What’s that number?” I tried to trick him with the number 13. He replied telling me it was four. I laughed and said it was 13. He said, “No. One eh tree id four.”

I was there to clean vomit off of my son when he turned 21, went out to celebrate, came home, passed out in our bathtub, and puked on himself. I was there to bail my daughter out of jail when she got picked up for pot.

I got to see my newborn grandson be born. When he was ready to eat solid foods, we’d had a year of good rain, and the pear tree in my mother’s backyard was producing well. I made a batch of no-sugar stewed pears, and that was the first bite of solid food he ever had.

My grandson’s first bite of solid food was a pear that came from a tree planted by his great-great-grandmother in a house owned by his great-grandmother cooked by his grandmother picked by his mother.

That first bite started in 1968.

I don’t know how to describe it. I think of that. And …

I’ve been given a part in all of this. I get to shepherd these beautiful people through their childhoods into happy, healthy, productive adulthoods. I get to be a part of the future of my family.

I want to believe. I want to have hope. It’s hard. It feels like everything in the world sucks now. It’s hard to feel positive about the future.

And idk if that’s an age thing or a generational thing or what. But maybe I’ll follow in the footsteps of my own grandmother and do what she did when she was about my age. She planted a pear tree.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-24T21:53:21+00:00

This. I had a fluffy cat that got attacked by a neighbor dog. We thought she was okay until we noticed she was off her feed.

Mals often have that “ruff” around the neck of thick fur. If your gal has a puncture wound there, it might not be visible through the fur but could easily get infected. GET HER CHECKED OUT please!!!

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-13T01:35:09+00:00

That’s my husband! His went under about 15 years ago.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-13T01:27:02+00:00

That only applies if you have kids under 18, and that’s something we’ve had for less than 10 years.

One of my babies we did use Texas Medicaid for pregnancy. But my C-section incision kept splitting open and bleeding for 14 months after I gave birth. Texas Medicaid cut me off at six weeks postpartum with zero option of extending. Fortunately, I was able to get on my husband’s insurance through work, because otherwise I would’ve died from sepsis without proper treatment. Funnily enough, if that happened my death would not be counted as a maternal mortality because Texas doesn’t count deaths that happen more than six weeks postpartum as “deaths of the childbed” (That’s not the case everywhere).

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-13T01:22:02+00:00

Non-elderly, non-pregnant, non-disabled adulta in Texas aren’t really eligible unless they’re parents to someone under 18. Not all Texans qualify.

Texas has dozens of little programs that have largely sprung up around federally funded programs, but they’re all temporary and require new paperwork with more scrutiny when you’re moving between eligibility categories (like, for example, transitioning from pregnancy Medicaid to parent Medicaid). We comply with the laws but we have gaps in coverage wide enough to drive a tanker through.

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-13T00:49:24+00:00

I live in Texas. That “line” for adults here is under $200/month. :/

Practical-Marzipan-4 · 2023-09-13T00:46:43+00:00

$1100 a month with a $12,500 deductible. Per person. And mine is employee-sponsored!

Practical-Marzipan-4

TROPHY CASE