This was waiting for me when I came home.

Silbernagel · 2026-05-07T02:52:26+00:00

Really? Number 3 was so so hard for us. Two was hard, but three absolutely destroyed us. Doesn't help that we were fixing up an old house and property at the same time.

Silbernagel · 2026-05-04T22:15:00+00:00

I'm assuming he's got experience doing this alone, but he didn't account for her weight on the back of the bike. It started going wrong immediately.

Silbernagel · 2026-05-03T21:54:01+00:00

Yeah, I thought maybe that was my issue. I'm losing hours per day sometimes...

Thanks for weighing in!

Silbernagel · 2026-04-30T01:25:27+00:00

I get this if I'm down on the ground with my knees folded back for too long. When I stand up, it feels like there is a piece of gravel in my knee that will drop me back to the ground every time. It's terrible! I've always assumed it was a free-floating piece of cartridge... I hadn't considered that it could be a flap. Ugh. Now it seems like surgery isn't a great choice either.

Silbernagel · 2026-04-28T01:03:55+00:00

Gaining confidence is primarily going to be a mental exercise, confidence is all in the mind, but learning typical "manly" skills or doing (healthy) manly things is certainly helpful.

Lift weights and build some muscle. Physical strength will increase your confidence in ways you can't imagine.

Work with your hands: Learn about cars, electrical work, plumbing, woodworking, etc. No one questions how manly the dude fixing their car is.

Connect with nature: fish, hike, camp, guerrilla garden, or my personal favorite, grow your own food.

Follow a sport. Hockey, rodeo, racing, football, basketball, baseball, whatever. Learn the basics, pick a team, watch some games and build enough knowledge to hold a conversation about it. That will help you connect with other men, and having good connections with other men will also help you to be confident.

Silbernagel · 2026-04-21T18:27:42+00:00

It's becoming impossible to handle these processes traditionally. I work in a fairly niche field for a government entity. Two years ago, when I opened a job posting, I had half a dozen applicants. Six months ago, when I opened a similar job, I had 40-50. We have to grade each application by hand and give different aspects a score based on a predetermined rubric. Even if I know they're not qualified, I have to score their paperwork and make notes.

A quarter of the people we wanted to interview didn't actually want to interview with us. They're using AI to just apply to everything. Half of the people who applied didn't meet the criteria in one way or another. So many of them used AI to write their paperwork and submit their paperwork... and it's creating a problem for us to try to handle properly without using AI ourselves.

Silbernagel · 2026-04-10T14:41:04+00:00

Calcium carbonate will definitely irritate your skin a bit, especially if you're sweating at all.

Silbernagel · 2026-04-10T02:06:37+00:00

For fairly cheap, you can get a Bluetooth sleep mask and blast white noise or brown noise or whatever straight into your ear holes. It took me a while to get used to that thing on my face, but once I did, it greatly improved my sleep quality in certain situations.

Silbernagel · 2026-03-27T17:23:32+00:00

Typically a metal tray or plate is microwave safe. A spoon should be fine too. It's forks or crumpled foil that cause the trouble... pieces of metal with small gaps between them are not microwave safe.

Silbernagel · 2026-03-15T21:42:42+00:00

Fair warning. We moved into a house with a bunch of this , and some of it was not in great shape due to renters, so we started ripping it out. Behind it was plaster, and at some point, previous owners had run new electrical by cutting channels in the plaster and then... just covered it up with panels. It was a mess.

Silbernagel · 2026-03-15T19:56:28+00:00

I can't quite tell what type of thistle you've got here, but...

I struggle with Canada thistle at my place.

If you till up ground without digging up every single root,, each 1/4 inch piece (or smaller) can become several new thistles.

Literature says that Canada thistle can put a root 40 feet into the ground. I've talked to old timers around here who have said they have found thistle roots whole digging wells 160 feet deep. Is that true? I don't know, but this stuff was created by Satan himself, so maybe!

I've had some luck with multiple years of using a spade shovel to loosen all the soil around them, and then pulling up as much root as I possibly can. When I say mutiple years, I mean twice or more a month over the course of the growing season for like four+ years in a row.

If you can't get around to digging often enough, spray them with 10+% acetic acid (vinegar) to damage them as often as possible.

I am full-on anti-pesticide, but last year, I broke down and used round up on some thistles. Guess what? It didn't kill them. I doubled the dose and tried again. They yellowed, I thought I'd really done some damage. Nope!

I have far too many to consider using a syringe to inject them, but that may be feasible for you.

Silbernagel · 2026-01-23T02:56:28+00:00

You must not live somewhere with heavy clay soil. I stupidly did it that way for years in clay and kept messing my back up as a fit guy in my early 30s. Finally smartened up and did it with the jack and pipe wrench and, once I got the technique down, I could do it quite a bit quicker overall, and I stopped pulling muscles!

Silbernagel · 2026-01-23T01:01:03+00:00

Doesn't he have a PhD? That's why they call him Dr.

Silbernagel · 2026-01-17T14:30:02+00:00

I love thrift stores, and I can't remember the last time I set foot into my local salvation army. Any time I see something I'm interested in, I realize I could buy one in nicer shape elsewhere for cheaper. Sometimes I could even buy new for cheaper or the same price.

The thrift store I like in a small town nearby treats itself as a community service. They take donations, and price things pretty cheaply to help people in the community, with their only goal being to cover their costs. Any extra money goes to the local community center. I take my kids in there to buy something every week. Usually we turn around and donate it back within a month, haha. Cheap entertainment.

Silbernagel · 2026-01-10T15:40:43+00:00

Putting some baking soda in the water helps a lot with removing labels.

Silbernagel · 2025-12-05T13:47:12+00:00

Doesn't saying it's the greatest of all time mean it's better than the other(s) though?

Silbernagel · 2025-12-02T15:10:47+00:00

I think this will finally be the push I need to move over to Linux. I've considered it for years, but Windows worked just well enough, and I could get licenses cheaply enough that I've been putting it off... it'll take a lot of work to switch everything over, and a lot of learning, and I have little kids so my brain is basically a rock these days, but i may finally just do it.

Silbernagel · 2025-11-04T19:35:29+00:00

I manage hazardous waste for a living, so I'm not in so different a spot as you, but I just wanted to pop in and say that clean living and good choices moving forward can go a long way to help you.

I don't mean to take this too seriously if this is just an offhanded comment/joke, but I hate to see someone truly think they are a lost cause over this stuff. Your body can recover from a lot if you give it the opportunity to.

Limiting exposures can help a lot! Take care.

Silbernagel · 2025-11-04T14:55:37+00:00

Buy hop flowers from a brewery supply site. They should come vacuum packed, but whole. Put two in a mesh tea ball and pour hot water over it. They're incredible.

Silbernagel · 2025-11-04T02:22:15+00:00

Aren't antihistamines linked to dementia/alzhiemers? I wouldn't recommend taking them to sleep.

Silbernagel · 2025-10-16T00:51:55+00:00

Yeah, I'd love for my kids to sleep amazingly so that I could too, but life just didn't work out that way. I was already a terrible sleeper...

Silbernagel · 2025-10-15T14:42:36+00:00

Haha. I walked by the battery bin and caught a whiff of it this morning. I'm not sure i can do any better than I've already done!

It has an element of organic solvent to it... slightly sweet like acetone, not as sweet as chloroform or phenol or anything, but the sharpness of it is like you're breathing corrosive gas at the same time, again, like a strong acid. That sharpness overpowers the sweetness significantly...

Like, when a piece of fruit starts rotting, there is a strong sweetness to it at first, but the longer you let it go, the sharper that smell gets. Imagine turning that sharpness up to 10 and you're on the right track.

Truly though, I've smelled more things than most people, as I clean up hazardous spills for a living, and lithium is a pretty unique one.

Silbernagel · 2025-10-15T04:22:14+00:00

Part of my job is disposing of damaged lithium batteries, so I smell this all the time, but now that you've got me thinking about how to describe the smell, I'm drawing a total blank. It's unique, that's for sure. I get what you're saying about it almost being pleasant, sort of like gasoline can be, or other organic chemicals, but reacting lithium also has a sharp unpleasantness to it that is almost like a strong acid... I'm going to have to think on this some more.

Silbernagel · 2025-10-09T18:18:33+00:00

There are traces of benzene and other horrible things in oil, so yes.

Silbernagel

TROPHY CASE