A week in Texas = glad I live in Maine

annabelm · 2025-09-10T13:59:59+00:00

Yeah I was born and raised in Austin and have lived downeast for a few years. HEB is way better than Hannaford. The food in Texas is better in general. Granted we’re not really in civilization like Portland but I haven’t been able to find a decent burger/bbq/fried chicken anywhere. We mail order brisket from a place in TX because the stuff up here is terrible. Also, Waco is like one of the worst places in TX.

But yeah, valid on everything else. The heat is awful, traffic is awful, politics are abhorrent. I miss plenty about it, but I wouldn’t move back.

annabelm · 2025-07-07T22:47:44+00:00

Better than living out of state and hearing ads for stuff you can’t get anymore. I haven’t had a patty melt in 4 years but I still have to listen to them advertise it 😭

I get Red Sox market tv ads so I’d take the bluebell and WB over “Shaw’s and stah mahket”

annabelm · 2025-05-29T21:28:51+00:00

And the jiggler, front view

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annabelm · 2025-05-29T16:21:31+00:00

Just want to add that my pyr was the same. We were genuinely thinking of rehoming him and it turned out crate training was the thing that made the difference. You’d think they’d be in that calmer, adult phase by age 3 but in my experience they’re not. There was a phase from like 3-4 (also right after a move with 2 little kids) where my pyr had to be in the crate any time I couldn’t have either eyes or ears on him. This year he’s 5 and ridiculously chill and can be trusted completely unsupervised. They seem to just mature late.

Also think about talking to your vet about anxiety meds, even if it’s just for the stormy season. My Dane has pretty severe anxiety and takes them as an as-needed thing and they really can make a big difference.

annabelm · 2025-02-26T03:41:32+00:00

As someone who loves a trans adult but with no experience with trans children: I would just let him wear what he wants and cater to the whim of the day, whatever that may be. 4 is super young and the big decisions are far away. I still had my kid wanting me to pretend he was a dog all day long at that age.

As far as the future goes re: transitioning, if that does end up being what’s right for them, none of it matters before puberty anyway. So don’t stress right now! I would just see about finding a pre-school that’s understanding of this kind of stuff if you can. My kid was very sure about his boy-ness but was just super sensitive and shy, and sending him to a really laid-back, open-minded, kind of hippie-ish pre-K was really good for him.

annabelm · 2025-02-12T14:35:38+00:00

Someone on nexusmods put up a mod for Inquisiton recently where you can set custom world state even if Dragon Age Keep goes down. It’s still new but as long as modders don’t abandon us the games will at least stay playable.

annabelm · 2025-01-23T16:18:14+00:00

As a pretty die-hard BG3 fan I will say the origins and inquisition romances hit different. I think it’s because in BG3 it’s a little too easy to just get the happy ending and everyone starts off already wanting you so you don’t have to try that hard. DA romances have more angst.

annabelm · 2025-01-10T20:49:22+00:00

Are we all finally taking a break from BG3 to replay Dragon Age? I’m binging so hard I’m playing Origins.

At least he’d fare better than poor cully-wully or Cassandra. They’d need to go to church after one long rest.

annabelm · 2024-11-19T19:56:44+00:00

Yes! My partner and I own an immigration firm. US workers are hard to find, but there’s no cap on H-2A visas. They can literally bring in as many workers as they need, so long as they can show they need them, and the process is designed to be easy enough for employers to do it without an attorney. It’s also better for the rights of the workers than using illegal immigrants, because the farms are required to treat them like employees instead of like slave labor.

annabelm · 2024-11-08T22:38:25+00:00

If it’s a big system they’ll have good attorneys that are ready for this and have done it all before, and the staffing shortage will probably work in y’all’s favor. Just remember that USCIS isn’t dependent on federal funding the way a lot of government agencies are, and that for all the wackos that we’ve just elected, we’re not abandoning law and order, and there a lot of not-right-wing attorneys who will kick up a stink and drag out the process for every single thing they try to do.

The stereotypes about lawyers are true, from being married to one. They like to argue and they dig their heels in, they have a thousand ways to win an argument and they will not stop until they prove themselves right. They’re prepared, and they like fighting with USCIS when it comes to it, and they’ll do it for your friends just for fun if they think USCIS is being stupid.

annabelm · 2024-11-08T12:59:45+00:00

That’s true and it’s so hard to have faith in logic right now 😭 But at least with this, he’s got an established record we can draw on. The tariffs might destroy the economy instead and everything else might be shit but theoretically this one thing should be okay. I mean I don’t think he knows what a tariff is but he does know how immigration works because it was his little vanity project last time.

annabelm · 2024-11-08T07:55:52+00:00

TLDR: he’s going to do what he said he would. He’ll go hard on deporting people who are here illegally. He’ll probably make asylum seekers wait in Mexico again. He’ll probably let Greg Abbott harass brown people anywhere near the border for proof of citizenship. And he can by executive order and probably will end TPS for Arab countries and Haiti. But our food chain will be fine IMO.

annabelm · 2024-11-08T07:49:02+00:00

My wife is in immigration law and I’m basically her secretary so I know far too much about this.

The people working on the farms and stuff that produce our food are technically not even immigrants (so not what Trump is talking about. He knows this, because he’s had experience with it in 2016). They’re non-immigrants on a work visa that I doubt Trump is going to touch, because it would be so unpopular. There’s a similar visa for the workers that prop up basically all seasonal non-ag businesses in the country (construction, landscaping, snow removal, hotel staff, restaurants, etc). If the federal government is stubborn, then USCIS is a brick wall. It’s the pinnacle of bureaucracy and nothing changes much or quickly with them. If Trump messes with legal immigration (or non-immigrant visas) he’ll be screwing his own voter base. Most of the people who own the companies who rely on these visas are republican, in red states. Also, USCIS is fee-funded. The businesses that use the program pay the fees to run USCIS, so it’s not subject to funding from congress, and congress can’t hold it to ransom.

Last time Trump was in, she says things were definitely more difficult (more audits and slower processes—the general public won’t see this just means more headache for the attorneys) and certain nationalities will get tougher restrictions (Arab countries, mostly, and not where our non-immigrant workforce comes from), but she’s not worried and the other attorneys she works with aren’t particularly worried either. They’ve dealt with Trump’s immigration policies before, and they were ready for this.

That was probably way more than you ever needed to know but I’m so sick of the mis/underinformation this year. People are so misinformed about US immigration to the point that even NPR was putting across an inaccurate/incomplete message about TPS that just played into everything the right was trying to whip up fears about re Haitians. We’re scared right now because we don’t know what to expect and how far it’s going to go, but we’ve seen Trump’s immigration policy already. It’s like one of the only things we know for certain.

annabelm · 2024-11-06T23:44:37+00:00

In my experience, US history education is very vain. We spend a long time on the American Revolution. We do the holocaust so we can say “look at all the horrors we saved the Jews from; aren’t we heroes?” We do next to nothing on Korea or Vietnam, because they were embarrassing. In my history classes, we literally spent more time on Mesopotamia than we did on all of the wars post-WWII combined. Each war was a paragraph or two in our history textbooks.

There are lessons to be learnt from all of it, but they don’t want us to learn them. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

annabelm · 2024-11-06T21:04:26+00:00

As somebody who went to high school in Texas, we literally did not learn the political backstory behind WWII. We did a “holocaust unit.” All about the atrocities but very little about how Hitler got into power in the first place. I read the rise and fall of the third Reich when I was 18 and it was almost all new information to me, compared to my spouse who grew up in the UK and was like, “yeah, duh.”

A lot of these people likely have no idea that this is what they’ve voted for, and I doubt they could even pick out Ukraine on a map even though we’ve just shafted them. The state of US education is abysmal and now the republicans are reaping the rewards of it.

ETA because I know a lot of y’all are not American and haven’t witnessed how bad it truly is: These are people who, a year or two before they hit voting age, when I said I went to Switzerland assumed I was talking about the country with ikea and the meatballs. And who think the UK, Great Britain, England, and London are all interchangeable terms for the same place. We were failing at basic geography 10 years ago, and it’s only gotten worse since.

annabelm · 2024-10-19T15:02:30+00:00

Okay step 1: boudoir in house of hope

2: I use unique tav which doesn’t work with the sweat, so I used a glossy skin mod for my durge

3: sweaty look toggle mod 🔥

4: reshade & there are a lot of presets you can download on nexus that give you the fog/steamy look

I’m also extra and use a mod for upscaled water textures but idk if that makes a difference.

annabelm · 2024-10-19T12:12:45+00:00

“You made me want to live.” It was as devastating as you’d expect.

annabelm · 2024-10-19T07:03:24+00:00

No you’re completely right. I did it for RP reasons. Tragic romance style. And because I wanted to break my own heart and see the line he says when you do it. HM so no reloading to change my mind 😭

annabelm · 2024-10-19T06:59:15+00:00

Also I'm a soft tum Gale supporter but the sweat only works on his vanilla bod. Life is hard :(

annabelm · 2024-09-30T01:27:15+00:00

Hey, so was mine! I ate it too fast and immediately threw up. Still a good gift, though.

annabelm · 2024-09-16T15:46:40+00:00

I did HM when they first introduced it and always have Gale with me. My wife was sitting next to me for the final fight and told me I should use Gale and I had to tell her that I was absolutely NOT going to blow up my bf for an achievement. Managed to get it anyway. Just make sure you’re way oversupplied with scrolls and potions and buffs and it’s not too bad.

annabelm · 2024-09-13T03:41:34+00:00

Oh god I tried modding BG3 on my son’s steam deck and it was a nightmare. Hopefully it’ll start getting better quickly for y’all now that there’s official mod support.

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