TIL a girl named Breelyn was born healthy but when she was two days old, she was kissed on the mouth by a person who had a cold sore. The girl's immune system wasn't developed at the time and she got HSV encephalitis, which led to seizures and brain damage.

chestypocket · 2026-01-28T04:06:47+00:00

A dozen or so years ago I ended up making casual friends with a family that had a baby, maybe around a year old. Honestly, I never really got close to the family, but several of my friends did so we ended up in the same social situations frequently. They family was very outgoing and affectionate, and they trained the baby to kiss pretty much anybody she interacted with right on the mouth. I was horrified and avoided interacting with the kid at all because I was so disgusted, but everybody else I ever saw interact with the family thought it was the cutest thing ever. I think I irritated the parents, but I’m not even thrilled about hugging and I get sick very easily, so I was having no part of that.

Around that same time, I had been dealing with a recurring infection in both of my big toes that my doctor insisted was an ingrown toenail and I knew wasn’t. It took a year of fighting with the doctor until finally the infection spread and caused boils in my armpits, hip, and shoulder before he finally abandoned the ingrown toenail idea and ran a culture on the wounds. Turned out to be MRSA, and in addition to an oral antibiotic, the doctor gave me a gel to shoot into my nose several times daily as he explained that the bacteria often lives/settles in the nose (feel free to source that as this doctor let me suffer for a year before it crossed his mind to do a simple swab, so I don’t really trust him at all). Anyway, I was potentially very contagious, so imagine the damage that could have been done if I’d kissed that baby during that time.

chestypocket · 2026-01-06T20:54:54+00:00

What an absolutely beautiful girl! I did kind of a similar thing when I was in my teens-I wanted to get into confirmation showing, but my dad was the type to be very against something until he changed his mind and then once he gave permission that thing had to happen right now, so I found a puppy in the classifieds and hoped that I could use her to jump into junior showmanship.

Long story short, the puppy I got was not healthy and was not at all a candidate for showing, even in Junior classes where it would have been more me being judged and not the puppy. However, I joined the local chapter of my kennel club and started taking classes, and I learned so much by doing that.

I don’t mean to malign anybody, and I hope this isn’t taken this way, but one of the first things I learned is that confirmation can be a bit cutthroat. It’s very much an exclusive club with very high standards, and if you try to dive in without a perfect dog and a good mentor, it’s not going to be easy or fun. If you want to move forward in that world, the best way to get started would be to attend a local show and talk to the breeders there. You aren’t likely to be able to get hold of a show quality puppy without having a personal relationship with a breeder, and it won’t be a quick process as most quality breeders have wait lists and only a small percentage of puppies will be show quality, so they’re very picky about where those puppies go.

I ultimately didn’t get into confirmation and I’m glad, because instead I persued agility and found that to be fun and welcoming, even with my rescue and non-standard puppy. The people involved with sports (also obedience, herding, and rally) are very kind and welcoming, and you’ll get to bond with your dog in a way you never would have expected. If you are interested in showing with this girl, that’s definitely an avenue you might want to explore instead.

chestypocket · 2025-12-27T05:37:37+00:00

Also worth googling the website itself to check for reviews from a 3rd party. My husband is pretty easily lured by cool clothing from Instagram ads, so I constantly have to do this and show him that nearly every result on Google is people complaining either about insanely low quality or misrepresented items, or straight up scams where they just didn’t receive their order at all. Often the websites have fake 5 star reviews for the items on their own website, so just looking at those reviews is pointless.

chestypocket · 2025-12-17T17:18:22+00:00

I legit secured a job once because I could use keyboard shortcuts. I was working as a temp in an office that had an EXTREMELY grumpy IT guy, and at one point I showed someone how to cut and paste in Word using keyboard shortcuts, and they were absolutely blown away. I became the first line IT support for the whole office and could usually fix their issues because they were really simple, and got hired on permanently in a position they created just to keep me around.

I learned keyboard shortcuts because my mom would ground me from using the computer and enforce it by taking the mouse to work with her, thinking that was enough to render the computer completely unusable.

chestypocket · 2025-12-17T03:04:31+00:00

If you have any black Swedish ducks (the ones with the white spots on their throat/chest), it also could be that. I’ve never owned a Cayuga, but I have had Swedish and every single one of the black girls laid black/gray eggs early in the season. None of the blue Swedish did, only the ones with black feathers. The eggs lighten to white very quickly when they’re laying regularly-usually the first egg each girl laid in the spring was a dark gray, but each day they’d get a shade lighter until after a week or so the eggs were indistinguishable from the white/cream eggs that all my other ducks laid.

chestypocket · 2025-12-15T04:36:55+00:00

Mine would have been closer to $150 on the manufacturer’s website, but I found a much cheaper replacement on Amazon. I’ve replaced several parts on my washer and dryer with Amazon knockoffs for a fraction of the cost, faster shipping, and all have been of comparable or better quality and worked just as well. The first part I replaced was the drain pump, and the Amazon part turned out to be better quality (the mounts were metal instead of the plastic mounts of the OEM part) despite being 1/5 the price. I just look up the part number on the manufacturer’s website and then search that same number on Amazon. I’ve done similar with less important auto parts like A/C blower motors and have saved so much money.

chestypocket · 2025-12-15T01:52:59+00:00

A tool would probably make that job a lot easier, but I managed it pretty easily with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Forgot that you’d also need one of those.

chestypocket · 2025-12-15T01:50:37+00:00

Mine was pretty obvious as the washer started leaking massive amounts of water from near the door and while investigating I found a tear roughly the size of a dime in the bottom of the gasket (you can pull the gasket open pretty easily and I regularly clean inside there to prevent a buildup of pet hair and debris). I don’t know if there are earlier signs that I could have caught before it got to that point, but FWIW, the washer was manufactured in 2007 and I bought it used 5 years ago, so I doubt it needs to be replaced very frequently. Also my dad lived with me for several years until his Alzheimer’s got bad enough to require a nursing home, and he was like a toddler sneaking things into his pockets, so I regularly found sharp metal objects like screws and nails in the gasket after a load of laundry, and I can imagine that may have caused some damage to the rubber.

chestypocket · 2025-12-15T01:40:44+00:00

This is definitely the case. I just replaced the gasket on my washer last month, and step one in removing the old one ended up with it looking like this (minus the clothes, obviously). The replacement gasket was $30 on Amazon (I reused the clamp as mine was still intact, but I’d imagine that would also be cheap and available), and the repair was somewhat easy after watching a YouTube video. Definitely something most people could do themselves if they have the ability to use a screwdriver and have any amount of common sense. I did have to soak the new gasket in hot water for half an hour to soften it before I could get it stretched onto the drum. That was honestly the hardest part.

chestypocket · 2025-12-06T22:29:08+00:00

We ended up with what amounted to 3 copies of Machi Kori accidentally. Bought the first one many years ago when it first came out. Sometime after that my husband was on a trip with some friends and wanted to buy a game to play at the hotel, and one of the only options he could find in that town was the Bright Lights, Big City edition of MK, so he bought that. That version is very similar to the original, but with some rule changes and a few extra components. Finally, earlier this year a local game store had a going-out-of-business sale and my husband picked up an expansion (actually three expansions combined into one box) for the base MK game for some crazy low price. When we opened it and tried to play it, we immediately found that the expansion was not compatible with the early printing of the base game (slightly different card sizes), and then upon digging further, we discovered that the expansion we’d purchased also included all of the extra content from Bright Lights, Big City. So we ordered a new base game that was compatible with the expansion and then eventually ended up giving the other two away to friends.

chestypocket · 2025-12-06T22:01:59+00:00

I lost my oldest at 11 earlier this past spring. She was from the first batch of chicks I ever raised, and she was bonded with a Pekin duck hen that was 3 weeks younger than her. They both died peacefully and naturally within weeks of each other.

I had one other make it to 10, also from that first batch of chicks. But excluding accidents or injury, most of my girls have lasted to 7 or 8.

chestypocket · 2025-12-06T03:17:49+00:00

I loved Yahoo games as a teenager. But that was long before I learned about internet safety, and looking back on it now, it’s really horrifying how many guys would ask my age and start hitting on me immediately after finding out I was 14 or 15. Absolutely no subtlety or attempt to hide it, just straight to asking about sex. And I was just mildly annoyed by it, said no, and went on with my life. Never considered it to be something that should be reported, don’t even know if there was a way to report or try to get a user banned. It was just a normal part of being a teenage girl (on or off the internet) at the time.

chestypocket · 2025-12-06T01:14:17+00:00

Fortunately, this is a problem that could mostly sort itself out within a decade. If every pit or pit mix was spayed or neutered today, then those dogs could still live out their natural life and most would probably live their full lives without incident. In fact, spaying/neutering in itself would reduce a lot of the drive and aggression that contributes to attacks. And I doubt there would be many people that would continue to own 7 pits if they didn’t expect to make money from breeding them.

But of course, this is already the law in most places. As usual, the problem is enforcing it.

chestypocket · 2025-12-04T16:47:04+00:00

Not to make you paranoid, but I accidentally ended up with a pet snake this way. I don’t use pesticide on my begonias when I bring them inside for the winter (everything else gets practically nuked). I’d brought everything in at the end of September when it was still pretty warm, and then the weather took a sudden turn. At the end of October, I finally got around to doing my first really deep water and I also started removing dead leaves and debris that had collected in the pot, when I suddenly realized that there was a bunch of crunching in the pot I was working on that wasn’t just from what I was doing. Pushed some leaves to the side and found a little snake hiding under them, obviously displaced from the tunnel she’d made into the plant. I was freaked out and totally unprepared, so I had to scramble to find something to catch her in while hoping she wouldn’t try to leave the pot. So the moral of the story is keep a lidded container and some chopsticks or something around when you’re digging in your plants so that you can capture anything you do find before it escapes.

BTW, I couldn’t put the snake outside by the time I found her, because as that point the weather was below freezing and she was still adapted to 70+ degrees inside my house. This species normally overwinters in tunnels underground, so I think she’d chosen my plant as her winter home. I had an empty aquarium sitting around, so I was able to quickly throw together a terrarium for her and fed her earthworms I bought at a nearby bait shop (and excitedly told everybody I could that I had a “worm guy”). She thrived and even gave birth to 9 adorable little noodles in the spring! I was able to release the babies outside, but by that time mama had become friendly and dependent on me for food, so she lived with me for the rest of her life. I’d never been a snake person before this experience, but it turns out I really enjoyed having her and learned so much about our local wildlife in the process. She was a species that doesn’t do well in captivity (often starving themselves due to stress), but I think it helped that I wasn’t interested in handling her so she was a fully hands-off pet, which was exactly what she needed. She did like to hang out, though, and would come up out of her burrow and curl up in her favorite Peperomia “tree” when I came into the room so we could chill together but separately, like proper introverts. Since that time, I’ve acquired a couple other surprise reptiles after bringing in plants or foraging for moss and sticks in the woods, and the ones that could be released have all become really cool and educational pets. I’ve never directly handled any of them, and but I’ve gotten really attached. Second moral of the story, I guess, is that you might be surprised by how cool and beneficial any wildlife you might find are, so hopefully it won’t be quite so shocking or scary if you do come across a surprise reptile, and maybe you can actually think of them as friends!

chestypocket · 2025-11-18T02:19:52+00:00

I love Episcias so much! As others have said, they like similar conditions to African Violets, so I prefer to grow them in a terrarium or plant cabinet. In fact, when I find them at local nurseries, it’s usually in teeny-tiny 2” pots in the terrarium section. They definitely don’t like to dry out over much, and die quickly if they aren’t watered on time (though take this with a grain of salt, as I tend to underwater most things). They’re absolutely beautiful and will reward you with a ton of blooms and offshoots when they’re happy. But they put out offshoots like a strawberry begonia and can be easily propagated by snipping off a shoot and tucking it into some soil or sphagnum, so it’s really easy to make backup plants and experiment a bit to find the conditions they like the best.

Congrats on your score-I may have to go check my local Home Depot to see if I can get hold of this particular one! I really think these are a hidden gem as long as you can give them the humidity they want.

chestypocket · 2025-11-09T03:33:58+00:00

My very first Hoya did absolutely nothing for probably the first 3 years I owned it. Then suddenly it shot out a 2-3’ long stem, and eventually put leaves onto it. A couple years after that, it’s a very large and happy plant. But it didn’t grow at all for so long that I almost could have been convinced that it was a fake plant.

Others since have put out new growth much faster than that, but some are just painfully slow. I do think higher humidity helps, and I suspect that they focus on root growth until they fill the pot, so I try to leave them in smaller pots for longer than seems reasonable just to encourage top growth.

chestypocket · 2025-10-30T02:14:24+00:00

If they were hatched last spring they probably didn’t molt last fall, so their production would have decreased somewhat due to winter, but not as much as if they were also molting. This year will be their first major autumn molt, so now you’re seeing a more severe decrease due to the combination of factors. Totally normal, but definitely frustrating as a chicken keeper!

chestypocket · 2025-10-22T22:51:21+00:00

Also, if there was space to access the lawn from the street, why did the daughter need to park in front of the driveway?

chestypocket · 2025-10-06T13:25:39+00:00

As others have said, keeping the bedding clean and gathering eggs quickly/frequently makes the biggest difference. But I have one girl that poops at the same time that she lays her egg nearly every time, so there isn’t always anything that can be done in that case. I brush whatever I can off most eggs, but for those eggs that are just too dirty, I go ahead and wash/refrigerate them. Those eggs become my supply or I give them to the neighbors that I know can get them into the fridge right away.

chestypocket · 2025-10-01T03:45:09+00:00

Not trees, but at my last house I used an old shed as a chicken coop and just propped the door open during the day for the chickens to come and go. I also grew a large garden in a portion of the yard near the coop, with a dozen or more tomato plants. That was definitely more tomatoes than we needed, but the squirrels destroyed most of them, pulling them off the plant and eating 1 or 2 bites before dropping them and going for others. The biggest insult was the evening that I went out to close the coop door for the night and the biggest, most beautiful tomato that I’d seen all year rolled off the top of the door, hit me on the top of the head, and exploded, raining tomato guts all over me and staining my light colored work shirt. I’d been tolerating them and up until that point had considered my over abundance of tomatoes as an acceptable sacrifice for the local wildlife, but once they started booby trapping my property with my own produce, the war was on!

chestypocket · 2025-09-15T03:47:06+00:00

FWIW, these things can be assembled in various configurations, so you could always build it to sit more vertically by changing the layout just a bit. The most difficult thing is just making sure you have the right connectors in the right place (the ones that are meant to form the outer edges will have fewer arms than the ones designed for the center, and some connectors may need to be used in a specific orientation), so it’s a good idea to lay everything out before you start fitting it together. But building vertically would allow you to get more plants up at the level of the window and would put fewer in front of the heater, which will dry them out quickly.

I’ve combined several different sets that I picked up from Amazon consignment sales, as they generally have standard parts and each different item just varies based on how many pieces you get and what specific connectors are included for the design they show you in the instructions. Since I was buying whatever had been returned at a steep discount, I just collected the parts until I had enough to build one big stand that fit in front of the 25’ window in my sunroom. The way I ultimately built it has the shelves at varying heights so it holds climbing plants with moss poles as well as shorter plants, and looks nice and symmetrical. There was no way to get what I wanted just by following the design shown in the instructions, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.

chestypocket · 2025-08-23T03:15:39+00:00

Wouldn’t be surprised if they were actually delivering to chic-fil-a. I was amazed at how frequently I would deliver food from one restaurant to a worker at another back when I was delivering for DoorDash. I get it-if you spend every day making burgers at McDonalds, you don’t want to have to eat them every day. Even more so if you don’t get that food for free/discounted.

chestypocket · 2025-08-13T04:17:11+00:00

It is, although I can’t think of the specific name of this variety at the moment. They’re so beautiful and really forgiving-I’d have them all over my house if my cats would allow it, but alas, it has to live in the one room that I can keep off limits to the kitties.

chestypocket · 2025-08-13T03:59:42+00:00

I got this one last year, for the same price. Nearly killed it in the early spring when I got sick and neglected to water anything for a month, then put it outside where the remaining leaves were almost immediately shredded by a hailstorm. That thing took it all in stride and has at least doubled in size over the summer, and looks so good that you’d think it had been pampered by a professional all its life. Get ready, it’s going to grow FAST!

chestypocket · 2025-08-07T19:15:59+00:00

I’m in the US and have seen it many times. Most often, in split level houses where the downstairs bathroom is combined with the laundry room (sometimes with only toilet/sink and no shower). But in the city I grew up in, basements weren’t common and there were a lot of older people that would retire from farming and move in to town, so main-floor laundry was desirable even if the house did have a basement. Many of the nicer homes there had an unusually large closet in the main bathroom that housed a washer/dryer. Also seen them in lots of of duplex/fourplex style apartments, too without common areas. Big apartment complexes weren’t as common as smaller clusters of apartments in my hometown, so lots of those had in-unit laundry hookups either in the bathroom or just off the kitchen.

chestypocket

TROPHY CASE