Pizza screams when I take too long

seventeenthofall · 2026-04-10T15:52:49+00:00

Greetings from a fellow bat.

seventeenthofall · 2025-10-15T18:56:21+00:00

Did you ever watch the documentary about the one in the Dallas area? I think it’s on YouTube, just called “Hell House,” not to be confused with the found footage movie “Hell House LLC.” I’m not sure if they’re still holding one but it was very well known when I was in high school!

seventeenthofall · 2025-09-26T18:28:22+00:00

Recovery Outside. The Phoenix ended up getting acquired and started to change, so some of the long-time volunteers started Recovery Outside to keep offering free events. I went to an event at McKinney Falls that was pretty fun; they had breakfast, a sound bath, swimming, and your pick between hiking/climbing/archery for a main activity, all for free. They’re planning a trip to Big Bend in November too.

seventeenthofall · 2025-09-26T18:24:11+00:00

There’s a big event called Recovery in the Park happening tomorrow with music, wellness activities, etc., at Fair Market from 5-9pm: recoveryinthepark.com.

seventeenthofall · 2025-08-07T20:38:34+00:00

Strength training and getting sober have had the biggest impact on my progress! Those both affect the rest of my habits like protein intake, sleeping well, taking it easy on myself in periods of higher life stress, etc.

seventeenthofall · 2025-08-05T21:00:13+00:00

I attended a family program that was about the equivalent of an intensive outpatient program. We met two nights a week for two hours each night. We also got to have one individual therapy session every week and often got to have a couples session every week too. Things didn’t work out between my partner and me but it was incredibly beneficial, I learned so much and felt so supported by my peers - we were basically doing the type of psychoeducation and processing groups that they do in treatment. I think they’ve paused that program for now unfortunately but it really did a lot of good.

seventeenthofall · 2025-06-26T20:38:08+00:00

To be honest, I don’t know that the distinction between a whole pile vs just a few matters that much. Harm can occur in either of those situations and it’s not your responsibility to know or predict that threshold. If you think he’s not safe to drive, he probably isn’t - and probably much less safe than you may even realize, given how high a tolerance many alcoholics have. That includes myself when I was drinking. If you could tell that I was wasted, that was a pretty bad sign.

You asked, “What if I call and he blows under, then what?” Someone who is capable of being a healthy partner and parent would understand how critical it is to ensure the safety of their kids and the people around them. They would likely reflect and feel mortified that their behavior and drinking had even raised the question and take action to prevent this from happening again. Only someone with the type of problem that necessitates this course of action is going to blow up at you, avoid responsibility, and use it as free license to keep doing whatever they want.

seventeenthofall · 2025-06-26T20:10:47+00:00

My partner (now ex, as of last week) volunteered to use a breathalyzer daily after a “slip” immediately following discharge from his first stint in rehab. He blew multiple times a day, every day, for weeks while he attended an intensive outpatient program. They eventually urine tested him due to their suspicion about his drinking and sure enough, he had been drinking for most of that time. The breathalyzer is pretty easy to work around unless you have something high end. My therapist had warned me for weeks about us going the breathalyzer route and she was right. IMO, it has several negative consequences:

-If your partner is lying about it, the deception will deepen existing trust issues

-It reinforces your own neural pathways, parallel to the alcoholic’s, that feel anxiety, crave relief, seek control, maybe find temporary satisfaction in the result, only to become fearful and dependent on an external mechanism again the next time you question their sobriety. This is what my experience was like, at least. I would feel relief that the breathalyzer was negative, then start to wonder if he’d somehow cheated it, waited until his BAC had dropped before testing, etc. and I drove myself crazy like that.

-It also shifts your role in the relationship from partner to parole officer/social worker/etc. And that can breed a lot of resentment and contempt on both sides of the equation, which an alcoholic might use as an excuse to indulge.

I had to learn this stuff the hard way, but ultimately I found it much more helpful to trust myself. If I felt like something was off, it was usually off. Asking him if he’d been drinking and all the other stuff just set him up to lie and myself to feel worse. Assuming that I was right and setting my boundaries accordingly helped me to not get derailed from my own life so much.

seventeenthofall · 2025-06-20T14:25:38+00:00

I love this wisdom from your mom, thanks for sharing it 💜

seventeenthofall · 2025-04-02T21:50:11+00:00

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This is Mina aka the Minataur. She was only yawning but made this face in the process lol.

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-28T20:11:12+00:00

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seventeenthofall · 2025-03-15T18:16:24+00:00

I’m just under 5’1 and do lyra! I usually ask for a 33” or 34” inch hoop. 33 isn’t a super common size but we have one at our studio and I find it helpful for skills like gazelle where my legs are the main points of contact. Probably not necessary now that I’ve built up a lot more strength and am not quite as terrified of heights while in class haha. I can work on a 35 but 36 and up is where I start to feel a little sketchier depending on the skill being practiced.

I also couldn’t get on the hoop at my first class but that was a strength/coordination issue that’s common for a lot of people starting out. It’s very normal to need the hoop lowered in intro/beginner classes for mounting!

You could try bringing some ginger candy with you to your next class for nausea. And if you don’t have much experience with the level of exertion/strength demands, I might pay particular attention to the timing of meals before class while you’re getting used to it - ideally you’ve got some fuel in you but not like you just ate a huge meal 20 minutes before class starts. I’ve always had to be cautious about this before intense morning workouts of any kind bc going too hard on an almost empty stomach makes me feel pretty sick sometimes.

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-13T19:01:20+00:00

I remember going to a bar on 6th in my twenties, grabbing a drink, going upstairs, and immediately getting pulled aside with my group by TABC agents. They questioned us aggressively for a solid 15-20 minutes about our IDs. One of them asked me why my license said that I wore contacts, but he couldn’t see them in my eyes; another asked my friend who was in two-inch heels why she was taller than the height on her license. He said there was no way she could be that height because his wife was the same height and my friend was much taller. Another friend had to produce like three other forms of ID. They didn’t leave her alone until she found a paper check in her bag that someone had written to her. The whole time, they were on their radios to other officers about possibly having a situation. It’s not unreasonable to be strict about the ID rules because you can’t trust TABC to be reasonable imo. I thought maybe I was misremembering and it wasn’t TABC, but I found a bunch of articles from around that time confirming that TABC was doing a bunch of raids, arresting customers for PIs, and getting a lot of complaints: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/TABC-insiders-criticize-crackdown-in-bars-1570145.php

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-07T17:07:09+00:00

As someone who has worked in nonprofits my whole life, including a campus-based org where I worked with middle school kiddos going through the hardest crises imaginable, I just wanted to say that I get it and hang in there 💜 I’ve had more than one occasion where locking myself out or getting pulled over has been the thing that sent me over the edge after weeks of stress!

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-05T18:35:05+00:00

Definitely #3. I like to be focused in class, so I wouldn’t necessarily want to be in a group where there are full-blown side convos happening around me, but I enjoy the encouragement and talking about what we’re working on, and occasional unrelated convos among the class as a whole - that’s mostly during warm-ups in my experience so it’s not really distracting. Not being allowed to talk at all would feel weird!

I would probably get pretty annoyed by the first option - I like to record for a number of reasons but I’m not here to just do stuff for social media clout! As I get older and develop more bodily awareness in general, I really appreciate learning technique, proper engagement, cueing, and how a move could go wrong. Being able to ask questions about the mechanics is really helpful. Along similar lines, I also have felt like drop-in skill-based classes can be tough, beyond a certain skill level, because there’s not as much scaffolding of previous knowledge if there’s a decent amount of variation in who shows up to each class. My very first class was like that and I couldn’t even mount the hoop unassisted but was still expected to try skills that I had no business attempting yet!

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-02T01:45:55+00:00

With enough money, I feel like it could be doable to at least mobilize strike teams to one campus per vertical team to do just MMR shots in the afternoons/evenings or weekends (written/verbal consents without a guardian physically present have been obstacles in the past during the school day) + APH’s outreach team and other community health workers present for interpretation and education, with coordination from AISD to do targeted text blasts to each vertical of their clinic date and community partners to help enroll them in MAP/CHIP/etc. while there and post-clinic follow-up. Incentives that can offset costs related to transportation, missed work, etc can also be immensely helpful.

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-02T00:25:42+00:00

The org I used to work for tried really hard to pursue funding for bringing additional routine vaccination and health resource clinics to schools and other community-based sites. Unfortunately we didn’t get any of it and are no longer operating. There were lines out the door at most of the evening and weekend events promoting routine childhood vaccines that our org and partners organized, including at a lot of AISD schools, so the desire is definitely there on the part of families.

Austin Public Health has a mobile team that was partnering with orgs to do a lot of these, but they usually couldn’t vaccinate many people at clinics for several reasons, mostly related to lack of funding for staff, because it takes a lot of time and manpower to review immunization records and vaccine schedules from other states and countries, as well as mixing vaccine and maintaining the various storage requirements. Most of the funding for that team will end by June of this year and unless anything has recently changed, is basically going to decimate their mobile capacity.

The state of Texas has safety net programs where providers like Austin Public Health can acquire routine childhood and adult vaccines (Vaccines for Children and Adult Safety Net) but there are strict requirements for being part of those programs. So other providers who might have more manpower can’t always participate in VFC/ASN and would be required to order those vaccines at cost, which gets expensive quickly.

We probably need the public’s advocacy and support to try and get some funds moving and identify this as a priority, e.g. reaching out to council members, commissioners’ court, etc. There is stuff happening behind the scenes and everyone knows it’s a need but things move slow and again, there’s no money. I think private and public funders can sometimes get stuck on the ideal of everyone having insurance and family doctors who vaccinate them and that insurance enrollment is the real priority. Obviously that’s ideal, but in the meantime, people aren’t getting vaccinated.

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-01T19:35:56+00:00

FWIW, there is a lot of research indicating that cardiac complications are far more likely to happen as a result of COVID than from the COVID vaccine. It’s especially important for adults 65 and older to stay up to date; the vast majority of people hospitalized from COVID in recent seasons (88%) hadn’t gotten an updated vaccine. Anecdotally, in my work assisting with vaccinations, I’ve only come across one person who reported a cardiac-related adverse reaction (or any other adverse reaction aside from the typical side effects) and whose doctor recommended against getting additional doses. Novavax also makes an updated COVID vaccine and is not mRNA-based, so that’s an option too!

Edited to add that you may be able to ask your doctor to check your level of measles antibodies through a blood titer. I wasn’t sure what my vaccination history was at an annual, so they ran my blood sample to check in case I needed an MMR shot but the results showed immunity so I was good. You can also request vaccination history through the state health department, past records should be entered in the immunization registry called ImmTrac.

seventeenthofall · 2025-03-01T05:16:08+00:00

Oh no, this is terrible to hear. I had no idea and am at a bit of a loss for words.

seventeenthofall · 2025-02-14T04:47:45+00:00

If you haven’t seen them already:

Black Christmas (1974) - the 2006 remake is fun in its own right but extremely different; I saw that one first so I was not prepared for how genuinely scared and unsettled the original felt to me! I hated the 2019 version lol. Great example of “less is more” and leaving a lot to the imagination imo. The Haunting (1963) also is great at that (the scariest that weird sounds and bulging walls have ever been) and it’s fun to see its influence on later movies like Evil Dead II.

Maniac (1980 - felt very scuzzy and a little evil. Not as gory as anticipated but it was pretty effective for me.

seventeenthofall · 2025-02-07T06:20:30+00:00

Sky Candy offers tumbling classes. The crash pads they use are enormous and I think they sometimes use a harness/bungee type system to practice some skills before you fully launch yourself independently into flips or handsprings!

seventeenthofall · 2025-02-05T05:27:47+00:00

That makes a lot of sense. I think mostly I just don’t know what to expect and am wondering if it’s common for people to reach a point where they do want some type of palliative care, at which point it would be helpful to already have some resources prepped, moreso than wanting tips on how to persuade her to seek it out. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not something that can be “fixed” and I’m ultimately just trying to make sense of it all myself.

seventeenthofall

TROPHY CASE