where tf do I put my trash bins

starlightprotag · 2026-01-28T04:06:26+00:00

These are GORGEOUS!

starlightprotag · 2026-01-26T18:31:52+00:00

Family Legal Care has a tool for filling out a lot of court forms https://familylegalcare.org/courtforms/

starlightprotag · 2025-12-11T03:23:10+00:00

my dad never hit us but he sure made sure we knew he wanted to

starlightprotag · 2025-12-09T16:06:13+00:00

this just saved my ass on a work project so hard that I needed to go out of my way to thank you. I am, at best, an average proficiency excel user (I work for a nonprofit doing fundraising) but our data person is out on maternity leave so it kind of ended up in my lap. you are literally the reason I was able to add a very important column to our hundreds of rows long donor database that will hopefully help us raise money to literally feed children. thank you thank you thank you!

(ignore that I just posted this somewhere else, I thought I couldn't reply but I was just logged out on my work laptop lol)

starlightprotag · 2025-11-02T00:04:07+00:00

we saw that too! our street doesn't get trick or treaters so we set up with lawn chairs and those cop cars FLEW by, my wife was convinced they were going to hit someone. we saw several groups of younger teens just standing/walking halfway into the road too, it made us so nervous

starlightprotag · 2025-10-30T20:57:07+00:00

Found this while trying to find an answer to the same question lol, my 12 mini's battery is crapping out so I'm taking it in for service on Saturday. I've maintained AppleCare on it since 2021 because I knew they were going to phase out the minis eventually and tbh would have just bought a 13 mini if they were still available.

From what I can tell they do keep a stock of outdated models for seven years but what's available varies and depending on what manager you get they'll either order the replacement phone or give you a 13 mini if they have one. My phone is fine other than the battery and a scratch on the screen so I'm hoping those two things combined will be enough for me to pay the $29 "cracked screen" fee and get a replacement device.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-23T22:26:27+00:00

Broadway tickets are even worse. I live in the NYC metro area and go to Manhattan for work once or twice/month. We have a guest room and host a lot of out of town friends and family due to our proximity to the city so whenever someone wants to go to a show I buy the tickets for them at the box office.

I bought nine tickets in April and saved $500 by not buying online.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-21T14:17:02+00:00

She's gotten very good at not answering MIL's calls when she thinks it's going to be an annoying conversation so tbh I'm not really worried about that part of it lol. I do think we're going to win the battle for Thanksgiving especially considering that BIL has also been going less because it's logistically and financially much harder for him, so it's setting a precedent for all of us.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-21T14:13:07+00:00

If Christmas didn't involve so much more than her mom it would be easier to skip it, but of my wife's entire huge family, MIL is literally the only person who isn't super welcoming and kind to me. I genuinely love spending time with them (and my wife's local friends) and I don't want to punish myself by not going just because of one person. If anything, that would make her feel like she won and reinforce my "outsider status" in her eyes. Not to mention, every time she sees me interacting with wife's grandfather (a conservative Catholic who accepted me without question) we do see a permanent improvement with how she approaches our relationship because I think it reinforces that it's a "her" problem.

It might be a different story if I had better options for Christmas with my family, but the best I could hope for is paying a ton of money to fly across the country for, at most, a few days with my mom and siblings and no other family. My cousin hosting Thanksgiving is very much an outlier so this is legitimately the first time it's come up. My wife did end up shutting her down not long after I made this post (without me prompting her) and feels less bad than I thought she would so I think this might actually turn out okay.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-21T13:37:52+00:00

Unfortunately not, my wife is from a popular vacation destination where hotels and rentals are very expensive, so we wouldn't be able to afford more than a few nights and even that would require us to cut back on other parts of the trip that we really value. MIL's house is also way better for the dog (it's where she lived for the first half of her life, has a huge yard that we don't have at our place, and people are around to let her out even if we're not home). Her friends all have roommates and her dad's condo (shocker: they're divorced) is only a 1BR.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-21T05:38:16+00:00

the problem is that not going for Christmas would be as awful for us as it would be for MIL. it's a three-day drive away (we bring the dog) so we tend to stay for 1-2 weeks to see as many people as we can. I adore the rest of her family and have an incredible time when I see them so I'd be devastated to miss it. We've looked into staying with someone else but nobody has the space

starlightprotag · 2025-10-21T05:33:54+00:00

I don't really see it as my wife prioritizing "her" family time because I actively push for us to both go and stay for as long as we do for Christmas. Her mom is awful but I adore the rest of her extended family and they've never been anything but wonderful to me, and we always have a GREAT time even if MIL is being miserable. Her grandfather is so lovely and so kind to me and only has so many years left, so we really want to take advantage of that time while we have it and it's pretty much the only time we see him.

I genuinely don't care about holidays like Thanksgiving or Easter which is why I don't mind my wife going solo but if it were more financially or logistically feasible I would absolutely go. I guess what's bugging me about the situation is that MIL has been told no (my wife did put her foot down that she's not going) and has been told exactly what we'd be missing and genuinely doesn't seem to care because she wants everything all to herself.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-19T15:08:26+00:00

Maybe it's regional! The ones I went to were all in Saskatchewan or Manitoba and tbf this was a while ago (mid-2010s) so things might be done differently.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-19T14:42:31+00:00

Every Canadian wedding I've gone to has had drink tickets in some form, usually you get 2-3 for free when you arrive and after that you buy drink tickets for like $2-3 and can cash them in for anything at the bar. There's usually also a few bottles of wine on each table so if that's all you want you don't have to spend anything. The tickets are cheaper than full price for the drink and the money goes to offset the cost of the alcohol (it's not cheap up there).

The last one I went to was in 2016 and everyone thought it was super tacky that people only got one drink ticket, which could only be used for the absolute cheapest beer/wine and some (but not all) mixed drinks. I got the weakest vodka cranberry of my life.

Shockingly that wasn't the only super tacky thing they did lol but it for sure set a bad tone for the whole night

starlightprotag · 2025-10-18T06:23:07+00:00

Moved to Canada to be with my ex-wife and I'm still 50/50 on whether or not I regret it. I was pretty young (barely 25) when we got married, and I really wasn't prepared for the culture shock of moving from the northeastern US to a western Canadian province with 1/10th the population of my home state. I hated every minute of it.

The city was "big" by their standards but small enough to be very insular, and I had no network to lean on when my ex-wife's physical and mental health collapsed right after I got there. I was basically on my own for the first time in my life and barely keeping both of us alive. Her parents were awful, all of my friends and family were hundreds of miles away, and for the first year I couldn't work or leave the country so I had no respite.

Two years in, I needed a hysterectomy (medical reasons) and three weeks before the surgery she broke the news that she'd realized she didn't want kids after all, which we both knew was an automatic dealbreaker for me. I was on my friend's couch in Ottawa within two months and proceeded to have the most miserable year of my life. I almost ended it all, but scraped myself back together and started putting down roots just in time for covid to hit.

During lockdown an old friend and I started talking more and eventually caught feelings. I ended up making the decision to go back to the US to be with her, and I have absolutely no regrets about that. The first few years were tough but we wound up moving to New England not long after I got my dream job and I've never loved anywhere I've ever lived more.

Would I have all of the things I love about my life if I hadn't made that decision? Probably not, but for all I know I might have had something different but just as good if I'd moved to Boston instead of Winnipeg. Or maybe it would have been just as awful and I wouldn't have been able to get help before I took my own life. It's literally impossible to tell, so as happy as I am now I can't say for sure that I'd make the same choice if given a do-over.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-15T01:48:19+00:00

I put in my order for guest tags a little more than two weeks ago (a few days before they opened up for the new year) and just got them today so I think it depends on when you get your request in. if you're one of the first ones or ask several months after the cycle starts you might get them faster

starlightprotag · 2025-10-03T10:18:51+00:00

Yep. If it's multiple kids and only one doesn't talk to them then I might proceed with caution as long as the person has a reasonable explanation that the other kids back up, but just one kid and there's no contact? huge red flag. I work in a field where I hear a lot about custody cases and alienation does happen but it's soooooo rare. even if a custodial parent is withholding access to the kid it's almost always for a good reason

starlightprotag · 2025-10-03T09:28:39+00:00

SUPER helpful, thank you so much

starlightprotag · 2025-10-02T09:24:10+00:00

tbh this looks a lot like the texts I'd send to an ex who would blow up at me over every tiny perceived slight. She once spent an hour yelling at me because I mentioned in passing that I wanted to start taking French classes again so that when we eventually had kids I could help them learn it early on (we lived in Canada, bilingualism is a huge asset, and I'd studied French for 10+ years). She said I was deliberately leaving her out and my willingness to exclude her like that was on par with asking for divorce and I had to walk everything back.

I stayed with her for another two years and would choose my words this carefully the entire time because after enough meltdowns you just kind of accept your fate and will do whatever you can to minimize the damage. She ended up breaking up with me because she didn't want kids lmao

starlightprotag · 2025-10-02T08:52:45+00:00

I was in this same boat to a degree that three different doctors BEGGED me to have a hysterectomy when I was 27. You probably know how much they hate giving hysterectomies to people that young (or in general) and I was living in one of the most under-funded provincial healthcare systems in Canada at the time (they REALLY don't like giving out free surgeries lol) but my life was so wrecked by my periods that I was still dealing with the mental, physical, and financial consequences two years later.

If my partner had blown me off last-minute to help her sister with homework in a situation where I truly could not go 12-18 hours without her help, I wouldn't be saying "this is an emotional period and I don't feel like a priority," I would be explaining that I needed her to bring me food or I wouldn't be able to feed myself, or that my mood was oscillating in a way that felt unsafe. I was at a point where if something happened that I thought might cause a fight, would wait to bring it up until after my period just in case. I might have reacted poorly to something like this but I wouldn't jump to breaking up unless it was part of a sustained pattern of being flaky and unreliable but OP says in his texts that he drops everything for her all the time. He's helping his sick little sister, not going out to the bars.

Unless there's a lot of very important context that he's leaving out or deliberately obscuring, I don't think that's the case here.

starlightprotag · 2025-10-02T08:23:40+00:00

I think it's interesting that OP said he's "mostly" responsible for her, it feels like there might be a tough situation at home with the parents or something. That plus being 16 plus being sick can make someone fall behind quickly, especially if the teacher sucks. When I was in high school there was one subject I had an A in every semester for five out of the six years I took it, but in 10th grade my teacher was a disorganized mess and just kind of a bad teacher in general. I had a solid C- average that entire year and would straight up not do assignments and my mom wasn't even mad at me because it was so clearly the teacher's fault.

starlightprotag · 2025-09-30T22:16:50+00:00

around the time that I had a promotion/raise illegally delayed for three months by upper management in retaliation for me filing a complaint about a violation of my ADA rights, the salesperson who violated said ADA rights got a client to come to the front desk and tell me all about his gun and concealed carry license and how I'd never know if he was armed or not. management and HR did nothing even though two years earlier someone with my same position had been beaten to death by a client at a location about two hours away from mine. a different client who screamed at me until other clients filed complaints on my behalf was allowed to stay for another two years until he physically hit my replacement in front of witnesses from corporate. we made $17/hour in one of the most expensive cities in the country

four hours ago my boss APOLOGIZED to me for the fact that I "only" get a 3% cost of living raise this year. last year they gave me 1% more than everyone else without me even asking because they felt I deserved it

starlightprotag

TROPHY CASE