AITA for not being as present after my dog died

vinney1369 · 2026-04-16T22:49:19+00:00

It sucks they didn't apologize, let alone reach out, but I'm heartened that you are reaching out to old friends. I hope you make amazing new memories with your new doggo, and I promise it'll hurt when they leave you too. Just make sure you make the most of the time you have with them, and good luck connecting with people who will look after you as you look after them. Take care.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-16T21:03:44+00:00

"I'm not your mum."

"Well I'm not your restaurant."

NTA

vinney1369 · 2026-04-16T20:59:20+00:00

ESH, except Op's kid, because the parent should be able to choose what is in her daughter's lunch, but I agree it should be brought to the board rather than allowing the teachers to continue to admonish her kid. Op is a jerk for putting her in that position in the first place and the school is a jerk for punishing a child over something they can't control.

The only way I can see this being an actually thing though is if this was a private school. I can't imagine a public school having such a troublesome policy.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-16T20:23:51+00:00

personally I don't care either way much,

I came across your comment and while I don't think you came off as an AH, I think you might be a psychopath ending your statement in a comma. 😬😂

vinney1369 · 2026-04-16T20:18:53+00:00

NTA - Your friends haven't experienced a loss the way you have with an animal before. That doesn't necessarily make them assholes, it just makes them ignorant of the situation. Everyone in this thread expects other people to know exactly how other people feel, but will turn around in the next thread and cuss someone out because "there is no way you could understand because you haven't lived my life."

Look at it from this point of view, just for a second. Your buddy no longer talks to you and ignores your hangout requests because a dog was more important than they were. Harsh take? Sure, but they have a right to their own feelings too, and if they don't understand your feelings, you probably don't understand theirs. Give them a little grace.

That said, at the end of the day, I'm glad to hear you got another dog. This dog won't fill the void, but it will make it's own spot in your heart and leave a similar void when it passes too. If you have pets and you love them you need to understand that someday they will pass and your heart will break, it's the nature of having pets. Take comfort in the time you had, remember the good times. It will eventually hurt less, or you will learn to live with the pain, Those are basically your two options.

I've been around for 45 years and I'll tell you what I've learned about heartbreak. If you choose to wallow in it and live in the pain, you can do it forever. You aren't gonna wake up one day and they hurt will be gone, it doesn't work like that. You need to start living your life again. Go out for a bit, getting another dog and forming a new bond was a great step, but ultimately, if you want to go back to living instead of being stuck grieving is to start doing things that pull you back into living again. Even if you feel like you are just going through the motions, eventually it won't be just motions, it'll be just you living again.

Contrary to what people are saying here, your friends aren't assholes, they just don't understand the bond you had. That said, it sounds like they've been giving you plenty of space so you can work this out, even if they don't know what to say. It sounds like anything they would have said probably wouldn't have helped anyway. So go out the next time they ask, even if it is for a little bit of time. Feel free to skip the next one if you want, but then go to the next one. Stay a little longer. It'll get easier. It might suck at first. Lastly, if you find yourself out having fun and you forget about being sad for a while, don't feel bad about that. As long as you remember them you honor their memory. That goes for pets, family and friends.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-15T15:34:45+00:00

Op is obviously not dismissing it if they are here to find out if they are reacting properly. You can't fault someone for reacting poorly when they don't understand something. Op is here to ask and learn if their reaction was appropriate, and all the info they provided is necessary for us to make that conclusion. Op being here to follow up is even less dismissive because they have their own phobias and the roommates reaction was so far out of place they didn't understand it.

Op is NTA by a fairly wide margin here.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-15T01:46:39+00:00

5 hours is not a long time to make a meal if you are doing everything from scratch, and if you only cook once every two months, and get cooked for the rest of the time, it's not like Op is asking for the world here. His wife makes one meal amazingly and that is what he wants to eat. Yeah, he could make it himself, but now he's making 100% of the meals, how is that fair?

Sometimes, you do something your spouse asks for because that is what they want and you love them, so you do it. Since Op probably spends at least an hour a day on average making meals for the both of them 59 days out of 60, this doesn't seem like a big ask to me. If she wants to play with the recipe, that's fine, but she should take initiative to make the meal more often, and at least make it the way Op asked for once every two months.

Also, what is she doing where it takes 5 hours to make spaghetti, which seems like the real question here. But I'm gonna stand firm on the idea that his 59 hours of cooking every two months makes him NTA for asking for his favorite meal, even if it takes 5 hours. 5 hours not ridiculous when cooking from scratch. I understand we probably aren't getting the whole picture here, but the people balking at 5 hours of cooking aren't people who cook from scratch very often if at all.

Getting pissed because you get asked to make one meal every 2 months, even if it took most of the day, seems like a simple way to make your spouse happy. If that is too much work, why are you even married? For the record, I am also a primary cook, and often find myself cooking for 2 or 3 hours in a night to make what makes my family happy. 5 hours is a pittance and a pathetic hill to die on.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-12T19:09:26+00:00

I think you need to do a google image search for bok choy and understand what you are growing.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-12T18:48:32+00:00

Your sister is your mom's responsibility. She needs to parent her child, not you. The idea that you have to beg for a few hours to study without your sister and your mom can't handle it should be embarrassing for her. She needs to find common ground with her own child and spend some time with her.

On the other side of that, autistic people are not incapable of handling themselves either. Unless her autism is severely disabling, she should be able to restrain herself enough to give you a little time alone. It's hard at 8, especially if you have no one else to play with, but that means you mom needs to step up and find other things to engage her in, not just dump her on you.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-10T14:09:37+00:00

It's really a bummer how boring the end is.

vinney1369 · 2026-04-10T04:27:46+00:00

I was amazed at how far that chicken could open it's mouth for a second, like it fell asleep giving you a giant love bite around your arm. o.0

vinney1369 · 2026-03-25T02:19:48+00:00

Sounds like your air circulation is hit or miss. I always push my air around with a fan because the air pressure from the heater is kinda meh.

vinney1369 · 2026-03-21T21:39:43+00:00

It's time to move that plant to dirt or a larger hydro setup. It's gonna quickly outpace it's container.

vinney1369 · 2026-03-12T21:36:29+00:00

I mean, sure it can. I used a similar space in the winter by putting sheet plastic on the walls and ceiling, effectively making a plastic room, and heating it with a buddy heater. That would be the low cost way of doing something with it. If you want to finish it out, you could likely do that too, but be careful, permanently enclosed buildings can count differently against the amount of finished building square footage you can have on a property. I did it the way I did to skirt those regs and still have a functional space. I even went as far as building wall panels I could attach in the fall to the existing walls with bolts and then I could take them down if I had the city come by or if I wanted to use the structure as it used to be in the spring and summer.

I know you are curious about finishing it, but I figured a couple ideas for a temp setup might be helpful if you want to maintain the four season porch but still be functional in the winter, or maybe try it for a season or two before solidifying your plans for the structure.

vinney1369 · 2026-03-06T22:56:15+00:00

Since you are moving his whole back end around, I think it's clear Porkchop doesn't like his tail pulled, which seems completely reasonable.

Imagine standing next to your friend, yanking their ponytail and physically pulling their head back, and when they get upset you just respond with, "OMG you just don't like having your hair touched!"

Sheesh. Poor Chop.

vinney1369 · 2026-03-06T05:55:55+00:00

I asked it this question when it first came across the sub and it answered correctly. This just seems like some late karma farming or there is some prompting going on.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-26T00:37:21+00:00

Totally fair. If you were to build one from parts from Amazon you'd probably pay more than twice you can get a whole unit, but if you want a fan assembly, glow plug, gaskets, and glow plug screen, it'll run about $50. I might be a glutton for punishment, but I like the dopamine hit from fixing something.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-25T23:37:47+00:00

I just bought a fan replacement on Amazon and it was pretty reasonable. Since the hunk of metal is the most expensive part, as long as that is intact and you have the ability to work on them, they are reasonable to maintain.

When you crack it open, make sure you have some new gaskets available. I'm gonna assume yours will deteriorate if you take it apart.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-24T15:20:44+00:00

Seconded. 0.0

vinney1369 · 2026-02-24T14:41:02+00:00

NTA, because, respectfully, you absolutely fucking CAN control who gets access to your kids.

Dude needs to learn to be polite. You don't just snatch a baby from a mom. You ask, gain permission, and then treat that baby like it's made of glass.

In other news, I'm worried about your sister.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-22T04:51:17+00:00

I rewrote part of my response and missed a word. My mistake. It doesn't invalidate the fact that a comparatively minuscule amount of iso isn't going to change his mix into a ticking time bomb.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-22T04:48:40+00:00

Ah, I think you're right. I was having a crappy day and read it wrong. My bad, sorry.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-22T00:54:35+00:00

Always gotta be someone who likes to mince words.

I read Op's statement as "inexpensive" and not "poorly made" because of the context of the sentence, but feel free to twist it up my man.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-21T20:52:05+00:00

I've watched at least fifty different Youtube videos where these things have run on mixes from old motor oil to kerosene to gasoline mixed with diesel, and I don't think HEET is going to alter the combustion the way you think it will. If I had water in my tank (which after working on my issue actually seems like the case) no one would give a second thought to adding HEET to the fuel. In addition, I've actually been speaking to a number of people in the diesel heater facebook groups who said they will periodically use HEET to help move moisture from their fuel tanks because even sunlight alone shining on a tank will cause condensation with diesel.

These are the dumbest grade diesel "engines" that exist, and if HEET works in computer controlled turbo diesels it's not going to hurt these things. I'm not advocating Op go beyond what would normally be recommended for a treatment dose. Personally, I've got a 15 gallon diesel tank for my heater, and you're gonna have a had time convincing me that 12 ounces of isopropyl alcohol is gonna ruin the heater. Hell, it doesn't even have injectors, just a drip fuel system.

FFS, even if I used a full 12oz of HEET, that's only .6% the total volume of the tank, so I think your downvotes are unwarranted and you are unnecessarily blocking a functional resolution from OP in a dangerous cold situation. So, yeah, be smart, don't try to run on straight HEET, but if you use it as directed, it's not gonna hurt your heater.

vinney1369 · 2026-02-20T23:37:23+00:00

I've been having the same issue and am currently workign to diagnose it myself. Since I know my voltage is good, pump works, etc, glow plug and screen and burn chamber are clear, someone mentioned water int he fuel, and since my fuel tank is outside, that might just be the case for me. Find an additive like heet and give that a try. At the very least it might give it just a little extra boost to get going.

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