I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but the real trick to managing pests in your home, is to allow the right predator pests to exist. The best ones are spiders and centipedes. Centipedes are especially the best because they won’t ever hurt you, they mostly stay out of sight, and they don’t leave webs hanging around. But when you do see one you will probably freak the fuck out. You just have to remember that they eat earwigs and mites and such and try not to kill them. Spiders are also great to keep around, but there should be a big asterisk about how I live in Illinois and most spiders are harmless here.

The feeling is even better when they let you go because you no longer have a moral obligation to transition anything over to your coworkers. You can just fuck off and not feel bad. This typically highlights all the holes in management when they are ineffective at delegating your tasks and things get dropped. My husband witnessed this happen recently. They let an employee go nearly a year ago, then a client started sending emails wondering what was happening to their project and why there hadn’t been communication.

I second the freezer meals! What I like to do is make things that I can make a very large batch of to make food prep easier when I want a quick healthy meal. My favorites to make are chicken pot pie, pesto, kale pesto, pulled pork (not healthy), and falafel. All of these things take lots of time and or ingredients. So when you make them, you make a big massive batch and then divide them into meal portions for freezing. This way all I have to do is grab 1 portion of say pot pie, thaw it out in hot water or in the fridge the day before, pop it in the oven with some pie crust or crescent rolls on top for 25 min and BAM, I’m eating stuff from my garden in the middle of winter with little to no effort!

I LOVE this sweet potato and peanut stew we found. We originally tried it when looking for easy camping meals, but it’s so good we just keep making it. I’m not even vegan, but it’s so hearty and filling. People we make it for often ask if we’re sure there’s no meat in it. Best part is it only takes 30 minutes to make and uses relatively cheap ingredients. I like to add extra kale to make it thicker and make some wheat rolls to go with it: https://www.freshoffthegrid.com/sweet-potato-and-peanut-stew/#recipe

At my school, they showed a video about all the different parts of the cell where each part was a character with a different “job” and looking back it was pretty racist. I specifically remember that the Lysosome was a garbage man with a Mexican accent. Very cool science video for children… very cool 🫤

I’ve had a different but similar issue. I have a VPN I log into so I can remotely access my work computer. If the VPN is on, YouTube won’t show me specific content that I know is usually there. It doesn’t tell me I can’t watch anything or tell me to turn it off, but some content is just missing 🤷

If worm, why not worm shaped? If not butt, why butt shaped?

6th grade health teacher told the class that studies show evidence of increased breast cancer risk for those that have had an abortion. This was in a suburban Illinois school.

If we’re strictly talking dust accumulation, there’s a few things you can do to reduce this.

• Make sure to change the filter in your HVAC system and intake vents every few months with a high quality filter. The better the filter, the more you need to change it.
• You can also add an air filter to individual rooms. I added them to all our bedrooms and it helps a ton with keeping dust down.

Aside from that, you’ll still need to dust every so often and how often will depend on how fast it gets dirty again and how deep you want to clean. I use a vacuum and damp rag to dust shelves and such every month and I dust other things like blinds and fan blades and pull out furniture and appliances once a year. Every few years we’ll need to remove something that usually never moves and we’ll clean up the dust from that. I will say it’s much easier to clean stuff regularly when you don’t have lots of things laying around or taking up space. Keeping literal objects tidy makes it less of a chore. It’s a lot easier to just wipe a table than to wipe a table and all the knick knacks.

This may seem basic, but I think some people really need it. I have a hard time remembering things like birthdays and such. So I make sure to add people’s birthdays into their contact info on my phone. Then it will show up on my calendar as a different color and I can see it coming up and actively try to be on top of it instead of it passing and feeling guilty for forgetting. Maybe you don’t care about everyone’s birthday in your life, but I at least try to add my friends and family so I can reach out to them or try to remember to send a gift to little ones that are far away, etc.

I’m disabled!!

Agreed. Rollerblading is very 90s.

One story my husband shared with me was when he and my dad stopped into a local bar after working hard on home renovations all day. They planned to get some dinner and have some beer after a hard day’s work but needed to wash their very dirty hands first. So they went back into the bathroom and washed their hands. Well apparently that was too “gay” for the owner of the bar and they went over to the bathroom and started saying things like “I don’t know what you think you’re doing in there” and “I just need to make sure you’re not doing anything funny”. So they ended up just leaving while the guy yelled at them saying they had to buy something.

A slightly different version of this concept also happened to my husband. At one point, 2 of our lady friends were talking about fashion and my husband, who is MUCH more fashionable than I am, chimed in. They proceeded to tell him that he’s “not allowed to have an opinion because he’s a man” which is the most double standard bullshit I’ve ever heard come out of any of my friends mouths. It’s stuck with me for a long time now because I think it keeps me honest with myself about standards and reminds me to think about how opinions change when you flip genders.

We had a dog once that was super smart and would learn what different words meant very rapidly. I’d say with most dogs I’ve had, you can go most of their life and they’ll maybe learn 2-3 different words for “dinner” and you can use other words if you’re trying not to excite them too much. But this dog I swear near the end of her life we would have to say ridiculous things around her like “Did you put the K9 cereal in the receptacle?” because she had learned just about every other basic way to say “did you feed the dog?”.

I’ve been taking a video game break to play more board games. Zoo Vadis has been a top pick lately and I highly recommend.

Don’t forget we wear them also…

In the Art History courses I’ve taken, they usually talk about nudity in the realm of “it represents fertility” or something like that. Yeah sure… Venus of Urbino is totally about “fertility” and she’s definitely not touching herself for any other reason.

When I was a kid, my mom either bought or was gifted a little plush snowman that would say “Happy holidays! Happy holidays!” When you squeezed it. It would maybe get squeezed a few times in December and then put in a bin until the following year. No one ever changed the batteries and it still worked each year for many years. Then it started to run out of juice. And slowly over each year it would sound more and more demonic, but it always played at least once before running out of power. It’s now been more than 25 years and we still check it each year to see if the demonic snowman is still alive. I’m not sure it will ever die if it was never alive in the first place…

This.

I KNOW WHOOOO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME