Fondots

joined 1 year ago
[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

nearly three years

Try 10 years

This whole shit show kicked off with Russia invading Crimea back in 2014 and it's been going on ever since.

Yes, it escalated in a big way a couple of years ago, but if someone were to, for example, invade Florida, we'd consider that to be the unquestionable start of a war, not 8 years later when they tried to move beyond Florida and attack the rest of the country.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 12 points 4 hours ago

For the US, I'd say a pretty strong contender is Woodstock, NY, with a population of around 6,000, and of course famous for the music festival of the same name (even though the actual festival was something like 60 miles away in Bethel)

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Pretty much exactly what you probably think they are, I think they're mostly a thing for people living off grid and maybe some RVs

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Also, if you can it helps to get multiple people involved and do big batches, then freeze them for later.

Once a year (this Sunday actually) I get together with some family and friends and make a ton of pierogies

People come with premade fillings, and we divide up the work, some people making dough, others rolling it out, someone filling them, another person bagging them up, etc.

We also use something like this so we can bang out 18 pierogies at once, lay down a sheet of dough, spoon filling into them, another sheet on top, roll over it with a rolling pin and you've got pierogies.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Sort of

For most toilets there's universal fittings that will work just fine, you may need to adjust them a little bit, but they're made to be adjusted, and they'll work just fine with most toilets.

If you have the original factory parts in your toilet, they may not be adjustable, and if you tried to swap them into another toilet they may not fit/work in other brands/models, or they may kind of work, but maybe not quite right.

There are a handful of brands that don't tend to play well with the universal fit parts, I want to say Kohler is one, and if you go to a hardware store, most likely they're going to stock the universal parts, then a couple of the most common oddball brands.

There's also of course some weird toilets that are just totally different- pressure assisted flush, composting or incinerator toilets, etc. that aren't even working on the same principle as most toilets, but I think the odds are that if you have one of those, you know that already.

Also I haven't played with any toilets that were manufactured that way, but I did retrofit one of my toilets to be a dual-flush. Those kits seem pretty universal, but probably double-check before trying to put them in an oddball toilet.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

One time I was working my way down the bread/dairy aisle at a grocery store. It's one of the wider aisles there, if 2 people pulled their carts off to the side, a third person could squeeze down the middle as long as those first two took a little care to not stick out into the aisle too much

Of course they never do

So there I am coming down the middle of the aisle, trying to squeeze between some idiot agonizing over which container of sour cream they should buy, and some moron who can't decide on a loaf of bread who are stopped directly across from each other, uttering plenty of "'scuze me/pardon me/lemme just squeeze through heres" and of course neither of them move an inch

I nearly make it, but do tap one of their carts a bit in the process

I give her a quick "sorry" and continue on my way.

Then she yells down after me with a very indignant "excuse you"

Lady, you were the one blocking the aisle without any situational awareness, and I already apologized, fucking die mad about it.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm an essential employee, and a lot of my hobbies are solo outdoor activities. so things were pretty much business as usual for me. But I remember the first few weeks of lockdown, I already commute at kind of a weird time and in a not too congested area, so I never dealt with much traffic to begin with, but there was basically no one on the roads then, and I don't think people realize how big the difference was because everyone was just stuck at home.

My car actually averaged a whole mile per gallon better than usual just from the lack of my already light traffic.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

If you're going to insult me, at least do it properly, the term you're looking for is "prima donna"

Italian for "first lady" the lead female singer in a theater company who would be given the prime roles. Because they were big draws at the box office, they got preferential treatment and could tend to be demanding.

Proper Italian pluralization would be "prime donne" but "pima donnas" is more commonly used in English.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

2 bedrooms (one is an office that doubles as a guest room with a pull-out couch) 2½ baths

The two full baths are attached to the bedrooms and are pretty cramped with pretty cheap fittings, but they do the trick. The powder room is downstairs, it's kind of an odd shape due to where it is in the house, and weirdly big but not in a way that makes it particularly more useable and still manages to feel a little cramped. No real counter space to speak of, or other storage options besides the cabinet under the sink. The master bedroom is weirdly huge, and the office is an ok size, but in both cases the way they're laid out with doors and windows, outlets, etc. often leaves us wishing we had a couple more inches any time we think about rearranging or getting new furniture.

We could only afford this house because it was my mother in laws, she sold it too us for cheap when she moved in with her mother to take care of her.

My parents have 3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, a powder room, and then I guess it might be called a ¾ bathroom in the basement. The master bath is pretty sweet with a whirlpool tub (albeit a fairly small one all things considered) 2 sinks, and a shower (the shower is nothing particularly special) and a TV.

The bathroom between the two other bedrooms is nothing too special, but has a nice-sized linen closet and pretty decent counter space.

The powder room is small, nothing too special there.

The basement bathroom has a sink, a weirdly huge linen close, and a shower stall, no tub.

The guy who originally owned the home was a landscaper who did a lot of business with a local builder so they tricked the house out for him. He ran his business from the home and we're pretty sure that was the point of the basement bathroom, he could go in through the basement door and shower without tracking dirt through the house.

The master bedroom is huge, 2 walk-in closets, high ceilings, plenty of space for a king sized bed, a plethora of dressers, a couple small bookshelves, a desk, and a chaise with room to spare. The other 2 bedrooms are decent sized, nothing too special, with pretty huge closets.

It's a pretty sweet house, I wouldn't be surprised if my parents could get a cool million for it if they sold it now, the stars kind of aligned, they'd just inherited a bit of money, the market was right, and the original owner killed himself there, so they paid less than half of that probably about 15 years ago now.

The house we lived in before that had 3 bedrooms, none of which were particularly big, and one bathroom.

The apartment I was living in when I first moved out (to live with my then-girlfriend-now-wife, and a roommate) had 3 bedrooms that were oddly spacious. The master bedroom was pretty big, but again weirdly laid-out, with an en suite bathroom that was nothing too special, it had a pretty decent sized shower that was nothing too special, and there was a second bathroom by the two bedrooms with your typical shower/bathtub. The two other bedrooms were decent-size, our roommates technically had a walk-in closet that doubled as the utility closet for the water heater (and if I miss one thing about that apartment it was the water heater, you could practically brew tea with water from the faucet and it never seemed to run out, and since the apartment wasn't all that big it was almost instant) one of those bedrooms started off as mine, because my wife and I had just recently started dating and I wanted to have my space in case things didn't work out between us (we'd been friends for a good while before that and our plans to move in together had been in the works well before we started dating) but eventually it became her office/storage and additional living space.

Honestly I liked that apartment, I could probably still be living there pretty happily if they didn't keep jacking the rent up. It was a first floor apartment with a washer and dryer and a decent little patio, my only major gripe was that the kitchen was tiny and there was no decent place to put any sort of dining table (at least not with how we used the space, we'd rather have a decent entertainment center setup and couches for entertaining) so we ate at the coffee table or on tray tables.

 

The other day I saw a post somewhere on Lemmy, it seems to have been taken down or at least I'm unable to find it again, by some dickwad asking, pretty clearly it bad faith, why people felt like they needed the day off from work or school after the election. It was full of him bitching about basically people being too soft if they couldn't handle their feelings being hurt and that sort of garbage. This was basically going to be my reply to that.

I work in 911 dispatch, that should tell you that I'm the kind of person who can handle stress well, i've dealt with some crazy shit both at work and in my personal life, I don't think anyone is going to claim I'm someone who's easily rattled.

And still, despite all of the things I've seen, done, heard, and been a part of, I have never felt as physically sick from stress as I did watching the election results coming in Tuesday night.

I was at work, and in the midst of it as it was becoming clear that Trump was going to win, right around 2AM, I got one of those really insane calls, the kind of thing that makes the evening news and that they make true crime TV shows out of, that normally leaves even a hardened tough guy like me a little bit shaken-up, and all I felt was relief because something finally came along to wrench my mind from the election.

I woke up the next day still feeling sick to my stomach. My wife woke up in tears. I spent the day feeling like I was lost in a fog, and by the next day the fog lifted giving way to a simmering rage that I'm not sure will ever go away entirely. Luckily Wednesday and Thursday were my scheduled days off this week, I genuinely don't think I could have worked Wednesday night feeling like I felt.

I'm an old boy scout, I took the scout motto of "be prepared" to heart, I believe that most people don't really rise to the occasion but instead they fall to their level of training, and all the other sayings and such about preparedness and self-reliance and all of that, and I've prepared myself so that I am rarely at a complete loss of what to say or do in any given situation, I have plenty of training and life experience to fall back on.

No one ever trains you how to watch democracy die.

Or how to handle something like ¾ of your country turning their back on your most deeply-held values either by actively voting against them or by not even caring enough to bother showing up to vote.

And nothing prepares you to look around you in a 911 dispatch center, surrounded by people that people are supposed to be able to trust to stand for justice, safety, law, order, security, fairness, equity, compassion, basic human decency, who are supposed to stand up for and provide assistance to vulnerable members of our community when they need it most, who like to pat themselves on the back for being the "calm voice in the night" or the "thin gold line"...

... And realizing that most of them either don't care or are actively rooting for a man who stands for the exact opposite of all of those values.

For the first time I can remember I feel well and truly lost. I tend to be the guy people turn to when they have a problem because I know how to fix it or I at least know how to find someone who can. I don't know how to fix this, and I certainly don't have a guy for this. I'm gonna keep on soldiering on until I figure it out or I guess I'll die trying, but I really don't know what my path forward from here is going to be. And if I need some time to figure this shit out. I certainly won't think less of anyone who needs the same.

And everyone deals with different kinds of stresses differently and more or less successfully than anyone else. Despite the crazy shit I've managed to deal with, there's other more mundane situations that some people can handle just fine that I can't hack. Put me in a regular office environment with reports, paperwork, deadlines and presentations, and I'd probably be burned out in a week. It's like the old saying about trying to judge a fish by its ability to climb trees.

It's ok to not be ok right now, honestly I think anyone who says they're ok right now is either faking it or a psychopath. Don't be afraid to ask for help, if you have it in you, try to check in on others to make sure they're doing ok and getting what they need too. The only way we're getting through this is together.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

My friend and her husband got a switch back when it first launched, I had heard about this and so the next time I was over I asked if they'd licked one yet.

He said they hadn't, and he also denied my request to lick one.

When he left the room, his wife got a mischievous look in her eye and asked if I wanted to lick one.

I of course took her up on her offer and tasted a cartridge while he wasn't looking.

I asked if she had tried one, and of course she had.

They're both cool people, but of the two of them she's definitely my partner in crime.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think there's at least 3 factors at play here.

First, you're probably living in a largely eurocentric bubble. You're not seeing other mythologies because they're not being marketed to you, and in some cases you may not even realize some of the ways that those mythologies and folklore and such are being presented to you because you just don't know what to look for (for example, Dragon Ball, in the beginning, borrowed very heavily from the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, which is a hugely important book in Asian literature, and I swear every couple of years there's some new adaptation coming out, but it's not nearly as well known to Western audiences) and translations can get a little wonky, if you watch a movie or read a book from a non-western culture, instead of naming specific deities or other mythological figures, the translator may figure that no one reading the translation is going to know who that is so they'll translate it as something generic like "god" or "a great hero" instead of naming names.

Second, Western media is huge, and kind of overshadows a lot of other cultures. White Americans making movies in Hollywood are going to tend to pull from their own cultural backgrounds, and that often includes Greek, Norse, and Roman mythology.

Finally, a lot of it comes down to which mythologies we have actual written records of. The Norse, Greeks, and Romans all wrote about their gods to some extent, Slavic people, on the other hand, did not write until after they'd been converted to Christianity (the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian and some other Slavic languages takes it's name from Saint Cyril, who helped to christianize the Slavic peoples, and was developed by his followers,) so there's no real first-hand accounts of their beliefs and practices, only second-hand accounts from other cultures who interacted with them and wrote down what they observed, and people recalling stories they'd heard about earlier times, and that comes with them inserting their own biases and interpretations and just plain getting things wrong. So if you wanted to write something about, for example, the Slavic gods Perun and Veles, you probably wouldn't have as much decent source material to work from as if you wanted to write about the roughly equivalent Norse gods- Thor and Loki.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

stripping to her underwear

It varies of course, but most public nudity laws I've seen pretty much only specify that genitals and female breasts (and sometimes not even breasts) need to be covered.

There's a picture in the article, she's wearing some fairly conservative undies, I've seen people wear more revealing clothes just out shopping at Walmart or going for a jog, and she's certainly showing less skin than you'd see at most beaches or swimming pools.

At worst you might get questioned by the cops about why you're out walking around in your underwear, but unless you seem like you're in the middle of a mental health crisis, or refusing to leave a business or otherwise causing a disturbance, it's kind of a stretch to say you'd be arrested, at least in most halfway modern countries if the cops are enforcing the laws properly (which is of course not a given)

 

Looking for some inspiration, my wife's out of town this week babysitting he grandmother with dementia, so she's been eating a lot of very bland, old-white-lady-palate-approved meals (her grandmother once described some jarred vodka sauce as being "too spicy")

We're both pretty adventurous eaters and spice-lovers, and I know it's driving her mad by now, so I figured I'd welcome her home in a couple days with a dinner full of all the biggest flavor bombs I can find

Help me light her taste buds on fire, decimated my spice cabinet, and make my toilet tremble in fear of what is to come.

 
 

I recently got my hands on a very old but still totally serviceable full-sized deli slicer, and my local restaurant depot is very liberal about handing out day passes to anyone who walks in and asks for one, and the savings buying a whole log of meat and slicing it yourself are pretty bonkers, totally worth the pain in the ass that is breaking it down to clean when I'm done.

Of course it's just the wife and I, and 6lbs of Pastrami is a lot for us to go through before it goes bad. So far I've mostly been getting a few friends to chip in and divying up stuff between us or doing a little bartering and trading lunch meat for homemade bread and such, but I'd like to start freezing some to have on-hand.

Anyone have any experience with this to share? I have a vacuum sealer and a deep freezer to work with.

Which meats freeze well, which don't? Is it worth trying to slice it then package and freeze it in smaller portions, or should I freezer larger chunks of meat then thaw and slice it as-needed? Should I just abandon the idea of freezing and stick with the little ad hoc food co-op thing I have going?

Of particular interest to me is homemade roast beef and turkey, I'm never going back to the deli counter for those after I've been making my own (those boneless turkey roasts are amazing for this purpose, even if I'm sure there's a little meat glue involved in them)

Also cheese, I've never really contemplated freezing cheese until I found myself with a 9lb block of Swiss in my fridge. My gut says cheese doesn't do well in the freezer, but my gut has been wrong before.

I also kind of like the idea of having pretty much a lifetime supply of prosciutto in my freezer, although a quick Google search seems to tell me that prosciutto does not freeze well at all, which seems odd to me, since it's pretty low-moisture I would have thought it would freeze spectacularly well.

Besides that, anyone have any other cool ideas about what I can do with a slicer? I've already sliced down some beef to make cheesesteaks, and when I get my smoker up and running when the weather gets nicer I'm going to have a go at making my own bacon, and will probably use it to slice down beef for jerky as well.

 

This is a true story.

My dad and sister went out shopping on black Friday one year. The went to a local mall that was of course packed. They went to drop a couple of their bags off in the car to free up their hands for more shopping. On their way back to the car, a lady who was driving around looking for a spot pulled up next to them and asked

"Are you two going out?" Hoping to nab their parking space if they were leaving.

To which my dad answered "No, we're related" earning some befuddled looks from the lady and some amused Snickers from my sister.

 

Sunny is, as far as we know, a purebred Malinois, she's almost 4 years old, and is a strong contender for being the Laziest Malinois in the world (which still means she has more energy than any other dog I've ever known)

Some Malinois like to catch frisbees, run up walls, chase bad guys, parachute into hostile territory, etc. Sunny just like to wait for you to get up so she can steal your chair.

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