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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Honest answer? Partly because I can operate on my schedule and not the train’s schedule. And the rest of it is getting to have adventures along the way that otherwise would mean getting off the train, finding a bus, taking a long bus ride to the thing, taking a long bus ride back to the train, getting on the train again…

    Sometimes I drive to Seattle, sometimes I take the train. There are times when I like the relaxing ‘let someone else get me there’ vibes, but there are times when the train schedule doesn’t work with my schedule, or I want to check stuff out on route, like fun restaurants I’ve read about, cool educational places, silly tourist traps…

    I remember seeing a sign for ‘World’s Largest Egg!’ one trip, so I just took that exit and went to find the World’s Largest Egg, because why not?

    And another reason is sometimes I just don’t want to be around a lot of people. One crowded train trip up I was treated to a child that felt the best way to pass the time on the 3.5-hour journey was to scream. A lot. It was also a trip where I’d forgotten my headphones. Not fun.



  • Fun fact: this was basically the opposite tactic they took from automatic cars. Everyone loved how easy automatics were to drive. Back then manual gear changes and actual physical steering was hard to do without a lot of upper body strength (and often even with lots of upper body strength). But using physical strength to drive a car was MANLY.

    So the ads were basically all like, ‘we know you, a manly man, can handle an manual car. But buy a nice, easy-to-drive automatic for the wife!’ That way guys could save face and claim they were just switching to automatics ‘for the lady’.


  • Actually, grilling was a marketing thing. Companies realized men were an untapped market for purchasing cooking supplies, but they had to convince men that there was a form of cooking that was ‘manly’ enough for them to do, because when grills were first invented cooking was very, very much ‘woman’s work’ and any man who touched it was ‘weak’ and ‘girly’ and perhaps ‘hen-pecked’.

    A grill, which was outdoors (rustic! woodsy! living off the land!), involved fire (manly!), and mostly meat cooking (even more manly!) was basically the solution they found.



  • I think my favorite part of endometriosis is the catch-22: surgery is needed to fix it, but to get that surgery covered under medical plans it needs to be proven medically necessary. Endo doesn’t show up on scans well, so generally surgery is the only way to confirm the diagnosis.