I’ve been married to someone with severe depression for a very long time. It isn’t necessarily a 24x7 experience. During the good times, she is an incredibly happy and fun person to be with. During the bad times, it is really hard on both of us. Medicine has helped, but isn’t perfect. We do our best to get through the hard times and enjoy the rest.

As of today, I am completely unable to estimate or visualize metric values with the exception of the meter (because it is roughly the same as a yard). That said, I would prefer to switch to metric and get used to it rather than continue using our current measurements. It would be vastly preferable to me to use mm and cm over fractions of an inch (I hate fractions, I much prefer decimals).

For temperature, I still prefer F over C. As you said, F is much more metric-like with a 100 degree range that roughly spans the typical weather environments we live in. And considering that the boiling point of water is only 100 C at sea level, that fact is no more valuable than remember that water boils at 212 F at sea level. The reality is, I don’t actually care what specific temperature water boils or freezes at (at any particular elevation). I happen to know what the values are in both C and F, but it doesn’t matter in my life (except for when I was trying to bake when living in Colorado).

I always thought this was their plan. I used to work for one of the cable companies when this came out. Most of us in the Operations space saw this as an obvious play to bully the big telecom companies to increase speeds and latency to benefit the tech companies. However the execs freaked out and treated them as an existential threat, which is exactly what Google wanted.

They never had any desire to run an Internet company, it costs a ton of money to build out. So they cherry picked relatively dense middle and upper class neighborhoods that would have a good return in a way that the regulated telecoms would not be allowed to. They normalized high speed internet nationally and now they can sell off the business to recoup some of the cost.

I’m not a fan of Google, but as an internet customer, I appreciate the result of this strategy.

I don’t know if this is a Mint limitation or my lack of experience with Linux, but I couldn’t get Mint to switch between the integrated graphics and dedicated GPU without manually selecting what I want and restarting. However, I switched to PopOS and everything works fine. This is on an older MSI laptop.

We had some electrical wiring that was overheating and burning/melting the insulation around the wiring. It was a super weird smell that the best description we could come up with was a mild, but gross fish smell. It would start 5-10 min after turning on the light that the wiring ran to and then take 30+ min to dissipate after turning off the light. We had to have an electrician track down the failure point and replace the wiring.

I like these too! Uprooted probably fits the feminine theme a little better, but I like Spinning Silver more. Both good books though.

Personal Training Coach is an app that is preloaded with lots of popular weight training programs and is capable of handling complex progression cycles. You can also build your own plan in it if you find something you like that isn’t preloaded. It includes timer functions (like rest time or exercise duration) and it has mechanisms that adjust for failure to complete an exercise (like repeating that exercise in a future session or reducing the weight in a future session).

I don’t use it when I’m doing simple progression because it is a bit overkill if I’m doing something simple, but it is great for something complex.

My kids used used to call it chokit. They have since learned to pronounce it correctly, but my wife and I have adopted chokit permanently.

I downgraded to gamepass PC for now. I would have cancelled entirely, but my kids also use it, so we do get some value out of it. My kids only use it on PC anyway, but I’ll miss the cloud streaming. Eventually I’ll drop it altogether and most likely this generation will be my last console of any kind.

Mint on my desktop and Pop on my laptop…so that part seems accurate for me.

That looks like a super car with a healthy 6-figure price tag to me.

Yeah, I was guessing that one might be way worse than that. When my kids were born, it was cheaper for my wife to quit working than to pay infant rate child care, but that was a long time ago.

I was curious what this might look like, so I ran some numbers. It would be easy to hit this in a high cost of living area where rent will easily run 5-6k per month, but what about a medium cost of living place? I assumed a family of 4 with both parents working for 75k each and a 20% total tax rate (FICA, federal, state). All of this is based on what I know of typical cost of living items in the US.

After Tax Income (monthly) 10000

Housing 2500 Child care 1500 2 Car Payments (25k each) 1000 Groceries 800 Medical (incl. insurance) 800 401k (6% deduction) 750 2 Student Loans (30k each) 700 Utilities 400 Auto Insurance 300 Total Core Expenses 8750 Leftover for Discretionary 1250

So, you’d have 1250 per month to cover clothing, auto fuel, dining out, pets, fun money, subscriptions, activities for the kids, gifts, etc. You could easily run that to zero or below every month.

Now, there may be some room to cut in this budget, like not funding your retirement and giving up your 401k match or living in a much smaller home. But I would also say some of these numbers are very generous. Rent could be over 3k, most people don’t have a 25k car loan, if you own your home you can get hit with random major repair costs, and probably most parents would laugh at my estimated child care cost.

I think a key takeaway here is that kids are really expensive. Aside from the child care costs, most people with kids will want a little more living space than is doable in an apartment and kids go through food and clothes like crazy. You could probably chop at least 2-3k per month off this budget if it was a couple living in an apartment closer into the city core, with shorter commutes and maybe even options for public transit, biking, or walking.

You can pressure cook frozen chicken in an instant pot.

Oh, that makes sense!

The tall one in the back looks a little inconvenient. Are you growing native prairie grass in there?

Not even a little bit true for me. I listened to pretty much only country at 14 and I don’t listen to any country now, not even the stuff I liked then. By 16 I had switched to mostly rock & alternative. I will still listen to that occasionally, mostly for nostalgia, but it isn’t on any of my playlists. I suspect most everything on my regular playlists came out after I was 30, but it continues to shift forward over time. I suspect eventually most of my current playlist will age out too.

I love this cover!

If your unit is a heat pump, are you then paying for that savings in the winter when it doesn’t benefit from any solar warmth to help heat your house? If so, I wonder if it is a relatively balanced outcome or if one of the seasons has a bigger impact. I imagine it depends in part on which season is more extreme in your area.

To some extent this isn’t new. Lots of companies stopped hiring entry level positions ages ago and just hoped to hire employees that other companies had already developed.