It’s my bodily autonomy. I’m a woman of child-bearing age. I even want to make a child sometime in the next four years. I’m risking my health. I can’t move. I will end up broke with zero resources in another state, with no job, and my husband will need to start his career from scratch if we move. We just can’t afford it. Plus wherever we move, we’ll be separated from both our families who are local here. And again, even if we move, wherever we start over could just be red in two election cycles anyway. Moving isn’t the answer.

Wear a reflective vest. It makes it obvious you’re just trying to safely walk your dog, makes you less likely to be hit by a car and signals safety because dangerous people don’t usually want to be conspicuous

Fleeing my state isn’t an option. Besides, my state didn’t used to be red. A lot of states flipped or at least went from purple to red. So it’s not even a guarantee if you uproot your entire family and life that you get to stay blue.

I feel so demoralized when this comes up, as if it’s my own fault I’m living somewhere with terrible laws. I voted. I got other people to vote. I changed a few minds on abortion (not easy to do!). I don’t have the money or resources to start somewhere else, and we’re all about to have less money.

We (me, spouse and 1 child) rent a big house with my grandmother who I care for. It’s 4 bedroom/2 bath, got a kitchen, living room, laundry room, a large dining room and extra living room that used to be a garage. It’s my parent’s place, while they live in an apartment for work.

The huge place is not worth it. I hate taking care of my grandmother. She has dementia and I’m burned out but we can’t afford to live anywhere else.

Plus the grocery shopping!

Make clue finders for adults! Same game, just adult level facts, puzzles, and math!

Thank you posting such an in depth and interesting explanation!

Yearly childcare is a years worth of income in plenty of places, so there’s that too.

Huh. In my large city I have difficulty finding things in brick and mortar stores. Want a silicone tray for your air fryer? Walmart’s website says they have them, but when you call the stores, they confirm they absolutely do not. Hobby lobby has it for 5x the price. No local stores come up as stocking them period, None other listed locally. I have this issue quite commonly. Maternity clothes sections just don’t exist locally with any variety or consistency with sizes. Baby necessities, toys, and clothing is truly hit or miss in stores. You drive to the one store you think will have what you need and they closed two weeks ago.

I don’t live in the boonies. If you live in the US, you’ve heard of my city. I am constantly running into the issue that things are only available online, and then Amazon is always the quickest shipping, and almost always the least expensive.

Fuck bezos and screw Amazon, but unless you’re able to wait a week or three for everything you need, you don’t have any good substitutes. I’d love to run out and buy it same day, but it’s just not reliable to go to the store anymore.

It’s not just totally unattractive guys trying to punch above their weight, it’s also mid range guys who pick the hottest girl in the group and then sulk when she goes home with sometime else after doing nothing to make themselves her best option. And the sulking is pretty transparent which further lowers their attractiveness, and that kind of behavior definitely makes it back to everyone in the group. Guys really say no one will date me and literally only mean their first top choice won’t date them.

I think the difference is that starfish just lie there, spread out, not really participating, and a pillow princess participates with words and moans, and their hands are roaming, and they’re I think usually good receivers they just don’t get on top and take a turn at the work part. They do motivate their partner to continue pleasing them though.

Start with a solid 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep! Then make myself a cup of coffee and finish it while it’s still hot while finishing my book! Then off to the library to get the next in the series and I pick up my dad for breakfast at a diner. Go home, and have a hot bath and start the next book. An afternoon quickie with my husband. Now I go to my sister’s house where our other sisters already are to make a puzzle. All the husbands and kids arrive but since my day is free and uninterrupted my parents are in charge of my baby while I cuddle my husband and we all play Jackbox until midnight .

Yeah, but that’s just a mindset. You can turn that mindset on in the Florida summers too. When you get in your car and it’s an oven until the AC cools it you just pretend you’re in a sauna, breathing that hot air from the coals. You’re sweating while you’re doing a job/project, you just pretend it’s like hot yoga.

A hot tub feels amazing. The heat can too when you decide it does. When you finally give into the heat and decide you’re just gonna be sweaty today, it feels great.

The car behind me or across the intersection’s headlights blinding me making it hard to see the road and also potentially causing a migraine. Ban them from the streets!

Isn’t that already true? Internet is available for free at the library. The discouragement part is that you have to pay for it at home or on your phone

This is a wild take. There is value in privacy. There is value in quiet! There is value in space. Electricity efficiency isn’t the only important thing!

I don’t want to dox myself publicly, but I’ll DM you a link to the page on my library’s site! They don’t have device names listed but there are descriptions of what they do and pictures of the devices so if you’re familiar maybe you can just figure it out?

Never? I know tons of people who are keeping up just fine. My grandmother, she just retired, but she was working up until like a year ago, she has dinner on the table at 6 every night, often with vegetables from her small garden. Her house is always clean, but she’s not a clean freak. She paints, follows a water color tutorial about once or twice a week. Two years ago, she took up drawing. A few years before that, photography. She realizes she needs something else for a recipe for dinner, runs to the store and grabs it, no procrastinating. She has an active social life, and is very involved in her church. She visits her mother.

My brother-in-law runs his own business. He pays all their family’s bills, he exercises, reads books to his sons as he puts them to bed. He eats healthy. He sets New Year’s resolutions and actually keeps them every year. His bottom floor just flooded in the hurricane, and he was very calm like yeah, a lot of our stuff just got ruined. A lot of my business stuff just got ruined. We’re going to be fine, let’s get to work.

My friend is a paralegal. Her house is spotless. She has a cat who she loves. Her boyfriend is annoying, but she loves him. She loves diet Coke. She owns her place, and wants to settle down and have kids in the next few years.

All that’s pretty foreign to me, I’m struggling to keep up. I have a lot of friends who are struggling. But there are definitely people who walk through life and are just better at it. They just seem to be able to handle things.

You don’t take it home, but my library has digitizing machines. You can digitize hundreds of old photos in minutes (it pulls them through and scans them like a deck of cards in a shuffling machine, so fast! And it is super sensitive so no/low risk of a photo jamming), and it can scan front and back at once, for those photos granny labeled on the back in her sweet cursive. You can digitize old home movies all the way back to those circular reel movies. All for free, as much as you want. The equipment is thousands of dollars and they just let me walk in and play with it. It’s incredible