I haven’t seen increased prices due to tariffs at all yet, but I haven’t been shopping lately for anything but groceries and other necessities. I actually bought kitty litter (Ökocat brand) last week and it was the same price as the last few times. Like you I buy almost exclusively store brands and I plan to hit up farmers markets this summer too. I’m also growing my own cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and corn.

Fair enough, but having a snappy phone with plenty of storage is important to those of us who do pretty much everything on our phones. My laptop on the other hand was purchased cheaply 6 years ago and I’ll often go a week without using it, and my laptop before that lasted 11 years.

I forgot my wallet the other day and only realized it when it was time to pay for my grocery purchase.

My state’s driver license app works flawlessly, but I can’t get any of these crappy wallet apps to work with Android on my S22 Ultra due to unresolvable errors with each of them. Hopefully PayPal can finally give us both a working wallet app.

I’m a 6’2" guy and people only mess with me if they’re intoxicated. I’m always completely aware of my surroundings unless I’m in a crowded place that should be safe (like malls and airports).

All my sketchy encounters were on public transit, so I no longer take it in my city (transit in Denver is THE FUCKING WORST). I’ve been threatened and followed multiple times by drugged out weirdos, but let me tell you about the two worst incidents: 1) I was jumped and attacked by a random guy at an empty train station, there was nobody around to help or even witness and I ran for my life as he chased me; 2) guy at a bus stop recognized me from my workplace and he followed me on the bus to my girlfriend’s place and then on another bus back to my home and he started hanging around outside my workplace hoping to run into me. So yeah most of the time I’m hyper-aware of everything happening around me in public and you’re right to be as well.

I feel the same about Paris, there’s nothing romantic or magical about it. It had easily the worst air pollution I’ve ever seen in Europe (but I understand that’s improved a lot in the last decade), it’s overcrowded and smells like sewage everywhere. Not a place I’d ever care to visit again. That said I use a number of French services and I really like a lot of their cultural exports, and I’d love to explore other areas of France.

Had a guy in one of my grad school courses who always found a way to shoehorn in the fact that he’d summited Everest not just once, but TWICE! 🙄 Climbing Everest just strikes me as rich person bragging rights, and it isn’t even that impressive given that a lot of the people who do it pay porters to carry their supplies and dig their latrines.

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Nothing personal

Sure sounds like it’s personal. But if all of us are to blame then please enlighten us, let’s hear about how you would have prevented Trump from coming to power a second time if you were American.

Food bank in the US. Food drives and individual donations of food don’t really mean shit to food banks and they result in overwhelmingly low quality food. Your local food bank isn’t hurting for your expired cans of coconut milk or your forgotten boxes of Kraft mac & cheese. Sugary junk and expired food will be sorted out and tossed. Most staple foods at food banks are distributed by the federal government or purchased by the food bank. Most other foods are donated in large volume by supermarkets and manufacturers. What food banks really need from you is donations of money, not food.

Another thing about food banks is that some supermarkets and manufacturers abuse them to dump their spoiled, expired or overproduced goods and get a tax write-off on them. I worked at a medium sized food bank that would throw away multiple pallets of sugary bakery items from Walmart every day because they didn’t meet our nutrition guidelines and Walmart had been told repeatedly not to donate them, but they did it anyway for the tax write-off. Ever walk into a Walmart and wonder how they can have so much bakery crap on display and sell it before it expires? Yeah, most of that stuff will be marked down multiple times and then trucked to the local food bank where it will be thrown away. Trader Joe’s also does this with their returns (most of their donations are unusable). Whole Foods on the other hand is really amazing about donating tons of high quality stuff on a daily basis.

Yeah seriously check what else your library has to offer. My library loaned me a brand new pair of Black Diamond trekking poles and I liked them so much that I bought by own pair.

That’s the one I immediately thought of too. We use my girlfriend’s sister’s account to binge classic shows, but it routinely plays a completely different episode than the one we selected. You also can’t pause most episodes, so you have to exit the episode and then start it back up again and find wherever you left off. And on top of all that they show ads for their own shitty shows before every episode – dude we’re watching Andy Griffith, clearly we’re not the target audience for your G-rated “Friends” knockoff.

Not sure if you’re being serious, but yeah we have guards pretty much everywhere in the US, particularly in cities. We also have guards at grocery stores (usually multiple guards, and they’re usually cops in uniform hired by the store) and at discount stores and sometimes on buses and trains. I’ve even seen them at convenience stores and cell phone shops. My apartment building has an armed guard on site with their own police-clone patrol SUV from like 10pm to 6am every night, I’ve had to call them a couple times and they arrive faster than the cops.

The US is a violent shithole and the guards primarily keep away sketchy troublemakers (except in larger stores where they’re useless and only used to deter shoplifting).

Learn from my experience!

I was obsessed with the same thing for a time so I bought one of those blue ear bulb syringes to aid with earwax removal. I’d put earwax removal drops in my ears, wait a few minutes and then use the bulb syringe to rinse the drops out of my ears, before squeezing the remaining water out of the bulb syringe and setting it on my counter. I did this almost every day for weeks.

One day I noticed a bit of gray earwax coming out after squirting water from the bulb syringe into my ears, like a few small chunks of it. I was so excited, my persistence was finally paying off!! The next day I did it again and there were even more gray earwax chunks!! Holy shit, I must have knocked something loose! Third day it happened again and this time I was suspicious, so I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut open the bulb syringe to find that it was full of mold. I’d been squirting chunks of mold into my ears and when they fell into the sink I thought they were earwax.

Now I use a translucent bulb syringe that’s split in the middle, so I can take it apart to dry properly and I’ll see if anything is growing inside of it.

If you haven’t tried then I recommend hydrogen peroxide in your ears. I dilute it 1:1 with water, but some people use it straight from the bottle. It feels SO GOOD and helps with earwax removal.

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I randomly point at my cat and tell her, “YOU!! I know what you’ve done!” and then I run at her. She immediately goes WILD and starts tearing around the apartment and doing little lion roars. If I stop pursuit too soon then she’ll taunt me by jumping over me on the sofa over and over again until I continue chasing her. When I “catch” her then she gives me a sassy slap in the face and scampers off.

Hard water vs soft water.

So many times we’ve been in a hotel room and I’ve taken a shower and commented on what soft water it is because it feels like the soap never rinses off and I feel slippery all over. She always tries to correct me by calling it hard water. She grew up in a desert city that has naturally hard water, so she’ll always say, “I know what hard water is, I grew up with hard water!” when the “hard” water she grew up with was softened by some means. It doesn’t matter how many articles and blog posts and ChatGPT sessions on the topic I show her, she always insists they’re wrong and she’s right. We argued about it a few times in the past, but now it’s a running joke between us.

You add it before cooking! It actually doesn’t get mushy at all, and brings out the banana’s sweetness.

Curry powder! I’ve never tried curry leaves or curry sauce, but those sound delicious too. Whichever way you add the curry, I highly recommend trying it!

I discovered that combo when I was living in Sweden where it’s a fairly common one that most pizza places offer. I believe the pizzas are usually called Bahamas, Afrikana or Tropicana and they always feature pineapple, banana and curry, and usually either ham, shrimp or peanuts.

Pineapple, banana and curry, optionally with peanuts. Now that’s a real pizza!

I’ve been on a similar coffee journey. I used to drink it nonstop throughout the day, like 5-6 cups of black coffee most days. Then one day I was physically assaulted and chased by a drugged out guy at a train station (never take transit in Denver, it’s a total fucking shitshow). I thought I was going to get stabbed or killed that day and I guess that event caused some trauma because I started getting panic attacks shortly after. I realized that my panic attacks were more frequent and lasted longer on the days that I drank more coffee, so I quickly cut all caffeine out of my life. Now I’ve been without caffeinated coffee for over a year and don’t miss it at all, although I still enjoy a decaf espresso most days.

Same thing happened with weed. I used to love weed and smoked/vaped it pretty frequently, but started getting panic attacks from it around the same time so I cut it almost entirely out of my life. Every few months I’ll buy a pack of pre-rolls to enjoy, but it literally takes me like five days to finish a single joint because I smoke one tiny puff at a time to avoid panic attacks.

Honestly though, even if I didn’t deal with panic attacks, I’m probably better off having no caffeine and only a tiny amount of weed.