Earlier today, Fd’A and were chatting and he mentioned that he had a particularly significant year, full of huge happenings in his life. I asked him how old he was and he replied that he turned 21 during the course of that year.
I’ve had a few significant years with lots of big changes/events, but not one in particular that stands out above the rest. (Except, of course, the year I met OMWC, which was the most amazing event in my life! OF COURSE!) Although, 2021 is shaping up to be huge for several reasons.
Have you had any watershed years, years that changed the course of your life or had an outsize impact? How old were you at the time?
Hard to pick a single year that was more “significant” than others.
————
Keto Stuffed Peppers turned out really well….unfortunately started eating a little too soon and my mouth is killing me now ;p
1965………..BECAUSE I WAS BORN!!!!!
https://youtu.be/EPhWR4d3FJQ
You must be a white nationalist.
Bruce can just fuck right off. I can still listen to most of his other stuff, but not this one.
Kid…
You didn’t say which month, so from January:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xLBVgnZyuic
All right, Junior.
“1965………..BECAUSE I WAS BORN!!!!!”
Listen old man!
Yeah! Grandpa! /born in ’66.
1965!
1995, moved out of my parents and out of state the first of the year. 6 mos later I got married. I was 24.
2020, the Year everyone and everything in my life Died, and I started over from scratch, I through everything away, literally, packed my Van and never looked back,
threw everything , jeez,
We remember. Hugs, sir.
No idea really. Maybe the year I moved to California and the year I moved out of California.
Like a Boat, the 2 best times, buying it, and selling it,
Were they consecutive years, like mine?
Sorry you had a bad time in SF.
I don’t know SF very well despite proximity. Pain, all those hills. I know NYC better* now that I think of it.
*not terribly well.
It wasn’t a “bad” time really; I just discovered that California was not for me.
I love SF, but I could never live there. Same with Hollywood. Although both of those places are entirely different now than they were when I made that assessment. And not for the better.
I enjoyed living in SF, but I was young and single with no kids. And though it was expensive, it was much cheaper than it is now.
I had to leave California twice, having been sucked back in once.
Short of the Progressive Rapture, I cannot imagine ever living there again.
I loved California, and there is nothing wrong with it that a neutron bomb couldn’t fix.
2011.
I was 40 and found out I had a tumor (Vestibular Schwannoma aka Acoustic Neuroma) the size of a large egg inside my head and it needed to come out. The tumor was found via MRI in June and in August I was in Los Angeles having surgery to have it removed. After 9 hours of surgery they got all of the tumor out and fortunately my facial nerve remained intact, meaning no facial palsy. Unfortunately, I have no hearing in my left ear, my balance is not great (although you probably wouldn’t notice anything off if you met me). I have not had a single day since where I have felt good physically, that’s why I say it was the most significant year of my life. My head hurts constantly, there are times when I would like to gouge my eyes out of my head because they bother me so much and I can’t hear for shit. Imagine being in a noisy shop and hearing someone call out your name and having no idea what direction the noise came from or how far away it was. Now imagine spinning in circles looking for anyone that seems to be looking at you or waving at you. Now imagine doing that when everyone around you is talking through a damn piece of cloth. But I’m still upright and still able to go to work everyday so praise God for that.
Sorry to hear about those physical problems, GS. I realize how lucky I have been.
“You never really know a man ’til you walk a mile in their shoes”
Damn, Gunslinger. That bites. I am so sorry.
Man, that’s a tough break. Good on you for keeping on, though.
Damn, that’s tough, but it sounds like you’re handling it with grace. Good on you.
33 years old and had a mid-life crisis and then some. Fired, separated and hospitalized for depression (cause and effect still up for debate); having not died (when I had a plan for that), I shed a whole lot of shit I’d been carrying around and emerged into a new life.
Like a butterfly, a wild butterfly
Not quite that Kafka-esque.
JI is your obsession?
I will collect him and capture him!
Don’t know what to do with him after that…
Oh, and damn you – that song is stuck in my head now!
Apparently I missed a lyrical reference.
I don’t know if it was significant but the summer of 1975 was probably the most free time in my life.
I separated from the Air Force in June and was accepted to college in August. I had my last paycheck in my pocket and drove back from New Jersey to New Mexico via Maine and California. No obligations, enough money to keep us fed and free time to go anywhere we wanted.
Oh, and to answer the question, 21.
https://youtu.be/nVw-6qIEEUE
2011, just for eventfulness. I quit one job to start a job that I ended up hating. I ended a relationship to start a relationship that fizzled out miserably. My brother, with whom I rented, left his girlfriend around the same time. We became a pair of heavy drinking bachelors in the space of a couple months. My car died on me and cost too much to repair, and I was still making payments on it. Some of my bleakest moments so far came out of that year: waking up to frosty mornings in the shitty, poorly-insulated house we rented, hungover, trudging to the bus stop to go to an awful, stressful job, trudging home in the twilight and drinking myself into a stupor with my brother. At the end of that year I resolved that I’d spend the next several years doing basically nothing different.
On the plus side there must be by virtue of some ying-yang logic a year coming up that’s nothing but upside.
2013 – saved up for a wedding, got married, started law school, bought a house, ran a marathon…. the “I’m accomplishing all my life goals in 6 months” phase, age 24-25.
Probably 2001; I was 50.
Massive work success followed by backstabbing and termination (it was *not* a good year in data transport/DSL). LASIK. Peak experiences, the beginning of a serious slough of despond, all wrapped up.
No it wasn’t good. Feels like just yesterday. 2000 was the high water mark for telecom I think. Never truly recovered.
Were you on the vendor or service provider side?
US West / Qwest back office middleware between the ordering systems and the network layer. Provisioning, inventory, trouble ticketing. Customers were both sides of the network, ISPs and DSL subscribers.
1988.
1993. Last year in college, lived in the House of Slack, started working in the used bookstore, House of Slack burned down
Last year of being single before first marriage and fatherhood.
At seventeen
Because someone had to do it.
Wait, she was only seventeen?
Expected this.
Expected you to expect this one.
Four videos and not this?
Dammit! I KNEW there was another one I was forgetting.
Always skip the most obvious one.
#MeToo
#MeToo
nature’s queen?
Heard that on Sirius yesterday. Made me think of George Carlin. 😉
Recorded in 74. Released in 75. It made a big impression on me even though it didn’t really apply to my situation.
Married in 76 with 1st kid to follow shortly thereafter.
Second kid in in 79. When she was about 17, she was suffering a lot of teenaged angst. I lent her my CD of Between The Lines. I never got it back.
My first response is to respond with the year I got my driver’s license and bought my first car. I’d like to think things started clicking in my life then, but that actually wasn’t until later.
On the other hand, that was an accomplishment of sorts. I had to pay for all of that myself and keep my grades up at a Catholic school (i.e., they had standards). Some people that know me think I am smart, but when I look at the people I actually had the bulk of my high school classes with, I was the dumb one.
The next possibility would be when I started my first salaried job.
On two other notes:
I am happy. I spent some time at a local place which is in Nashua (in other words, mask ordinance). I wore a face diaper on the way in due to the ordinance (the business and employees can be fined) and the manager once asked me nicely to do so when entering and exiting. The bartender tended to take her face diaper off when she talked to customers. The previously mentioned manager sometimes had her face diaper off when she walked around. No one said a thing to me when I went to the men’s room without a face diaper on and when I left without a face diaper on. I was there to celebrate the good news from PA. I will have a second celebration in PA this weekend.
The other good note is the Nashua Board of Health had a meeting today about the mask ordinance. The BoH will recommend the Board of Aldermen rescind the ordinance. Excellent.
I’ve had a number of cataclysmic years. The first time the government stole me in ’75 and the second time in ’81. The year I got sober, ’82 and the year I stopped being sober, ’16. The year I met my wife, ’91. The year I adopted my son, ’12. There’s more.
1998?
It is the year I stopped fucking around and chose to pursue an actual career.
As an aside, it was just a really great time to be a single, late twenty-something in NYC.
First time I went. Local guide advised WTC as southern-facing compass.
(Your year, that is.)
The year I met SP, of course.
Obligatory aside, 1984, the year my father died, I turned 30, and I did the best scientific work in my career at the best job I ever had.
Greatest work experience: 1986-1990. I did the high voltage for a laser fusion project. I had carte blanche and I made that fucker work!
Most fun at work was during EMP testing 1979-1986. Worked hard and played hard.
Such a mundane thing as going in the army, 1956, 19 years old, was the most significant year. Not because in and of itself was it significant but everything, good and bad, happened after that. 2 marriages, 2 kids, allowed me to retire without financial worries.
I truly grew up during the first years of my army life. A lot of later decisions were made with a little more insight and a few with more hind sight. Experiencing the vastness of the rest of the world and proving to myself that I could handle it.
Now, I’m listening to Headgames and I remembered really liking this song. It was a staple on KMET, the might met. AOR at it’s finest.
And, for all the scientists, there’s this one.
The whole album was played regularly on the radio back then. What the fuck happened to radio in L.A.? Such a great album. Now, all you’re gonna hear is fucking “Urgent” over and over. Sad.
WKRP remembers. 😉
Les Nessman remembers.
2020. The year they forced me to work from home forever, even though they didn’t know it yet. And I didn’t get the vaccine or the vide. Neener neener, losers, I won.
There’s really only two explanations for our response to this thing. We had the numbers pretty accurately back in Mar. 2020. One, we are petrified of a disease that might kill a quarter of a percent of us, or two it was all just a scam to wrest power into the hands of the left. Considering all of the externalities, it’s safe to assume it’s the latter.
“it was all just a scam to wrest power into the hands of the left”
And we have a winner. Let’s give this guy a prize.
Yeah, about the same time, I did the math and the gaps between reality and the response(s) were bewildering, to say the least
I think some from column A and some from column B.
Well… there is that crazy ass conspiracy theory that some people maybe knew it was a genetically engineered virus that escaped from a Chinese lab and legit panicked that it might turn out to be The Stand. But that’s a crazy conspiracy theory that nobody should ever mention.
Haven’t gotten my shot yet either, and I’m not sure how far I’ll go to avoid getting it (out of principle of not being bullied into making my own personal medical decisions).
My workplace currently requires everyone working in-office to wear a mask. They sent out an email after the vaccines started rolling out that clarified that you still need to wear it even if you’ve been vaccinated. It’s stupid, but I’m kind of glad because if they let the vaccinated people stop wearing it, the mask would become a visual marker of people who are refusing to take it. I’m sure those people would be hauled into HR to be given passive-aggressive lectures about how safe and effective the vaccines are and strongly suggesting that you make an appointment to get one.
So I guess they would require you to prove to somebody (direct manager? HR?) that you got the vaccine before they let you take the mask off? How far are they prepared to go to prove that your “passport certificate” isn’t a fake? I read about how some companies are handling this and wonder how much thought they are putting into it.
In the small shop where I work nobody wears masks. Sometimes when somebody sneezes the owner shouts out “group hug!”. That’s the attitude at my workplace.
Due to how things are going here in Japan I’m the only where I work who has had a chance to get the vaccine – I got it at a US base and my reason was mostly as a gesture towards protecting my f-i-l from getting it via me.
I seriously hope that they’re going to take the least controversial route, which I speculate would be mandating masks until the CDC says that nobody at all has to wear them.
I’m just trying to think like an HR manager here: Seems like if they allow unmasking for vaccinated people and single out the unvaccinated, they could be inviting lawsuits, which are still very costly and arduous things even if the company wins. But they also can’t risk lawsuits if they allow unilateral unmasking and one person happens to get COVID. So the least risky thing to do is probably mandate masks until some official sciencey organization says that they’re not needed at all.
As much as I hate wearing those stupid things, I think it’s the best possible outcome.
“… if they allow unmasking for vaccinated people …”
As I point out above – how they implement this would be fraught with problems. Will it be done on the honor system or does each employee have to prove they were vaccinated? What would that proof look like? How would the company verify this? It sounds like a huge can of worms.
Probably 1991. Desert Storm gave me a little perspective and made me get my shit together, and also, that was where I met the future Mrs. Animal.
“also, that was where I met the future Mrs. Animal.”
Yay, good for you Animal, hard to underestimate that perk!
Wooooo! B’s win!
Whoever wins this series is going to be beat to hell. 3 games, 4 OTs, so far.
Age 24.
Too many bad choices, not enough good.
No matter, I carry on.
Marriage was *encouraged* upon me.
No she wasn’t knocked up, but she made an ultimatum. I fell for the free milk and a cow speech.
That has not turned out well.
It turns out the “free milk” is contingent upon lots of things. Apparently I have not been holding up those things (I’m still not sure what they are 25 years after).
I feel your pain. I married a wonderful German woman. The only problem is when I do something that she doesn’t approve of, she reverts back to German to fuss at me. So I basically know I’ve done something wrong, but have absolutely no clue what it was. I just am very sure that I’ve been properly told off – no language in the world is better suited for profanity than German.
I’m still pretty much clueless what precipitated every argument we’ve had for the past 15 years.
It was nien things.
I know how that feels.
I never understood that “free milk” spiel. If all she feels when I’m getting this “milk” is akin to somebody jerking on her undercarriage then we have non-matching appreciation for what that action is supposed to be about.
I can narrow it down even more to just 6 months – October 1999 to March 2000 (28 years old).
My status in October ’99: just finishing up my 3rd college degree after finally figuring out what I’d do for a career. I had been dating a girl for the past 6 years, and we were seriously looking at getting married (serious enough that I was about 75% of the way through the meetings with her rabbi to convert so we could have the wedding at the temple). Was considering a couple job offers, but knew that there was really only one that I could accept and still be with her. I was going to get married, have kids, and live the rest of my life in Alabama.
My status in March 2000: newly single, living in DC, working at the job I wanted to take but was going to turn down to stay with the girlfriend.
Still not entirely sure what happened between the girlfriend and me. I think we both just realized that I wouldn’t have been truly happy with the life I had laid out before me in the fall. Happy to report that I am still friends with the girlfriend, and she is happily married to the guy she started dating right after me. I’m sure if we had stayed together we would have been content with our lives, but not truly happy – I would have always wondered what I had missed out on, and she would have known that my wondering was entirely due to me being with her.
Goddamn those Alabama Jewesses, you do it to me every time…
That’s a bit of a sweet story.
BTW, I (and I think others) would love a follow-up on your suit journey when you end up going there. I’m guessing you’re going to Kirbys? (based on links from the Samuelsohn website) That place looks awesome – 3 generations! I love that.
I definitely will follow up on it. Actually not going to Kirbys – somehow it didn’t pop up when I was doing my searches. I’m actually going to Greiner’s. Not quite as old (only been around for 30 years), but the people they have there have been there nearly the whole time. And it’s likely that I’ll be working directly with the owner of the place for the fitting.
If I was a half decent writer, I’d consider turning it into an article for the site. But after 20 years writing audit reports for the government, my writing skills are not that exciting…
Greiner’s looks solid too & I agree that having the owner involved is a huge plus – my local place is good, but I’m never _quite_ as satisfied when the younger guy takes care of me vs. the owner.
I suspect you could make a solid article out of it…
Hmm. An article about the first foray into buying a proper suit that is written by someone who is used to writing about government agencies failing to follow the FAR requirements when it comes to COTR assignments. Remember that Navy commercial – “If someone made a movie of your life, would anyone want to see it?” My answer was a definitive “No.” And I have the feeling it’d be the same for any article I write.
Don’t get me wrong, I write some great reports. Been quoted in a number of newspapers, and even used by congress critters during confirmation hearings (I’m an auditor, so by nature I have a healthy supply of shadenfreude, and I rather enjoy when my reports make a bureaucrat squirm). But I’m not entirely sure those are the same writing skills that would result in an enjoyable column.
Fair enough.
That said, I think a bunch of us would be interested in updates via the comments. Good luck with the selection and fitting!
I’m way worse of a writer and I wrote two submissions. Do it.
Did you know lois Malone too?
That’s a solid jam. I don’t really know ARS.
Have some
Some MORE!
I’d say 1994 – After giving it our best shot with his, mine, and our counseling sessions, I decided my first husband and I each just needed to be with a different kind of person, and we parted just about as amicably as can be done (except for those outlier cases where a couple divorces but still live together or still have sex with each other. We didn’t do that.) As friendly as it was, the next few months were rough, and I (re)learned that dating sucks. Then on New Year’s Eve, I met Tom Teriffic. <3
I’ll have to go with 1989 – I hated my freshman year at the University of Delaware and wanted to just move home and find a job.
I was convinced to try a different school and took a flyer at Northeastern in Boston, because of the co-op program* (TBF, I had looked at Drexel before I started at Delaware, so co-op was on my mind).
That remains the best, single decision I have made in my life (sorry, wife) – the combination of theory at school and hands-on experience was utterly invaluable. At a bare minimum, it let me know what I didn’t want to do (commuting in to Wall St. from Long Island) without having to make a major commitment. It also let me make peace with doing something that I really liked but wouldn’t pay particularly well (tech, at the time) vs. something I was good at but didn’t really like all that much (finance).
I was fortunate that tech ended up paying pretty well, too, so win-win.
* it may have changed, but is/was a 5 year school – after freshman year it’s 2 quarters of school, 2 quarters of working in your field (in some combination – 6 months/6 months was common); the co-op department at NU helped place you and had all sorts of connections.
Co-ops should be standard for any career focused degree. Every student should do one.
I remain flummoxed that it’s not more common.
I mean, not really “flummoxed” – you’re in school or working year round, with just a week off between quarters; your “spring break” isn’t going to line up with other schools and between school or work you don’t spend 4 or 5 years with a bunch of “close friends”. School spirit wasn’t huge, because students are coming and going every 3 or 6 months.
Co-op really cut into “the college experience”, man.
Everyone knows college is meant to be a time of personal discovery and not, you know, learning valuable life skills.
I’ll note that at NU you don’t do one – you do one every single year. You can repeat, so mine ended up:
– Banker’s Trust on Wall Street (6 mo)
– Bank of New England, after the FDIC seized it and it was being absorbed by Fleet Bank (2 6 mo. stints – it paid so well I doubled-up)
– John Hancock – my first pure tech job (the others were finance related)
Invaluable – 2 years with real job experience when I graduated.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do until five years after I graduated, so… I dunno. What I wound up doing was a field that I had rejected during my early years in college.
That’s a bit at what I’m getting at – I’m sure I would have gotten there eventually, but I had rejected “a computer job” in college and studied finance because I figured I’d make a good living at it (plus I was reasonably good at it); computers were super interesting to me but didn’t pay particularly well at the time.
My compromise was my degree was finance/MIS (as we called it at the time [something, something, onion on my belt]).
That last co-op job was something of a “screw it, I won’t make that much but I’d much rather do this”, and all I looked for after graduation were tech jobs, albeit in financial services.*
Co-op was invaluable in helping to figure all that out before I had actually graduated.
* A friend in school who was a hard-charging finance guy tried to convince me “you should get a job as a quant, that’s up and coming” but I figured I didn’t have the math chops for that; in retrospect, I probably should have at least tried that path. I might be rolling around in hookers and blackjack at this point. Also, I would have helped crash the market at least once by now.
Did the co-op bit at Drexel. Agree completely with what you said.
I guess I’d say 1979, age 23, in grad school, got married.
The current year is always the most significant. Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today is a gift.
I try to live with this mindset, but don’t always succeed. Tend to get grumpy when I read too much of the news, wondering whether this straw or the next will be the one to break the back. But I’ve been getting better about catching myself before I go too deep, take a breath, look at the glories of nature around me, and just enjoy the present.
Respect the past, strive for the future and live today. /grandma obe
https://archive.li/lESNB/d67d317fc9e4121a0a2376622fbc1b98343478e4.jpg
NSFW.
https://archive.li/3kbs6/b0eebaef1d1fa75d23269c28618a700e4141e2d4.jpg
NSFW.
https://archive.li/JWO7U/e0390aa1b35f0f490cfa41f8b2a79f272ef4f43d.jpg
NSFW.
yes on the brunettes
Hear hear.
Seconded.
P.S. This has to be better than a Zoom call/meeting/whatever. (Don’t revoke my Glib card SP)
https://archive.li/FjcJ3/565c669b6ccf250f40454460e6f81a262cccf843.jpg
NSFW.
Yowsa! That could be Karen McDougal’s younger sister.
2005 I was 40, and the best job I ever had was winding down. But I had my son’s college mostly in the bank, so when the general manager tried some power move where I would need to do some really evil things to my direct reports, I wrote it up and put it on his desk and went and played golf for a year. FirstWife was furious, but we would split up the towels and dishes soon after that.
I had done all the things I was supposed to, I had some handy degrees, a rich professional portfolio, my health, some money, and I was clean on my responsibilities. I would be a bachelor for five delicious years (who knew how fun and easy that was going to be) and start a streak of quitting every job since (well, three of four) on my own terms. And then I met a proper SEC sorority girl, escaped the desert, and continued never again giving a shit what anyone thought about anything and what’s for supper, sweetheart?
Professionally, I’ve had three good years since 2008, but I’ve kissed zero ass and haven’t gone backwards on the nest egg. Saturday I played the best golf of my life. She made chicken cayenne tonight, and we’re going hiking in the Ozarks for a long weekend Friday.
At 40 I started living for me.
Sounds pretty f*cking good.
1976. I finished high school and was in boot camp about a week later. Went direct from boot camp to my first platoon and OJT into my MOS. I was on my own and figuring out stuff about life that hadn’t occurred to me before.
As Fourscore says, joining the military is not really that significant but for me the path it put me on was very significant.
Even though I had been interested in Japan for as long as I know back in that timeframe nobody just went to Japan to live. Had I not been in the Marines I probably wouldn’t have gone. Which means I probably wouldn’t have gotten the chance to learn Japanese and a lot of the significant things in my life sprang from learning Japanese.
Being in the military also gave me the means to pay for my education so that really was huge in my life. Also, had I not been in the military before there would have been no way to go back in and end up retiring from the service.
There have been a number of years during which very significant things happened – just last year something huge turned up which wasn’t even related to the ‘Rona – but just about all of them go back to something that would never have happened had I not enlisted back then.
1993 was a crazy rollercoaster clusterfuck of a year. I was 22-23. I actually wrote an article about that year a few months ago which I was going to submit to this site but then never did.
1995 may have had more impact, though, since that was the year I met my wife and made another friend who helped me get my foot in the door at an ISP and started my IT career a while later.
2001 had more impact on my future, but 1994 is my favorite year of my younger days. Graduated high school, the Rangers won the Cup, Knicks almost won a title of their own. So much awesome music. Went out to California for my freshman year of college, which was one of the happiest of my life.
2010 was mine. Out of the military, finally landed a job and as they say, do something you love and never work a day in your life.
2001 – I joined the Marines more or less on a whim. This led me to be stationed in Pensacola for training, which I liked enough that I requested to stay in Pcola for radar school after basic avionics ended. Because of that, I met my future wife, when my radar school classmate’s wife decided one of her co-workers and I would make a good match. In an interesting twist, my classmate was soon to be kicked out for drugs, which led to his wife turning to stripping to make ends meet, so today my wife can delight in telling people that we were set up by a stripper and a cokehead.
?
Twenty-seven years old. I got married in August, and the Old Man died Christmas morning that same year. In four and a half months I went from being a nominally single guy to one who was responsible for a young wife, a wheelchair-bound mother, and my almost-octogenarian grandmother. The womenfolk had zero financial acumen or discipline, and con men were soon circling around mom and Grandma like sharks. It was a bit strange at first, going from being the one whose life was run by those two (then three) to being the Man in Charge, and I had to go from newly-minted “grownup” to no-shit grownup real quick… but it worked.
Significant in a good way? No. I don’t really remember having a year I would consider very good.
Significant in a bad way? Yes. 2017 was a year that wrecked me and I am not yet recovered and probably never will be.
Probably many people had it/have it a lot worse I suppose but that does not really help my brain get back on track.
That’s bleak dude, sorry. At least a bear didn’t try to eat you, right?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/may/15/australias-mouse-plague-six-months-ago-it-was-war-now-whole-towns-have-accepted-their-presence
Eeeeeewwwww.
*gags*
I can smell it from here.
Mornin’, Sean.
Morning.
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/05/alaska-man-survives-short-but-lethal-encounter-with-brown-bear-the-second-bite-is-the-one-that-broke-the-bones.html
Ooof. That’s rough.
Can we please get this week over with? My back is screaming at me to stop, and the only way to relieve the pain is, walking, go figure…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lF_C7BvAf_A
?
?
^^^
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XkcGuZHPbKk
Let’s have some more Jack.
?
Maybe I’m letting it affect me too much, but how is 2020 not the watershed year of every sane person’s life? So much has changed in my life, and I just continue on like it’ll all be okay. If I didn’t have two kids to launch, I don’t know where I’d be right now. I wouldn’t be here, I don’t think.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if 2020 doesn’t turn out to have been a watershed year for the U.S. (maybe even a lot of the world?) but I guess I was lucky that my life didn’t change that much. I’m still working at the same job, even if there are a lot fewer people in the building, and I’m still in the same relationship, marking a significant milestone. I have worries about the future, but I try to keep them in the back of my mind and enjoy what IS. I guess I don’t guess – I KNOW I’ve been lucky.
I have worries about the future, but I try to keep them in the back of my mind and enjoy what IS.
This. Well said. Morning, Gilbred.
In a sense, I’ve been lucky too. It’s just that last year was going to be so awesome. Travel plans, decent money coming in, work going well, and then it all fell apart. It’s like I got nice pair of glasses like in They Live.
Thanks, and good morning, TARDy! I’m sorry things turned out so badly for you last year. 🙁 I hope they get better as soon as possible.
Huh.
For the past eight days my weight has deviated by less than a pound. The first three digits have remained the same while the decimal place has varied. That’s effectively no change whatsoever.
I’ve been having much the same results. Frustrating, and I’m not sure whether further diet changes or additional exercise would make more difference. I suppose I should try both.
“35 Republicans buck Trump, back study of Jan. 6 Capitol riot” alternate title “The Republicans are Morons and Cucks”
https://apnews.com/article/politics-michael-pence-donald-trump-capitol-siege-government-and-politics-5200132c46aab8bf6f8f91923589d905
Approving hearings to flat out railroad their voters which is absolutely what the findings will be used for. Goddamn are they pathetic.
“What difference, at this point…”
Oh, screw it.
The Republican mavericks
Annnndd… I’m out. These jornos are mendacious wordsmiths, ain’t they? If I ever get trapped in a confined space (e.g. airplane) with one, I’ll happily tell it what a POS it is.
One person’s maverick is another person’s sellout but only suckers are still falling for that slanted wordplay anyway.
Apparently maverick has some new meaning about literally sucking donkey dick? That explains Mccain.
Lobot and I are solving the worlds problems on Zoom.
Is this still the “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” Zoom SP set up? Dang, y’all are good at turning these here Zoom shindigs into marathons!
Join us. We’re both making fresh cocktails.
Many thanks for the invite, but I’ll have to pass. It’s about time for me to go get ready for work. (Plus TT is probably getting up soon for a doctor’s appointment, and as my in-house tech support, he’s suspicious about Zoom’s security.)
False advertising!
Yes ma’am
Don’t you ever sleep? What do you get, like 4 hours a night?
It feels like Huntington beach right now, 66 and overcast, you can smell the lake in the breeze, quite nice,
Hope that’s a pleasant aroma. Around here (moreso at our old place a few miles away) the only thing you can smell on an overcast morning is the nearby Cargill plant.
Good morning, Yu! 63 and sunny down here.
Howdy GT, it smells oceany, fecund,
I love the weather right now, shorts after work, lots of daylight to play in,
59 and mostly cloudy. That part’s fine.
High of 85… ugh 🙁
Gonna be a bit of a scorcher down here for the next several days, and so far I haven’t been able to schedule an appointment to get my car’s A/C “refreshed” until a week from today. 🙁
You want the hillbilly to do it ? I need to blast that turd of an truck too, soon.
whaddup’ pimp-juice ?
Good morning, homey! I’ll let you know about that – after I made the appointment online, I called the dealership’s service department, and the guy I spoke to said he’d see if they could get me in sooner, since as far as I can tell, it’s a simple, routine procedure.
fuck the dealer- my house has more beer cans, dip spit, hepatitis, and doge
Are you going for the service or “ambiance” ?
/doge pic sexted
My car’s AC has been one of the few areas of respite of late.
The downside is first getting in the car after it’s been a solar oven. In the time before it cools down, letting the wheel slide within my grip (as I habitually do when coming out of a gentle turn since it naturally wants to straighten out) the heat feels like a knife being drawn across my palms. I could wait for the thing to cool down, but with the sun and the price of gas, its simpler to roll down the windows and get moving the flush the furnace air out. Nothing will cool down the steering wheel within the first half hour.
I need to start remembering to put the sun shade up under the windshield when I get to work – that, and maybe stop parking with the car facing south. As it is, I open the sunroof (I love my sunroof!) and at least the driver’s side window when I leave work until I’m pulling onto the interstate.
Why isnt Donato’s open atthidhuur
*at this hour
The phone guy got smothered by his wife’s ass.
We got their new Green Goddess salads for dinner last night – made of nom! (And a lot fewer carbs than my previous go-to salad, the Chicken Harvest. Must be the apples and cranberries in the latter that drive up the carb count.)
My high water mark was when I was 15 in 1980. Pretty sure that most of the good that happened back then was because I wasn’t my Brother. Then I got lazy. Meeting Judi back in 1995 has kept me vertical (mostly) since then but to be honest, I’ve been phoning it in for decades. On a happier note, first three day weekend in years coming up! Poor old liver…
Good morning, Fes! Enjoy that three-day respite, but not TOO much! 😉
Mornin’ to you too, Red! Our time here is short and fraught with troubles. I’ve settled into what I am. Wish that I’d golf a lot more, though. Maybe take up drawing again…
Mornin’ Fes, I haven’t golfed since 2001. I would like to take it up again. We bought into a timeshare deal in SC that had two golf courses attached. I took lessons there, bought some customs clubs, played a round on 9/10/2001. On 9/11, my mom died (FLA)…. Next time we finally made it back to SC, they had sold the links to a developer who put in some crappy houses. We didn’t even know it had happened. Wrote the timeshare off, and walked away.
Ugh.
Darn salespeople, cancelling a recurring meeting just because we bought their product.
Most of the time there were no updates on those meetings, so we were done quick. Kept the whole block of time free.
Now someone’s going to schedule a meeting in it.
Quick! Call the salesfolks and ask, “What else ya got?” even if you have no intention of buying anything.
Or would there then be too much to talk about in the meeting with them?
That would result in too much to talk about.
My one teen came with two barrels on how shitty Chris Columbus was. I don’t know if he thought I was going to defend the guy or what.
“He is the worst human in history!” Ugh, keep reading, you will find out there were far worse people.
“It shouldn’t be a holiday” I agree, but probably not on the same grounds.
The director? 😉
Look, the guy made a math mistake that led to finding out about a whole set of continents.
Quite frankly, I’m fine with celebrating his role in helping set up the circumstances that allowed my country to come into being. The bigger problem is the effort of dipshits and nihilists to destroy that country.
Jesus you’re all so OLD! ; )
I’d say 2003 for me. 18 years old in Seattle Washington about to finish my CIS degree. Markets crashed and I told myself that i needed to change careers because there’s no way the world needed more programmers.
I applied at the Railroad… Talk about a left or right event.
I can’t imagine how different my life would’ve been had I pursued programming and stayed in Seattle.
Late to thread: 2015 maybe? Wife was pregnant (Daughter was conceived in 2014 and born in 2016, but 2015 was still a big deal), closed the brewery, went back to work for the MAN* for the first time in 15 years (and for the most money I had ever made).
*or maybe THE MAN, as it was Warren Buffett#. I avoided commenting on anything related to him from 2015-19, out of a general “don’t say bad things about your employer” mentality, but I am free from that now.
#Very indirectly, Fruit of the Loom is wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway. I expect that to change any year now, and for Fruit to either be sold or spun off as an independent company…the first more likely. Or first the first, then the latter. I could see someone buying them, merge the most profitable divisions or most aligned divisions into the new company, and then spin back off Fruit with just the less synergistic divisions.
That’s….a long gestation period.
Your poor wife! (She IS human, isn’t she?)
I’m not sure how that works.
Well, you see, robc was away for much of 2015…
Well hello fellow Berkshire B worker. I’m pretty sure the plan right now is there won’t be any big shifts until Munger or Buffett pass. Then the other will retire. I’m guessing Matt Rose will be the new Captain in charge. THEN, we’ll start seeing some changes.
Whenever I go through the driver thru at DQ I always ask for the employee discount. I usually get it.