Went inside Aldi today. Didn’t notice anything missing. Ordered pickup from Walmart. They had everything in my order except for the low-sodium spaghetti sauce and some decorative icing for some cookies I’d like to bake this weekend. I was surprised that Aldi was so plentiful. Even had the chicken thighs I needed. Pennsylvania.

I usually just skim over the setting parts of books. But I’m re-reading the Earth’s Children series, which takes place about 30,000 years ago, and for the first time I’m relishing the rich descriptions in the book—the scenery of middle Europe 30,000 years ago, the descriptions of the animal life and practices, the descriptions of the way the people lived. I’ve never savored descriptions before, but this writer is a master at it and I actually slow down to read the descriptions. The books are by Jean Auel. The sex scenes are overly-descriptive for my taste and i get super bored with them and skip them. And I skipped the first book because I find it too sad. A person can start with the second book and not need to read the first if they don’t want to read the sad first book. (First time I read the series, I accidentally started with book 2, and I was able to follow along just fine.)

If you’re going to talk to him about it, then go ahead and say something along the lines of, “Ok, so you think I’m living in fear and limiting our lives. Vaccines are the way to assuage my fears and help me to expand our lives some more, so we can feel a bit more normalcy. We don’t agree on many things around covid, but we both know that my fears of covid is a problem, and for me, vaccines are the solution.” Men like to feel there are solutions to problems. Because while the whole, “living in fear thing” is such an insult…it’s a bit true. You are afraid of everyone getting covid. But if everyone has the vaccine, that fear will ease. If you use those terms, it might help him understand that if your fear is a problem, then vaccines are the solution. Not 100%, but it’ll get you better than you are now.

Get everyone vaccinated that you can, so that when he goes out and takes everyone places, you know they are as protected as can be. That will at least give you a little peace of mind. If he isn’t putting his foot down and saying a strong ABSOLUTELY NOT to the vaccines for the kids, then go ahead with it. It is the safest decision and it will open up the world a bit more to you all. Some of the tension between you two will ease if you don’t feel as big of a need to stay in the house. Your lives will get a little bit back to normal. Not entirely but a bit. (Well, unless you have little ones at home who can’t be vaxed?)

Oh wow! Crazy! They lowered the age for colonoscopy screenings from 50 to 45. I was 48 when the age was lowered and I asked my doctor to refer me for a screening. I’m 49 now, but I have a feeling I’ll be 50 by the time my number rolls around due to all the covid delays. I’m sorry your dh has to wait some more. So frustrating. And I’m glad the man with the tumor is getting in there. I can’t imagine the stress of watching a tumor grow and the doctor doing nothing about it.

Since the OP has a black thumb and no interest in a plant, I’d do as Faith as said: buy a bouquet of flowers from somewhere cheap. Get two vases: a low one for the table and a tall one for the counter. There are usually a lot of vases to choose from at thrift stores. Split the bouquet into the two vases. Use the powder stuff that they give you in the water to make the flowers last longer. Change the water every few days. They’ll last around 2 weeks.

Does anyone know if there’s any reason he can’t use Sudafed if he has nasal congestion and Mucinex if he has chest congestion? I would think you’d want to clear out the gunk by using those OTC meds.

I turn 50 in December and I want to go to England. But I don’t want to have to plan it, so I’m going to talk to a friend of mine who used some sort of travel agent who planned a trip to England for her family. It’s hard enough planning little overnight trips close to home, much less planning something a continent away. Nope. Not gonna plan this one. I hate the planning part. I’ll go with DH and my two sons, covid permitting.

Oh, and I agree with putting money into a 529 for later.

Kids that little have no clue what’s going on and no memories of presents. Get the diapers. Get a good kid’s book. Take them to the zoo later. Double check with Mom and see if diapers was really what was wanted, just in case Dad was speaking out of turn. I remember the decade of being overwhelmed with toys. It was just too much. And also, like a PP said, if you really want to buy toys (and most Grandmas do), create a little space with kids’ toys in your own house that stay in your house. Special toys that live at Granny’s house.

Get the gravestone he wants. It’s not like anyone will see it, since there’s just the one person who might go visit it. There are people who enjoy walking through graveyards and reading the inscriptions (my parents used to do this a lot.) Someone someday will get a kick out of the weird little saying on her gravestone. Even though it’s grammatically questionable, it’s sweet. When your dad goes, do absolutely whatever it is you want to do without feeling any guilt.

This is where I am. We had relaxed some things, but we’re tightening back up with the recent omicron explosion, but we’re not at the same level as we were prior to being vaccinated/boosted. We are some of the very few who mask in public spaces in this area. I used to feel uncomfortable being the odd one out, but at the end of the day, I had to know within myself that I am doing what I can to help others, even if people passing by me are thinking badly of me. But I’m not at the same level of caution as when we were pre-vaccines, and I’m also ok with that. I am doing what I can and am at peace with our level of caution at this point. It’s not perfect, but I’m at peace with it.

At least 1 hour per class, often more. Six classes is usual. So 6-8 hours/day.

Yeah, I posted and then double checked the numbers in DC and saw they were even worse than I thought. So, I wrote to my friend and we decided to postpone. We’ll just wait it out a few months and re-assess. Stoopid covid.

2-3 hours. That’s about how long it takes to get to DC once you factor in traffic. In fact, I’m taking a friend to DC in a few weeks, and I’ll be doing all the driving (she has medical issues.) That’s about my limit, though. (Actually…now that Omicron is getting just Out Of Control…I need to talk to my friend and maybe postpone that trip to DC…hmmm.)

I have to admit that at age 19, I wouldn’t have had a clue, either. I was invincible and thought everyone else was, too. I might have acted like your son’s gf at that age, I’m ashamed to say. If she’s like me, when she’s older she’ll look back at a few memories like this one and cringe.

The fanciest thing I have is a dress I bought for an event with friends where we dressed up like the cast of Grease. I’m the person whose back is turned to you. But otherwise, I don’t have anything fancy enough for going out, and I’m not so sure about that 50’s style dress. Depends on the event. And I’d wear black stockings with it.

I sit with my son and read every stinkin’ word on every syllabus. He’s one of those 2E types, where he’s smart as all get out, but due to learning disabilities he still needs some scaffolding from me. And frankly, every single syllabus we’ve read has been a mess. I get so sick and tired of reading those things, because they often have conflicting information or leave out vital information. He’s taken 8 classes and so far there’s not been a single one that didn’t have a big, glaring error that made it so my son had to contact the professor for clarification. It’s just so frustrating. If we’d have read that in there, there’s no way we’d have taken action. My GenX self would have been like, “Look—this is the weirdest mistake in any syllabus yet! But…you should go look in that locker!” and my Gen Z son would have been all, “Mom, are you kidding? I’m not going to go snooping around in someone else’s locker. That’s wrong,” and I’d have felt like a big, bumbling oaf and realized he was right—it’s wrong to go snooping in other people’s lockers. I really hate these “gotcha” things meant to make young people look like idiots. As if any of us entered college with the wisdom that we’ve gleaned over 50 years of life. No. We entered college just as confused as the young people are today. Why pick on young people? We were all young and we all had to learn along the way. It’s just so rich that a professor did this, when I know for a fact that they write sloppy, confusing syllabi all the time, yet get snooty and self-righteous about it. It’s getting to the point where my son just flat out doesn’t believe me anymore that reading the syllabus is important, because they’re wrong more often than they’re right and now I look like I’m the clueless one for insisting that we read them all. (rant over.)

In the movie, a sassy 17-year-old Angela Lansbury was also undermining the wife, so that added to why the wife didn’t go. It wasn’t just the husband telling the wife she was going insane…someone else was saying it, too, until the wife believed it. The main character is a young Ingrid Bergman who is wooed by a sophisticated older man. But he’s a con artist. And he knows of an inheritance that Ingrid doesn’t know about. So, he woos and marries her so he can slowly drive her insane and keep her inheritance for himself. Angela Lansbury is the, well…horny teenaged 17 yo maid in the house who is interested in the sophisticated older man of the house and flirts with him and hates his new wife. So, she does whatever she can to undercut the confidence of Ingrid Bergman. The husband will take a picture off the wall and hide it then start asking, “Who took that picture?” Ingrid Bergman is confused, “I don’t know…where is that picture?” They look for it, and it’s found in Ingrid’s room (the era when husbands and wives have separate rooms.) The husband asks, “Darling, why did you hide that picture there?” And Ingrid is all, “I didn’t hide it there!” But it happens over and over, with various things going missing and being found among Ingrid’s things, until she begins to believe that she’s somehow doing these things without knowing it. The part about the gaslight is that he is snooping around in the attic turning on the attic lights when no one knew he was up there snooping—and the technology of the day was that if the lights were turned on in one area of the house, they would dim in the rest of the house. So, Ingrid keeps seeing the lights dim and can’t figure out why and when she tells people something’s wrong with the lights, everyone says, “We don’t see the lights dim. What are you talking about??” And the husband seems so loving and concerned that Ingrid begins to believe she really is going insane and she needs to depend on her husband to take care of her. He’s hoping to drive her nuts enough to send to the asylum and take her inheritance. It’s a really good movie. If you liked movies, I’d say you should watch it. 🙂

Forgot to add—on that same trip when my mom opened the fridge door and was astounded at the amount of food, she kept throwing out the leftovers. In her mind, they were just taking up space and wouldn’t be used anyway. No one could possibly eat all that food! But then, my dh, kids, and I would rifle through the fridge looking for the leftovers to eat for lunch and say, “Hey, where did that ravioli from last night go?” And my mom would say, “Oh, I threw that out. There was too much. We were never going to eat that!” And then we’d all have to scramble to figure out what to eat for lunch. My mom is good natured and loves a good joke, so we got to the point where we could joke with her and say, “Stop throwing out our food!” in a lighthearted way and she stopped. But I do think it kinda made her twitch a little to see her fridge stuffed with all that food clutter. I’m not sure she ever quite understood how hungry we all were for lunch each day.

My parents have been just the two of them for almost 30 years. In those years, their appetites have diminished such that they never eat lunch anymore. My family visited them two years ago (they live 2500 miles away, so visits are rare). So, instead of 2 people in my parent’s house, there were 6. My mom called me over one day, using a disbelieving, “you-gotta-come-see-this” voice. She opened the fridge and said, “Look!!” I looked. It was a fridge. There were things in it. I was like, “What am I looking at?” She was like, “LOOK at all the STUFF!!!!” There wasn’t really very much stuff—just what 6 people would need for a couple of days. But to her, it was an astounding amount of food. In that same trip, we were going to go on a little touristy day trip somewhere. My mom, her sister (also with no appetite) and I were planning the day. I noticed there was no time set aside for lunch. I said, “Maybe we can stop at a sit down restaurant for lunch around noonish?” They both paused and asked with complete sincerity, “But…do we need to do that? It’s not like we’ll be hungry.” Um…yes, we’ll be hungry! People under 70 eat three meals a day. It’s pretty standard and well-known. My parents know this and when I pointed it out they were like, “Yes, I guess you’re right,” but we all sat down at our lunch that day and my mom, dad, aunt, and uncle didn’t order anything because they just honestly weren’t hungry. My husband, kids, and I age a full lunch—burgers, fries, etc. So, I dunno OP. Your family might really believe it’s enough and be flabbergasted to find out it’s not. Chinese takeout for the win.

My ds16 is just fascinated by all the cards. As they come in the mail, he’s like, “What? More cards?” I finally stuck them all on a few doors in our hallway yesterday (I’d had them on a couple of tables, but they kept falling over) and he hung around to watch what I was doing. I realized that I haven’t exchanged cards since before he was born, and this whole tradition of sending and receiving cards is new and foreign to him. To me, it’s something nice that reminds me of years ago when I exchanged cards every year; to him, this is a fresh new thing. I’m not sure I’m explaining it right—it’s just funny to me how fascinated he is by the whole thing. I can tell he’s not sure what to make of it. He seemed to think this was something that The Hive cooked up for this year, and when I explained to him yesterday that this used to happen every year and that people did this all the time, he was just flabbergasted. Charmed and flabbergasted.

I like the above wording, except I’d delete the word “misunderstood”. Sorry I kept it so long. I thought it was a gift for me to keep. At first I thought there might have been a miscommunication, but then I read this Now, there still might be a miscommunication. One thing I’ve learned from The Hive is that some people really do expect you to read their minds, and they live in a world of subtle subtexts that they think everyone else will understand because in their FOO, they all understood. Either way, this needs to stop. If it’s a miscommunication, then they need to know that you do not understand their subtexts so they’ll have to speak frankly to you from here on out. If it’s not a miscommunication, then it’s a bunch of passive-aggressive baloney and it’s time for you to confront it head on and stop it. It’s not about making you feel better and it’s not about whether the other person understands. It’s about being 50 years old and being done with putting up with BS. Either way, the above wording covers both scenarios.

When oldest was 17 and youngest was 15. But only because we moved some rooms around in the house (stopped using a schoolroom.) Otherwise, they’d still be sharing.

I had no idea what it was about going into it. All the spoilers that everyone seems to know about were new to me. I hadn’t read or seen anything about this movie—I didn’t even watch a trailer before watching it. I’ve seen the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies, but not the Andrew Garfield ones. I did see Dr. Strange, but I don’t think you need to. The only reason a person might have needed to see End Games is because it would explain why a certain character was missing. I was able to enjoy the movie without knowing much about it. And I think I’d have enjoyed it even if I hadn’t watched Dr. Strange or End Game. So, if anyone is wondering if they’ll have to watch a bunch of stuff to enjoy the movie-nah. Will you miss some sentimental moments and deeper meanings? Sure. But not enough to ruin the movie.