You are doing great with your daughter! My mother seemed to have the feelings you do—that basic grooming and making oneself look nice by fixing hair and putting on minimal makeup was unsavory or dirty. So, those ideas were the family culture and I just looked unkempt much of the time. Wanting to wear anything fashionable was especially looked down on. You are doing so well to recognize the mistakes in your own upbringing and change things for your daughter! Good job!

I think the term is “basic grooming” and not “self care”. I was taught minimal grooming. For example, my mother had low self-esteem and for some reason that translated into a family culture that “we don’t make ourselves too fancy”, and so I would brush my hair once in the morning and no matter how snarly it got (and it got snarly because it’s fine hair, and fine hair tangles easily), i would just walk around with terrible hair all day. There was just some sort of odd culture in my house that we didn’t mess with our hair. So it looked really bad most of the time. No hair products. No instruction on how to style my hair. It just sat there, lank, on my head. No lessons on how often to bathe, so I’d go a couple of days between bathing when I probably shouldn’t have as a teenager. When I got my period, she put a pad in my underwear and left it on my bed for me to find it to see how all that worked. I just found it there—no discussion about it. No talk of tampons, ever. No one told me about flossing. I remember being a kid and wanting to shave because the shaving cream looked like fun, so I sort of figured that out at around 11 or 12. So, there were minimal basic grooming skills taught. My clothes were ill-fitting and thrift store finds that were not treasures—they were dumpy looking finds because I didn’t know how to create an outfit that looked put together. It was kinda bad—I was not filthy and neglected, but I was scruffy looking and woefully out of fashion. I try not to think about it because while it’s not painful to remember, it’s not a happy memory either. I was certainly ostracized at school because of my poor grooming skills. And I was an only child without the kind of friends who would teach me these things, so I had no recourse. I knew I looked bad and I was ashamed of it, but I didn’t know how to fix it.

I’m late to the thread, but I wanted to say that my first Pfizer shot, back in April, was horrible going in. The woman jabbed my arm really hard and it HURT. The thought, “She just hit my BONE,” flashed into my head, and she exclaimed, “Oh, you don’t have a lot of fat on your arm, do you?” I believe it was a badly given shot and it hurt for a day or two—not the normal “I had an immunization that hurt” pain, but “someone jabbed a needle into my bone” pain. It felt like an injury type of pain and not the pain from the body responding to the contents of the needle. (It probably didn’t go in the bone, but it was badly administered and it hurt.) Most other people said that the actual needle didn’t hurt at all, and some people didn’t feel it. But for me it was immediate sharp and intense pain. For my second shot, I told the person what had happened with the first and asked them to please not jab me too hard, and they didn’t and it felt like a getting a normal shot—a tiny pinch and done.

I’ve bounced around in my life on the introversion/extroversion scale. Most of the time I’m introverted, but every now and then I’ve gone through an extroverted phase. I have a job now and very much enjoy interacting with my coworkers. But I don’t want to interact with my own friends as much now. Dealing with coworkers is easier than dealing with friends. We all keep it professional and light. With friends, there might be tension over varying covid or political views, or we might talk about deep subjects, or share our troubles, so it’s actually harder to socialize with my friends than with coworkers. At work, no one brings up covid or politics or troubles. It’s all taboo. It’s light and easy. All the unrest of the past few years has exhausted me and I don’t want to dance around tricky subjects anymore. So, I talk about work and stay positive with coworkers and then I’m done interacting for the day. P.S. I just wanted to say, @Quill that when you first said you decided not to be scared of making business phone calls anymore, that changed me. Like, snap! Changed in an instant. I thought, “If Quill can just decide not to be bothered by business calls, then so can I.” And ever since then, they’re completely no big deal. I used to dread them and put them off, and now, I just pick up the phone and make the call effortlessly.

Thank you for the update. The state of the people in India brought tears to my eyes-that so many of them have had a personal loss.

Thank you both so much!!!

I got a job and could *finally* afford the $200 couch covers for the Ektorp Ikea couch….and they’ve discontinued that couch, so they aren’t selling the covers anymore, except for the beige one that I already have. I waited 4 years to be able to afford those stupid covers and now they’re gone. I found a website that will custom make the covers for you, but they’re $500. Even with the job, I’m not spending $500 on a couch cover. 😞 ETA: I double checked and the website that custom makes the covers has a few that are around the $250-$300 range, but they are in the colors I don’t like as much…but maybe I’ll go ahead and get one. Something to think about.

A wise and gentle pastor I used to have would tell us that we are human beings, not human doings. It was a little play on words, but he saw too many people scrambling around trying to find purpose in activities, and he wanted us to know that it’s ok to simply be. It’s ok to simply be the creation that God made to fellowship with, without having to prove our worth or do anything to deserve God’s attention and love. There is always balance of course. I mean, he was a pastor, so obviously he was doing something, but I hope you understand what he was trying to convey: sometimes it’s not about the doing and is simply about the being.

Well, after the Spaghettio snafu 🙂, I made the decision to stock up on only some paper products and on the foods that my very picky eater eats. If there’s something that the rest of us can’t get, we’ll just get something else at the store. But for my picky eater, it would be difficult to find alternatives for him. And even then, I only keep about 4 or 5 extras on hand. So, if he likes spaghetti (regular spaghetti and not the O’s!), then I keep 4 extra boxes of it on hand. And he likes bacon at breakfast, so I have 4 packages of bacon in the freezer, etc. So, we have about a months’ supply of extras for him. Hopefully if there’s a shortage, it won’t last more than a month before we can track down the item for him somewhere else. That seemed to be what happened all throughout 2020: something would be out of stock in one store, but if you searched a couple of other stores, you could eventually track it down. Of course, it could be different in the future and items could disappear for months at a time from all of the stores. In that case, my son will have to think hard about what he wants to do. He’s 19, so it’s not like he’s a 5 yo without logic. He’ll either eat more of the foods left to him, or find alternatives. I’m also a picky eater, and there may come a day when something I love is gone forever and I’ll have to make due with something else, which would be difficult for me, but I could do it.

I married at 19. My oldest is 19. It’s weird. I do my best to treat him like an adult, but it’s hard. 🙂 He seems so young. But there I was, at the same age, married and in an apartment and working full time and paying bills. I owned a house by the time I was 22. So, I do my best to treat him like an adult, but at the same time he’s still my little baby, you know? I used to tell people, “Well, I married young, but I married an older man and he was more mature, so it’s not like we were both super young or something...” Snort. My “older man” was 24. At the time, he seemed downright ancient, but now I know that 24 is still very young and hardly an “older, more mature” man.

You stole my idea! This drives me batty and was my first thought when I read the title. It’s impossible to clean out all the needless nooks and crannies that become slimy. 😞 This is due to HIPAA laws. You can 100% get a letter, bensonduck, like mlktwins does with her insurance, to get authorization to handle all the insurance calls even if you’re not the policy holder. Call and ask them for it.

I have all that info for my student. But I’m also crazy-organized with things like that, so sometimes what seems normal to me isn’t normal to anyone else. Is that an overly burdensome list? I don’t see it that way, but my kids aren’t applying to top tier schools like Cornell, so maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about.

I want to join. I’ll send you my address.

Same day, 24 hours at the most. i live in a small town of 7000 people surrounded by other small towns of similar size, but within an hour’s drive of 2 cities (one north, one south.). East coast farmland, so I’m not in the boonies of Kansas, but also not in the suburbs of LA.

Hang on, can someone review again what an ellipsis means to a younger person? My boss is 68 years old and randomly uses them in emails and they don’t seem to have a rhyme or reason for them. She randomly uses them at ends of sentences… I’m 48 years old and I use them to mean something is trailing off, often when I’m writing something humorous like, ‘Well, that was awkward… 😄” So what’s an ellipsis mean to a 28 or 18 year old?

Yup. Got stories like that, too. I’ve given up being mad. I’m in a state of cynical ennui when it comes to the adhd shenanigans that go on in this house. I’m just so done with the drama. “Gasp! I should have left 20 minutes ago! I’m late!” “I have to leave in 30 seconds and can’t find my keys!” “I don’t have the paperwork! I’ll have to sort through 500 emails!” Yawn. Whatever. I’m just over getting riled up anymore. But it’s taken me 29 years to get here.

Congratulations!!!!!

I’m so sorry. I don’t have advice, but I can recognize the feelings you’re expressing.

Why indeed! My ds16 and ds19 had never even eaten Spaghettios. Why did I buy cans of Spaghettios during a pandemic? Something about words that end in -ios I guess: Cheerios and Spaghettios.

Lack of sleep throughout your life also increases the risk Alzheimers, so don’t wait for a dx. Get your sleep now, if you can, or you can have problems later in life. Don’t stress if you’re someone who can’t sleep. I’m talking to the people who choose to stay up late and get up early on purpose because they’re too busy to sleep.

There was a thread about 2 months ago that people were starting to see a few shortages again, so I’ve been stocking up ever since. I had stocked up in Feb 2020, based on threads here, but made a few missteps in what I stocked up on (Spaghettios? Really, Garga? We didn’t need to stock up on Spaghettios!) This time around I’m better at what I stock up on. TP is high on the list and I have a bunch of packs in the basement.

@Alte Veste Academy Thanks for posting. I won’t quote, but your story is similar to mine. I don’t regret homeschooling itself. They were precious years that I wouldn’t have traded for the world. I would have been miserable going to a job all day and being separated from my kids. But I 100% regret not having my son tested, so I could have homeschooled him differently. I did him such a disservice. Things were such a struggle and I flailed about not being able to help him, because I never properly found out what his needs were. Why didn’t I just get him checked out? Why did I let it wait until he was 17 and falling into serious depression? I thought he was fine, but just a little quirky. I thought I would recognize all the signs for myself. (like Not A Number.) Urgh. But at the same time, my homeschooling years were hands down the most fulfilling years of my life. Hands down. I managed to nab a job just 4 months ago, doing what I did before I homeschooled, and I’ve been able to pick up where I left off. Working is much, much easier than homeschooling ever was, but nowhere near as precious and worthy. ——- I don’t expect I’ll retire before 70-something. As a Gen Xer, I’ve known for a long time—at least 20 years—that I’ll have to work until I’m physically incapable of work. That’s just the world we live in.

So I had to test this today, because I simply don’t believe that you can buy a weeks’ worth of food in 15 minutes from the moment you get into the store to the moment you get out. I went to Aldi. I had a piled high cart (as usual.) I spent $200. And I was booking it. I was trying to get it all done in 20 minutes. I was not poking around to prove a point. I was on task and focused. I buy the same stuff every time I go, because we eat the same 7 breakfasts/lunches/dinners every week. The same. Every week. There is no looking for something interesting to get on a whim. There is no comparison shopping. There is no looking for sales. There is no reading labels. I have my list laid out to perfectly match the stores. Not only do I have it listed in order by aisle, but it’s also in order in the aisle. So, if the garlic comes before the lettuce, then garlic is first on the list and lettuce is second. I’m crazy-organized. As I walk down the aisle, I’m checking off the list in order and popping everything into the cart with no effort. I never, ever go down that aisle with the home goods. I skip right by it because I don’t want to take the time. Oh, and my Aldi is usually very empty when I go. There are almost no other people to navigate around. There was one person ahead of me in line, so it took 3 minutes to wait for them to be done. I had that huge cart to unload, and unloading it and having it checked out took 5 minutes. (I timed every step of this trip, so I *know* it was a 3 minute wait and a 5 minute checkout for me.) Bagging took me 5 minutes, but it’s usually longer. But this time ds16 was with me and helped me bag, so I was done faster than usual. I didn’t do my normal, time-consuming, special bagging of the cold stuff. I didn’t bag the cold stuff at all. I left it in the cart, and then tossed it all into the cooler at the car. I’m sorry, but it’s 8 minutes just to checkout and 5 minutes of bagging is 13 minutes right there. There’s no way people are buying a week’s worth of groceries at Aldi in 15 or 20 minutes. It’s not physically possible. And remember, I had only 1 person ahead of me. Not 5 or 6. I was there for a total of 32 minutes from the moment I set foot in the door until we stepped back outside. The thread was about your exposure indoors to covid, so the question was how long you’re in the store—not how long it takes to gather the items. You have to include the checkout time as well. I simply don’t believe anyone can do a weeks’ worth of shopping at Aldi in 15 or 20 minutes. I don’t think anyone is lying, but I do think their assessment of time is way off, unless you only buy 10 chuck roasts and 10 heads of lettuce and eat roast and lettuce all week long. If you get any assortment of goods, it takes time to physically walk up and down the aisles and pick it all up. Even if you don’t bag in the store, but do it at your car, there’s still 8 minutes or so for checkout. That leaves only 7-12 minutes to gather. I buy for 4 people, two adults and two teenagers.

That’s just wonderful! Thank you for the update!

🙂 I plan to spend 4 hours out of my house for “grocery shopping”. It’s 50 minutes just in drive time, plus I stop and get a taco for dinner at Taco Bell and read my book in the car for 30-40 minutes (precious alone time.). That leaves 2 hours and 30 minutes for the actual shopping between two stores. Oh, wait! I forgot Petsmart. I can get in and out of Petsmart in 10-15 minutes, but I’m only there for a few cans of catfood when I go. But I do stop and coo at the cats in cages whenever I go there. Petsmart is often included in my 4 hour shopping adventure, but I don’t have to go there every time I shop. I’m writing up my shopping list right now and will go tomorrow night. I hate going. I am not looking forward to it.