https://shop.mochithings.com/products/128059 I like Mochithings laptop bags - they seem to have a little more space for a notebook, charger, and pencils than other bags. But they seem a little expensive to me. I have this case from amazon and I like it. The handle is nice for carrying, and it is a cozy safe fit for my laptop. It can hold my charger and a small notebook and pencil. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078S1B93Q/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ETA - whoops! Didn't see your bag posted above - it is super cute and I love the shoulder strap!!

I agree with this. We live in one of the highest crime/capita cities in the country and we heard terrible things about it before we moved here. Others who had been stationed here told us that the that the whole city is unsafe, but we feel safe in our neighborhood. There are places I have felt unsafe, and there are areas I avoid, especially at night, but I think we are safer here than where we lived in (a walled community with a manned gate) in N. Las Vegas. So go see the areas for yourself before you decide it's an automatic no.

I have ordered bulk flowers and greenery from sams club online for weddings, but I'm not sure if they will need more time than a week to fulfill the order. Sams club and Costco have great flowers in their fresh flower section. Also, if you have a Safeway or Albertsons with a floral department, you can talk to the florist and ask her to order what you need or set aside things you are looking for - they get fresh flowers twice a week usually and are super helpful. The dollar store often has nice clear glass vases if you need any. It sounds like you have a good plan. I'm sure everything will be lovely!!

We have lived in several older military homes that were built before or just after WW2, that have a washer/dryer hook up near or in the kitchen - often kind squeezed into the kitchen as an afterthought/add on, but not in a separate room. I imagine when the homes were built, indoor laundry was not common, and then it was easier to add onto or make room in the kitchen then squeeze it into the only/tiny bathroom. My current house that was built in the 1920s/30s has the "laundry room" in a hallway directly off of the kitchen. I can toss a dirty hand towel from the kitchen sink directly into the washer 🙂 It's a tight fit, but it works okay. I don't hate the laundry in the kitchen. It is convenient - it's easy to remember to move along the laundry when you are tidying up after lunch. eta - and because it is right in the open I don't let things pile up...

I've been listening to a podcast called "Waking Up to Narcissism". It is really good and has helped me get a better understanding of a loved one in my life. Tony Overbay (the podcaster and therapist) describes narcissism as a spectrum of emotional immaturity. We all have some emotional immaturity, but someone with narcissism is using narcissism as a way to control others and avoid any personal responsibility. I think if someone is a little lower on the narcissism spectrum, they could gain a better awareness and learn to overcome their tendencies. I'm not convinced that narcissism is a life sentence, but I also think it can be hard/impossible to overcome if narcissism is a person's go-to coping mechanism. The podcast emphasizes that a person in a relationship with a narcissist needs to educate themselves and become stronger within themselves.

My grandma used to call them "toughies". I have no idea why, but that is what we call fried dough here!! She would set aside bread dough when she was making bread or rolls and fry up small pieces in oil and either top them with powdered sugar or cinnamon sugar. I am lazier, so I have made "toughies" or small fried dough pieces using refrigerator rolls. We liked to cut them into 1/4ths, flatten them a little, fry them in hot oil (they puff up), and toss in powdered sugar or cinnamon sugar. Yum!! We live in Louisiana and Beignets are a little different than fried bread dough - very delicious but maybe more flaky and tender than bread dough.

We liked to do movie theater style candies and some cash or a gift card to a favorite drink or fast food type place.

We moved into a really cool historic home about 6 months ago. I noticed kind of an "old lady" smell and tracked it down to a closet. I read (on Instagram so it must be true, haha!) that pinesol could help reduce odors, so I went and found some at the store and mopped every surface in the closet with it, including the walls, ceiling, underside of the shelves, and inside of the closet doors. I think it really helped. I set an open bowl of baking soda on a shelf and have replaced it about once a month, and haven't noticed the smell... There are other odd smells in our house that I'm not sure about - when it gets warm, the sunroom has a strong animal smell!!

https://www.bphope.com/caregivers/meeting-parental-needs-adult-bipolar-children/ https://www.bphope.com/caregivers/the-hijacked-house-tips-for-parents-of-adult-children-with-bipolar-disorder-living-at-home/ "When you pay, you have a say." And even if you aren't giving him actual money, he is living with you, so you are paying!!! These articles show that you are not alone! The hundreds of comments are both heartbreaking and help me feel seen!! I have no judgment or ideas about what you are going through, but I would work to set up some boundaries and guidelines so that my credit is not in any way affected by his financial situation. What do you need to not feel so helpless? More knowledge about what is going on? access to his financial situation? Complete distance from it?

I'm so sorry! This is such a hard thing. Have you read any of Julie Fast's books? She is a coach and expert in bipolar disorder and she lives with bipolar with schizoaffective disorder. She writes about managing symptoms through life choices. Her books are written for the person with bipolar and also for their loved ones. I have found them to be hugely helpful. Especially, Take Charge of Bipolar Disorder and Loving Someone with Bipolar (written for a spouse but helpful as a parent, too.) She does not recommend not using meds, she recommends learning to manage your life so that meds are not your only option. I know not everyone in various Reddit groups like her, but her books and articles gave me a sense of hope and empowerment that there could be some things we could do outside of medication to recognize and manage (and hopefully learn to avoid or minimize) mood symptoms. She has a facebook group called "The Stable Table" that is written for parents of bipolar. She links to various articles she has written and offers different strategies. She is also very responsive on her Instagram page (Julie Fast). She posts live videos talking about her struggles or common issues, and responds to questions, etc.

More than a Body is a good book about how focusing on appearance (even body positivity) creates insecurities and self- judgement. It helped me find better ways to talk about bodies and clothing and think about my own body insecurities based on “modesty”. link to a website with more info about the book: https://www.morethanabody.org (Sorry if this was already posted I haven’t read the whole thread)

My daughter (adult) had Covid last week. Sunday she had a little bit of a sore throat. Monday she felt achy and feverish. She had been traveling so had to take a Covid test before returning to work, tested positive. Slept most of the day. Tuesday, achy and fever, slept most of the day, low energy. Wednesday, feeling a little better - lazy but did not need to nap. Thursday mostly better. Friday she felt fine. She never had a cough, but her sense of small is not normal. She is vaccinated and boosted and doesn’t think she had Covid before. She’s back to normal this week and doesn’t feel any lingering tiredness. But she says she has over 600 emails to catch up in at work…

I’m intimately aware of rising college costs with having 4 kids go through college over the last 10+ years! I have two current undergrads and one starting a wildly expensive grad school in January! It is impossible for summer jobs or campus jobs to cover any real college costs, and perhaps the realization that minimum wage jobs barely make a dent makes it less motivating to work? On the car- it made the best cost-sense for us to sell our teenage car and send him with no car! Because we didn’t want to have car problems in an older car with dad too far away to fix it!! But yes, used cars are expensive to buy and expensive to fix.

Just a couple observations, which prove nothing but seem interesting to me. My youngest son is going to college at the same university that his oldest sister attended, about 12 years apart. This fall, the food court was offering large bonuses and still not filling open positions. The food court and nearly all student jobs shut down for Covid and even last year they didn’t have a full food court open. It’s possible that students who would have traditionally needed to work on campus found jobs in town. Or families found that they could help cover more expenses for their college students than they would have before? This fall, we also noticed that there seemed to be no junker cars on campus any more. Our daughter drove my grandmas 20+ year old toyota Tercel when she was a student (total junker). Our son doesn’t have a car to drive. Perhaps it is just me assuming everyone is like me, but my attitude about helping college students has changed over the last 12 years. My parents believed in not helping college students in any way. You were lucky to get a phone call after you left for college and if you couldn’t find a way home for Christmas or summer, then that was fine. We had a small college fund for our daughter but she was expected to be mostly independent and she had great scholarship. I never checked her bank account. Our son also has a scholarship but not as great, and he has a job to help cover some expenses, but we are helping him with monthly grocery costs, and I check to make sure he has money for food (he cooks and doesn’t eat a meal plan). My parents live near our college kids and my mother likes to say “you help your kids soooooooo much!” And we do help more than my parents did but it feels like we do less than most others. All that to say, maybe it’s the parents not the kids. If I’m doing more to support my college kid financially, maybe I’m not alone. I think the newer cars in the very full freshman parking lots may show that parents are doing more to support their college kids than a generation or even 10 years ago.

My daughter fainted several times between about 10 and 15 or 16, then she had a few fainting episodes closer together, so we pushed for more help from her doctor. They referred her to a cardiologist and they had her wear a holter monitor for a couple of weeks. The monitor did not pick up any scary heart issues, which was extremely reassuring. She continued to see the cardiologist for about a year and the big recommendation that her doctor made was that she needed to drink a huge amount of water in the morning before going to school or doing anything. Like 2 - 4 water bottles. He told us that often fainting in teens is due to low blood volume (not low blood pressure and not low blood sugar) and that drinking way more water than I would have considered “hydrated” typically fixed the issue. It was not a fancy fix, and it wasn’t an overnight cure, but she worked hard to boost her water intake and only fainted one or two more times as a teen. We would set two water bottles next to her bed to drink before her shower in the morning and then she would drink one more in the car to school. She could drink more water faster if it wasn’t too cold. She continued to drink through the day, but that early morning boost was the key. But please don’t take my word for it, ask for a cardiology referral and get her a very thorough check up!! *she once fainted -all in one week - off of the bleachers in choir, while trying on clothes at the mall, and while picking up tennis balls after practice. She had done a couple of ekgs with different doctors over the years that didn’t show anything. * I can’t remember what we asked for at the cardiologist. I think we just told them about her fainting history.

Everything stays in the inbox until you add it to a project, whether it has a date or not, or whether you have given it a priority or not. I don’t mind having things sit in my inbox if I don’t have a clear project for it. I’m less likely to forget about if it’s just in the inbox. I like to use “today” as my main list - I specifically date things for when I need to do them, and if they come up of today and it’s not an actually priority for today, then I’ll add a new date. I also always check the inbox and I try to slide through each project, to just make sure I didn’t miss anything and see if I need to change any dates… I rarely use priorities, but I’ve been playing around with those this week and I can see that they could be helpful.

I think you are doing great!! I’m impressed that you are finding a system that works for you! I try to carefully add and use dates and work with my “today” list. So as I add items I put in a date when I expect to work on it. A lot of that is for today or tomorrow. if those items come up in my today list and are no longer a priority, I push them to tomorrow or next week. I always like to have a date when I move an item out of the inbox and into a project or they can get lost for me. Thanks for starting this thread and asking questions. You’ve helped me think about todoist in new ways. There are a lot of ways to filter and prioritize that I had never used before! I wish I could do a better job of explaining things!

I started to reply to your last thread about todoist and then saw this thread. Todoist is both simple and hard!! The more you play with it the better it goes. I have used some tips from “the art of manliness” for basic todoist planning. He mentions getting things done, too. Super simple explanation: https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/todoist-productivity-tips/ I generally fill the inbox with things I need to do as they pop in my head or come up in a meeting - if I’m too busy to add dates or sort into projects then I just leave it in the inbox until I have time. I keep my projects really simple. I have a couple large projects a year that get their own project, but most of my work todos just go into the “work” project. I don’t generally rate how important something is, but I should do that… I like to use deadlines so I can look at “today” and see things across all the projects that are due today. It’s easy to move to tomorrow if it didn’t get done today. I’m sure you know this, but as you type the todo item, it will auto set up dates “water plants every Sunday #home” will automatically set up a weekly item in my “home” project I am sure you are figuring all of this out! YouTube is great and I’ve also listened to a couple of different podcasts about productivity and todoist. I’m sorry that I don’t check this site as often as I should (you asked a couple questions in your previous post and I didn’t see them until today, sorry!!)

I took a statistics class last spring and my group project was buying the same groceries one month apart to see if prices were changing. We did not see a difference over that one month period, but I still have the data from a couple of US locations and Germany. But my family moved this summer so I can’t go back to the same grocery store to buy those same items. Do you want our grocery prices from last year without current prices from those areas?

You’ve gotten a lot of great advice above, and I hate to add to any confusion, but I had to chime in with an app that has been a lifesaver for me when I started a busy job with lots of different moving parts and projects to keep track of. Todoist is like a one stop list manager. I can create projects with more lists gathered together, set up reminders and recurring reminders, basically it helps me get things out of my head and reduces my natural “panic” feeling about missing something it complements paper notes - I prefer paper at a meeting but then I can easily make reminders and add to projects in Todoist (on my phone or computer) https://todoist.com/getting-started lots of quick info videos https://blog.doist.com/how-to-use-todoist-effectively/ great overview of how it works and how to use it Along with this, I love sticky notes and use color coded stickies on kanban boards and around my computer screen… I need to see what I need to do…

This may be completely out of left field, but I wanted to point out that It is possible to have both bipolar and a separate psychotic disorder. Paranoia is generally associated with psychosis, and psychosis or paranoia outside of other bipolar symptoms of mania or depression may be more closely related to a schizo-affective disorder. The same types of meds - mood stabilizers and antipsychotics - could help, but thinking of this as separate from bipolar may open up other treatment plans/options. Julie Fast writes and speaks about managing bipolar. She lives with bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. She has a great Instagram and Facebook page (the stable table) with info about bipolar. I haven’t seen her address aging or dementia with bipolar, but here area few of her articles at bphope: This has some info about triggers: https://www.bphope.com/bipolar-stories-video-blog/video-bipolar-disorder-triggers/ Angry bipolar: https://www.bphope.com/caregivers/why-can-people-with-bipolar-disorder-be-so-mean-and-nasty/ Paranoia: https://www.bphope.com/fast-talks-paranoia-and-trust-issues/ Hugs to you! There is nothing simple about this and it is so hard to know what to do, and if what we are doing actually helps.

My young adult son prefers a simple elastic wallet, like a Thread Wallet. He has used this style for a few years and has never lost it or money/cards from it. He keeps it on a hook on a belt loop or in a pocket and often hooks on keys and airpod case.

It’s hard in such an unexpected way. I don’t feel like I have good memories of my parents parenting my siblings and I as young adults. We were sort of dropped off at college and forgotten - my parents were very hands off and almost uninterested in us. I rarely talked to my mom after I left home unless I was visiting her at her home, and I didn’t live near her. Maybe it’s partly our young adults staying kids longer? Maybe it’s having a vested interest in their success as we are helping a little with college? Maybe it’s because I genuinely like my kids and want them to have all the happiness? My mom lives near the college our kids have gone to and when I have visited to spend time with my college kids, she will say, “you do sooooo much for your kids!” I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean it as a compliment.(And I feel guilty that we do so little compared to many parents.)

The person with shingles in my life can trip off an episode by being too hot, stressed, busy, sick, etc. It’s the worst. I’m so sorry! I hope you get well soon!!

In Greys Anatomy, Derek, Addison, and Mark. Derek and Mark were best friends. (Not a movie) In the movie Dan in Real Life there’s a love triangle between two brothers.