I don't think Martha's point was whether or not $150,000 felt elite to you, no matter where you live. Her point was that anyone who can afford to replace four large appliances in a year without pain, go on two or three vacations annually, eat out regularly, manage emergencies without flinching, and stop at Starbucks without concern is doing far better than most folks are in the US. It has nothing to do with how privileged or not you may feel. We're also in a high COL area, and I know that $150,000 doesn't go nearly as far here as it would in rural Oklahoma. It doesn't change the fact that anyone who doesn't have to worry about money pretty much every day is doing better than average. When you live in a bubble where pretty much everyone you know (though not everyone you interact with, like your grocery store clerk) makes as much or more money than you, it seems very normal. If you don't personally know people who are struggling to pay the rent or the mortgage, it is easy for it to seem like a small percentage of people. In reality, it's not. The average household income in the US is not very high, even for low COL areas, and that makes life very hard for a lot of people, but that struggle is largely invisible to those who are substantially better off.

Why does it seem not true to you? Isn't the average household income in the US 40-something thousand per year?

Honestly, it can just take a long time for your body image to catch up to reality. I've looked at pictures to compare now to before, and that helps a bit. I've pulled out my tiny jeans and held them up next to my old ones. It doesn't help much, though. 99% of the time when I look in the mirror, I see the old, 40+ pounds heavier me. All I can see are my heavy areas, despite objectively being pretty small. Every so often, I'll catch a glimpse of myself somewhere that's not my usual mirror, and I'll be surprised to see someone quite thin. For some reason, I can't see it in my normal full-length mirror, but I can sometimes see it in other random mirrors. I find it very weird. For me, at least, it's not a lack of toning or muscle thing. I mean, I could use a bit of both, but it's really more just a body dysmorphia problem. I know this because of how shocked I'll be when I occasionally catch a glimpse of myself that shows me looking unexpectedly tiny.

Thinking of joining in late. Do you have a link where I can read about the current area and catch up on past ones?

Yes, in my area too. I even see a few six-year-olds walking home after school on their own, though most are either picked up or walking with someone else. Whenever I read about controversy because of kids walking alone, I am ever so thankful to live in a city (yes, large city in the US!) where kids walking alone is still common.

All I can say is "whew" because I saw this immediately after your "freaking dinner" thread, and I thought things had deteriorated on the dinner front!

I recommend using a pressure cooker if you have one. With a pressure cooker, you can add salt before they cook, and that makes them more flavorful when done. Adding salt before cooking without a pressure cooker will leave you with a pot of tough beans.

Were they on the general ed board?

To be doubly sure that you're not using minutes at the gym, you could put your phone in airplane mode or look in the settings to turn cellular data off while you're there.

That's what I was going to say. I keep my phone in my pocket around the house, so I didn't want the plus. I knew that if I got the plus, I'd be using "where's my iphone" all the time because I'd keep leaving it on random surfaces. The regular 6 sticks out of my pocket, but it doesn't fall out, so it works for me. I will say that DH's 5S now feels like a miniature play phone. I find it hard to use and read on now, so I'm sure if I'd gotten the plus, I'd feel that way about the regular 6. It's amazing how quickly I grew accustomed to even the small increase in size of the 6.

You know, I have a really hard time imagining a group of women actually planning this out and implementing it. I can see a woman on her own bringing up her own struggles with weight and hoping that her heavier friend will have an "aha" moment, but I just can not see a group of women planning it out. Teenage girls, as a way to humiliate someone, yes, but then the conversation would be nasty and full of "ooh, gross!" comments about someone above a size 2. Regardless, I find I'm much happier in general if I take a charitable interpretation of people's acts.

You can cook dry beans with an acid if you do so in the pressure cooker. You can also use salt that way, which helps make the beans more flavorful because the salt will be inside the beans instead of just in the broth around them.

The one thing that helped me more than anything else, by far, was to track every single bite of food that went in my mouth. For challenging meals (for me, this was nightly dinner with DH), I would very carefully plan out what I was going to eat before I took a single bite. I did this before I would even sit down at the table. I found that if I had planned out what I was going to eat, it wasn't nearly as difficult for me to not overload my plate or go back for seconds. I also had a serious talk with DH when I started losing weight (40 pounds last year). Previous attempts to lose weight had stalled, and a huge part of the reason why was I had difficulty continuing when it was so contrary to our family culture. I told him I needed him to support me in eating less, and that sometimes that would mean me eating salad with minimal dressing while he and DS ate a regular meal. Sometimes I wouldn't even sit at the table with them because I wasn't hungry and knew eating while not hungry was not a good idea for me. I told him that I had to track what I ate, measure/weigh everything I ate, and know what was in what I was eating, so if he cooked, I had to help him by weighing oils, etc. It got through to him, and losing weight this past year was much easier in the past because he didn't complain about me not eating with them sometimes, eating different foods, and taking the time to plan my food before I ate. Good luck to you. It's hard when the family culture is against you, but if you learn the skills to lose weight within that culture, you will have an easier time maintaining within it afterward.

We have the Electrolux speed oven, and I'm fairly happy we got it. (I still kind of wish we'd gotten a second oven and a separate microwave, but space didn't really allow that!) It works as both a convection oven and as a microwave, and the manual says we can do "speed cooking" where the baking is augmented by microwaves (haven't tried that function). Ours is designed to have the metal rack sit on the turntable, making it impossible to bake anything that's not round. I get around it by using it without the turntable for baking. I would suggest checking what size pans will fit in the ones you consider.

Yes, this, exactly. Disney policy says it's non-refundable if cancelled with less than 48 hours notice, but you can change the dates. I'm not sure about change costs other than paying any increase in room rates, etc., but you can definitely change it. Ditto for airlines, though they have higher change penalties usually. You can call Disney and ask them about different dates and what, if any, the change costs would be.

I would think that if a complaint were filed afterward and the footage didn't exist, that it would not look favorable for the officer involved. I also suspect that a lot of those situations don't start out with the officer(s) intending to use inappropriate force. It just happens in the heat of the moment. Turning it off mid-altercation would seem pretty suspicious, I'd think. One of the best arguments I've heard for the cameras came from an ex-cop who started a body-cam business. He said, "Everyone behaves better when they're on camera." I realized it's true. If someone is pulled over and knows they're being filmed, they're less likely to get belligerent. Ditto for the officers involved. The very presence of an active camera is probably quite likely to reduce the frequency of aggressive responses--kind of like how I'm more likely to yell at DS when I'm alone than I am to yell at him with my great aunt standing next to me.

I asked my dad, and he said, "Huh. She's a tough one. I don't know." Yeah, not helpful at all. And there definitely needs to be a better word than girlfriend, but "lady friend" actually sounds worse to me! Keep the ideas coming, please!

When I know I should be done, but I don't want to be done, I channel my obsessive giving impulses toward useful, needed things--a pair of socks, a travel mug, lotion, body wash, even new toothpaste. Getting and wrapping things like that helps me get the pleasure of adding to the pile under the tree but the reassurance that it's things that would have been purchased anyway.

Yeah, I think not seeing gifts for him under the tree would really freak DS out in a bad way. All my pranks are confined to putting more things under the tree or disguising things that are there, but I know DS will be ok with those. It really depends on your kids!

Oh, yes, I've done this too. I've also given the most-hoped-for gift to someone else, just to throw DS off the scent when he knows what a box feels like. Then he'll open a box saying that he actually gets to have the gift that has so-and-so's name on it!

My father and his girlfriend will be with us for Christmas. His girlfriend is a very nice woman, from what I can tell, but I don't know her that well. I have no idea what to get her. She's very practical and not at all fashion-oriented. Normally I'd fall back on a scarf, but she's not a scarf wearer. She doesn't seem to like scented things like lotions or candles. She's in her late 50s. I'm at a loss. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Oh, yeah! I've done a treasure hunt for a much-desired present, where the first clue was wrapped up in a great big box. I made the clues a little too challenging, and it ended up taking a few hours to finish--and only got finished then because DS happened across the hidden present while searching for his next clue! I love to wrap something small and insignificant, like a pair of socks, in a large box. I've been known to add a couple of bricks to make it seem more substantial. I find that this strategy is also helpful for keeping the element of surprise for kids who like to shake their presents to try to figure out what they are! DS will end up stewing over a large box with a brick, a few loose dominoes (for noise), and a pair of pajamas and be completely distracted from the smaller and less-impressive-looking box of Legos sitting right near it.

I am so glad to hear this! :hurray:

Definitely cruise Ravelry. Look for a plain ribbed or basic cable hat. Cables look hard, but they're actually really easy. A two-minute youtube video will be all you need to learn how to cable. Cable charts are a little tricky to learn to read, so take a look at the actual pattern to see if there are written instructions. Here's a simple cable hat that is cute but very easy to do if you know how to knit, purl, and knit two together: decreasing cables hat

I think the extent of my Amazon problem will be clear when I admit that I can't figure out how all of you who order fairly infrequently (once a month maybe or less) don't live your lives driving around trying to find things! I live in a major city, and I'm sure I could get anything I order from Amazon locally, but I hate trying to find things like our flavor of toothpaste when our normal store has discontinued it. I use Amazon all the time for things like that, and it saves me a lot of hassle. I know my UPS driver, and he'll call out, "Hi, Sun!" if he sees me elsewhere around town, so I clearly have an Amazon problem! I will preferentially shop from Amazon because it's so darned easy. I hate having to enter all my information at other online retailers.