Any homemade card is more thoughtful than a purchased one. So I don’t think it matters if you are a good artist or not. It’s a thoughtful message and you created it yourself.

Everything that has to be individually worked like that is a drag. Each one rolled out and cooked by itself. And it’s never one, right? The only time we do that is for a party so it’s at least two dozen.

I love homemade croissants, and make them, mostly because with sourdough starter in there the flavor is incredible but while I am a reasonably neat- handed person, you are understating the difficulty of laminated dough. It wants to tear, the dough and butter have to each be at the perfect magical temperature, can’t overwork it, dough is delicate and butter is tough. It’s fussy as fuck.

My first one didn’t last, but my second try, made with regular all purpose flour from the grocery and tap water, has been going strong for over a decade now. I do ferment other stuff too. Wondering if he could seed it with starter from someone local, I’ve shared mine before and it helped people.

I just made that this week and think I may agree with you, or at least I’d not try on a workday again. I didn’t have the right peppers and used dried ancho, jarred roasted red pepper and a little fresh red pepper and it came out really good, sorta new world /old world delicious fusion but my God, toasting, grinding, processing, tasting, resting the paste. Started in the morning and let it rest while I was at work. Also started sourdough naan in the morning & of course made a vegetable dish to go with the meat - everything was good but I was exhausted by the end of the day!

Well if money is no object then a world tour that lasts the rest of my life, thanks (or if I can use this magic purse on behalf of others instead, stay home and buy up all the world’s debt, sponsor a jubilee year.)

Performing Arts. Dancers can be great without becoming choreographers, singers & other musicians can be great without becoming songwriters. Interpretation of existing works can be very creative, and technical proficiency and stage presence are also impressive skills.

Like a medieval peasant, I’m living now less than a mile from where I was born. The US is too big to feel culturally attached to it, but my city, yeah, I am very “from here”. Like when I was a kid we’d wander around the ghost town of a weekend downtown, and as I grew up the city became populated and revitalized, it grew up with me.

In another country I usually say Florida, and if it’s a Spanish speaking country then people start speaking to me in Spanish.

I have done sous vide steak and sous vide egg cups. Both very good but I can reverse sear steak and get as good a result; the egg cups though were incredible and I don’t know another way to get the low and consistent temperature. It’s like a warm water bath for them.

I have made some fussy dishes, including sourdough puff pastry. I’m pretty motivated to make food homemade.

Baklava is the one I’d like to make but never will, even if I bought the dough - layering phyllo sheets one by one would kill me.

Temp to perm, I started as a temp and was hired on.

When my younger kids were little, one of their older sisters used to play with them as the anti-hero The Nuisance. She would just get in their way, turn them around, open cabinet doors if they closed them, or close them if they opened them, gently grab them and lay them on the floor, move objects to block them, nothing violent or mean really she just kinda followed and jammed them. It was really funny.

Well I’m certainly not having any more of them!

I dunno, it seems way more possible to set up some solar charging arrangement for an electric vehicle than to somehow find and pump gas into a gas powered car!

I always drive manual but my husband likes automatic. My kids learned on his car but my penultimate daughter drives mine to school now. I dunno, shifting seems easy to learn once you know how to drive in general - I learned it because everyone else was drunk one night so I had to drive home, when I was a teenager, and the drunk kid’s car was manual.

ETA: I let the school kids use the car and got myself an e-bike because their commute loop is much longer than mine. I have an enjoyable ride in to work. But tell them to baby the car because it may be my last gas-powered car and I will miss the stick shift. Have not had an automatic transmission car for 30 years now.

That’s a pretty healthy weight for that height. I agree you don’t want to lose though. And need energy for a physical job. Eat eat eat!

Anecdotally I have found the exact opposite to be true for my body. I got a job that required a short walk and stairs to get to and even that made a difference in how much I had to eat. Started jazzercise after my last kid and was confused because I thought I’d lost like 5 lb but I was having to buy new clothes because mine didn’t fit - I had dropped 25lb, and gotten underweight just from doing aerobic dance while my kids were in swim class a few times a week.

When I cannot work out, even if I control my diet I will gain, still inside a healthy weight but definitely gain.

It’s always activity that makes the difference for me.

House. But not in the suburbs. I’ve shared houses with lots of roommates, both rented and owned (well, with a mortgage) houses, in town not on the outskirts.

If the choice is apartment in the city or house in the suburbs, then apartment is the only choice because I don’t want to commute, want a lot of stuff around me not just miles of houses.

Here the increases are capped at 3% per year if you live in the house. I lived in a shitty house we bought for 35k in the 1990s crash, and property taxes when we sold it in the breakup 20 years later were still under 1k a year, though insurance was crazy high. With husband we had to buy a much more expensive house, there are no shitty ones for sale anymore, all are snatched by corps to flip and rent. So now it’s high but in 20 years maybe it will seem low again. Especially if the market crashes and it’s re-assessed more reasonably.

It’s just inflation, I do think someone owning a home costs the city in roads, trash, transit, other services, Is not crazy to tax on property ownership.

This is sort of what I saw in California - where I’m from, Hispanic people were “the white people”, and people descended from Africans were “the black people” and I wasn’t aware of any sort of prejudice against Asians, they got lumped under the big umbrella of “white” . But when I was in California it was more like black and white guys considered themselves Americans, all one thing, and discriminated against Mexicans and Asians.

It’s all made up, to keep people divided. Not to say there are no historical reasons reverberating still - institutional wealth comes from the past and slavery, so descendents of slaves have legitimate grievance- but the categories/rules of in groups and out groups and who is discriminated against are not the same all over the US.