neomachino

I apparently have an unhealthy relationship with food. After not having much of it for a majority of my life, now that I can afford to eat 3 meals a day I usually make those meals way to big, to the point where I make myself sick a lot.

My wife pointed out that I always need to be watching something while I eat and it's likely me trying to ignore the fact that I'm constantly panic eating as much food as possible.

I also can't stand when people talk to me or look at me while I'm eating, especially in any sort of company. My wife says I'm like a rabid dog when we go out and tries to remind me that no ones going to come up and take my food away from me. But just this evening my toddler snatched the last chocolate cookie litterally out of my mouth, although to be fair I did the same thing to him with a piece of plastic he was trying to eat a few minutes earlier.

Anyway there's my somewhat related take.

My son is more observant than shy but a lot of people chalk it up to shy. Sometimes he'd rather watch kids play than join in, like he's just trying to figure it out.

One thing that I think helped was me not getting involved immediately when things go wrong. It used to be we'd go to the park with a soccer ball and some kid would come up and just take the ball (usually trying to play with him) or get to close to him and he would lose it, run over to me and that would be the end of it. If I was lucky we'd stay at the park and move away from the other kids.

I tried teaching him to use his "big boy bark" and now when a kid does something he really doesn't like he'll handle it himself, usually just by yelling something like "stop", "don't do that", "give me space". Usually the other kid will come up to me and ask what's wrong with him and I'll translate "he told you not to do X, maybe you can try asking him first" and it results in the other kid being a little more concious of what they're doing, and since my son can handle this stuff mostly himself he's much more open to playing with other kids and continue playing if something doesn't go his way. I can see him just letting stuff go without making a fuss now too, whether he doesn't feel like the thing is worth his effort or he doesn't want to upset his "new friend".

While writing this out I realized my 3 year old almost exclusively plays with older kids, maybe it's because they can somewhat grasp the stuff he's trying to get accross? I think whenever we play with kids his age he gets frustrated and they try to touch him a lot which he doesn't tolerate well.

Then again they're kids and I don't have a single clue what I'm doing or they're thinking. I think the big boy bark is a good tool to have though, we got the idea from a bluey episode and I just annoyed the shit out of him for a few days straight and by the end of it he was telling me exactly what he didn't like in a very clear voice

I actually have a few months ago, I made a bunch of crockpot meals, pre-cooked some fresh veggies, made a few deserts. It was great for a few days.

Then I woke up one morning and my freezer door was wide open. My fridge/freezer is like 25 years old and doesn't really shut properly so it will open if you bump it too hard, I assume a cat jumped up there and got it open. Everything was thawed out and warm, I tried to save what I could but our compost got a lot of it.

It hasn't happened since but I'm a little scared to put a bunch of food in there again. I have been pre chopping all of my veggies though and that's been a huge time saver.

I'm just waiting for one of my fancy friends to get rid of their perfectly good fridge and ask if anyone needs it, then I'll probably try again.

I cook 3 times a day. It's fucking exhausting and I've come to hate my kitchen. But it keeps everyone fed and happy for a fair price.

I also work from home though and mostly cook on company time.

This is how I feel. Growing up ramen was too expansive. I have no problem going back there.

I worry about my kids but thankfully my sons favorite meals are my home cooked rice and beans and my homemade veggie stromboli that I can get down to ~$2 for a giant Stromboli if I make my own cheese sauce for it.

Nah nothing like that. I used to be an awful person, I'm still just trying to be better.

Although even at my worst I don't think I would ever assault a child.

Any suggestions on good traps to use, where to put them and how to be allowed to open your door in the summer?

I like the bees, I don't mind a few wasps. My wife's been stung twice so far and my son once and it's barely Spring.

The wasp wars continue.

This makes so much sense.

I made a lemon balm border around one of my garden beds to keep the squirels out (no one told me to, I had no evidence that it would do anything) and the alley cat who lives across the street moved in almost immediately. I had to replant my peppers and tomatoes 3 times because she kept stepping on/eating the seedlings. On the bright side squirels no longer go near that garden bed, wether it's because of my genius lemon balm border or the guard cat we accidentally made a deal with. She seems to use the bathroom right outside of the garden and likes to sleep under the plants so it works out all around.

I had a kid who lives a block over egg my house a few years ago on Halloween. A few weeks later I saw him riding his bike and stopped him and just asked him not to do it again because it was a pain to clean properly. He apologized, thanked me for not yelling at him and then laughed when he saw my house that hasn't been power washed in years with just a few clean spots where his eggs hit.

Now he comes over every week and plays soccer with me and my toddler and helps us with yard work in the summer.

A little bit of human decency and talking to a kid like they're a person can go along way. Kids aren't stupid, they just don't know a lot of things.

I'm not sure how I feel about community service as a punishment. At the surface I think it's a good idea, someone did something stupid so they have to go help out somewhere when they'd probably rather be doing something else, and it's definitely a better alternative to beating your kids. I just feel like ultimately the people there should want to be there helping out, and forcing them to create a kind of divide between them and the people they're supposed to be helping.

As a reckless teenager I had to do some court ordered community service and got to pick where I went, so I picked the shelter my mom and I were staying at thinking it'd be a breeze. On my first day there I heard some of the most vulgure things about the people staying there, I got the rundown on who everyone ordered to be there wished wasn't alive, and how everyone generally didnt want to be there helping these people and would rather be anywhere else. I kept my head down while we were there so no one really recognized me, I honestly don't think they saw us as people worth remembering anyway. I switched to a food bank after a few days because I couldn't take it. It was a little better because most of the people working there were actual volunteers.

Not knocking your parenting method at all, I'm sure (I hope) your oldest isn't spitting in a big pot of soup out of spite for being forced to be there.

Also kudos to you for not trying to scare your kids into submission. Everyone that I've seen try to use fear as a parenting tool has in my eyes failed and it shows through their kids, who you really can't blame. I'm currently trying to get a neighborhood kid to stop coming around because his parents come over and scream too much, so the kid acts out, but I can't figure out how to do that without making him feel like he's just a bad kid who we don't want around, it seems like he'd be a good kid with a little love in his life. He's just a kid and the bad shit he does is entirely the parents fault.

It took 5 minutes to get my father in law to open teamviewer because he kept clicking on the first result which for some reason brought him to the teamviewer website instead of opening the fucking software he had installed already.

And you know what? I can't blame him at all

I wish there was a good FOSS (or just works on Linux) alternative to adobe lightroom so I could stop fixing broken windows shit on my wife's computer.

She's a photographer and does a lot of heavy editing stuff. I know there's some alternatives but she says nothing comes close for what she needs to do, and from the few examples she showed me I agree.

I don't know what the fuck Microsoft is doing but almost everytime there's an update something breaks on her laptop. The only thing she does is use lightroom, occasionally Photoshop and Firefox.

I recently had to use her laptop to make a windows installer USB for someone and Rufus was cool. When installing windows though it just didn't see any of the drives in the laptop? Apparently I had to load storage drivers specific to that laptop, which weren't available anywhere online I could find. I managed to get it working by loading a bunch of unrelated drivers for a different HP model laptop, none of them related to storage. I think it was the Bluetooth driver that got it working, after it installed nothing was working, no mouse, speakers, USB ports. I had to install all of those same drivers again for some reason. Before that just to make sure the drive wasn't bad I installed Debian on there and what do you know, it just did it, because of course it did, and everything worked.

I got way off topic, but again what the fuck is microsoft doing?