Mouthwash has become an essential step for me before leaving the house. I’m going to be wearing a mask, so 30 seconds of swishing helps knock out bad breath and whatnot before I mask up. Makes life much more pleasant.

Depends on which tests get sent out, but they almost surely expire. The BinaxNow tests I have at home (stocked up in October) expire in March 2022. If you get 5-6 months, then tests sent at the end of January should probably be good into June or July.

Did a frog get into the sewer line in our backyard and work its way into the toilet at the front of the house? Yes, yes it did. Did my wife scream at the surprise of finding it in there? Yes, yes she did. Did this incident set back out daughter’s potty training by a couple of weeks? Almost surely. 😁

Counterpoint: this fear is irrational, so simply adding more facts doesn’t rationalize it away. I know, and have long known, the incredible safety record of commercial airlines. I don’t know anyone who’s ever been in a plane crash or been injured by turbulence. I have, on the other hand, been injured in a car…

To be fair, there is only one street in our neighborhood with sidewalks at all and on that street, there is no greenspace between the sidewalk and the curb. 

Seasonal complaint: your Christmas lights are synced to music? The flashing is annoying, but I’ll survive. If that music plays on speaker though, not via an FM transmitter? Fuck right off (I say to both of my neighbors who did/are doing that this year).

Morning workouts are the only way I’ll do it. I take my kid to school, which forces me out of the house, and after I drop her off, I go to the gym. This semester, I have morning classes two days a week for the first time in a loooooong time. There’s not enough time to drop her off, workout, and get home to be…

Just say all this again, all over. True things should be repeated.

#1-10: Use Overcast.

Dryer sheets make cloth diapers less absorbent, so we switched to dryer balls when our daughter was born and have never switched back. Stuff is dry faster, static remains a not-problem, and we don’t have the dryer sheets all over stuff. They’re pretty cheap and they last forever.

Nah, it’s just straight antisemitism.

My now-6th grader is pretty good about recapping stuff. In 1st grade, I would ask her to tell me one good thing about the day, one thing that could have been better, and about one person she talked with or one thing she did for someone else. In 2nd grade, I made it 2 of everything, and so on. It was an easy way to…

Prior to a last minute change, our school board was simply requiring masks for anyone under 12, which meant that my 6th grader with a summer birthday would slowly become one of the last masked kids in school. Teachers were not required to mask, paraprofessional staff were not required, regardless of vaccination…

Not clicking through that many slides, but the Independence Day scenes were amazing. I’ll add that when I saw it in the theatre, as the skyscraper in LA is blown up and the explosion travels down the building and washes out toward the audience, a storm knocked out the power at exactly that moment. The best CGI,…

A long time ago (pre-TSA), I got stopped at customs because the xray of my carryon has one thing that looked suspicious. The agent had one arm in a cast, so I had to unpack my bag myself while not knowing what she was looking for. Turned out to be a 5 inch stone obelisk from the Vatican. My friend, on the other hand,…

I’d disagree that this is the first time that Israel has been portrayed as the aggressor. There are entire books on the subject of Israel having long since fallen behind in the effort to frame conflicts in Gaza.

Here’s the France24 story, including the claim that Hamas was in the building: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210515-israel-strikes-high-rise-building-housing-ap-al-jazeera-offices-in-gaza-city

The building also contained Hamas assets. Whether that justifies the attack or not, I won’t argue, but at least report the entirety of the context.  Even the AP is acknowledging that there were military targets in the building. 

That’s definitely our message to her, that some people are addicted tohe alcohol and cannot safely use it, but that we happen to not be those people. We drink alcohol and enjoy it, but we do so responsibly by limiting how much we use and not driving when we’ve been drinking. She sees excessive consumption when we go…

I started drinking kosher wine during Jewish holidays. It’s typically sweet so it’s not so bad for a 10 year old. I mention 10 because that both my daughter’s current age and the first time I was drunk. Nothing but Manischewitz for a seder means hungover enough to miss a day of fifth grade after.