When I landed a $500 fare to Paris, I did some research before I actually jumped the gun. The flight is to Orly rather than CDG, and that turned out to be better for me - Orly is closer and cheaper to get into the city (which is unusual for satellite airports), and EVERYONE I know who’s been there hates on CDG. So…

Yes to the pupillary distance. I got them wrong on my last pair and hoo boy that was an extremely uncomfortable experience. The glasses were fine for long distance - which is what I need them for anyway - but anything closer than ten feet and even arm’s length was headache-inducing.

I’ve taken my Zenni glasses to the local LensCrafters once or twice just to have them rebalanced a bit, *but* I *have* spent several hundred dollars there on two or three other pairs in the past seven years, and I don’t ever ask them to fix anything more than that.

After a lifetime of the stringy red/green crap, I never knew how good mangoes could be until I went to the Dominican Republic, and then eight or ten years later the local market started carrying champagne mangoes. mmmmmmmm.

Quite familiar with the hostel route - some of them are great, some of them ... not so great. Looking into AirBNB for the first time on this upcoming trip. I’ll make it further south eventually... so much to see, never enough money.

Google Flights. And sometimes if you can find a good deal there but not quite on the days you want, go to that airline’s site and play with the dates. I found someone a $900 round trip to Tenerife barely three weeks out that way. She couldn’t go on the cheap dates listed on Google Flights, but that airline had the…

Croatia is right at the top of my bucket list along with northern Italy (Cinque Terre and Bolzano).

The other night, I happened across a ninja airfare sale to Paris and Amsterdam from multiple US cities for $500-$540, via American Airlines and British Airways. Even open jaw - into one and out the other - was still $500. I bought my tickets for June; someone else bought theirs at the same price for September. The…

That’s what I was thinking, but I wasn’t sure, or if they were similar in production but genetically different enough not to trigger allergies.

Spicy mustards often have horseradish in them though, so reeeead that label.

Coincidentally, just in the last week I was going through some genealogy stuff, and the notes on one distant relative who helped found Hartford CT indicated he was a good buddy of Cotton Mather. I had no idea at the time who that was and hadn’t gotten around to looking it up. Now I know! And, uh, am very glad that’s…

All of my grandparents were born in the US (I have one great-grandfather who was an immigrant), and a significant percentage of my maternal grandfather’s family line have been here since the early to mid 1600s. None of my family would ever vote for Drumpf.

I am not much of a makeup person, but I do follow Temptalia (because I hate wasting money on overpriced crap when I do buy makeup), Bobbie Brown lip glosses came highly recommended there, and there is a BB counter in my local Belk where the staff was happy to let me play with testers until I found one I liked.

I flung a guy who had a terrible problem with ingrown hairs and sensitive skin, and since he couldn’t grow a full beard anyway, he was in the process of laser removal. I was totally onboard with the idea because it meant snogging sessions that wouldn’t give me cold sores from the scraping!

And it scraaaaapes the face. ow. Either let it grow long enough to be soft, or laser that shit if you don’t have productive enough follicles.

Me either. *Or* Ryan Gosling. Women have been cooing over him for twenty years and I was always like ... okay? I’ll take Christian Bale with the adorkable little smile instead... (this was long before Batman, and his Terminator temper tantrum.)

I’d agree but for the collateral damage they cause.

Where are you getting ginger beer for four bucks? Inquiring minds that can only find 4 packs of Crabbies for ten bucks want to know.

Scratch my question, since it was probably irrelevant in light of it probably being an outdated code.

In the early to mid 80s, my mother was about to go to work and discovered a Maine Coon mix who was not as lucky as these other kittehs and wedged himself somewhere in a car engine that he got beat to hell - broken teeth, broken legs, broken ribs. Vet wasn’t sure he’d make it. Thankfully, he pulled through - complete…