Ooh, I want those Haunted Canada stamps. Unfortunately, while I live in Canada, all my stamp purchases are for postage to the US.

They're only good for first-class (in Canada, lettermail) domestic postage, so that's one reason why people don't always buy them. But in general, yeah, especially now that they seem to be coming out with cool ones. When the USPS first introduced the forever stamps, all the pretty stamps were still for the current…

We do have them in Canada—they're called Permanent (P) stamps here.

'What is food to me? What do I consider food?'

Because those consequences aren't just going to affect them. This picture happened during a "team-building" exercise for the cheerleading squad. I have no idea what was going through the cheerleading coach's (or coaches') mind at that point, but back when I used to sponsor extracurricular activities (drama, not…

I don't even hate people for doing the "fries trick" at a time of day when the place is dead and those fries may have been sitting for a good long while. (Rush? No. Let's not make more work for the people already running their asses off. Besides, as I said, during a rush there's a pretty good chance those fries were…

Yeah, I have. I've been a high school teacher. And you can totally tell a student group — because this isn't just some kids being stupid, this was being done for a spirit/dress-up day — that their "theme" is absolutely unacceptable and they need to come up with something else. You may not be able to get them to…

Nope. They're insanely expensive here, which is made even less tolerable by the memories of childhood, when our neighbors (who owned an orchard) would routinely give my parents big sacks of pecans. (We had so many pecans in the freezer that I think, even though that neighbor died when I was in high school, I took some…

I love almonds, but they are NOT an acceptable substitute for candy. I try not to eat that much candy, but if I really, really want candy, almonds aren't going to cut it, unless they're in almond brittle or something.

Oh, hell, I was unaware. (I no longer live in the US, and I never watched any sports but Cubs games when I did—because I moved to a town with actual shit to do—so these things escape me.)

I think there was probably some confusion on this end between "WA" as in "Western Australia" and "WA" as in "Washington state, in the US."

Hm, depends on what channel it is. I don't know anything about NYC, but lots of school districts have their own low-budget cable channels, and sports stuff—especially if it's a championship game, or whatever—gets shown on those sometimes. So do third-grade Christmas pageants. So that wouldn't surprise me, or even…

It's not even always denial. Sometimes when you're in the middle of it, because no one thing is a red flag, you miss the fact that all these little things add up to being a big red flag once they become a pattern of behavior instead of an isolated fuckup.

Yup! The next time I look around and think, "Damn, we have too many pets," (Note: we don't have more pets than we can afford or can take good care of, but we do have quite a few smaller pets, because MrsPye loves animals and handles most of their care), I am going to remember that I'd rather be married to someone who…

I wish my paternal grandmother hadn't died when I was a small child, because apparently she kept a stash of books hidden in her knitting basket. All erotica, written by "anonymous." Between that, and the fact that she and my dad apparently used to have long conversations about the TV shows they used to watch, I think…

I'm going to be honest: I do mock bad fanfic. I have done so for 30 years now. I do it privately, either to myself or with one or two like-minded friends, not publicly, and it generally has to be spectacularly bad. (I'd mock bad professional fiction with those friends, but that depends on all of us having a copy of a…

I've been reading fanfic since the early 80s, and it wasn't primarily teenagers writing erotic fanfic then (or at least, not getting it printed in the fanzines I read). And...the sex has always been hit or miss. And when it misses, it often really, really misses.

Well, you're talking about towns where there's fuck-all else to do but go to the football game on Friday night. (Again, I grew up in one of these towns. We went to the football games. And the basketball games. My parents and I didn't take high school sports that seriously, but it was something to DO. )

Not all Americans, and not everywhere, but in a small town in Georgia, oh yes, they do. (Source: I grew up in a small town in Georgia.)

They get that at MrsPye's work—she's at a Tims, so while tips are a decent supplement to her income, they're not the majority of it. It makes people happy that she lets them have the larger coins; they usually want them for bus fare, and we're going to roll the change anyway and then (most weeks) get her manager to…