Kids, yes. Cats, no.

Yeah, Hot Damn in a mug of cocoa was always pretty good. I wouldn’t drink shots of it, though.

When I lived in Minnesota (2000-2013), nobody ever had anything at summer parties besides beer. Plain ordinary American beer.

I sympathize with everything but dumping them somewhere they were going to be a problem for other people. MrsPye and I are about to do a major book purge—mostly of books we read once, and never want to read again (a lot of them came from Goodwill in the first place). Anything in halfway decent shape that our…

I just discovered Ngaio Marsh (well, I’d heard of her before, but hadn’t read anything) a few weeks ago, when I found an omnibus volume in the thrift shop. I’ve added a lot of her books to my Kindle wish list, because I don’t think they’re things I love well enough to give shelf space to, but they’re definitely…

Not all public libraries do, though. In the town where I grew up, our library took donations (I worked there as a teen), but not everything. The librarians took some things for the shelves, some for the annual book sale, and rejected a lot of things that were not fit for either. In the last town I lived in, the…

The Dowager is splendid. Peter and Harriet are my favorite literary couple of all time. I have tattered paperbacks, a couple of hardbacks (I’m trying to eventually get hardbacks of all of them), but I am still pleased to have the ebooks, because if I’m stuck somewhere (missed a bus or whatever), I can pull those up…

If there’s a book I think I’m going to want to reread, I buy it in hard copy, but for a lot of books that I’m only going to want to read once, I get an ebook. (And for some of my favorites, I have both. I like knowing that for under $5, I can carry all the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in my purse at all times.)

I know that nursing homes often welcome book donations, too. The one in the small town I used to live in, and the one my mother worked in, both used to take any romance novels, westerns, and mysteries they could get their hands on, because those were really popular with the residents.

Well, if you do like SOMEONE I KNOW has done and forget to pour out the coffee before you go on a trip, you may come home to find that it (black coffee in the coffee pot, so no sugar/cream) has sprouted a lovely mold colony. But that was a matter of ten days, not a few hours.

I’m sorry, too, because I shouldn’t have dumped that here. I was just hit with a huge wash of feelings, from this comment thread and a couple of things from elsewhere today.

Sorry to have just dumped my trauma on this post. I am working to get better, for whatever value of “better” is possible for me, and my life is not exactly unrelenting misery. (I am also luckier than some of my school friends; two of my high school group have committed suicide.) But damn, I wish I could have one of…

Yeah, that’s me. And it’s partly due to the bullying I got in high school, for that matter. (I have complex PTSD—the kind that is brought on by sustained trauma, not one huge shattering event—and while the bullying and abuse at school is not the only cause, it’s a contributing factor.) So my bullies, including the…

Okay, so if it isn’t smegma, what is it? Because that’s what I think when I hear “cock cheese.”

YES. Because MrsPye gets home from work very late (and even though my own schedule is similarly time-shifted, there is something in me that rebels at cooking a meal, start to finish, starting at 11 PM), I do everything that can be done in advance, hours before I start to cook. And so then, sure, I can get the meal…

If dinner takes under 30 minutes (and I am a good, experienced cook), we’re probably having leftovers, with a handful of cherry tomatoes plunked on the plate for veg. (Other things I can get on the table in < 30 minutes include cold cereal, scrambled eggs, and grilled cheese + Campbell’s tomato soup.)

Jesus. I didn’t know that about strangulation.

I was a teacher for several years. If I needed to leave my classroom for any reason, I had to have another school employee (and not just any—it had to be a teacher or the office staff, and the latter was only for true emergencies, like when the hospital called me because my father had been taken to the ER) take over…

Oh wait! They had TV in the room where I waited to have outpatient surgery (you could be in that room for up to a few hours, depending on how things were going that day—my ob/gyn had a baby to deliver before she performed my surgery, so I was there for a while). But since those were private little rooms (really, just…

Neither have I. My previous gynecologist had a TV in her waiting room, but it played nothing but informational slides about preventative health care.