Well, I was taught that too, but not in the sense of discussing compensation with other people in your industry.

This is why I plan to let dandelions and other weeds have free rein in my yard. It takes one hell of a drought before dandelions stop being vividly green. (Plus, we can eat the greens, or better yet, feed them to our rabbits.) The neighbors might hate us, but AFAICT, nobody has a manicured lawn in that neighborhood…

No, you’re not off at all.

It’s definitely not raining as much. We didn’t have a garden this year because our new landlords have decided we can’t leave anything overnight on the balconies, including flowerpots, but it’s been a lot drier than last year, as well as warmer. (Well. We had one cold snap at the perfect time to give our gerbil…

It’s ridiculous. We’re a week into October and it’s 17 degrees right now. My wife has only complained ONCE about being cold since April, and she’s usually wearing scarves and hats by October 1, and has dug out her lighter winter coat by Thanksgiving. (And yet, she’s the native Montréalaise, and I grew up in the…

Okay, but that’s Chicago. From everything I’ve been reading about this since May, New York City has a lot of salons offering EXTREMELY cheap manicures and other services (like, $10 manicures), and these statistics and this investigation are focused on NYC/the NYC metro area.

From the article above: “In addition to Goins’ civil case, Los Angeles investigators are in the process of reviewing Goins’ criminal case.”

My dad used to date a woman who could eat raw tomatoes, at least in small quantities, but was allergic to the cooked ones (he went to the hospital with her once when something that didn’t say it had tomatoes in it had stealth tomato, so she definitely had an allergy). She usually didn’t eat raw tomato, but she could…

In some parts of Canada, there is indeed a tipped minimum wage. It’s a lot better than $2.13 an hour, though (even as a percentage of the minimum wage, it’s a lot higher). Quebec has a tipped minimum wage that’s currently about 85% of minimum wage; Alberta, BC and Ontario have tipped minimum wage, but only for places…

My SIL is thin and 7 months pregnant. I saw her this morning. She looks like she had a big breakfast. (When she was pregnant with her first kid, she was even thinner, and she never really looked pregnant. She looked like she’d put on a little weight, though not much.)

In the 1990s, I taught parenting classes to incarcerated women, most of whom needed the classes in order to be allowed to have visits from their children (or to be allowed the visits without a DFCS employee in the room at all times).

We had an afternoon reception because it worked better for our guests (we got married on a Sunday, and a few people who traveled needed to catch flights home; we also had my wife’s grandparents, who were in their late 80s at the time, and quite a few little kids). We only worried about a couple of tables in the…

Our wedding reception was in the afternoon, and we had a buffet like that. (No open bar, though. We told people flat-out that there were enough problem drinkers in the families that we were not having a bar, and if they didn’t like that, we’d understand if they chose not to come.)

Exactly. What if he cut himself? I don’t care if you’re HIV-positive or not, I don’t want blood on my sandwich.

Now I want to get a Twitter account just to keep asking Yoko, “Are we there yet?”

I needed to just not have contact with her. I only saw the pictures because they were in the envelope with the very last things I needed her to mail to me (some papers that didn’t get packed when my dad walked into the apartment and started throwing my things into boxes for me). After that point, the few things that…

And the actual killer received only a life sentence.

The one time I tried to leave my abusive ex, I couldn’t find a place to stay that would let me take my cats, and I knew she’d kill them if I left them with her. (When she kicked me out, I took the cats—I’d finally told my father what was going on, so I had a place to go—but couldn’t take the birds she’d bought a few…

We kept the A/C going this year after our normal Sept. 1 cutoff because it was still so hot and humid, and we have elderly gerbils (gerbils are originally desert animals, and humidity, especially when it’s also hot, is really hard on them). Come to think of it, we also turned it on before the Fête Nationale (24 June)…

If they’re going to spend $37K to remodel, I am guessing they already have taken this dog to the vet more than once trying to figure out WTF is going on and how they can make it stop.