*sniffle* I just want Timeless back.

My brothers and I got a lot of gimmick foods because my dad was a gold star picky eater and he’d eat that stuff so that’s what my mom cooked. She got tired of spending hours in the kitchen just to watch him push some carefully crafted recipe around his plate. So we got TV dinners, Chun King chow mein, turkey…

I got a friend request on Facebook from a friend of my mother’s who was a total dick. Couldn’t stand him then, not interested in talking with him now.

That describes my parents. They both wanted to be RIGHT and the other person WRONG and they both carried grudges pretty much forever.

Or you could take the kid to the library and check out the real book for free.

There is a time limit on the retroactive payment. If I remember right it’s five months. I’d suggest that you call the local SS office and talk to someone there.

I remember those. They didn’t have much flavor. Some of them had powder inside so you could exhale through the “cigarette” and appear to be smoking.

The problem is that you are eating the modern versions of these candies. Chances are good they all have high fructose corn syrup in them now and the flavors are muted. Old people got to eat the real thing. Sometimes a memory of the real thing gets you past the sad sorry imitations of today.

When I was a kid, I took the bus home from choir practice once a week. The bus stop was in front of a strip of shops that included a bakery. Which in those dearly departed days sold the most amazing big chocolate frosted brownies for a nickel. I still have such fond memories of that although I’m inevitably too lazy to…

America’s Test Kitchen did a show about making brownies from scratch that are as good as the ones from a mix. I think Christopher Kimball has a vastly inflated view of himself. :)

My boss had no friends and no social life and still lived with her parents in her mid-50s. Her job was her life, and the office had to be run Just So. Anyone who could do things better than she could was a major threat.

My mom worked a whole series of dead-end, Z-grade jobs after my parents got divorced (she wanted to “be free for auditions” rather than work full time) and what she would have gotten on her own earnings was correspondingly low. So she opted for half my dad’s SS at 62 (they were married for 27 years and divorced). I…

My parents didn’t have those skills. 

I have tried repeatedly to talk my relatives out of putting in for SS at 62. Unfortunately they think of it as easy money they don’t have to work for, and the notion that they’re cheating themselves out of future earnings just doesn’t connect. Delayed gratification is not in their mindset. One of them, if they’d…

Asimov admitted in later years that he didn’t put female characters in his stories because before he met his wife he didn’t really know any women (and going by the way he describes his first marriage, he didn’t really make any effort to get to know his first wife, either). Bayta Darell was based on Gertrude Asimov.

I gather some of Faulkner’s other books are readable. I never even tried to read any, just because As I Lay Dying was so wretched.

50 years out of high school (this year) and I still remember how much I loathed being forced to read Typee (Melville) and As I Lay Dying (Faulkner). Thank goodness they’re not on the reading list any more. Scarlet Letter was good, but having to write Chillingworth and Dimmesdale over and over and over again on the…

I’ve lived with cats nearly all my life. It’s been my experience that there are “people cats” (friendly to everyone) and “cat cats” (disappear when new humans are around). We always had people cats before. Now we have cat cats. Getting them to interact with anyone they don’t already know means first enticing them out…

Sweetie, it’s a DOG. Believe it or not, you can go places without your dog. Your dog will be just fine at home. Get used to it.

We bought our first calculator in 1973. It was made by Commodore, if I remember right, and it cost about $30. Very primitive. It dealt with whole numbers only (no decimals). There was a switch you could flip to put one little LED dot on the screen, for when you were dealing with money.