I don’t think think I’ll ever “retire” in the traditional sense.

My thought was to always have a severe mental breakdown around 50 and run off to the woods to build a log cabin and grow my own food. My wife knows of this plan but I’m pretty sure she thinks it’s a joke. It’s not.

My toddler and I have been bringing a trash bag to the park and cleaning the place up. It’s always a mess and it makes me sad to see because it’s my sons favorite park.

Commenting to check back later.

I also do not have an answer but want to know.

I have used Flex launcher on a mini PC, it seemed like a good option but I got busy before I could even half set it up.

I got my first dishwasher a few years ago and decided to go sort of all in and get a solid mid range one instead of the cheapest option because I was so excited to not have to do dishes.

The fucking touch buttons are the worst fucking god damn bullshit pieces of shit I’ve ever experienced. From the jump even when they worked ‘properly’ it just felt weird, but a couple years later and half the time the touch doesn’t register. Sometimes there’s the slightest but of crud or water on there and the thing goes crazy and becomes super sensitive all of a sudden, usually I spend 5 minutes loading the dish washer and 10 minutes trying to get it to register which button I pushed.

I want real physical buttons.

Also while I’m on the topic I was highly disappointed to learn that you still have to wash food and stuf off of dishes before you put them in. I don’t know why I thought I could throw a plate with crusted lsagana on it the dishwasher but I did. I thought all dishwashers had some sort of garbage disposal thing built into it. They do not.

I had to go to urgent care the other day and the only way to check in was to scan a QR code and fill out a god awful, half broken form on a random third party website. There were no error messages. The site would timeout if you spent too long on one page, so you’d have to start over. The amount of people who had all sorts of issues is nuts.

This was “an upgrade”

Ahh I think I had it mixed up, in the states at least rice contains a lot of heavy metals so when my son was young we avoided giving him too much rice, which was difficult since basically every kid snack is rice based.

A quick google search says washing it ‘could’ get rid of some of those metals, but not really. Makes me feel a little better about not ever washing my rice but it does cook a lot nicer after washing which makes sense.

I love cooking and I’ve gotten pretty good at making a lot of stuff completely from scratch. But my rice has always been awful, it seems so simple.

We got a $20 rice cooker a few months ago and its been a game changer. Perfect rice every time.

Also I just recently found out your supposed to wash rice before you eat it. Apparently its covered in a lot of heavy metals or something.

I put up a bird feeder and few months ago and now we constantly have at least 20 birds all around our yard. My son likes to throw bird seed all around now so its really cool to see them just walking around and pecking.

I absolutely fell in love with morning doves

Hope your pipe situation got resolved easily.

We had a pipe burst right at the entrance of our crawlspace a few weeks ago and it took a bit to realize. It was a nightmare and now we have to get some foundation work done.

I don’t know, it doesn’t seem far off.

The beach, I couldn’t give less of a bother about going to lay on some burning sand, occasionally dipping my toes in some freezing fish piss water, and getting pelted in the face with sand as a bunch of kids run by kicking up every speck of sand they touch while their parents are getting shitfaced and blasting music no one else wants to hear.

Put me in a secluded lake in the woods with some shade near by and I’m all in though. I guess more specifically my issue is with the people at the beach, but still.

Years ago when I was on Medicaid I spent about 2 weeks in the hospital. They took my appendix out and after looking at it and running some tests found out that I had some rare parasite. I was in excruciating pain at the time, throwing up blood a few times a day and just withering away. There was a pill that I was waiting to get that would’ve killed the parasites which could’ve been given to me after my 4th day there when they confirmed what I had. I spent the rest of the 2 weeks being doped up on morphine and an array of fluids until I couldn’t take it anymore and left the hospital ‘AMA’.

I went to a different hospital and got the medicine I needed almost immediately.

I did throw up again though when I got a ~$60k bill from my 2 week stay at the first hospital. Again they took out my appendix, ran some test, and pumped me with opiods for 2 weeks without treating my actual issue.

As a clean shaved man who doesn’t shave because he can’t grow any sort of facial hair I feel personally attacked.

You could always just boot up a windows VM and set up a shared folder to code on Linux/test on windows if your application has issues running on Linux.

If you don’t mind me asking what do you do? I’m always curious since truthfully the $200k/y fang jobs sometime make me think I’m the odd one out who’s not gonna retire by 40. And as primarily a perl developer on a team of 2 I feel like were in our own world most of the time.

When my title changed from web developer to software developer I got a 60% pay increase, but my job hardly changed in reality. I still only make just enough to do doordash on the side as an extra safety net and not as a necessity to afford food.

But when anyone asks what I do for work and I tell them, they immediately assume we’re absolutely loaded and I’m picking up the check everywhere we go.

Cutting a piece of your baby’s junk off for no other reason then everyone does it is a really weird thing that I’ve never been able to wrap my head around.

I’m not religious but I at least can understand if it’s for religious reason, there’s a point to it, even if I don’t agree with/understand the point. But people seem to just do it for no reason aside from it’s what people do. It’s forced genital mutilation anyway you look at it.

One night a while back I ordered some food from a place about 10 minutes away after a long day with a sick baby and tipped ~30%.

While the drivers at the restaurant I got like 5 messages asking for a better tip, I didn’t answer because why would I. Then my foods on the way and on the app it looked like the guy parked down the street for 10 minutes and continued to spam me with messages asking for a better tip. I didn’t respond because why would I. Then the food gets here, I’m hype. I have very simple delivery notes on every order “Please don’t knock or ring the bell” and always do leave it at the door. I pulled up my security camera to see this guy just going in on my doorbell (which is disconnected anyway), then he starts slamming on the door yelling variation of “come get your food”. After a few minutes of that he just puts the food on the step and starts yelling a bunch of stuff out front of my house at like 9pm, including again asking for more of a tip. In this time he set off my dog who’s now losing his mind and woke my sick baby. So naturally I put my dog on the leash, grabbed my crying baby and in the most redneck b horror movie fashion I could muster flung the door open and just stood there on the step with a crying baby, a 100lb dog going nuts and the defeated eyes of a father who just wanted a cheesesteak after a long day.

I said all that to support, how I didn’t get to eat my food until hours later because now I had to soothe my baby back to sleep. Their response was something along the lines of

‘Hi ***, sorry about that. Here’s a 4.63 credit as an apology. That’s 20% off your order total!’

Moral of the story is now I always keep a few quick meals in the house that cook in the toaster oven. It’s cheaper and the toaster oven never woke my baby.

I got a job that doubled my income and gave me the free time to do things like start a garden, learn macrame and spend a lot more uninterrupted time with my family. It was really life changing.

If I could undo this year I might though. I had 5 family members die including my grandma who raised me, my wife and I had a devastating miscarriage, my causing got hit by a car and may not be able to walk, I was diagnosed with a heart condition and put on lifelong medication and still might need open heart surgery, my deadbeat dad got out of jail and has been harrasing my mom and sister, and the icing on the cake, last week our best cat died.

I don’t even have any regular friends and wouldn’t even begin to know how to make one.

I used to have a lot of friends, then I got clean.

I’m just not good at talking in that perspective. I can talk about specific topics but seem to lack the ability for small talk that making friends seems to require. In the past 6 years I thought I made a friend once, we worked together for a while and would talk a couple times a day, I was a little more advanced in my career so I would often help her with projects/teach her stuff, I even opened up a bit and let out my weird thoughts occasionally. It was good, then one day she just stopped responding.

I’m very content with having my wife and son as my best friends, but an actual friend would be nice.