I’m one of the parents in this arrangement and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We raised three kids, a son and two daughters. None of us are rich by any means, but we’re all currently self-sufficient. The one’s that live here don’t do it out of need, but because they’d be crazy not to. We own a decent-sized ranch style house, plenty of room for two couples, on 2.6 acres with a largish pool, and it’s conveniently located to everything one wants to be convenient to. At this stage in our lives, if it were just my wife and I here we’d go crazy. This place has been the central family gathering spot for our local extended family for decades now. Pretty much every month at least one big gathering is happening here. Anywho… We’ve paid it off and deeded it to a trust, with the three kids being successor trustees. Once we’re gone, the property transfers automatically. They can live here forever, or they can sell it and split the proceeds three ways, but I seriously doubt they’ll ever do that. Our oldest lives nearby quite affordably with his girlfriend (both child-free by choice), and our middle daughter and her husband own their own place with our two grand-daughters just outside of town. Our youngest daughter and her husband (no kids yet) live here with us. This son-in-law races street-stocks on dirt and was able to build a big 30’ x 60’ shop in the back, so this place is like heaven to him. He’s 28 going on 12 and has a pretty good job, so he gets to buy whatever toys he wants, and with the investment of his shop into the property, he’s actually got some skin in the game. They are both hugely helpful, and it’s a great arrangement for all of us. We’re currently kicking around some ideas for my son and his girlfriend to move back onto the property, but into their own space…

Shut the fuck up, Donny!

One day a couple of years ago, we had some meatloaf and some baked mac&cheese leftovers that my wife had made. The next day I got a loaf of homemade sourdough from the farmers market that pops up every Saturday. I sliced off about a half-inch thick slice of the meatloaf and the baked mac&cheese with that fresh sourdough and grilled a sandwich that I really hope to be able to replicate at least once more before I die…

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

Elvira - The Oakridge Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGKatCAQed0

I know this from experience because when this song was fairly new, we were eating in a Pizza Hut and a kids Little League team came in after their game and proceeded to occupy a good portion of the restaurant. I swear every damn one of those kids had a quarter for the jukebox and every one of them picked that song. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they all just had to frickin’ sing along with it on top of that! I remember a couple of those little turds waving their arms like conductors…

I worked in an office that had a water fountain that everyone stopped using after we got a filtered dispenser installed in the kitchen. Every couple of weeks or so we’d walk in the door first thing in the morning and get a nice little aromatic reminder to run a little bit of water through it…

Just yesterday we were at my wife’s sister’s house. They live in a brand-new house in a brand-new neighborhood. Some dingus was going around to every single house leaving flyers advertising a tree trimming service and reminding everyone that it’s hurricane season. The thing is, their wasn’t a single tree in the entire neighborhood that was bigger than a year-old sapling.

What is it about brewing it cold that makes it better? Why not brew it normally and then cool it off? I love coffee, but have never really been a cold brew aficionado. I recently watched an episode of Americas Test Kitchen that showed the best way to make cold brew coffee, and when they used enough coffee grounds to brew two pots worth just to make two servings that wouldn’t be ready til the next day, I realized I probably would never become one.

whodathunkit…

My wife’s maternal side of her family is all from Mississippi. I was blown away the first time I traveled up there to meet them all. They all seemed like the nicest, warmest people you could meet. Welcomed me into their family with open arms. We had a big meal, and afterwards we were all gathered around just shooting the breeze and the subject of conversation moved to how they all used to torment black people back in the good ol’ days. N-words as far as the ear could hear, and uproarious laughter filled the room. This was about the time I started spending all my time outside smoking. I couldn’t wait to GTFO of there…

My wife has extended family from Mississippi. They are some of the stupidest people I have ever met. They all, and I mean ALL, send their kids to private schools so they won’t have to attend alongside black kids. One of her cousins was just down visiting with us and I walked in while she was ranting about how “I know trump is blahbidyblah, but things were so much better under him… just look at the GAS PRICES screee scrawww hurr durr”. I did the ol’ Grandpa Simpson about face and checked tf out before I said something ugly and upset my wife (not that she actually agrees with her cousin or anything, I just need to be nice…)

Here lately I’ve been watching Camping With Steve. He’s a really likeable Canadian guy who does all sorts of camping videos, and a lot of them are stealth camping, where he camps in some pretty crazy places in all sorts of imaginative and inexpensive ways. I’ve always liked to daydream about camping out in various wooded areas that I would see while driving by them in the car, and this guy actually goes and does it. Along highway on-ramps, in the middle of a round-about, behind billboards, in the wooded lot behind a police station… you name it. I’m too old and comfortable to go do something like that now, so it’s fun living vicariously through him.

Learned that lesson… I work developing e-learning, and all of our stuff was built in Flash. Our development and delivery systems also relied heavily on Flash components cooperating with HTML and Javascript. It was a monumental undertaking when we had to convert everything to HTML5. When our system was first developed and implemented, we couldn’t foresee the death of Flash, and as mobile devices became more ubiquitous, we never imagined anyone would want to take our training on those little bitty phone screens. Boy were we wrong. There was a time when I really wanted to tell Steve Jobs he could take his IOS and cram it up his cram-hole…

As a white guy growing up along the redneck riviera, I can only look back in dismay at the casual racism and homophobia I took part in with my other fellow white boys under the guise of “humor”. Not a single person who knows me would ever accuse me of being a racist or a homophobe, as I reserve all of my hatred for the haters, but it took me growing up quite a bit to realize how terrible a lot of those jokes were.