Destiny Skywalker

Apparently you don't live in Seattle with a lot of nerdy UW alumni.

Wait I thought ladies' junk was pink. She should have that checked.

This is a bit slow for me, even. Normally I am all about character development but for some reason I'm not feeling invested. I like the Mon Mothma storyline, though.

Ah yes, we like to call this "Bring me a rock". Which is usually followed by "No, not that rock, a different rock." Repeat at least 3x, but more likely infinity.

Amazing news! E's OT got a new job already with a place closer to our house AND with a more convenient time slot. I needed some good news. He has had a sub for over a week and she has not been good for him.

Ok, in all seriousness... I probably wouldn't contact Jason. I think it has the very real ability to become an emotional connection and an easy out when/if things get hard with real life. It's an escape, and I'm wondering if that is when the dreams come up. Have things been OK with life? Not just Trevor, but life in general. Honestly I need a vacation from life in general and probably a girls weekend of not being a mom. You aren't alone if you don't want that sometimes. Just make sure your outlets are healthy.

Warm + sticky = moist. Sorry, I'm not helpful.

Well if they can't do anything sounds like you just don't pay her. Problem solved!

Your family reminds me of my mom's family. Stay the eff away. Also, LMAO at Tim. Didn't see that one coming.

Are you kidding me? Break out the popcorn, I love crazy people stories.

I think Washington made a similar regulation, but for 2030. I think it would be fabulous if we could get there, but I'm not sure production or infrastructure will be able to support that target.

Yes

We picked up the truck on Friday. They gave us less than 1/4 of a tank of gas and forgot to put on the temporary plates and had to email them to us Saturday. Eff that place. We filled up and it was over $125 because it's a 30 gallon tank. However, so far we are doing about 25% of the miles as electric, so that's not too shabby considering we drove quite a few highway miles this weekend. The GPS system through Android Auto is not so great. The warnings are way too late and we drove all over West Seattle because my husband kept missing turns. But he's also driving super cautious because it is a BOAT and requires a lot of stopping distance. Looking at the now published towing capacity, the Lightning was never going to work out anyway. Max towing of 10,000 lbs is based on tons of upgrades.

Good luck!

Yeah I need to find the receipt again because I must've been mischarged. I found it online for much cheaper, obviously. I don't think they require the pants, and we have blue pants anyway from school uniforms. We got the hat because E wanted it. Sorry that you're being dismissed because of your gender. Can confirm that definitely happens. I'm admittedly avoiding picking up any positions because I really just want to be there for E the first year. And the jobs they're looking for help with do not seem to be a good fit for a new parent.

Geez Louise that uniform was expensive. And he will wear it for 1 year. I'm not sure how that World Crest was $15. And I don't even think we got everything, but I pissed off the lady at the store by refusing to go one size larger on E's uniform because a Small was already pretty large and he's going to wear it for one year before he moves up to Webelos. So when I asked if I had missed anything, she ignored me. She spent like 30 minutes positively doting over this one family with 3 boys, and absolutely ignored us until she was done with them. Also the lady at the Scout store said Webelo at least twice and I smirked internally. Thanks for now making me pedantic, too.

My husband makes fridge pickles. I'm not a fan, but he and my daughter like them. He likes spicy ones.

I've always wondered how they came up with that name. Q got selected for Student of the Month already. I'm starting to feel better about her school year. Her 504 plan was not communicated well and I think it resulted in some misunderstandings. Q gets really frustrated when she tries to advocate for herself and gets blown off. For instance, the choir teacher put her up front but to the side. She has been raising her hand to tell the director that she can't see the board at the angle but the director keeps telling her "not now" and won't take the time to talk to her about what her concern is. It's really frustrating because it's honestly so simple and yet the director has blown her off for over a week. I am trying to help her self-advocate but I feel like she really is ignored by lots of adults.

In case anyone was wondering, the car buying experience still sucks. We spent 9 to 3 driving around to dealerships trying to test drive a car. At the first one, I had an email saying it was still in stock. Got there and it was gone, sold the night before. So they said they would open up a new one for us to look at. Then they couldn't find the keys. Turns out someone had the keys in their pocket and took them home. So then they had to track down another car. We spent an hour dealing with this nonsense. Then the guy had to go find a business card, and he was out. It was such a disaster, there's no way I would trust that dealership to put in an order for us. Next we tried another dealership about 15 miles away. Same story, car was sold last night. At least the guy figured it out quickly, like within 15 minutes. Then we went to lunch before driving back home to drop off the bicycle in my car and drive 2 cars to the next dealership knowing that we only had about an hour until we had to split up to pick up kids. They found the truck and as we were looking through it, someone else decided to buy it. So then we couldn't test drive it. They did finally manage to find one we could test drive. By that time, the deal fell through on the one we really wanted. Looking back at my last car buying experience in this thread though, it also took them forever to get their act together at the dealership. Car buying is actually worse than buying a home, IMO.

We picked up a 2021 Ford F-150 Hybrid today. (OK, technically it's at the dealership still for a software update.) We drove to 3 places yesterday just trying to test drive one and each time, it had been sold the night before or someone was in the process of buying it. The original plan was test drive one and place an order for a 2022. At the last place, which was actually the closest location to us and where we intended to actually place the order, we got there right as someone was buying it, so we couldn't even test drive it. It was now 1:30pm and we had an hour before we had to leave to get the kids. Seeing how frustrated we were, they managed to find a new one that was promised to one of their employees and let us drive it. Our big concern was that we heard the transition from electric to gas was sometimes hesitant or jerky. Luckily, we did not experience that. But when we got back from the test drive, the buyer walked away because the deal fell apart on the trade in. So we snatched it up and took it home for an overnight so no one else could buy it. The truck had 9k miles on it and was fully loaded with everything we wanted and then some, and because it was slightly used, it was a little under the same price we would've had to pay for a custom order anyway and we got some instant gratification out of it instead of waiting 6 months for it (and I found out today that they aren't even offering the hybrid in the trim package we were looking at, so we basically saved even more). My favorite part? It has massaging seats. The only thing it has that we didn't like? It's black, which is boring. My husband would've picked red and I would've picked blue.

We went to Cub Scouts a 2nd time tonight. To be honest, I thought it was a hot mess but E seems really interested. They were making duct tape wallets, which I guess is a Scout tradition. They had 5 or 6 rolls of tape and about 6 scissors and 5 rulers for 18 Scouts K-5. E and I "helped" a Webelo make one but really I'd rather sit down with E later and actually help him with it because it was so hard to keep him engaged with so much sharing of supplies. There are definitely some high energy boys so at least he doesn't stand out too much. It was also a pack meeting so it was a little painful to sit through so much adult talk. I think den meetings might be better for him. Smaller groups and less adult boring stuff.

The coworker who mansplained for me a few weeks ago called me last night to tell me they discovered a brain bleed and he was being life-flighted to another state. He sounded awful. I am honestly scared he isn't going to make it. He has had several health issues the last 7 years. We have been friends for 16 years. He also has everything saved on his hard drive instead of shared servers that I can access. I asked him last week to make me an Admin for a tool that we share ownership of. (I used to be an Admin but I left the organization for 2 years so they removed me. I have been back for 5 years now and this isn't the first time I've asked.) He is so afraid of being made redundant because he is fully remote in another state that he has hoarded information, and honestly, now it's going to screw us and I'm going to have to bring it to light and have management do it for him. It would be one thing if he took care of these tasks regularly, but he doesn't and others complain to me or ask if I can help them get tool access because he will neglect this stuff for weeks. Folks, please don't do this to your colleagues. It really doesn't help you and makes a bad situation worse. I am so frustrated with my friend and angry at him for not trusting me, and also just really afraid he isn't going to make it.

What is up with the terrible production values on this film, especially the early scenes? It looks like it was shot with a Sony HandyCam. Were they reshoots?

I also read that retirements are way up. The Boomers are finally retiring after COVID. My own dad just retired at age 67 and man was he ready. Like a typical Boomer, he didn't save properly for retirement so he's worried about having enough money to actually retire. Not sure I would've dropped almost $40k on a new minivan as soon as he retired but oh well. At least his rent is cheap. He said if he has to work he's going to go back to optometry, though, because he figures he would have to work more hours in a shitty service job to make the same amount of money.

I'm interested in what kind of effect COVID deaths had on the labor market. I didn't lose anyone I knew somehow, but my husband lost several people he worked with indirectly. However, I just went and looked up total COVID deaths by age on the CDC website, and its only 262,957 for ages 18-64. So that's around 25% of the total 1.05M deaths in the US. Maybe I should figure out long-haul statistics, because it doesn't look like that's enough to be the sole cause. I see an Aug 2022 report stating that the labor market participation rate is 62.4%, which is only 1.0% under the February 2020 level.