A “go bag” is a bag you have for when you need to leave (“go”) in a hurry. For example, you might have a change of clothes, cash, hygiene items, your passport(s), snacks, a week’s worth of prescription meds, first aid kit.

My friend has one because he’s an immigrant and doesn’t feel secure in the current political environment. I have one because I’m trans and I don’t feel secure in the current political environment.

I downvoted you because it felt skeevy to be told I was providing backup to you, when I didn’t feel my data was particularly supportive. It felt like you putting words in my mouth.

“only 33% of naturalized citizens from Venezuela have a go bag packed” is not the support you think it is.

Sample size of 3: my naturalized citizen (from Venezuela as an infant) D&D buddy is concerned AF. His (also naturalized) parents are more blithe about the current political climate.

Thank you for the pointer. I’ll try it out and see if I can recommend it to my colleagues. (I’m the library techie, so if a coworker has a problem, I’m the one they’ll ask for help. So, I should at least play around with it a bit first.)

Btw, all cultures that have dumpling/ravioli/pierogi/potstickers are actually the same. /s

BeyondCompare. I’ve used it for all my Windows text comparison needs for decades. It also handles comparing spreadsheets and directory structures.

My old man dog loves my heated lap blanket. I set the blanket on low with a timer while I work from home and my dog stretches out on top of it. Without the heated blanket he curls up into a tight little croissant.

Conservation land, in my area, is just land designated to not be developed. It might be privately owned and designated "conservation land* for tax benefits, or owned by the town, or what have you. Sometimes housing developers will designate part of their land plot as “conservation” for some benefit from the town (like taxes or zoning easement).

If your store has a Bob’s Red Mill section, it might be there.

I’m a big fan of TVP in spaghetti sauce, to give a bit of chewy texture. You can also use it to replace the meat in shepherd’s pie, or anywhere else ground meat provides texture but is overwhelmed by other flavors.

The shelf stable aspect is a huge selling point for my household.

But some grocers have a tank of live ones. I have never bought seafood like that. Do they give it to you live or do they kill it in the store before purchase?

They give it to you live. My middle school home ec teacher thought they killed it for you, brought home two live lobsters and the only pot she had that they’d fit in was a glass one. She watched the poor things scrambling at the sides of the pot as they boiled alive. She didn’t buy live lobster again. Then she told the story to her home ec students, every year.

If you don’t know your ward (and the election folks aren’t nice), you have to wait in line for each ward until you accidentally find the person with your name in their book. (Each book represents a ward.)

Ooof. Here, they have posters with listings of street names, saying something like

• Leaf Street. Odd Numbers. district 2
• Leaf Street. Even Numbers. district 1
• Main Street. 1-250. district 1

Are you allowed to vote in any of those locations? I’m only allowed to vote by mail or at a single designated location (the local high school). Other voting locations exist for people in other voting zones.

Update: I asked and it was Gather Town.

My pup hates the elevator but hates the stairs more. When we were in an apartment he’d lead me to take the stairs down and the elevator up, until his arthritis got worse and he’d be team elevator each time.

When he comes to work with me, we take a glass-sided elevator up to my office. He can see that we’re going up and he hates it. It doesn’t matter if he stands on the ground or is in his crate, he shivers. He’d much rather I carry him up the stairs.

Good call asking. It just clicked that my glass pots wouldn’t work. I mean, of course they wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t think of them while stove shopping because I only rarely use them.

5 am rambling about why I have glass pots: I keep them around for a friend that keeps kosher and visits. My non-Jewish understanding is that different folks keep kosher differently based on different traditions. Her tradition is that glass doesn’t pick up meat, dairy, or non-kosherness, so the same pot can be used for meat, dairy, or non-kosher meals, with washing in between of course.

Edit: and to make something explicit that I didn’t know until I started ordering pizza with kosher-keeping D&D friends: there’s a rule against mixing meat and dairy, so it’s important to keep things with meat-i-ness and dairy-i-ness separate, because a dairy plate could transfer dairy-i-ness to a meat meal, which would make the meal not-kosher.

I suspect it was https://workadventu.re/ because IIRC they self-hosted–my friend showed me the mothballed, just-moved-off-of version, so he wouldn’t run into co-workers. But, I could be wrong.

A friend of mine works in a wicked neurodiverse, geeky company. They telecommute from all over and have a virtual campus with proximity audio and rooms you can move your little character to encourage the spontaneous conversations that happen IRL. He said it really worked for him. He demoed it for me and it was adorable, pixel art, iirc.

The all day meeting idea sounds like hell.

Grief is complicated and doesn’t always look the same. When my dad died, he’d been in the hospital for a month for a surprise illness, so I had time to get used to the idea he might not make it out. His older sisters hadn’t seriously considered the possibility. I’d done some “pre grieving” and they hadn’t, so my reaction was a bit less dramatic? outwardly intense?

A friend of mine says grief is an ambush predator. You can be going about your day and suddenly something triggers you to suddenly drown in emotion. When that hits, I just swim in it, feel my feelings, all the complex emotions that come up–anger, loss, regret.

And as time goes on, I’ve gotten ambushed less often, but it can still feel just as intense. I have more practice swimming in it, so maybe I don’t have to excuse myself and hide in a work bathroom to cry anymore, I can just sit at my desk and focus on drinking my coffee.

(It’s after my bedtime, so I hope this all makes sense. There’s also the Grief Box analogy, which feels accurate to me.)

My bad. I should have linked directly to the one in the Miskatonic University archive. (it takes a while to load, but it does load for me, all the pages)

Am librarian. Here you go