Fresh corn tortillas.

Tequila.

Haircare stuff

Husband bought “the good eggs” once and has not looked back since. I used to keep chickens and the bougie store eggs are much closer to those than they are to the factory farmed thin shelled light yolked ones.

Whole Foods, oddly enough, is the place I find the cheapest good pasta. Their store brand is less than most places and really good.

They are not corporeal so why would they care what your body looks like? To them it is just some envelope holding you, right? Your soul I don’t think would have race, or sex, those are embodied things, skin tone being the most superficial of all.

I hope it’s passed, and you are feeling better now. Elbow have a new album out, it’s pretty good. It finally started raining here, our dry season was too dry and it’s so good to have the rains most days now.

Kidneys are right there. Get checked out please.

In theory maybe 10 years in either direction (I’m old) but in practice I’ve only had long term relationships with guys within a couple years of my age.

Lovers between times, for whatever reason I always ended up with younger guys, that seemed to be the people into me, but still never more than 10 years difference.

When I was your age? One or two years at most. Absolutely not anyone much older or younger, no.

Gym membership where I live is cheap. Like it would take years of monthly gym payments to equal the cost of a good set of weights and stuff to work out with. Husband has a lot of free weights so I do lift at home but do yoga at a studio, and when I did use the gym, I took aerobic dance classes, did stairmaster and watched people lift weights, used machines and lifted weights myself and didn’t have to take up half the bedroom with weights.

I personally enjoy going someplace to work out a lot more than doing it at home, but I do both.

Clothes don’t matter, don’t you have any loose shorts? That’s what I see guys wearing at the gym, they are probably like $5 at Walmart.

ETA: on your actual question yes home workout can be effective, of course. Plenty of people do fine just going out for a run and doing some pushups, pullups, unweighted squats, planks, etc; and yes I enjoy more going to the gym, and once there, will work out - at home always something else needs to be done and it’s harder to focus.

When I was in school, so early 1990s? There wasn’t much. I had email, Usenet text based groups, a proxy server at the university I could log onto. That handshake sound of the modem connecting, I will never forget that. Any networking meant running cables to connect things.

I was pulled over one for “crooked license plate”, it was a little tilted. Always got pulled over in that car (67 mustang) and kind of figured they just wanted to look at the car. It got ridiculous though.

BMI misses more often in the other direction (skinny-fat), being fit and obese is much less common.

It’s my understanding that the only proven health metric with regard to size is waist to height. Your waist measurement less than half your height? Then you don’t have too much abdominal fat, and it’s the abdominal fat that is a bigger risk to your health.

Yeah that’s a terrible example of an unhealthy fat person, she is an outlier for sure, was so overweight and could run and sing at the same time! I’m sure it’s harder on your joints and all but if someone can out-dance you, while singing loud, she is in better cardiovascular shape than you.

Angelic androgynous beauty is indeed so very beautiful.

Fennel too- I always thought the white part was below the earth, like an onion. But no, the whole fennel sits on the earth, on a tippy root that’s underground.

I like how the standard has fractured and there isn’t really a standard now, but I do also kind of like the obviously fake bodies being the standard because an insistence on natural beauty is more oppressive than the idea of beauty as something you do, an art or achievement, even a purchase.

If beauty like that is something you choose, I am free to choose it or not. If it’s just by luck of birth, that sucks so bad. When I was a gawky tall stick insect of a teenager and the only girls considered pretty were the short and stacked, there was no way to meet that standard.

Later the tide shifted but as I didn’t grow up feeling my body could ever be mainstream sexy, I didn’t get attached to that - I do have hangups but they are my own. I just try to stay in shape, have good hair, take care of my skin and let the rest be.

But I think my unpopular opinion is beauty as something you do - makeup, style, fitness, is more democratic than insistence on symmetry of features or a particular height or build, the idea of “natural beauty” is worse. Beauty should be a choice, a hobby, a project, do or not.

In terms of what I do not currently understand, it’s the moustaches. Young men with weedy little moustaches, straight men with moustaches that scream gay to me, the unopposed highway patrol/1980s gay man moustache I can’t wait for that trend to pass.

This happens to us - if I cook dinner for everyone, two of us eat, if I cook dinner for two of us, everyone wants to eat. If I make enough for leftovers, nobody takes them to lunch. If I don’t make enough, they ask why there is not enough for lunch.

Things that help on your question though -

Canned beans, canned tomatoes, canned coconut milk, canned pumpkin, jarred spaghetti sauce, spices - a lot of our staples are not perishable.

Do you live where you can stop by the store on the way home? Then don’t buy perishables for the week, buy them for the meal you are making.

Some foods and meals freeze pretty well, freeze them and keep a list of what’s in the freezer so you remember to eat it.

I hate meal planning but it helps a lot. I sometimes put a note on the fridge “we have food for dal with spinach, chicken & cabbage, sheet pan gnocchi with sausage and broccoli, eggs and potatoes” or whatever we have the food to make, and cross them off as they are made.

Some foods make other foods. So if I make a hunk of pork, it’s pork, rice and beans then enchiladas then burritos, and so on.

I would like to know how much of the increased risk of hospital vaginal birth is iatrogenic, is it actually safer to cut you open, remove the uterus, cut it open, take out the baby, replace the uterus, sew you up, than to have the baby come out the way most mammals do? Or is it the hospital setting & obstetric interventions making it so? Please know I would never, ever, ever want to go back to when the cesarean section was more risky, and am very happy if it’s safe now.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2742137/

Planned and professionally attended home birth less risky than planned hospital birth, which implies some risk associated with the hospital itself.

I don’t understand this either, but if you don’t like plain water, there are ways to make it taste different. Squeezed lemon in water is delicious, fizzy water is nice, there’s always Crystal Light, lol.

I love so many drinks but if I could only have one, iced water is it. It’s the best drink of all and goes with every food.

Smaller communities make a different quality of conversation. What it reminds me of is early Reddit, yes.

I feel the opposite. I want to hate him so badly, but he’s a good actor. Like I was absolutely furious about his casting in Interview with a Vampire, then he killed it, was gaunt and vampire as hell. He is not good looking to me and seems a shit person, but my goodness he can act.

I care, because C-section is much more dangerous for both mother and child, much harder to recover from major abdominal surgery than vaginal birth, reduces chance of successful breastfeeding, and because, since it wasn’t so high in other places, does imply they were routinely doing something to cause labor to stall. Which they were. And no, no way is 50% reasonable.

My youngest is 18, oldest 30. So this was not recent. They are down to 37% now, which is still out of line with hospital standards.