Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby JamishT » Sun Jun 21, 2020 3:09 am

Coincidentally, I just accepted a new job opportunity that pays way more than my current job. It's far more physical than my current job, it's in Ohio, will require me to switch from night shift to early mornings, and I start in a month. It will allow me to rent a house all on my own and I'll be home for Christmas for the first time in 10 years, so it seems worthwhile to me!
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby cmsellers » Sun Jun 21, 2020 5:48 am

JamishT wrote:Coincidentally, I just accepted a new job opportunity that pays way more than my current job. It's far more physical than my current job, it's in Ohio, will require me to switch from night shift to early mornings, and I start in a month. It will allow me to rent a house all on my own and I'll be home for Christmas for the first time in 10 years, so it seems worthwhile to me!

But it also means you'll no longer be living in Misery.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby JamishT » Mon Jun 22, 2020 2:28 am

cmsellers wrote:But it also means you'll no longer be living in Misery.


Misery has pretty good BBQ, though
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JamishT was a heck of a guy,
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And his feel-good powers,
He made all the girls blush and sigh.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby cmsellers » Sat Jul 04, 2020 4:25 am

So, Houston, as with Austin, is gerrymandered via cracking such that it's composed of mostly heavily Republican districts. In 2018, with Trump driving the suburbs away from the GOP, the Democrats broke through in several of these districts. They'd hoped to flip several more this year, but the one I live in was rated by all elections handicappers except for the Democratic Daily Kos as "Safe Republican."

Yesterday, the Sabato Crystal Ball moved my district to "Likely Republican." I've decided that if I have any energy come October (when early voting starts), I'm going to volunteer with GOTV efforts.

My Congressman may be pro-gay-rights and may look like a pirate, but given every member of the GOP House caucus voted to say that Trump's behavior on Ukraine was NBD, I want to see him go down, him and as many of his small-minded friends as possible.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby cmsellers » Tue Jul 28, 2020 4:12 pm

Apparently you can buy a home micropropagation kit for $200.

Guess what new hobby I plan on taking up.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby JamishT » Tue Jul 28, 2020 9:48 pm

Guess what word I just had to Google
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He made all the girls blush and sigh.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby NathanLoiselle » Tue Jul 28, 2020 10:09 pm

Googleplex. It was googleplex, wasn't it?
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jul 29, 2020 7:03 am

Incidentally, since posting this I've figured out why micropropagation kits have become available.

I can't decide whether to be grateful to potheads, or concerned that living in Texas, ordering a micropropagation kit and some grow lights will bring the cops straight to my door.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby JamishT » Thu Jul 30, 2020 2:52 am

I do have some good things going on, because of my move across the country...or should I say, my move across the Midwest. I am living in the basement of my brother's new house. Renovations haven't started, but I'll be here until they do, which I am cool with because the room I'm in also contains a ping pong table and a pool table (both of which came with the property). I have been playing pool alone for at least an hour every day, with no signs of improvement and likely cementing bad habits, but hey, I'm having fun!

My new job is as a driver for an Amish guy who owns a construction company. I drive him around in a pretty new Chevy truck to various locations (mostly jobs sites) and help out however I can. I have really only worked 2 full days, and I don't feel like I have a firm grasp on all my duties, but it's good so far. The guy may refuse to wear masks, seatbelts, and deodorant, but he's also very chill, fair to his employees, and a competent business owner from what I can see. I get to practice my Pennsylvania Dutch, which I've always been able to understand better than I can speak it, but I've been feeling more and more confident over the past few days. I'm not used to the early morning schedule yet, and I am terrible at remembering which back road leads to where, but I'll get there.

Also, my brother and the realtors involved had trouble getting the closing to happen, so I stayed at the farm where I grew up for a few nights. During that time, I drove a bulldozer for the first time (and, according to a different brother, did a pretty good job at it) and experienced the shockwave that happens when a person uses Tannerite to reduce the cab of an RV to small ribbons of metal (the rest of the RV got the same treatment weeks earlier). Maybe when I'm in a place where WiFi is setup and I'm not relying on slow data, I'll share the videos of that insanity.
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JamishT was a heck of a guy,
With a devilish twinkle in his eye.
With his hand-picked flowers,
And his feel-good powers,
He made all the girls blush and sigh.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby jbobsully11 » Sun Aug 02, 2020 10:12 pm

I just finished refinancing my car loan. I should have a >2.5% lower interest rate soon.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby cmsellers » Sun Aug 09, 2020 7:47 am

So some animal has been knocking over my plants and leaving droppings on my patio, which doesn't sound like an auspicious start to a post here and was definitely annoying me.

But today, I was out late reading, and a young possum climbed up onto my railing, saw me, and froze.

I got up and when I realized it would let me get close, I tried to pet it. It moved out of reach, but not by much.

I went inside and got a guava (these are little bite-sized guavas called Mexican guavas), put it right in front of its face, and left it on the plant rack, yet it somehow showed no interest.

After maybe forty minutes on the railing, it climbed down and foraged around below my feet (I have a zero-gravity chair) for another 10-15 minutes, then wandered off.

Young possums have ridiculously large ears for their size, and I've always liked how America's only marsupial is so often chill around people. Disappointed it didn't want the guava, though. That would have been cute to watch.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby cmsellers » Fri Aug 14, 2020 7:03 pm

Can I just say how much I love ResearchGate and the scientific community? I've requested scientific papers not already available from the authors twice in the past two weeks, and both times, one of the authors sent me a copy the very next morning.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby JamishT » Sat Aug 15, 2020 3:45 pm

For the last few days, a cricket has been screaming its desperately wicked heart out every night in the room I sleep in. The tiny bastard kept hiding from me, but then would be so loud at night that it would wake me up (which is hard to do, especially when I have my fan running close to my head as I have it now). I bought a can of Raid yesterday, because I knew it was hiding betwixt the wall paneling and carpet where I could not reach it with anything solid, so I sprayed that area like it was a Nazi bunker and I had a flamethrower. That night, all was quiet when I laid down, but then I heard it.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

That thing had somehow foreseen my strategy and negated my efforts by moving halfway across the room while I wasn't observing it. It had made a fatal mistake, however. It had gone back to its previous strategy of concealing itself in the wall. I crept toward the wall in the dark, relying on my auditory detection and triangulation capabilities to reveal its new location to me. When I was certain I was directly in front of it, I turned on my flashlight suddenly, like the concentration camp searchlights it had likely operated in a previous life. and sprayed the noxious gas into the gap where it seemed to be hiding. Nothing happened for a beat, but then it leapt from that very hole! It made an attempt to flee to its own version of Argentina, but was unable to escape its fate of ingesting large amounts of poison gas. If I had the ability and/or was not inebriated on blueberry wine, I would have held a trial for it just to remind it of what that's like. I have left its tiny corpse where it crumpled, as a warning to all other tiny evil crickets that find themselves in this room and are considering interrupting my slumber.

Image
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JamishT was a heck of a guy,
With a devilish twinkle in his eye.
With his hand-picked flowers,
And his feel-good powers,
He made all the girls blush and sigh.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby cmsellers » Fri Sep 04, 2020 5:50 pm

My net worth has finally surpassed five figures. Which is honestly not all that impressive at age 32, especially when you consider that I'd expected to have far more than that saved by this point. But then COVID intervened, and a whole bunch of other issues. Plus, I don't even like the base-ten system, and I'm only about halfway to five figures in base-twelve, and not even a sixth of the way in hex.

Still with so much of my adult life unemployed, it feels like a major milestone.
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Re: Looking on the Brighter Side, Things that are good

Postby Pedgerow » Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:12 pm

The first ten grand is the hardest. I used to eagerly check my bank account constantly, wishing I had a five-figure bank account so I could proclaim myself to be a baller and strut around obnoxiously. It took years. Since then, I have had enough for a deposit to buy a house (in my mind, that was the target), and now my bank account has more than my annual salary in it. I still don't own a house, of course, but if I save really hard this month, my next payday (before rent etc goes out) might just put me over £30,000 in the bank. Of course, house prices are the purest madness, but my point is that it feels like just a couple of months ago that I was dancing around with 10 Gs in the bank like I was Elon Musk trying to impress Jay-Z, and now I've saved up nearly three times that much completely by accident. And it'll happen for you too! Unless there is something expensive which you want and can also afford, of course. I'll be broke as shit if I ever do buy a house.

Also, hey, we're the same age!
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