Whine like a baby, now with 500% more drama!

bhamv3

bhamv3

I figure it's analogous to, say, medical professionals dealing with sick anti-vaxxers or something like that.

Imagine we have a forumite who's a doctor or a nurse, who at the height of the pandemic had to deal with people calling them liars about the vaccine, or demanding injections of horse paste, or threatening to sue them because of whatever hare-brained reason they can think of. Imagine if the aforesaid doctor or nurse came onto the forum and called them "these fuckin' quack idiots" or said something like, "sometimes I think we should just let them all die." No, I don't think calling people idiots is okay, nor do I think medical professionals should advocate letting patients die. But I understand the need to vent, especially since this forum is a relatively safe place for us to get our feelings out. I don't think saying such things would necessarily indicate that a doctor or nurse will be any less professional in their work or will deliberately or negligently cause harm to the people they're meant to be caring for.

So yeah, IronBrig's posts are not nice, but I'm fine with him venting on his wife's behalf. (Sorry for getting that wrong earlier, btw.)
 
General Specific

General Specific

Working in a school and doing IT, I see all the classes. There's one teacher here that has to have a helper just to keep one kid seated and on-task or they will bolt to the door if attention is taken off of them for a second. That is not a Special Ed class or a special case. Kid just refuses to behave. Calls home go unanswered, only grandma will ever come to the school to try to do anything with the child. Prevailing theory is the kid is roundly ignored at home and left to do whatever they want and fend for themselves.

There are shitty parents. There are also parents who try, but the kid is still a little shit. Venting should not be taken seriously.
 
drawn_inward

drawn_inward

I think people have a problem with calling children feral because they are not rational adults with life experience. My kids can act quite obnoxious at times, cry over silly shit, and honestly be quite mean to their siblings. But, they are children. They don't have the maturity to understand the world around them.
These feral kids are quite likely products of a anxiety and fear-based home life. Kids can use brutal and vile words and disrupt classes for attention. But, they quite likely don't even know why they are behaving that way.
Hell, I can be a grumpy ass if I am hungry and I am in my 40s. If I can be manipulated by hunger as an adult just think how hard it is for kids with a terrible home life.
 
IronBrig4

IronBrig4

I agree with you up to a point. There are the issues that usually come with childhood. Teachers are equipped to handle obnoxious kids. But I'm talking about kids who intentionally upend water bottles onto the carpet, steal food from classmates and even teachers, and routinely hit their classmates. These are issues that get Behavioral Interventionists involved. One of the kids regularly threatens to kill himself by holding his breath. When he realizes nobody is paying attention, he wets his pants so he can get a free pass to the nurse's office (that's where they keep extra clothes). The turd isn't even housebroken. Our dog is more advanced.

The kids have gotten much worse since the pandemic. Somebody else posted here (can't find the post now) that their Mom is retiring from a career as a kindergarten teacher partly because of that.

When I taught in Korea, it was at an English immersion academy. The kids weren't supposed to speak Korean except during breaks. During one break, one of the kids walked past a teacher's room and called her the Korean equivalent of bitch. The teacher didn't speak Korean so she didn't know. At that moment, a Korean secretary rounded the corner. She was a tiny woman but she rushed the kid, wrenched his arm behind his back, and pushed him into room. She practically slammed him onto the desk and forced him to stammer an apology. You just know he got his ass whooped when he got home that night.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

Grumble grumble remote meeting grumble grumble need to clean up my room/office so it doesn't look too messy on camera grumble grumble.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

bhamv3 said:
Can't risk it, some of the stuff in the background should really not be showing up in any sort of professional context.
Click to expand...
Teams (assuming you're using Teams) also has funky backgrounds you can use, too. My manager uses a Minecraft background, for example. There are other less nerdy ones, but it's better than a blurry background or showing whatever horrors are in your room.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
When I had to do remotes I would copy a picture from the university and using that as my background. It’s professional but doesn’t let them see my room.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Tinwhistler said:
I've actually used this as my zoom background at a job where I knew the humor would be appreciated
Click to expand...
I think my direct managers wouldn't recognize it, honestly... But too many others might, and I don't think my current job qualifies as one where it would be appreciated.
Unless I claimed not to recognize it myself.
 
IronBrig4

IronBrig4

It's a long story, but the Mom cat and one of her kittens are back on campus. The Mom (her name is Daisy) has been fixed and is much more social. Her kitten, Ivy, is wise to traps and is very skittish.

Daisy will meow and run to me whenever I show up. Even after I feed her, she'll keep following me and relax under whichever bench I sit on. The professor who got her fixed says that Daisy never adjusted to indoor environments but would make an excellent backyard cat. It can't be my backyard, however, because there are two unfriendly pit bull variants next door. If Daisy ever snuck into their yard they'd maul her.

The semester is about to end and the cats will lose one of their food sources. I've seen students give them fast food. I'm coordinating with two other people so the cats will be fed consistently. We are also being more discreet than before because some folks on campus see them as pests. They'd love nothing more than to put the cats down or dump them somewhere down the highway. I called the Houston SPCA and wildlife centers but they don't deal with feral cats. Local animal control would just put them down.

I'm whining because these two cats would be foster material if we could just find the right people.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

I couldn't quite decide where to put this, but anyway: we went to a goodbye party for a friend of ours on Saturday. She had breast cancer and after two years it was determined terminal and she only had weeks/months to go. It had spread to, well, everything.
She was too sick to make it to the party herself, and she passed away today.
Her euthanasia date was set for the 8th, and she was really adamant about not wanting residential health assistance (nurses over constantly) which she had to start with last week despite all protests, so in a way it just saved her a last week or so of pain and embarrassment and frustration, but it still smarts.
She was 44.

Cancer sucks.

Also, ladies, check out your boobs regularly, or have someone do it for you - plenty of volunteers on this here forum, I'm sure ;) . Breast cancer is usually one with a fairly high survivor rate, but that's still a long way away from 100% - and even surviving can and will leave you physically compromised (another friend of mine - who is 36 I think? - seems to have successfully beaten breast cancer about a year and a half ago but is still nowhere near who she was before it all began).
 
Simfers

Simfers

Should probably give some news here, huh? Been a minute... Strap in, it's a wild ride.

So on 5 April, Maryse's (my wife) mum was hospitalized to try and rebound from an influenza that she'd gotten around the Holidays and that, combined with the mouth ulcers caused by her immune therapy treatments for pre-cancer cells and a sciatica, had left her bed-ridden and a good 60 pounds lighter (because she was barely able to eat due to the aforementioned mouth ulcers). While there, they found out her left lung was punctured. Not a big hole, but you don't want it there. So they operated to install a drain. Week-end is uneventful, road to recovery is ahead, outlook is optimistic.

On the 8th, we get some stupendously good news about Maryse. Turns out that the radio-oncologist in Montreal who did her second TEP scan last year undersold just how GOOD her results were (likely to make sure we didn't let our guard down). We thought the cancer was halted and that the bones had started healing, but we were only partially right. The cancer is indeed halted, but her bones are pretty much ALL HEALED. Which, BTW, is unheard of, especially not in 8 months. Over the moon, we were.

A few hours later, the other show drops and we learn that Maryse's mum had been lying to us. Oh, the influenza was real, as were the treatments, but those pre-cancer treatments weren't preventive at all. She had a lump near a kidney (that sciatica? yeah, no, that was the lump putting pressure on a nerve and causing pain) and the punctured lung may have been caused by a metastasis. Ouch. Still, though, it was ONE metastasis, hardly the end of the world, she was in the system, and now that we knew what we were fighting, we could actually fight. Determined and optimistic, were we.

On the 11th, she saw a specialist for the puncture, and the news was super good. No need to operate, just inject a medicine directly in the drain and it would heal it up in 24-48 hours. She was also gonna be taken in by the one of the best oncology centres in the country, the same one where Maryse is getting her treatments. The fight was gonna be long and hard, but it was gonna be okay. Just get some strength back into her, and let's get started. Let's go and all that.

On the 12th, she had a seizure. Fortunately, she was already in bed, so no fall. Fearing a stroke, they rushed her to a scan. Good news: No stroke. Bad news: cancer cells ALL OVER her brain, surprising EVERYONE. According to the doctors, from the quantity, it had been insidiously growing there for a long time, maybe even years (which in itself is BONKERS) until it caused a brain bleed. She was basically catatonic at that point and immediately moved to hospice/palliative care, as there was nothing else to be done. Even if she survived, she'd be essentlally a vegetable.

So she was moved to a private room (shout out here to the staff at the Gatineau hospital, who were absolute angels) and kept comfortable. She had moments of lucidity that were for the most part touching and beautiful and sad, but for the most part she slept. She never suffered. We also learned that even if we'd known earlier about the cancer, it would have changed nothing. Nobody knew about the brain, it was already too advanced by the time it was found out. Which was a massive relief to her and to Maryse's dad, who had kept the secret for a long time at his wife's request.

She eventually passed, peacefully and surrounded by her family, on 17th April, 2024, at 6:36 PM. She was 63. Funeral arrangements were finalized yesterday, it's happening on 11 May.

So that's where I've been.

Fuck you, cancer, you absolute little shit.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

My condolences. It's a really big shame that the positive news about your wife had to be so absolutely overshadowed by the crappy news about her mother.
I sincerely hope Maryse makes a full recovery!

I used to be of the "plan for retirement, work now, play later, postpone to save up, etc" type, and while I'm still definitely not a "just throw out the money and go into debt, who cares" person now, I have really tried to teach myself to live in the now. I've seen far too many good people work hard their whole lives only to somehow never be able to properly enjoy it at all. Enjoy and cherish the moments you have with your loved ones (not just you Simfers, you in general).

Up yours, cancer (and associated variations)
 
Simfers

Simfers

She (Maryse, that is) is doing SO great, it's baffling. The good kind of baffling.

But yeah, enjoy life while you can, it's fragile. These last few years have certainly switched my piorities around.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Power's out in my neighborhood.

Had to scramble to the Laundromat at 6:30 this morning because the boy's work clothes were still wet in the washer.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Power's back on.

Fiber's still out.

This is almost as bad.

GF is joking-not-jokingly asking if we can get a hotel room until they can come out to fix it.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

bhamv3 said:
So Facebook sucks.

I'm sure everyone who uses Facebook realizes that it loves sticking random ads and suggested groups in your feed instead of actual posts and updates from your Facebook friends. I noticed this, naturally, but then I decided to game their algorithm to make it show me posts from groups dedicated to posting pictures that I'd enjoy seeing. (For the sake of discussion, let's say they're "landscape paintings".) Every time a "landscape painting" post showed up, I would tap/click on it so that the algorithm would see that I was interested in stuff like this, and it would therefore show me more "landscape painting" posts in the future. Eventually I got it to the point where I could open up Facebook, see a few updates from my Facebook friends, and then scroll through an endless collection of "landscape paintings" from a wide range of groups, all handily curated and collected for me by the algorithm.

And then apparently something changed in the last couple of days for me, because now I'm only getting Facebook friend updates in my feed, punctuated by unrelated ads. I don't care about my friends, I want "landscape paintings" dammit!
Click to expand...
So minor update to this.

I have manipulated the Facebook algorithm in the app on my phone to pretty much only show me "landscape paintings" now. (As an aside, some of these groups/pages are finding some rather creative ways to push the envelope on what is allowed.) Yesterday my wife said to me, "Hey, I heard that (mutual friend of ours) posted some vacation pictures on Facebook and she asked me to check them out, can I borrow your phone so I can use Facebook on it?"

And I said, "Why can't you use your own phone?"

"I'm not Facebook friends with her. So can I use your phone?"

"... No, no you may not."
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

In the further adventures of Nick's first bikepacking trip: I can't sleep. It's 2 AM and I've slept maybe an hour so far.

The inflatable mattress isn't comfortable. Neither is the inflatable pillow. It's colder than I expected (I'm wearing both pairs of socks). I'm not freezing, but I'm a little cold. And I can't find a comfortable position to sleep.

This is also the first time trying to sleep without my CPAP machine in ages. I woke up to a sore throat from snoring.

I hope I can get back to sleep because it's a long bike ride home.
 
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