54m here, married for 19 years.
My wife has a very demanding career, so really needs her hobbies to let go of the stress. What I do is listen when she's talking about what has her interests. Then if there is anything I can do to facilitate it, it will suddenly materialize. This is not always something expensive or even something material.
Just before COVID the entire family got into playing D&D. Being an artist my wife went bonkers on painting miniatures. So I made sure she had all the paints and brushes she needed. Plus, the dining room, which is actually our "hobby" room, got a lighting upgrade
How bonkers did she get? This bonkers and there are many many more:
Here's an exchange between my wife and I, while she was in urgent care after severely spraining her ankle and breaking the 5th metatarsal in her right foot. She has danced ballet since the age of 4. We're in our middle-50's now. This was a couple of years ago and she's fully healed and back to dancing now.
Wife: Getting old sucks.
Me: It beats the alternative.
Wife, after a moment of reflection: Not by much.
But that really was Ricardo's actual chest.
Apparently he worked out... A LOT.
Another parent on one of my kid's team has a ridiculously huge Cadillac. It's the size of a Suburban. She has one kid and not planning to have more.
She made the mistake of making a backhanded comment about how my wife and I drive older cars to our faces. We have a 2014 Camry LE and a 2015 Lexus ES 300h. (Mine and wife's respectively)
So I asked her what type of contracting work she does. She looked at me with a bewildered expression. I went on and said; "well you drive a big work truck, I assumed you did construction or something."
The look she gave me could have melted steel.
Just to be clear, I have a great deal of respect for the trades. She however is married to money, not terribly bright, and looks down her nose at just about everyone. So I knew that would hit a nerve with her.
Given:
You lack the capacity to experience imposter syndrome.
Nail a few of these idiots with sedition charges and suddenly the rest might be interested in checking their sources. Even those in the so called "main stream media".
Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Service Model". It was excellent. But be warned, if you're looking for military, adventure sci fi with snarky AI's this will not be your cup of tea. The author takes on modern societal issues in the setting of post collapse human society. Yes, I'm aware of the dichotomy there.
If you do want snarky AI's and adventure, then I recommend the following series:
"Backyard Starship" series. I think it's up to book 17 so far and the quality of the books have stayed pretty consistent. The prequel series "The Peacemaker Wars" is also pretty good.
"Expeditionary Force" The quality does NOT stay consistent in this series and quite frankly, it's not very well written. However, it's like Lofthouse cookies, a lot of mediocre ingredients come together to make something great. I am a die hard fan of the series and highly recommend it if you want something that just removes you from reality for a while.
Gen X'er here and an older one at that.
My two idiot older brothers, one of whom is an Oathbreaker... Keeper...what the fuck ever, are voting for that fucking asshole.
A lot of my fellow classmates of my highschool graduating class are also voting for him. I went to the same school, came from the same town had a lot of the same experiences. How the living ever fuck are they so bamboozled?
It's absolute insanity and it is not going to end here.
Trump supporters should not be hauling garbage.
They should be hauled off AS garbage.
I was getting ready to leave my girlfriend's apartment. We had gone out for a walk and ended up having dinner. It wasn't a formal date or anything, we had been together, officially, for nearly 6 months by that point.
We hugged and just kept hugging. Not petting or getting frisky, just holding each other and enjoying each other's company for the final few moments of the evening.
It just came out, I said "I love you."
She tensed and was silent for what felt forever. Long enough to start thinking I just either ended our relationship, or caused serious damage.
Just when I was about to disengage from her, she relaxed looked up and gave me a very very nice kiss and said; "I love you too."
At the time I lived nearly 20 miles away from her and I do not remember the drive at all.
That was 21 years ago. We have two teenage boys now and happier now than we were back then.
In case someone wonders why I didn't stay with her that night, it was a weeknight. We both had work the next day and she had an earlier morning than usual. The following weekend we spent the whole time together.
The interesting thing is the engine is running just fine. I changed the plugs about 60k ago and put in Iridium plugs, or whatever..They were the OEM recommended. All filters have been changed on the dot according to the manual and I've always used OEM or better.
The car sits in the same spot in a garage and it has never leaked anything. So the oil is definitely being burnt.
I haven't paid attention to the coolant level other than making sure the level in the overflow is good. I had a car that blew a head gasket before, so I know the symptoms for that and I don't see any of them with this engine. That car was an 85 Pontiac Sunbird. I haven't owned a GM product since, because of it.
The plugs actually look OK when I pulled them out. Coils are the originals.
The main thing is I'm trying to make an intelligent decision between dropping a bunch of money on this car for new PCV, shocks/struts and a few other things and getting another 60k to 80k out of it. Or dropping a whole lot more on another car.
Thank you for taking the time, I appreciate it .
Sorry for the bad image quality.
The image is of the top of piston 4 and the cylinder wall in a Toyota 2AR-FE with 162,000 miles. All Toyota recommended maintenance was performed throughout the engine's life. I have the feeling those recommendations were written by marketing people and not the engineers.
Based on what the image shows, the engine needs a short block. Am I correct?
Absolutely agree.
I tightly control every piece of media that comes into my house. My kids have never had to sit through 10 minutes of commercials to watch a 20 minute program. When they go to a friends house and watch TV, they can't stand it and go do something else. My oldest loves Figure Skating in the Olympics (he's a competitive figure skater himself), but all the commercials made it all but unwatchable to him. He just waits till the skaters programs, he wants to watch, are on Youtube. This has had the added benefit that my kids have been completely unaware of the "latest and greatest" toy or thing that all of their peers absolutely had to have.
The absolute frenzy to "make a buck" on freaking everything has made almost all forms of media devoid of worth. An oxymoron I know, but it is the truth. The cost in time and attention to sit through so many advertisements is way too high and I refuse to pay that price. If that means I don't see or hear the latest and greatest movies, TV series, or music... Oh well.