@madrobin @kingrat does he let random people use his telescopes? Or you mean to recommend where I go?

@madrobin oh man, a dude ranch sounds awesome but probably out of my price range unless my parents want to chip in again.

Stargazing sounds so cool! I don't know how to plan around clouds, if you just try, knowing that you might have to reschedule.

@kingrat that sounds super fun

Crowdsourcing ideas for Christmas presents for my nieces and nephew. We always do a fun experience, not just gifts.

The problem is that I've set the bar pretty high with Xmas and birthday gifts. In the past we have done:

-the pop-up museum The Color Factory in San Francisco
-Safari West in Santa Rosa
-Santa Cruz Boardwalk
-staying in hotels with the dog (their choice)
-otter feeding experience
-Oakland Zoo vet hospital tour
-cable cars and SF Chinatown
-ferry to San Francisco to see plays
-Great Wolf Lodge (I had financial help on this one)
-Monterey hotel and aquarium (had financial help on this one)

I'm forgetting a bunch but you get the idea.

Things that are not exciting to them because they've done it a bunch (they're bay Area kids!)

-Exploratorium
-either zoo
-Great America
-Six Flags

help I;'m running out of ideas!

@kingrat I'm a little surprised that, not only is it still there, no one has dumped anything gross in it.

There are four units where I live and we take turns taking out the trash and recycling the night before trash pickup. Every Thursday night one of us brings the four bins to the curb: one garbage, two recycling, one compost bin. At some point on Friday, that same person brings them all back.

Well, my neighbor, yes, that neighbor, brought back 3 of the 4 bins. the fourth one has been sitting on the curb for a few extra days and I have no idea why she gave up 3/4 of the way through the job

When I was younger, I often felt bad about myself if I didn’t have social plans on a Friday or Saturday night. I felt like it was a sign that I didn’t have good friends or I was missing out on something.

Right now it is 8:54 pm on a Saturday night and I am in my pajamas, in bed with a heating pad and a book.

I want to go back in time and tell my younger self how awesome this can be.

Just spent way too much of my Spanish class trying to explain the electoral college system.

My Spanish teacher finally told me to tell her in English because it wasn't making sense in Spanish. GUESS WHAT, IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE IN ENGLISH EITHER.

@kingrat just found out she’s also not following the kid’s IEP, which somehow isn’t surprising.

One of my students' PE teacher won't listen to the heat advisory and made them run laps.

He now (7th grade) is planning a strike and trying to get all his classmates to join.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how I’d deal with charging if I got an EV since there’s no chargers where I live. And then my downstairs neighbor got one so I found out:

She runs the charger to an extension cord to the laundry room. This is a problem because:

1/2

I’m by no means anti-EV and would like us to stop being dependent on fossil fuels but I don’t know how this is going to work anytime soon in places like ours.

ALSO you know what’s better than an EV? Functioning public transit so we can get FEWER CARS on the road, not just fewer gas cars.

oops I should have numbered better, I’m going to be a little more long-winded

I’m hoping that extension cords hanging out in puddles of water won’t be a problem but I’m worried.

So I still don’t know what I’d do if and when I get an EV. I work from home and almost never go to the shopping centers with chargers so it will be a problem and I think next year, you can only buy EVs in California.

-knowing my landlord as I do, the minute he gets the new electric bill for the laundry room, he’s going to either raise our rents or tell her she can’t do that
-the extension cord is long and goes through the part of the driveway that collects standing water as soon as it rains at all and that doesn’t seem great
-the other neighbors want the laundry room locked (understandably) so the door is closed on the extension cord, and the rubber part is starting to come off
-she unplugs the dryer

@kingrat makes sense.

And I rarely do anything from links in email because I'm paranoid

@kingrat I didn’t do it through the link or anything. I did it later

@kingrat well, since I'm not willing to change my password twice a week, I guess I just hope it's nothing terrible.

There's someone who has an instagram handle one character off from mine and apparently put my email (similar to the IG handle) as their recovery email. For about a year, I've gotten at least 1-2 "here's how to reset your IG password" email per week

The first couple times, I reset my password. I'm not resetting my password twice a week for the rest of my life.

Is this someone who is just super optimistic that THIS time the password reset will send to her or is this some kind of scam?

@kingrat about once a decade I forget this and try one and it's like eating a salty wicker basket.

@kingrat absolutely terrible