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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve got another one:

    Long before COVID, I would go to a barber shop for haircuts.

    The place I went to had one short, old guy who had arthritis. I’m tall, and long in the torso. When he was cutting my hair, he couldn’t lower the chair enough to be able to cut my hair, so I’d have to scoot down in the chair so that I was sitting with my ass at the edge of the seat and my spine bent so my head was low enough.

    When you entered the shop, you’d write your name on the board, and if you wanted someone specific to cut your hair, you’d put the barber’s name next to yours. So, I started picking one of the taller, younger guys to cut my hair.

    One day I was in a rush, and there was a line, so I figured I’d just take whoever was available and scoot down if I had to. The old guy skipped over me two times. When someone pointed out that I was there before him, the barber got pissy and said, “he doesn’t want me cutting his hair”

    One of the other barbers apologized and took me next. I gave that guy a $20 tip.

    When I got home I went online and bought a Flowbee. I haven’t been to a barber shop since. It does a great job, there’s no line to wait in, it takes me about 10 minutes, leaves no mess behind, and I haven’t paid for anything but electricity and shop vac bags ever since.


  • Eufy 11S Max robot vacuum.

    We had a Roomba back when they were new. It did ok, but it wasn’t really that impressive. My wife had a rechargeable upright vacuum after that. When that died, I argued for going back to a robot vacuum because her health problems were both making it hard for her to use the vacuum and also leaving me too busy to do it.

    She resisted because she was never happy with the job the Roomba did. However from day 1, the Eufy vacuum did a visibly good job cleaning and won her over.

    We have it set to run once a day. There’s one chair it occasionally gets stuck under, and we have to block the base of the fridge or it gets stuck there. Aside from that, it’s very independent. It does the vacuuming and then finds its base to recharge for the next day. It needs to be emptied out every day and cleaned more thoroughly once a week.

    We’ve been very pleased with it.

    We named it Meryl Sweep.








  • Years ago, I had an open pizza box sitting on a table. The cat decided to walk over and get some pizza, but he stepped confidently from a chair onto the unsupported lid of the pizza box and fell through to the floor.

    In and of itself, it’s not particularly humorous, but when I add in the way he looked around to see if anyone noticed and tried to pretend that was what he wanted to do, it gives me a chuckle.

    That was long ago, and we don’t have cats now. We have guinea pigs. I taught the guinea pigs to spin in a circle once to get a treat. Now if I’m taking too long giving them their treat, they just start spinning non-stop.

    They also chew the bars of their pens. I think they think it gets us to feed them faster (it doesn’t). One of them will get so involved in chewing the bars that I she forgets why she’s doing it and doesn’t come to eat when the food is available. We have to gently poke her in the nose until she stops chewing and realizes that there’s food.




  • I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?

    Books, radio, and TV. Also, learning from others.

    Before the Internet (because computers didn’t really replace any other information mechanisms before the Internet), if you wanted to learn something you might start by talking to someone more knowledgeable than yourself.

    If there wasn’t someone who knew more than you, or you needed to learn more than the people around you knew, then you’d go to the library or the bookstore. Where other teenage guys would fumble around in sex unable to find the clitoris, I’m enough of a nerd that I went to the library and found a book that gave me the info I needed.

    There were also TV shows that would actually impart knowledge. Before the rise of cable channels in the U.S., Public Broadcasting would have shows that shared knowledge. News and history, of course. Science too. Back then, broadcasters took their responsibility to educate the public much more seriously.

    I probably learned more about math and grammar from School House Rock during Saturday morning cartoons in the 70’s than I was learning from school (Interjections [hey!] show excitement [yow!] or emotion [ouch!]. They are generally set aside from a sentence by an exclamation point or by a comma if the feeling’s not as strong… Conjunction Junction… Number Nine… Three Is a Magic Number…)

    On TV you had shows like Nova which would report on science topics. There were, of course, cooking shows where the host would make recipes, not to win a contest, but to show the audience how to cook them.

    I learned an enormous amount of what I know about home repairs from obsessively watching shows like This Old House and Home Time, and I picked up a lot about woodworking from a show called The Woodwright’s Shop. I also watched [Nahm!] The New Yankee workshop.

    I watched a lot of the original version of This Old House where they would spend a season renovating and rehabilitating one house. It’s probably a big reason why my wife and I bought an old Victorian house.