The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Thena :

@98 - Maybe their men's stuff is better than their women's stuff; I know the last pair of jeans I bought there ended up in the thrift store bag after the second washing because they shrank. They were cheap, so I wasn't out much money, but I'd rather had a pair of pants that fit.

I don't shop there much any more; I have other options and it's a big, noisy, crowded place with a ton of cheap crap I don't really need.

(I remember, however, as a child in the mid-80s when WM came into Louisiana, that their merchandise was both cheaper and higher quality than what K-Mart offered at the time [before it merged with Sears]. And there weren't really many other places to shop.)

@90 - the reason Walmart clothes last as long as lower-mid-price ones is that by and large the mid-price ones have gone to using the same low-grade fabric and careless construction that the Walmart ones do, while still charging their old prices in an effort to make ends meet. (I've found that a $12 Walmart shirt will inevitably shrink or fade in three washings; a $20-$25 shirt from Fashion Bug isn't much better.)

You have to get up into the upper-mid-range to exclusive to find stuff that's made better and lasts long enough to be worth it (I've had good luck with the retail-$50 shirts from LL Bean - they probably really ARE wearable four or five times as long as the Walmart ones, but you have to have $50 in one place to get one to begin with. Unless you live in Maine and happen to find one at the outlet store for 40% off. And even then, it's not a cheap shirt.)

@34 --

I had wondered how Bethel managed to have a chain pharmacy when all the rest of it was little shops. (I live in Augusta.)

Heh. That's interesting.

@613 -- Open thread 103 is full of oatmeal following #791


Not sure if that's the oatmeal you are looking for, though.

@wayback - Michael Roberts

Late to the party for adding to Michael Roberts' to-read list, but if you haven't already read John Scalzi's Old Man's War, well, a) why not, it's been out a few years, and b) not only is it a good story and a well-written story, but it's got enough space opera to appeal to a fellow Heinlein fan and there's a strong romantic undercurrent between Perry and another character that runs through the three-(or four)-novel story arc.

(I was thinking it had got a nomination or award or something from a romance writer's publication or organization, but I'm not finding that on the author's blog, so I could be making that up. It deserves one, though.)

The difficulty I have with Jacob's Ladders is that I feel compelled to TAKE THEM APART AND SEE HOW THEY WORK and then of course I can't ever put them back together again.

One of these books would have a life expectancy of approximately five minutes in my hands - and that long only because the one in the video is almost too beautiful to disassemble and analyze.

Almost.

*twitch*

@45 et seq

I will absolutely admit to being one of the people who goes around the other way in a retail store when I encounter a fellow shopper using a wheelchair / mobility scooter / etc.

The idea that my behaviour would read as "OMG Wheelchair Cooties Run!" had not occurred to me (ableist privilege, natch).

I'm probably not going to stop doing it, though, because I do it for a reason: I usually have a shopping cart, and the aisles in many big box stores are too narrow for two shopping carts - or a cart and a mobility device - to pass each other comfortably.

So, in the interest of a) not ramming a fellow shopper, and b) not having to wait for my fellow shopper to get out of the middle of the aisle, I generally just take my shopping cart and come in from the other end of the aisle. Because I hate having to wait even more than I hate having to shop.

No cooties, just logistics. YMMV.

Mmmm. Tillamook cheese.

@243 - Gee, thanks, now I'm going to bed with THAT stuck in my head (and mental images of the book-bashing monastics from Monty Python and the search for the holy grail).

I'm all for a LumiCon if we ever get sufficiently organized. I'm not sure we'd all fit in my church at the same time but we could take turns standing on the lawn befuddling the local populace.

@EClaire - Not sure where you are but reading that comment I'm wishing I could invite you to my local UU church. Spiritual diversity, we can has. Also strong community.

And coffee.

Xopher @ 35:

I saw what you did there. What you did there, I saw that.

@53

An employer/employee relationship or a parent/child relationship is one with differing statuses, yes, where one party has authority over the other, but I would say that it's not the existence of a power dynamic / line of authority that necessitates the bullying but how that power relationship is manifested.

Certainly parents *can* bully their children (sometimes to the point of criminal abuse) and without a doubt employers and supervisors *can* bully their subordinates - but the aggression or forcible dominance isn't inherent to these relationships.

(Okay, parents of little children, yes, you *do* sometimes have to say "Because I said so, that's why" and/or pick up the screaming mimi in a football hold and remove her/him bodily from the location of a public tantrum, but if the parent-child relationship develops in a sane & healthy way the parties involved can usually get to a point, eventually, where they can sort things out sensibly. That's the "cooperative growth" part.)

Another US data point for tax year 2008

1) Effective tax rate: 16.7%
2) Effective tax + medical rate: 22%
2a) Effective tax + medical including dental: 23.5%

I am uninsured so all my medical, dental and vision expenses are out of pocket. During the period in question I had three different employers, one of whom had a different tax status than the other two, and my taxes are generally weird and complicated for reasons I won't get into, but the percentages look about right in my experience.

If I had purchased the non-subsidized insurance offered by one of those three employers for the time period I worked there, my 2a) percentage would have been 36.7% - and I only worked at that employer for four of twelve months.

I was going to calculate out what it would have cost me if I'd purchased and been covered by that employer's insurance plan for the full year, but that's an awful lot of math. (I do know the full premium for 12 months would have been more than twice what my actual out of pocket was, and 2008 was a relatively expensive health care year for me...)

New England directional sense:

I knew I was starting to acclimate when someone gave me directions that concluded with the phrase "It's right before the barn that isn't there any more" and I knew where they meant.

It frightens me to think that emergency services function the same way. Although I know better than to think they'd ever find my street on first go without the descriptor of "would be across from the pool except it doesn't go there" [1]

[1] Due to being a dead-end, which, if it went through, would come out across the arterial from where the city pool driveway is. But it doesn't, and you can't get there from here. Well, you can, but it's up hill both ways, especially in the snow. Which doesn't sound bad on a day as hot and muggy as today has been...

Considering I never got down to Portsmouth to look for the glowing tombstone, due to getting a job.....


This might happen.

Depends on the weather.

My Other Half is trying to talk me into coming out to visit. We'd thought about it last year, but either the weather was crap or something else came up, and since it's an overnight for us we have to actually plan this sort of thing.

Since we aren't actually going on a honeymoon...

Price point for basic dental care, last three years, Maine/USA, uninsured patient (that is, all out-of-pocket):

Cleaning and X-rays and exam by dentist- $171 (2006)
Two smallish fillings (2006) - $225
Cleaning and exam by hygienist - $115 (2009)
Cleaning and X-rays and exam by hygienist - $162 (2008)

I should add, as a footnote, that I had to call three quarters of the dentists in the local directory before I found a practice that was taking new patients - and this without any insurance hassle.

(I've learned to promote myself as an insurance-hassle-free patient: no paperwork, just let me know cash, check or plastic. Crazy, but sometimes it can get me in the door of a busy practice for a little thing that needs attention.)

I'm thinking the googlebot doesn't know what it's supposed to be looking for around here.

Which is just fine, because we enjoy a readership that's brighter, on average, than the googlebot.

(It's late, and I'm having difficulty believing I just used 'googlebot' in a serious sentence.)

@NinjaSerge - If you sew or can persuade someone else to do so, you can find a variety of costume patterns from the major pattern manufacturers (Simplicity, Butterick, McCalls) at your local fabric retailer (Jo-Ann Fabrics is the only one in my area other than EvilMart, but I hear tell other places still have independent fabric shops.) A hood isn't difficult to sew (usually two pieces with a seam over the crown of the head) and adding a lower-face covering scarf piece is fairly straightforward.

@64

In my (own, limited) experience that particular usage is very unevenly distributed by racial/ethnic subculture. (Translation: in the south, where I grew up, White People Don't Do That - the refrain of my childhood. It's taken me a very long time to begin to understand racial privilege when my earliest experience of whiteness was about all the interesting things White People Don't Do.)

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