I'd like to add my voice to those saying to treat Soren's comment with care. It's hard to do when you're feeling so vulnerable, I know. For what it's worth, the community has your back.
Right now, hold fiercely on to the fact that you love him.
Happy birthday, Velma, and may this be the last such a one for you. I know last year's really sucked too.
Hold fast. We're praying for you.
Serge @42:
Incorruptible?
Sea-green, baby. Though people are welcome to try.
JaNell @13:
I did a lot of research about ten years ago, when I was just coming to understand SAD, and the consensus then was that it was the quantity of light rather than its spectrum that was important.
My light box (it's an OutsideIn Sunbeam Max, which appears to be a defunct product from a defunct company now) uses very bright fluorescent bulbs, and works wonders for me. I also use a bright but ordinary desk lamp at work.
I understand that the latest research indicates that blue LEDs are the thing. I haven't tried them yet. But I'm unconvinced that full-spectrum is necessary, and it is expensive.
DDB @35:
I would herd the thread to keep it on-topic. Not that I've seen the thing—so I'm not part of any critical mass—but I am by character and inclination spoiler-proof.
Hey, would people be interested in a spoileriffic Dr Who thread? I'm seeing comments in various threads about it; is there critical mass for a discussion of its own?
Anyone for Sir Thomas More?
Assertio Undecim Doctorum (In Defense of the Eleven Doctors) and Responsio Ad Dominum (A Reply to the Master)
albatross @918:
FWIW (for those who haven't noticed from my other posts here) I'm both Catholic and a supporter of gay marriage.
I am too, both, and I don't think you need your mirror for this one. (There are churches that have argued this, or similar things, but since they're not "mainline", they pretty much get ignored.)
I think that, specifically for the Catholic Church, there is a worthwhile argument that the ship of trying to limit the recognition of secular marriage to the boundaries of sacramental marriage has long since sailed. There's already a disconnect, and the fault line is remarriage after divorce.
To assert that they cannot run a charitable organization if the laws force them to recognize marriages that we consider sinful is to assert that they cannot run a charitable organization.
albatross @912:
From the article you linked to:
Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.
Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.
Quaere: does Catholic Charities have a problem with extending employee benefits to the spouses of divorced and remarried staff? Does the legal requirement to do so stop it from working in DC?
If not, why not?
(I don't expect that you have an answer, but that's the question that springs immediately to mind.)
Prayers, yes, though by the time I woke up and saw this, some of it's thanksgiving as well.
So a friend bought, sight unseen, a €25 box of old clock parts, with an eye to some steampunk accessories. She expected that most of it would be dull, or small, or modern, but when she opened it, it was a treasure trove of brass gears.
I offered to bind her a steampunk journal in exchange for some of them. (I could have just asked, of course, but that deprives me of the pleasure of binding her a steampunk journal.) So she came over this afternoon with a box labeled "Gears for Abi".
Nice. Thirty-odd pieces, mostly on spindles of some sort. We spent the afternoon cleaning them in ketchup and spinning them like tops. I've managed to clip the spindles short on enough of them to make nice impressions in leather book covers. And now I'm contemplating this bowl of assorted gears on sticks.
I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, but I think it's going to be fun.
I poked PNH on IM (because I was a little worried too), and Teresa is fine. Just busy, and the day snuck up on her.
lorax @813:
Yes, but my original suspicion was not just that the story wasn't true, but that Patrick and Teresa made it up themselves.
I should not have doubted, of course. It was already an evening of improbabilities, as one should have after a successful dragonquest.
Elliot @814:
Your Google term is bakfiets. Go!
When Patrick and Teresa were visiting us, they mentioned that carrots were not always orange, and indeed that orange carrots were bred by the Dutch. Not having heard any of this before, I immediately suspected a hoax. It was just too neat to be true.
The point where this crosses into paranoia is when they showed me a website on the subject, and my first thought was, domain names are cheap.
dcb @802:
Kids too old for bicycle seats and still a bit young to make reasonable speed on their own bikes are a problem. How popular are those "trainer" add-ons to fit on the back of the bicycle so the child also pedals?
They're not unknown, but they're not common. Before we sold ours to someone in Amsterdam, there were three in our village of 9,000 people (that I saw, anyway; there may have been more.)
The more useful ones hang off the back rack in such a fashion that you can also mount a bike seat on the rack, as well as panniers. Add a smaller seat in the front, and you can take three kids to the supermarket.
Elliot @803:
Many of the bikes in the "Multiple riders on one bicycle" section of this page are mom bikes. You mount a baby or toddler-sized seat on the steering column and an older kid-sized seat behind.
Mom bikes also tend to have step-through frames, and very wide kickstands.
dcb @789:
As for living without a car, there is a half-way house: we have a car, but except on very rare occasions take public transport (or train plus bicycle, for me) to work, and often use the bus to get to the nearest town (or again, if it's just me, bicycle).
We were just on the other side of the line for years: we didn't own a car, but we'd rent one every month or so for trips or large shopping expeditions. We used to say that if someone gave us a car, we still wouldn't take it.
The first time someone did*, we held firm and sold it. The second time, it was my in-laws, firmly suggesting that Martin have a company car from the family business so that we could go visit them more often (and he could therefore keep their computers in working order.)
And what I feared would happen, happened. Martin is a car addict. More and more, when there was a choice between the bus and the car, we'd take the car. I was not, at that point, licensed to drive in the UK, so I still took the bus everywhere†.
We had to get a car when we moved here, because we ended up with several journeys that would take too long on bike or bus. For about six months, we had two kids who had to be ten minutes' drive/twenty minutes' kid-cycle apart at the same time, twice a day. A car lets you turn that kind of impossibility into mere inconvenience.
At the moment, we're heavily dependent on the car for the kids' complex schedules: medical appointments, swimming lessons and karate lessons all require people to be at specific places in shorter timescales than can be managed on cycles, particularly with two kids too old for the standard front-and-back child seats they do here‡. Martin does the grocery shopping in the car, but I, given the choice, do it by bike.
-----
* We won a people-carrier from Fuji Film. It was one of those things where there's a little slip of paper inside the box that told you if you'd won an instant camera, a Mac, or one of four cars they were giving away. If anyone tells you no one ever wins those things? They do.
† Edinburgh is, in many places, relatively bikeable; when they took most of the urban train lines out they turned the tracks into walking/biking paths. My area was not on that network, and cycling on the street is nasty, dull, brutish and life-shortening.
‡ Toddler seat just behind the handlebars, seat for an older kid on the rack at the back. It's all part of the wonder that is the Dutch "Mom bike".
PJ Evans @743:
Sadly, the UK has come down with an epidemic of malls and out of town shopping centres, and they're widely perceived as destroying both the traditional high street and village shops. Combine that with the gradual degradation of rural bus schedules and the slow strangling of the train network, and fewer and fewer people outwith the big cities can exist without a car. Even car-free urbanites will find their style seriously cramped; you have to be poor or a fanatic to want to live without a motor vehicle of your very own. It's a matter of great controversy, but no one seems to have figured out how to reverse it. It turns out that people moan about going to big malls, but they do go. They moan about traffic, but only the poor take the bus (when there is a bus).
I have my own view about shopping in Britain. When I left, there were too many branches of too few chains, so that every high street looked exactly alike: Boots, Superdrug, McColl's, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, HMV, Waterstone's, Carphone Warehouse, Body Shop, New Look, Clark's, yawn, yawn*. The country was turning into less of a nation of shopkeepers and more of a nation of shop assistants.
I don't know what the economic crisis will have done to that, but I fear that it's simply shut chains down (Woolie's) and left nothing in their place, since the chains killed the culture where people started, and shopped in, local businesses.
Good thing I left. I was well on my way to being a curmudgeon.
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* It hit me the most strongly when I went back to St Andrews, where I'd spent a year studying, after about a decade away. Almost every interesting or unique business I remembered had been replaced by another outpost of British mercantile uniformity.
Fragano @722:
That pattern of city-visiting works in the Netherlands, too, though the car parks aren't generally underground. Most city centers are pedestrianized, so you park in a car park and do all your stuff afoot (if you must drive to the city in the first place).
Martin and I were talking about this last weekend, more in regard to city planning in the UK vs the Netherlands. The Dutch still don't do much out-of-town shopping; there are a couple of mall-type areas in Amsterdam (Arena, for instance), and Ikeas tend to be out of town, but most shopping is done in pedestrianized districts with houses above the shops, or even from street markets.
more generally:
There are layers of Catch-22 around walking. For instance, half the population of the city (women) won't want to walk for half the time (when it's dark) unless there's a sufficient density of population and lighting to make them feel safe. But, was with cycling, getting the critical mass to make them safe is very difficult to do, because it's dangerous.
Likewise, there's no interest in creating pedestrian-friendly areas unless there are pedestrians who will go there. And no one walks in cities without pedestrian-friendly areas.
Personally, I think the zoning laws need to change. We need more mixed residential and shopping districts, for instance, so that local residents form the seed population of foot traffic.
Xopher @719:
If after my death I experience walking up to a gate like that, with winged and haloed angels watching in the background, I will certainly go to the "Wrong Religion Entrance," since it's not at all what my religion leads me to expect!
I'm sure it would look completely different to you. You might also find that both entrances were so labeled, just to make it easy for you!
And @719:
Not a good market to rent out either?
Keep us posted.
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