Backroads

One time I was in the donation line at the local thrift store and realized the car ahead of me was our family doctor. Waved hi, did some quick chitchat... and found myself wondering just what goodies he donated perhaps I should go spy for in there. There's an entire hobby of finding awesome deals at thrift stores. You often hear about "shop the thrift stores in the rich neighborhoods..." I discovered Thredup online and recently treated myself to a very nice Camilla tee for about fifty bucks instead of hundreds of dollars.

I think there's a lot of truth here, but I gotta say it also creates rather large cross-section of a pet peeve of mine. I am admin for a couple of buy nothing/local needs groups, and we have actual problems of ostensibly very poor people who are completely generous to the fault they can't take care of themselves. Now, I have no doubt some of the claims are pure fiction, but I also get the impression some are true. "I need groceries and dog food and money because I just gave all I had to my neighbor!" "I just adopted three starving cats and I have no means to feed them, please help!" If I'm honest with myself, I agree with the political compass quizzes that put me as pure moderate, but I agree with the conservative ideal of taking care of one's own as a value.

I did early morning janitorial to pay for living expenses after the incredibly stupid move I did to get a full-ride scholarship (gamed the split summer semester system with too many credits via a loophole via the aim of getting such n such GPA during it to factor into the math equation that would then provide me a full-ride scholarship. Worked. Cost me my soul and sanity). I loved early morning janitorial. My claim to fame was I cleaned Bednar's office. Oddly, my favorite thing to clean was the bathrooms. Met one of my best friends doing this job. And then I had the rest of the day to do stuff. Yeah, jobs like these are indeed generally meant to get you through to the next thing. But I also think of the quote from God on Bruce Almight "Some of the happiest people in the world go home stinking to high heaven at the end of the day."

For the life of me I can't remember the sitcom (probably Will & Grace), but the guest actor was Matt Damon if memory serves me correctly. His character was pretending to be gay in order to join some musical theater group and at the end had to give some impassioned speech about how straight men should be allowed to enjoys musicals too.

You're not wrong.

I'm just going to say thank-you for this thread. It was fairly idiot-friendly for the tariff debate. I still have no real opinion.

I honestly thought the Wicked movie was an incredibly piece of filmmaking and thought it was a strong contender for Best Picture. My kids are finally ending their Moana 2 phase and thank goodness. I still don't know what the plot is, but the music is awful.

This is what I tend to interpret. Slumbering and sleeping aren't bad things, but they certainly aren't exciting. It's the day to day (night to night?) stuff of a mortal world. No real sin involved, but that's just it, isn't it? We can be leading mostly decent lives and still be at risk of getting caught off-guard. Like Carb said, the important thing is we recognize what is happening when it is happening because I think despite all the signs and warnings pretty much all will be caught off-guard to some extent. Will we have oil ready?

Every "behind the scenes" tale of this man has been nothing but impeccable. Truly a quality good human.

If I recall correctly, it was the last two plus something else entirely. There was definitely a hole that had been dug earlier in life. I mostly recall thinking "yikes".

I knew a person who kind of did make some tithing calculation adjustments. There was so much being taken out of their paycheck for this and that (can't remember the details, it was a highly unusual case) that the money for tithing-on-the-gross literally wasn't there, that calculation being more than the paycheck. So I generally don't grudge one's tithing calculations. I find it silly to nickel and dime it. But that goes for all sides of the spectrum.

It's an Amazon scam that uses (inappropriately) TRS for debt collection (which makes it tricky to detect). The reality is that Amazon is very picky and won't sell you anything if they don't have a payment. Apparently what I should have done was verify the debt with Amazon (apparently Amazon almost always knows nothing about it).

I'm pretty sure I just fell victim to a scam the other day. Less than a hundred dollars, but from what I'm learning that's how they rely on it.

Muriel who bakes her own birthday cake likes her monthly check.

1. Justified. 2. Probably not ideal, but the de-escalation/escalation scale isn't always so clean. Ideal isn't the right word. Probably necessary. 3. Unacceptable. 4. No idea. My husband actually teaches classes in this sort of thing but he went to bed so... 5. Honestly, this turned into Person A and Person B in my head, so same answers.

I've expressed before that perhaps Trump is an anti-Christ, but I don't really believe it. I think he's a red herring for something else. Then again, I also think the anti-vax movement is a secret combination plotting something, probably with the same big wigs behind vaccines for all I know, so I don't know if I can sensibly predict anything. But I agree we will have a much bigger problems than Trump.

Then it might be right up your ally! You don't get quite the same freedom as more traditional and proper homeschooling, but, hey, it's free, your kids are at home with you, and it's still more flexible than a school building.

Yes, it was in the paperwork. The one pause I will give is that there is a chance there wasn't enough in the paperwork. Some people need it explained more than others. However, this is in Utah and the state is very strict with charters that I could see the state saying don't make it so clear that it frightens away families and takes away their choice (we actually can't do some of the information other states can do because of this)

Elementary school. They've risen in popularity over the past few years. Ours is a public school, but I find the families who do best are the ones who want to homeschool but want it free and for the state to do most of the heavy lifting.

A coworker of mine was screamed at something fierce the other day by a parent (we're teachers for an online school.) Parent was upset the bull of the lessons were online because they're a screen-free household. Once again, note we are online school. If school choice options increase (and note In totally down with this) I do hope families bother to weigh their options.

I'm all for "This Little Light of Mine". And I am so for the clapping.

Yup. They don't give you time to think, they plan on the lizard brain, hit you where it hurts. I've heard of people who actively investigate scams finding themselves fooled. And a lot of people want to trust, want to protect their food name, or maybe just find it rude or problematic to not answer the phone. As for other types of fraud Gator mentioned, I think Utah Church members have certain weaknesses that put us in danger of being scammed. We really like our provident living. We want to prove we are successful at the commandment to work hard and provide for ourselves and others. Oh, something comes along that can get us living providently at a faster speed? (but surely not get-rich-quick because this is totally different). It certainly would be prudent to try it! Oh, and Brother So-n-So and Sister Whatsit come from good families and we don't want to hurt feelings by saying no.

But he says that would be too much trouble and wanted to help us get it all squared away!

My husband had the sheriff's call a few months' back. He was trying to be smart. He was looking up the guy's name. Now, my brother makes his side money from a scam-bait YouTube channel. He gets and shares a lot of the good stuff. When my husband was on the phone for this guy for thirty minutes, not letting me get a word in (scammers talk), I was suspicious. Finally my husband says he needs to go and withdraw money. I finally figured out what was happening and had to pull up a declaration on the computer of how the sheriff's department works before my husband calmed down. Our first clue should have been the mispronunciation of Weber County, to be honest. But my husband is smart and has dealt with scammers. But scammers just amp it up.

I hate to say "let's have a computer handle all this" but with today's communication and even AI tech, surely we can update a few procedures.