NightSG

So in other words, it's equal in importance to The Great and Holy Gospel of the White Shirt.

Y'mean like when my former HT companion couldn't remember the names of an inactive couple we were supposed to check up on, even though he'd been their HT for over a year when they were active? My suggestion that we be honest and address them as "Brother and Sister Potential Headcount" wasn't well received.

I've included a chart to help you out. (Though I'd note that the forearm red zone doesn't apply to military unit insignia.)

Problem with that movie is that Phil can get away with anything. No aging at all, for him or any of the ~2700 women in Punxsutawney. No worries about disease, unwanted pregnancy, death, jealous boyfriends, jealous husbands, having to call her in the morning, etc. Then he finally does the "right" thing and...back to aging. Though, granted, Andie MacDowell has aged quite nicely.

Someone hasn't dealt with the Dallas version of Southern Baptists. It was, by far, the less violent of the possibly effective options, and mostly inspired by the fact that their actions weren't particularly unlike the woman who triggered that response in the movie. Apparently, to their minds, wearing a charcoal gray trenchcoat and fedora in a cold, pouring rain is an invitation for people to immediately start telling you you're going to hell and your only chance is to join their church, then start asking personal questions.

Last time someone tried to get me to go to their Southern Baptist den of hypocrisy, I used something more based on Colin Firth's lines from the church scene in Kingsman. Worked well, though I'm not sure you'd want to use it in a place you spend much time.

One thing you should do is look over your daily process; are you making more work for yourself than necessary? For example, my ex wife would get extremely picky about "machine wash cold with like colors" and such to the point that she was often washing 3-4 items in a 4.0 cubic foot washing machine. A few relatively minor wardrobe changes and being less picky about that cut the number of loads per week by more than half, saving water, time and detergent; it's a lot less effort to wash a dozen things at once than three loads of four things each. When it was just the two of us, she would do the same with the dishwasher, running it less than half full after every meal. Look at combining kitchen prep time too; depending on the recipes, it often doesn't add too much time or effort to go ahead and get at least part of another meal prepped while you're doing dinner, then stick it back in the fridge or the freezer for an easy evening later in the week. (Anyone who has worked in a decent commercial kitchen will have tons of tips on things like keeping sliced fruits and vegetables fresh for a couple of days in the fridge, keeping ready-to-cook meat from freezer burn or fridge dry-out, etc.) Do you have close neighbors with kids around he same age? Even trading off for an hour or two can be really helpful, besides giving them another playmate to keep them occupied during those times. Watching one or two extra for two hours is a lot less hassle when it means you get two hours of the other parents watching yours while you run errands or catch up a chore that yours get in the way of. (My oldest was terrible about grabbing for sharp and/or hot things, so a 5 minute repair with a soldering iron, torch or razor knife needed 20 minutes of setup to gate off the area and make sure she was safely occupied first.)

Why not? It balances the knee-highs rolled down to the ankles.

Some hot or cold places, it's not that unusual to wear an athletic base layer (like UnderArmor IsoChill) under regular clothes. It has multiple advantages, including dispersing sweat a bit before it gets to the outer layer, so your shirt doesn't show armpit or seat belt sweat spots. You could look for the cheap WalMart versions (or the good ones if you want the full thermal effects) in colors that go with your outfits.

You know, I've heard that if you play Nickelback songs backward, you'll hear mind-controlling Satanic messages. Which is still better for your soul than playing them forward.

If you can find the most convenient dumpster to the end of a delivery route, the carriers generally don't take their leftovers back to the office. Turned out that was a block down from one apartment I lived in in Dallas, and with a little practice, I could strip a dozen papers of their coupon sections, one Sunday comic section and one local events guide in about a minute. We'd clip as many of the coupons as we were pretty sure we could use before they expired, then drop the rest of the stack in the laundry room of the apartment complex, where it would quickly dwindle to a few $0.10 off >$5 product ones.

Only if we're such utter fools as to ruin the best meat and torture the animal with such a poor hunting technique. Headshots with rifles would still be the only humanely efficient way to dispatch a pig for food. That much is apparent from his Nickelback Fan Club Life Member t-shirt.

No. Your punctuation was far from correct.

You claimed that people respect you because they find you useful and reliable. I provided three examples of people I find useful and reliable, while having virtually no respect for any other aspect of their character. One of the three, I'd consider flat out depraved in every other meaningful way that comes to mind; she's cheated on four husbands, given four children (by four other men she never married) up for adoption, (ok, I do respect her refusal to abort any of them) been to prison for felony theft twice, and brags about sleeping with a guy she can't stand just long enough to convince him to buy her a car. (Actually, that's just the latest of her boasts of what she can get guys to do for her with sex. The 23-year list would take a while to go through.) To the point that I would never recommend that anyone else trust her under any circumstances, and yet, for some reason, she's never treated me as she has even others who have done more for her. And yes, she's well aware of my opinion of her life choices as I am of her opinion of mine. It's actually kind of handy, as we both know, when the other asks for help, all other reasonable options have been exhausted.

Irrelevant; just because I can depend on someone doesn't mean I particularly respect anything about them other than their reliability. Frankly, the top three people outside my family that I know I can count on to do everything in their power to help me any time I really need it are a pothead, a crystal meth burnout and a neurotic (as confirmed by a court-ordered psych eval) slacker. Certainly no paragons of any virtue other than loyalty, but they are reliable, and I would do or have done the same for them. (And yes, either way, we're likely to be yelling at each other at some point about our respective and continuing lifestyle choices as they pertain to whatever emergency we're dealing with, generally with a great deal of obscenity and escalating to as much hurtful insult as we can think of, as we're doing what needs done. Yes, it's dysfunctional, but actually fairly tame compared to the last 8-9 months of my marriage...and my ex wife was never reliable.) $2,000 for a trip to Israel? Unless you live in Egypt or they're being smuggled both ways in crates, that's a great deal. Sending a Scout to National Jamboree is $975 and that doesn't include travel costs or anything else the troop does with the travel time, which usually includes at least a few hundred more in admissions to various museums and such. Adding it all up, it's easily well over $2,000 for a few days in DC and a week of camping in WV. Because providing a once in a lifetime opportunity for their children is the sort of thing that most parents earn money to do. After all, couldn't you provide a few hundred pounds of rice each year to the starving people by making your kids' clothes yourself, using only the cheapest products from Dollar Tree instead of the fancy WalMart brands, etc? Remember that having 2,000 calories a day and so much clean water that you think nothing of peeing in it daily makes you unbelievably rich and wasteful in the eyes of a significant number of people. Sure, I've been back to DC since Jamboree, but it'll never be quite the same as doing it at 13, with 3 friends I'd known since kindergarten and 32 more I'd only met a few weeks before during the preparation campouts. My family wasn't rich by any means, and I suspect my grandparents got creative to come up with some of that. Still, it was one of the most significant positive events of my childhood.

I'm not seeing how "things not working out" and abuse or adultery are somehow exclusive of one another. Those are pretty much the main reasons things wouldn't work out in a marriage that's made it past the first couple of years.

Children don't even get those exceptions, though; if one's child becomes abusive prior to adulthood, there's really very little that can be done apart from having them institutionalized, and even that depends on having far more clear evidence than simply divorcing an abusive spouse.

Not all that rare. Off the top of my head, I know two women, one man and a married couple with physical or psychological issues that render them permanently unsuitable for parenting, while otherwise no less functional than many, to the point that I've known one of the women and the husband in the couple for most of my life and only found out in the last few years why they never had kids. Well, not everyone feels so wonderful as you in only their own company. We're stuck with merely a deity who must pale in comparison to even your reflection in a mirror, so we seek the companionship of another human for a myriad of reasons. Sex is generally one of those reasons, but very rarely the primary one, or we'd all just marry the first attractive person willing to put out and be happy with them.

Wow. I'm so glad the rest of us don't have to live in your little fantasy world where people who are permanently incapable of raising children are deemed unworthy of having a partner.

This. Unfortunately, far too few, though. My HS, for example, back in the mid 1990s when a perfect SAT score really meant something, had two in one year. A couple years after that, one particular teacher retired, and it's not been the same since. Really? I seem to remember a story about a guy who followed all God's commandments perfectly, and I don't recall anything about Him being socially inept. Well, maybe you should have let her out of the basement a lot sooner, then. Some parents forget about things like that, but it's not that hard to come up with better social activities. An old friend worked with a couple from Argentina, so his homeschooled kids and several others they knew got tango lessons instead of dodge ball for PE, and instead of a prom, they all went to a full-on milonga. Not only can the dresses be even more elaborate, but none of them were stuck doing the Penguin Shuffle and trying to look cool. So what do you think has kept her from changing all these years? If your "homeschooling" is just sitting around the house doing lesson plans, no. OTOH, a lot of people put daily real-life experience into it. For example, a few years ago, there was a couple travelling by bicycle with their three kids from Barrow Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego. Those kids were getting geography, math, economics, language and culture lessons firsthand. And no worries about childhood obesity. Somebody's got to say it... Um, no. What they heard was, "I'm a weirdo." Nobody wants to go to the jiggly room with some dude that's going to try to order chocolate milk. Interesting; I have a friend who describes Baptist church services as being about as interesting as watching flies...uh...mate. Maybe you should recommend that girl if you ever get the Baptist wanna-be-missionaries running around your neighborhood. Also, inaccurate in my experience; whorehouses charge money for...that, and crack never really caught on here. Guess that's why my HS sweetheart ended up becoming a meth whore a couple years after we split up instead of a crack whore.

That's why I could never be a judge. That travesty of "communication" would look like a murder scene with all the red pen, and it would be sent back with a recommendation that the "educated" lawyer hire a 4th grade English teacher to check all of his work. I'm pretty sure the legal profession clings stubbornly to that hideous structure in hopes that it will make their inability to write properly less obvious.

It's a little of both; I notice a lot of South Americans tend to make various types of contact during a conversation, but it's also an aspect of martial arts in general. When you grapple with various people, (and all three of the dojos I've attended on any sort of regular basis mix up the sizes often because in self defense, you want to know what will work on someone twice your size, and you want to see it really work) hands, faces and pretty much all other body parts end up in all sorts of places. Thus, there's rarely a second thought to touching the places you're talking about when describing a technique or listing off your latest aches and pains, unless they're really off-limits-except-by-total-accident-or-necessity places. After a while, it's not really much different from talking to a medical professional who has seen 8-10 people's private bits already today and describes something appetite-destroying without realizing how others will take it. (I dated an OB/GYN nurse for a while, and it got so bad I had to stop her every time she started talking about work at the dinner table. You don't want to know what sorts of things are commonly found there.)

Unless translating for live closed captions, why not just give it a second listening afterward, when he can pause and rewind as needed? I know it takes them up to a few hours to post the video and audio to the website, but I'd think they could have it to people performing official GC functions like transcripts and translations within minutes of each talk ending, and certainly within minutes after the session. (Assuming the breaks between talks, music etc. are edited into the continuous video afterward, rather than recording to two (or four, if one wants immediate access to audio-only files) separate devices, one splitting after each talk, hymn or prayer, and the other running through the whole session.)

You're no fun. These things should be settled with knife duels.

Because some people keep putting stuff off if not given specific deadlines.