Karen C🥨👵🏻🌲🏖️ @gamehawk@mastodon.social

This Mexican restaurant has the best WiFi network name.

Free advice to dudes and dude-presenting folks: don't follow-and-DM ladies and lady-presenting folks with yer zero-post account. You gotta make some public posts (yes, even if it feels like no one is listening to you yet) to show you're a real human being. Then you participate in a *public* conversation. Then maybe you can DM.

(j/k never DM)

DANGIT UNICODE

Oh, and of COURSE because those clueless emails go out with non-blind CC, someone finally did a (non-ironic, I think) reply-all. 😆

I mean, I've had kids like little T, who started mid-session, spoke no English, and just cried from drop-off to pick-up... but she was perfectly happy to have someone read Plaza Sésamo books to her even if she didn't understand a word they were saying *and* they weren't particularly good at doing the Muppet voices. So yeah, I'll be there the first day.

(Can't stay all day, gotta give my own kid a ride TO COLLEGE)

Read-to-littles update: last Friday was the last day for the kids' session; this week and next will be teachers getting the classroom ready, meeting with parents, etc.

But *yesterday* the training coordinator sent out an email telling us not to report next week (I guess we were to show up this week and read to teachers? 😉) *or* the week after to "give the students the opportunity to settle into their classrooms."

But... *my* teachers begged me to come on the FIRST day back, two days EARLY.

A dev Slack I'm in just declared that Ubuntu's Toy Story name is "Debian Forky" and... yeah, it is, isn't it?

Pretty sure it's still legal to drill for oil inside city limits, though. It was five years ago, at least.

Me to Carl: We should probably think about moving back to Wichita to take care of your mom and brother. There's a Democratic governor these days, state might be turning around.

Wichita: OH HEY WE'RE BANNING SOLAR AND WIND POWER IN THE WHOLE COUNTY

Me: ... okay maybe Kansas City would be close enough. Close to the state line.

TIL Tim Pool lives in Deptford though. 🤷

Honestly if you'd asked me to bet whether the Inquirer (Philly locally-owned) or Courier-Post (Cherry Hill Gannett) would have the more fine-people-on-both-sides take on it, I would have bet on the Courier-Post. Yet here we are.

https://www.courierpostonline.com/story/news/2019/08/20/south-jersey-groups-aim-shut-down-minds-event-pitman-nj-bill-ottman-tim-pool/2061575001/

So... they're withholding flu vaccines because "it's only short term detention" at the same time they're petitioning for longer detention (which they're doing anyway).

I'm not sure exactly when history is going to say "this is the start of the genocide" but I'm absolutely sure it's going to be at or before this point.

Huh. Local paper says the Pitman theater...

"has canceled a controversial event about race relations that its organizers said was aimed at 'combating racism, violence, and authoritarianism.'

"The one-day conference, sponsored by Minds.com, a cryptocurrency social networking site, had been scheduled..."

Guest list is... quite a lineup. Includes Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula and Andy Ngo so... hooboy.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/new-jersey/new-jersey-pitman-broadway-theatre-race-discussion-20190820.html

what

"Heat Wave is a revolutionary yarn that is activated by sunlight, even on a cloudy day, to keep you up to 12°F warmer. Upgrade your outdoor gear and stay warm at sporting events, everyday outside activities or even walking your dog."

https://www.joann.com/red-heart-heat-wave-yarn/zprd_16911638a.html

Ah, the big boom was maybe-probably the Cherry Hill townhouse strike mentioned in this article. https://6abc.com/weather/severe-storms-leave-trail-of-destruction-across-parts-of-nj/5479463/

I didn't see significant wind but wow, apparently a lot of *big* trees came down. Didn't think we'd had enough rain to saturate the ground but then again with the humidity we've had lately, maybe it's just not drying out.

(Also compLETEly unrelated but the kid responded to discovering a tiny puddle of water in front of the sink in the middle of the night by putting a half-size paper towel on top of the puddle, with the result that I had to ask just why there was a giant puddle in front of the sink with a saturated paper towel in it. Turns out the landlord's amateur repair of the p-trap failed. As expected, which is why I don't know why the bucket wasn't under it in the first place.)

In the course of rearranging things to make space on the kitchen counter, the dish drainer got put on the floor and, well, I guess we could have predicted that.

(It needed washed anyway...)

#cats #catsofmastodon #oliviathetortiepoint

It sprinkled on me on the way to the post office, grocery store, and gas station, and the skies opened up between the gas station and the second grocery store, and it was back to sunny by the time that brief trip was over. Tiny but INTENSE weather we're having today.

Oh, and the rain was apparently confusing enough to make one of the resident snapping turtles decide to cross the road to the other pond; some presumably-my-neighbors had just given it a boost up over the curb.

I walked out the door into the sunny humid weather earlier and was greeted by a thundercrack that I *felt* (like you feel fireworks) and that knocked dead leaves out of the treetops. After the initial crack it rumbled for a good half a minute while I confirmed that okay *yes*, there are some dark clouds on the tree-hidden horizon, so it was probably not literally a bolt from the blue or the Philly refinery blowing up (again!).

Gotta say, I went ahead and turned on a Philly radio station anyway.

Semi-related: one of the employees at my grocery has a vehicle-wrap type ad, which is currently advertising WHYY... which is a public radio station and therefore doesn't carry advertising itself, which makes using questionable forms of IRL advertising seem particularly weird to me. (I don't know why bus wrap is less weird than private car, other than buses don't park in places where billboards wouldn't be legal.)

Suddenly remembered the other day when I was driving and pulled up behind a car with a big advertising sticker in its rear window, one of those "You read this ad, why not advertise with us?" type things, except... the graphic on the side of it was an inverted 👌 and I'm like... really? Was that a made-you-look thing, or what?

I can't remember the URL (so: bad job, advertiser) other than it was a dot-co instead of a dot-com (so: clearly not a top-shelf one *aside* from the questionable logo).

*door slams open, Karen runs into middle of room*

"WHAT IF MASTODON HAD THE ABILITY TO SET PEOPLE TO ALWAYS-CW'D OR ALWAYS-HIDE-IMAGES AS A MUTE TYPE?!"

*Karen runs out of room*