Time is the coin of your Life.

It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.

Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

And when you spend it, spend it wisely so that you get the most for your expenditure.

~Carl Sandburg

Thank you for seeing me. Some days, the worst is the feeling that all of the struggle is not only insignificant in the end, but also invisible. I think of all of the rest that are in situations like me and that I’ll never know them.

Rough patch.

My wife is going through chemo for colon cancer. Prognosis looks good. But the treatment is hell. Halfway through next week.

Her aunt lives with us. She has Parkinsons. Starting to really slide. Needs bathroom help every 2 hours - 24x7x365. No one sleeps much here. She’ll need to go into assisted living real soon now. Will she live longer than her money? Maybe.

My kid is 14. Good kid. Smart. Well-intentioned. But 14 is hard. And he’s a total slacker.

My mom just had gallbladder surgery at 80. She’s recovering well. But lives on her own and needs extra attention. We all worry she will need to go into assisted living, too. But she’s mostly broke. Not good.

The place I work was bought out a few months ago. My job is likely safe through the end of the year. But after that… well, we all know how it usually goes. At least my wife’s chemo will be covered until then.

I’m over 60 and overweight with HBP. No heart attack… yet. But that can’t be too far off.

So… plenty of pressure all around. But I manage to keep to the Stoics’ philosophy and accept the world as it is. Be patient and kind and let things happen as they happen. I keep trying to loose weight.

Either we get through this, or we don’t. But I can easily accept that we all did our best.

I have an old-school D&D campaign planned out. 1st-level, rural town. Like a reverse scooby-doo - small trivial problems like lost livestock resolve to hint at deeper mystical evil. As they level up they’ll find dark cults and demonic influences. The peaceful rustic countryside is far from what it seems.

But the players never get it together enough to set up a good date. The last campaign was fun, and they all said they wanted more. So I just keep writing more NPCs and extending the setting.

Starve? Die from lack of medicine/doctors? Get killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

That’s how I make sure I’m dreaming - I look for anything written. Written words in dreams are always changing and illegible.

I did this myself a few years ago. Put a planter full of coir in the closest bush I found it near. Fed twice a day on mealworms. Disappeared after 3 weeks. Mine was either a starling or a grackle.

I’d also consider Tempest.

Tuna Colada. No.

Or real orthotics. Mine completely changed my ability to get through my day.

I was a manager of a team with rotating 12 hour 6 to 6 shifts.

It was a datacenter. We had to staff the building 24x7x365. Billions of dollars of equipment, not to mention the transactions flowing through. No mistakes allowed here.

We paid $15/hour in 2010. Entry level. But it was a foot into the industry for someone without experience. Tasks were light security, walk the floor, swap drives, be on hand for server emergencies.

We used the rotation to onboard. No one did nights solo (no one else in the building) until they knew the job. Two weeks days, two weeks nights, back and forth. Two days on, one day off. 6-day rotation meant no one person was always stuck with weekends. And overtime pay every week.

We managed the schedule with a staff of 4.

Prior, the night shifts were handled by sysadmins who would work a day shift, go to the break room and get a few hours of sleep between tasks, then shower and go back on day shift. That really sucked. I did it for more than a year.

We had plenty of applicants every time a position opened. Folks tended to like the rotation as no one would get stuck with repeat holidays or all overnight. It sucked in a fair way to everyone. And if someone missed a shift (sick, emergency, etc.) I would have to fill the shift. It happened at least once a month. It was a good team. I liked all of my people, and after I got canned, they all wrote recommendations for me on LinkedIn.

Yes. Migraines. It wasn’t my parents but an early job in the late 80s. Dude next to me smoked so much it was a problem with fouling the equipment. We had to re-do jobs all the time for failure to clean the settled soot. I left the job and one of the reasons was the constant migraines.

I am in the local club and have two over-the-top scopes and still can’t pull it together.

I live in a NYC suburbs and work in another. It is possible to take a bus/train to NYC from each, but no direct way between them. So I drive the 18 miles. I have to cross a bridge. That makes for a traffic bottleneck. Without traffic, it’s less than 30 minutes. With traffic it can be 1.5 hours. One snowstorm made for a 5 hour ride home.

If you can find a new one. They are $45+ on ebay used. None of the usual US sellers has any.

Fly her apart then!

Nice mention of Feather. Excellent. I find them more effective but less forgiving than Astra. A superior tool for someone with experience. I always recommend Astra for a beginners first pack and Feather after the first month or 2.

There is plenty of room for common ground on that. I could not vote for her either. I have the unpopular opinion that she would have been much worse for the country. And I REALLY dislike T. (I didn’t vote for him either.)

Thanks for keeping this all civil. Voices like yours are needed to prevent the Reddification of Lemmy.

Hold up. OP asked a reasonable question and vector_zero gave his answer without being abusive or even unpleasant. The downvotes and your reply are not conducive to a reasonable discussion. This isn’t Reddit. We can be better.

Sure- I don’t see it like vector. But I’d like to think we could talk about it with civility.

In my experience, older folks see software/artistic piracy as less morally desirable.