Im just here as a part of the pro-grinch movement. Fuck the presents and expectations of the season, it puts far too much guilt on people for the sake of marketing executives. Spend time on the people in your life, not money.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Mr Grinch here. Today’s been the sending of on-line cards to people who we met many years ago but with no subsequent connection. Why the f*ck am I bothering?. Mrs Floofah said, "we’d better stay in touch", me wtf! 🤬
I think there's a middle ground between grinch and consumerism.
With the adults in my life we've always kept it pretty low key, but present exchanges are fun. I try to get people to buy me stuff I need anyway, I haven't bought my own socks or T-shirts in years, I just get them for Christmas. There are socks and T-shirts for all budgets.
I don't buy for people outside parents, siblings, wife, and kids - and I just ask people what they want.
Oh, there absolutely is a middle ground but as a society we aren't anywhere near it under the guise of "its for the kids" or tradition. The kids don't need 20 more toys from the warehouse and 2$ shop that will be played with once then added to the pile.
Absolutely show your love and appreciation with something - but gifts are meant to be a small part of what the holiday should be.
Oh man the kids toys. I'd almost forgotten. We never did work out how to avoid relatives buying cheap fragile toys. Close relatives we screen ideas and so don't do too badly.
My family gets together a lot during the year anyway, so gifts and Christmas crackers are the only thing that makes Christmas special 😆
The best response I have makes people irrationally angry - "please do no buy the kids more toys they need for nothing. We plan on buying one good gift for them if you are interested in contributing". Otherwise x kid would be more than happy with a giant bowl of pasta, y kid would love a slab of salmon, and Z kid wants to go tidy a beach.
New trampoline, Xbox, holiday to raro will be remembered and used much more than a bigger pile of toys.
My go-to is lego. We have a pile of lego (I bought about 9kg off trademe), so any lego anyone buys isn't going to greatly increase storage requirements. The kids can have a set they play with and when they get bored the set will get tipped into the main pile. You can get $10 sets of lego and $1,000 sets of lego so there is one for any budget (unfortunately no one has gone with the Millennium Falcon option yet).
And the best thing about lego is I know it will still be getting used in 5 years time.
Unfortunately for extended relatives they tend to just buy stuff and not ask, but since we have immediate family under control I think we don't do too badly in terms of not filling the house with crap. There's only a small handful of inconsistent extended relatives that buy for the kids.
We also have some other kids to give hand-me-down toys to so have a path to get them out of the house too.
Ooo, lego is a great idea.
I'm glad I held off on upgrading to 0.19, now we have 0.19.1 because outbound federation wasn't working properly in 0.19.
I don't think I will do the update before Christmas, I'll wait and see if more issues are found, but will install to a test instance to see if I come across any issues.
What do you mean, you're supposed to do bleeding edge upgrades right before the holidays. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
Remember to wait til the end of the day, that way you can get everything important done early in the day and then just coast into the holidays.
Haha oh man for my private self hosted stuff it's hard fighting the urge to do updates just before bed. It's when I have free time, but inevitably the day I try to do a quick update before heading to bed is the day the update breaks everything and I need to restore from backup to get it working again 😆
Yup, I can see that happen to feddit.de
So, turns out my car might have blown a head gasket. Fun times. It's overflowing way too much coolant into the overflow tank, so possibly exhaust gases getting into the system.
I know nothing about cars, but I do know I had a friend blow a head gasket on his Subaru Legacy wagon, and it was gonna cost more in labour to fix than the car was worth. Hopefully your car makes it easier or you can do it yourself!
Definitely not, it's a late model diesel, mazda CX-5. I'd never get it back together if I did that.
It's also been doing the coolant thing for a while, so it's not getting any worse. I might just nurse it along for a while, you just need to remove the radiator cap and blow into the overflow pipe to push it back into the radiator.
Ah that's not a great situation then. Let's hope ignoring it works for you 😆
The loan is paid off in three years, I can probably drag it out until then.
Or set fire to it.
Break up day. Yay! 2.5 weeks of doing mostly manly man things in my manly man shed with my manly man tools. Might have some manly beers in between my manly projects. Gonna be awesome. One kid is off to Malaysia for a month, other one out camping doing young people stuff. Just me and wifey. Nice.
Exciting! Today I realised everyone else is finishing today and I'm working tomorrow with nothing to do because no one else is there. I guess I'll find something to do.
I used to love working the days in between Christmas and New Years. Hardest thing about it is not getting bored. I think I would get like two calls total over three days