RedBike23
I absolutely would like recommendations!!
Learning French. I bought some beginners books, I’m listening to French music on Spotify, and I’m trying to decide which TV show to watch to immerse myself in it a bit.
I don’t expect to become fluent, mostly I’m just tired of mispronouncing French words/phrases I find in text that is otherwise English. It seems like everyone else had a couple years of French in high school and I want to be at that level.
A corner of my master bedroom. It’s not so bad, in terms of how much space it takes, but it does make it so I have to shut everything off at night and then boot it all back up in the morning.
I bought this house in 2019 with no intention of working from home (I always wanted to WFH, but it never panned out with previous employers), only to finally snag a remote position in 2021. It’s good enough.
About 11k hours of EverQuest, 1999-2005. (I still consider it the best time of my life, too.)
That since I was pregnant it was time to let my career go.
My career is critical to my family’s ability to live a middle class life (and it’s critical to my sanity and happiness, but the person who gave me this “advice“ wasn’t really one for acknowledging or valuing mental health).
Did I write this? Especially the part about needing to emotionally prepare for a phone call and needing a script. I can't deal with phone calls... sorry, find some other way to reach me.
I personally hate having to "allocate bandwidth" to the event ahead of time. Like, I have to clear out all the other stressful things in my life so that this stupid appointment can have my full bandwidth for dealing with its bs. The worst is when the appointment or whatever it is exceeds the amount of bandwidth I allocated to it - like if they want me to come back or follow-up in some way it's probably just not going to happen because I just do not have the energy resources and capacity for the stress it causes.
I am super curious to know what the fixed issues are! I struggled to get into BOTW (I put maybe 20 hours into it over the course of a few months and then gave up?), and I think it was the constant weapon breaking and food prep that made the game feel like it was punishing me with chores, lol.
That’s clearly Raphael
I turn 40 next month and I've done everything right and I'm BARELY keeping up.
I got good grades in school. I did as much community college as I could and then my parents paid for the rest of my bachelor's. I worked hard at my jobs. I put myself through school for another degree so I could move up (and paid for it out of my savings, no loans). I had two kids and went back to work. I paid the crippling $3k a month to have them in daycare. I moved closer family to get their help after school. I drive a modest car and I live in a modest house. I have no vices - no drugs, no alcohol, no gambling. I cook my own food and do my own cleaning. I worked a "side hustle" for most of my 20s and early 30s (writing, making maybe 500-1k a month). I've saved everything I didn't spend on rent, food, and utilities. I've never bought a coffee, or traveled outside the US, or traveled much at all. I am in good health. I married a good partner, and he's a software engineer with no debt.
I literally did everything right, and yet we are behind on savings, we can't afford to repair anything but the absolute essentials on our home, and we're counting the days until we write our last daycare check so we can start... saving for college.
It's hard not to think that shelling out over $140k to the daycare over the past 7 years didn't have something to do with it.
And then there are my 79-year-old parents, watching my husband and I run this treadmill, and scratching their heads in wonder. We have so much less than they did at my age, and yet we have two incomes! How are we not living in absolute luxury?!
What a different world they lived in. Sometimes, when I feel like feeling bad, I remember that my dad's pension pays him more every month than I earn doing my 40 hour a week software developer job. A pension! Imagine being paid while not even working.
(It was definitely the kids that did us in - I often think about how much more secure we would be without the daycare costs.)