The price of eggs in particular I haven’t noticed. I have been vegan for ten years, so I am over here trying to give people tips on how and where to replace eggs with other, cheaper stuff. I do anlot of baking and cooking, so I have tried all the swaps the internet recommended and have a pretty good idea which ones work.

However, the price of food as a whole is going up as well, and I don’t expect it to stop anytime soon. I am hoping to set up a ‘victory garden’ to try to help. If anyone else is looking into this, I recommend looking for an official victory garden guide that would have been issued for your particular area. I found one that was written by an agricultural professor at the University of Ithaca in NY, for example, and it goes over what crops and food preservation methods will work in my area. It will give you important information about temp tolerances, which is about to be more important than ever.

As someone who has suffered from night terrors and other disturbingly vivid dreams, I would recommend starting to do “wake checks”.

Set an alarm on your phone to go off every few hours at random times during the day. When the alarm goes off, do something that produces a reliable result, like turning a light on/off, turning on a faucet, checking the time on a clock, or pinching yourself. Make your checks as varied as possible, and do them in a different order from day to day, because you don’t want the results to become part of a pattern.

Once you are in the habit of doing that, start doing those checks any time something ‘out of the norm’ happens. What ‘out of the norm’ means is up to you, but essentially any time you think that something is weird or out of place, do a check. What you are doing is training yourself to check whether you are in reality or not.

Once you start doing that, you will probably continue that habit when you end up in a dream. However, these checks will not produce reliable results when you do them in a dream. Turning on the faucet won’t make it give water, the time will change drastically, lights won’t turn on when you flip the switch, etc. These are now your cues to see if you are awake or not. If one of these things ever DOES start to give reliable results in a dream, stop using it immediately and substitute a different one.

Once you have a way of determining if you are awake or not, you have a way to wake up. Most people wake up after realizing they are in a dream, and even if you don’t, realizing you are dreaming should result in a massive shift in what is happening in the dream.

One warning though: if you have night terrors where you end up paralyzed, you will want to have a contingency plan. My night terrors usually started in a situation where I was unable to move, and that is the main reason I struggled with them for over a decade. The only thing that helped there was meditation where I would focus on “feeling” my fingers and toes and how they moved, and then getting myself in the habit of using that meditation as an anxiety response. Doing that in a dream will usually end up waking me up because it forces my brain to focus and eventually move my body irl.

I am short with a somewhat femme figure, sparse but obvious facial hair, a flat chest, and a voice that sounds somewhere between a very gay man, a 13 year old boy, and an older woman. I am very visibly crossing many lines that people look for when trying to figure out how to address someone. Meaning, in a time when attacks on trans people and our rights are very quickly ramping up, I am in more danger of harassment and assault than I have been in the last few years.

As far as who is looking out for me: I am, that is part of my goal, but I also have a husband and a few friends who I can ask for help. However, I am in a slightly better position in life than most trans people in this country, since I live in a blue state that is (probably) unlikely to strip me of my rights. Hence my focus on helping others. There will probably be a lot of people coming here for medical treatment, and I want to make sure I help in any way I can.

As a visibly trans person: survive, and help as many other people survive as I can.

Having two dinners this year. My mother in law came over on Christmas Day, we had a Field Roast, garlic smashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, brandied cranberry sauce, and boozy nog, with plenty of cookies for dessert. It was a nice time, though a bit bittersweet as this is the first Christmas since my father in law passed.

This Sunday we are having friends over for another dinner, and I am making veggie pot pie, fondant potatoes, green beans in garlic butter, the rest of the cranberries, and ricotta cheesecake for dessert. It won’t be a huge crowd, just doing dinner and some board games, so looking forward to that.

Anything that was a major thing in your life, good or bad, can be missed in some way once it is gone. The trick is to remember that quite a bit of that feeling is missing the predictably of daily life, not necessarily missing the thing itself.

I was also kicked out, though it was during my college years, and there are still times I find myself missing my parents, even almost 10 years later. The feeling isn’t as strong, and it is mostly just me lamenting the fact that I will not have a lot of experiences most people consider universal, such as having family to visit for holidays, or having someone to talk to no matter what you have going on in your life.

It is a bit like grief. The parents you thought you had are gone, even if they are physically living, and you had no choice in the matter. The feeling will come and go, it will change over time. But it will get easier.

Saint Francis of Assisi did this. He renounced his family name, inheritance, and (according to legend) the clothes on his back when his dad took issue with him giving alms. He spent the rest of his life wandering with a small group of other penitents and providing comfort to the sick, especially those with leprosy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi?wprov=sfla1

C.S. Lewis, specifically The Screwtape Letters. I had been raised very conservative Catholic, and this book was my introduction to moral philosophy, as odd as that may sound given the overtly religious nature of it. The idea that morality has nuance, that an action can be wrong and still not damning, or ‘virtuous’ and still evil, was a new idea to me in my early teens.

While it would take me several more years to really start learning more definite philosophical concepts, that book was the first one that actually challenged me to ask myself why I believed the things I did, and made the case that blind, unchallenged faith was not faith at all. I started paying more attention to the things I had previously accepted at face value, and that examination would lead to me leaving the church and Christianity entirely later on. I still have faith of a sort, but it is more a faith in humanity and an undying and unifying spirit of community than a religion.

Now I have read quite a bit more in terms of philosophy, though not as much as I would like. All thanks to one book about demons trying to send a man to hell.

I was in NYC for Pride the other year and got a sample of a cannabis drink made by a new-at-the-time company Cycling Frog. Flavor is good for a seltzer type drink, and the inebriation level is tailored to be about equal to 1-2 alcoholic beverages, which makes it easy to dose. Hubby and I loved it and bought a couple of cans on the spot. They are now available in dispensaries near us, and we still pick up a case every few months.

When I was about 12 and searching the local paper to learn local rent costs. I was looking with the plan that I would move out at 16 and take my sister with me so we could escape the abuse we were suffering from our mom.

Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.

Avocados and peppers to make guacamole 😋

Either pumpkin pie or apple pie are my favorites!

Thanksgiving is for pies in my family, any other desserts wait until Christmas.

When recipes call for you to cook an item in a pan without first adding oil, they say to toast it to indicate that you are applying dry heat to it. For example, most Indian recipes call for toasting whole spices in a dry pan before grinding. That is also why you can toast marshmallows over an open flame.

It just irritates my mouth. May be oral allergy or just a reaction to the enzymes in the pineapple. It isn’t as bad as my reaction to wine and vinegar though, so I have to see more specialists to figure that out lol.

Not really? I actually get confused if people use mixed up idioms or other weird turns of phrase. It is really only this food item in particular.

I also like my ice cream to be soup lol! Pineapple on pizza is okay, but I can only have small amounts of pineapple. The rest are odd, but at least you know what you like!

No, we grew up in the same region of the same state and haven’t moved from there. Most of our friends are native to the region as well. I have no idea why I call it something different, it is the term I have used all my life. Even my sister calls it a ‘grilled cheese’!

According to my husband and all my friends, the weirdest thing about me is my name for a sandwich.

Apparently, everyone else calls it a ‘grilled cheese’. I have always called it by it’s proper name, a ‘toasted cheese’.

If you make it in a panini press, then it is a grilled cheese. But if you make a sandwich by buttering each side and toasting it in a pan on the stove until the cheese melts, then it is a toasted cheese. But every time I say ‘toasted cheese’, people look at me as though I have grown another head.

Yes, I even passed my driver’s test in a manual while needing to do a 3 point turn on a hill. I am almost 30, born and raised in the suburbs of New York.

I haven’t driven manual in years, ever since that car fell victim to black ice and a guard rail, but I have done recent test drives of manuals without stalling, so I guess it is something you never forget once you know how.