#missbuster

[bomberqueen17]

moo

fabledshadow replied to your post “cow”

I was driving home down a back road and COW appearedfrom the fog in the middle of the road. So i turned on my hazards and shooed them off into the grass. no way to tell which of the many farms nearby they came from so i called the sheriff's department with the closest address on a mailbox and let them handle it lol

I would’ve done something if I’d been the only nearby motorist but like, I couldn’t even slow down because there were so many people behind me and like, around me, and stuff. And I thought, “someone equipped to deal with this will see it before I find someone equipped to deal with this.”

missbuster replied to your post “cow”

OOH HOME TIME how long do you get to stay?

I am here until Saturday and have to be back at the farm by Saturday afternoon because Farmkid wants to have A Potluck In The Woods so like. Yeah.

BUT!! Dude’s mom is back from California and quarantining but that means she can cat-sit, so maybe we’ll haul our precious bundle of fur-joy over there and then Dude can come with me to the farm for the week and get away from this house, where he’s been trapped alone since March, so like. Maybe! I get ! to have! a nice! time! for a minute! We’ll see.

And on other notes-- I guess the discussion of building me a tiny house has been revived; my eldest nephew is fascinated with tiny houses, and my dad is busy teaching him all kinds of stuff he never taught me. (I’m a bit salty; he “taught” me to weld and do carpentry mostly by showing it and by doing it and letting me help a little but he never really let me do much on those projects? and here the Grandson is getting to actually do, and all these years I just thought my dad wasn’t a great teacher, but no, it’s that he didn’t think a girl could learn. Argh!!! Anyway, I’m not that salty, I probably wasn’t good at learning either, and I’d rather have my nephew learn to build me a house than have to come up with the time to learn how to do it myself.)

So, maybe, maybe I really will eventually wind up with a space? IDK. IDK!

I’m going to spend as much time on the phone with the Dep’t of Labor today as I can spare. Their phone line opens in fifteen minutes and I’ve got the numbers punched in and am going to hit “go” as soon as the clock ticks over. Which is probably counterproductive, but. I’m so tired of being anxious and not knowing.

[bomberqueen17]

it’s really not a garden of kinders

missbuster replied to your post “LOLLL thursday”

What I do with kids this age is help them sound out the word, like segment and repeat the different sounds in the word, so they can map the sounds into letters they know. That might work well for Girl 5. 6 seems confident enough to use his own knowledge.

That’s mostly what I do. 

The boy is extremely confident, and one thousand percent completely wrong. We had just puzzled through the word “school” together, and not two minutes later, he was to write “school” on his sheet of paper, and he very confidently sounded out, sss, c-c-c, oo, oo, L!  and wrote down “sokoh”. What! Then I told him how to spell “house” and he rejected that and wrote “haws”, which at least has the benefit of having the phonemes in the right order, so I let it stand, but his justification was that his method was shorter, and I was like, the entire point is that someone else can read it, dear, and he seemed taken aback by this. So it’s a work in progress. He is definitely getting to be a more comfortable reader though so I’ll take it-- I think he’s improved in the last two weeks already. 

The girl, however, really likes to melt down emotionally-- like, she’s actually fairly tough most of the time, but once in a while she’ll pick something and flip out about it? You can kind of watch her work herself up over something she’s decided she needs to be upset about, and it’s weird, and her mom is not great at diverting her which is I think why she does it? She’s got this weird need to control her mother, which is bizarre-- anyway, I can usually head her off from this by alternating being stern with being silly, but I’ve just sort of developed this feeling when we’re doing writing stuff-- often, what she’ll flip out about is that something she’s done a thousand times is suddenly “too hard” and she “can’t do it”, so if I try to make her do something too challenging when she’s not in the mood, it’s this huge pointless stupid fight. So I’ll make deals with her before there’s any sign of upset, and I’ve been working with her on helping her write by making her do all the words she knows already, and then I’ll make her sound out the ones I’m sure she can get, and then if I know there are non-phonetic bits or a word is more than seven letters long (and not a compound of shorter words she knows) I’ll just give it to her.  (The problem in this is that of course I’m a 40 year old woman fluent in English, and I don’t remember learning to read, and a lot of times I don’t realize a word doesn’t make any phonetical sense at all until I’m halfway through it. And I’m sure I’m giving away too much, but I’m mostly just trying to get her to come along on momentum so we can do more cool stuff, so.)

In the evenings after the kids go to bed we’ve been hearing a lot of talking over the upstairs hallway baby monitor and tonight MathMom finally found out what’s been going on:

They’re homeschooling their stuffed animals. Every night after bed, the boy sets his up and gives them ninja lessons and then sleeps during their recess. The girl sets hers up and is teaching them to read.  😭😍

[copperbadge]

janedrewfinally replied to your post “Welp, next week work is going to mandatory work-from-home for two...”

Sam, good luck! (and send Cryptid photos!)

ALWAYS. So much plaid, so many furry daughters. 

clockways replied to your post “Welp, next week work is going to mandatory work-from-home for two...”

They will love it xD and then get to the point of OH MY GOD DAD go somewhere so we can SLEEP.

AS IF THEIR FAVORITE PLACE TO SLEEP ISN’T ON ME :D The hardest thing about working from home is that Polk doesn’t understand she’s not a kitten anymore and is too small to fit between my lap and my laptop when I’m working. 

missbuster replied to your post “Welp, next week work is going to mandatory work-from-home for two...”

I just found out I will have three weeks of non voluntary unemployment as I"m a teacher and they just closed our schools for an extra two weeks after march break sooooooooo

Nooooo! Do you get any kind of pay for that, or are you just screwed for the month? 

peoriarhetoriapeoria replied to your post “Girl Scouts Get Shit Done”

That's very impressive for Juniors. Especially since the fundraiser receipts were split between multiple charities. If you could send a thank you, I would encourage it. Girl Scouts send lots of cards etc over their troop activities, and being appreciated back would mean a lot.

That’s actually the second thing I checked after looking at the amount -- we record all our interactions with donors (if they attended an event, if we sent them a mailing, etc) and I wanted to make sure she was amply thanked. It turns out in 2013 we did indeed send her a handwritten thank you card and asked her to thank her fellow scouts as well for us. 

zorilleerrant replied to your post “Girl Scouts Get Shit Done”

If you'd still like to track her down, you should check where the nearest Girl Scout Council is to where the letter is from, if you have that info. They keep rosters, but they also tend to have regular contact with area scout leaders and can probably pass a message along pretty easily.

(Thank you also for the link!) I talked to my boss about it, because if we had her address in the system and had ever interacted again that would be one thing, but because since the gift she’s just had the thank-you card and a few mailings sent to her Girl Scout branch address, it gets a little complex. She’s likely still a legal minor, and while we occasionally do research minors if they’re the child of a donor (just to say like “daughter named X who attends Y high school) we generally don’t research minors on their own, and GDPR standards mean we can’t store certain information about them. Boss said not to pursue it any further, but that we could potentially send an invite to our next fundraising event in the area to the address we do have and see if she replies. 

[peonymoss]

Happy Birthday @missbuster​!

(from https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2019/9/15/sunday-sweets-sew-much-fun)

[bomberqueen17]

missbuster replied to your post “the untamed”

is this the chinese series with the wigs and the elf robes?

oh yes. occasionally i’ll be watching and i’ll be like huh, aesthetically, this is the silmarillion right here

lazaefair replied to your post “the untamed”

Ah, the joy of trying to render a non-latinate language in latinate symbols

yes ugh 

fortunately i have enough prior exposure from gifsets and shitposts that mostly i can keep people straight. and, as dude pointed out, they very kindly dress in themed uniforms by family, so that’s super polite of them. 

popkin16 replied to your post “the untamed”

ISN'T IT WEIRD BUT GOOD?

I mean. clearly, a lot of the weirdness is that it’s leaning on tropes I’m totally unfamiliar with, like how buddy cop shows all use the same camera angles and hallmark movies have the formulaic bit where you take the whole thing on faith as having been established somehow by sheer weight of expectation-- clearly, there must be similar conventions in Chinese television dramas that I’m just not familiar with, so maybe the WILDLY SWINGING CAMERAS are just part of that, and so on.

And the fact that people fucking fly for no reason all the time, I have no idea if that’s like, just normal on Chinese TV or if that’s just for this show. 

but yes, it is deeply bizarre and also extremely compelling. I blame the Pretty People In Semi-Unconvincing Wigs. The Man With One Facial Expression Only is so pretty and really gets a lot of mileage out of the only facial expression they let him have (and most of that mileage is furious gay pining which I am so here for). And his brother, with the Square Righteous Jaw And Kind Eyes, he is also so lovely. And our doe-eyed mischievous protagonist whose names are the only ones I can remember because his family name is the same as that of a roommate of mine from college (why is his family name different from his siblings though do they explain that??? also it is only three letters and i am very stupid so three letters is what i can handle and as a bonus they are pronounced like they look like), he is also very beautiful. And I only just met Wen Qing but I want to cradle her adorable sticky-outy ears, she is so pretty. IDK why I can remember her name but I super can. Maybe because nobody seems to call her anything else and she’s one of like two women. She kind of pouts sometimes and that is all I want to look at in this world, thank you for being so pretty, nice lady from Evil World. Gosh I hope she has a nice time in this show.

(I know that she will not. I know that is the point of this show, literally nobody has a nice time in it. I have, after all, seen the gifsets. I was a little startled to see the dripping-blood-hand-off-a-cliff part so early, actually; I sort of figured that was a spoiler but no, this show takes no fucking prisoners, that is the opening scene. Okay then!)

[leupagus]

missbuster replied to your post: lareginaphantom replied to your post: ...

YOu said you used a specific pen to annotate, do you number your letters from others?

OH OK no not that kind of annotation, sorry — more for like, addendums. Basically I tend to leave a bit of room on the right side of the page; before I send out a letter I usually read through it to make sure I didn’t make any your/you’re errors or whatnot, and sometimes when something else occurs to me as like a postcript type of thing, I’ll write a little note in the margin in blue ink. Like so: 

...I just spent like 15 minutes making this, Jesus Christ

[bomberqueen17]

a wild grab bag of reply-replies

 Normally I’d do this in batches of related topics or whatever but something I reblogged got a ton of notifications and for some reason Tumblr’s not grouping them together so I had to scroll for three days to get to any notes about any other posts, so like, yikes, sorry, here’s a firehose of everything interesting anyone’s ever said to me. Thanks, Xkit, for allowing reply-replies, but sorry, Dreamwidth peeps, for what an incoherent mess the crossposter makes this into.

msilverstar replied to your post “updates from the middle-aged”

a) sprinklers ≠ whole pool, b) May ≠ August

i mean, fair, but we also had a kiddie pool and we also just sprayed the hose on each other, and it was over 90 yesterday.

akilah12902 replied to your post “UNDERCUT ACHIEVED”

That undercut is just magnetically attractive. I was gonna play the whole game with the long hair but the opening screen kept TAUNTING me and I went undercut and haven't changed it since.

I can’t get over it, it’s sort of horrifying to me what a difference it makes for me. I have to re-evaluate myself in ways I wasn’t prepared for.

missbuster replied to your post “updates from the middle-aged”

Uhhh. Remember it’s still May and snowed like three weeks ago so the large bodies of water + water tables are still frigid

I mean, fair, but, I did this in spring as a kid. I have noticed that the temperature of the water at my parents’ house doesn’t vary seasonally, but the municipal water supplies in Buffalo and Rochester absolutely do, which is super weird

waxscoralpants  eplied to your post “updates from the middle-aged”

My mom used to fill our kiddie pool and then boil several kettles of water to dump in. What a sweet gesture, in retrospect

awww!!!

Last night I emptied the muddy water and refilled the pools with clean water, so that it could be at least ambient temperature this afternoon. Of course, having done that, it’ll be rainy and we won’t play outside, but we need the rain so it was all really kind of a ploy to exploit Murphy’s law.

akilah12902 replied to your post “updates from the middle-aged”

HOW ON EARTH, AS THE SKINNIEST DARN KID, I EVER MANAGED TO LIVE WITH HOSE WATER

Right?? I was a lil beanpole too!! 

I really remember our fingernails and lips being blue and our mom making us stop playing 

saffronheliotrope replied to your post “mouths of babes vol 749”

My 2yo was EXTREMELY AFFRONTED when I started wearing shorts and he encountered my sting hairs. Sorry, kiddo. Shaving in a quarantine is *all done hands*

STING HAIRS. She re-shaved yesterday, the fool-- I was like no that’s your protective layer, and she just laughed. 

mikkeneko replied to your post “Extra Dad Jokes”

So of the pig farmer, the military logistics, and the party-planner, which was the one you would ask to hide a body and which one got offended?

The pig farmer! Who, in retrospect, is also super-intense and competitive, so IDK why I didn’t see that coming except I fully expected her to be like “I have a business, I can’t risk the cops involving themselves!” and she was like HOW DARE U. She’s super ruthless but also ride or die and how dare I forget that.

bittylildragon replied to your post “Extra Dad Jokes”

Oh man, Lambert's Tragic Dead Boyfriend Revenge Quest and Geralt's 'you smell wonderful at this funeral' line AND his dad jokes all in one evening

It was really a pretty magical evening.

missbuster replied to your post “Extra Dad Jokes”

For the first time in my life my house is getting central air too. I cannot fucking wait.

Oh I know, man. But my dude got the first quote and sent me this bitmoji of himself (the bitmoji looks a lot more like Cary Elwes than Dude actually does, for the record): 

[image description: bitmoji cartoon of green-eyed white blond man with a moustache and goatee making a dead-eyed open-mouthed grin while flinging green bills of US currency over his shoulder with wild abandon]

but i mean, the furnace is from the late 70s or early 80s and has to Go, so

[copperbadge]

maplerosekisses replied to your post “Are you slowly fading away from the Marvel fandom?”

Would you be interested in recommendations for comics?

Not just yet, thank you though! I’ll post when/if I do, asking for reccs. I’ve had a few, I just haven’t investigated deeply yet :) 

missbuster replied to your photo “Ooh I wonder when sunset is in SPACE”

every 17 minutes sam

Well that’ll make for a nice fast festival of light :D

thatmadhatter replied to your post “Sam I just learned that the French's mustard cap if you push it all...”

Oh we're supposed to have Plochman’s in our fridges? I just have the generic yellow stuff from aldi...

That’s probably peak chicagoan, to be honest. Plochman’s is local, but generic yellow from Aldi is specific.

kissmeagainarthas replied to your post “Do you have siblings? Or is it just you and your parents for the...”

Your sister is so secretive that this is the first time I've heard of her and I've been following you for close on a decade already. o_o

I used to talk about her more in the early years, back on LJ, but as she got older I wanted to give her more say in how much I talked about her online, and she didn’t really want to have a presence -- and anyway we see less of each other now, so I haven’t brought her up much. 

janedrewfinally replied to your post “mangy-mongrel replied to your post “Sam, if you don’t mind me asking -...”

Azelastine sounds like a “Good Omens” fanfic character...

Patron saint of sinus infections and crying in doctors’ offices (viz: things I had to do to get the prescription).

[roane72]

missbuster replied to your link: Expecting the Worst

My mom is in treatment for leukaemia and I’m amazed at the range of options they have for treating cancer I had no idea about…. not that I can make things better but I can try to be optimistic. I like you and you need to stick around.

It’s true. The funny/ironic/interesting part is that my mom, who died in 2006, was part of the clinical trials for a lot of the next generation drugs out there now... some of which may wind up helping me. I just realized that and I’m having a little bit of a moment right now.

I know logically that even if the worst is true, I probably have years, good years, left to enjoy things. It’s just that I’ve been burned so many times with this by being optimistic, I’m holding that back right now. 

I like you too, and I wanna stick around!

[bomberqueen17]

missbuster replied to your post “oh ho ho we in it now”

WHAT THAT IS VERY FAST we have three confirmed cases here and they are still travel-related. They moved our testing to a local hockey arena and out of the second hospital too.

Our first three were all travel-related... from vastly different origins. (NYC, which you’d expect, but then Orlando and a third out-of-state I forget?) 

We got as high as nine confirmed cases, and then I think it just became clear that we were not going to be given anything like enough testing kits. I mean, obviously, it arrived here from NUMEROUS other points of origin, and since NYC is in fullblown Hotbed Of Pestilence mode, there’s just no resources left for us, the second-largest city in the state. (Before you get outraged, understand that we have literally half the population of two separate towns on Long Island (the way cities and towns are legally categorized has nothing to do with size), and in fact are the only the eighth most populous county in the state, just after Westchester, which is another Hotbed Of Pestilence. NYC is HUGE.)

We are not really surprised that there are no resources left for us. It’s obvious that most of the new cases are community spread, not from an outside point of infection, meaning that it’s loose now. There’s literally no point trying to track it; it’s too late to halt the spread.

They did update the list of exposures. Now not only our grocery store and our nearest Target is on the list, but also our liquor store. We checked our receipt; we were last there six days before the known-infected person.

But the list of exposures isn’t really much good, because it’s all a week ago or more. Of course it is! But it’s out there, in the wild. There’s nothing to do but treat everyone as potentially infected, and stay the fuck home, which is what I’m doing. 

[laylainalaska]

missbuster replied to your photoset “tezz0027: goawfma: to think 1957 was only a little over 60 years...”

Ok WHEN I WAS TWELVE (as in, it is the 1990's here folks) MY MOTHER gave me a sanitary belt and napkins for the first time. It was like those elastic straps that hold the corners of sheets on. It had those plastic keyholes and buttons and was literally a piece of elastic. The pad? The pad was some kind of absorbent pillow thing with the outer cover longer than the inside. The 'tails' of the cover went into the plastic buttonholes to hold the pad in place.

What ACTUALLY held the pad in place was a) my underwear b) the rear tail being wedged firmly in my buttcrack and c) terror that something would slip and I would bleed all over everything. This was from MY MOTHER. Who had got it from HER MOTHER (my grandmother). Self adhesive pads existed but it was a few years until I finally learned what worked so I just slept with my legs clamped together worrying that something would happen. She should have just given me a towel.

I hope you don’t mind me pulling this out from the comments to reply to it because that is WILD! It’s also really interesting because it was the late 80s for me (born in ‘76) and I just used the regular adhesive pad kind exactly like we have now. I never even SAW a belt or knew they existed prior to doing historical research to find out what women used to use. The restroom vending machines full of the disposable adhesive ones already even existed because I remember being able to get them from those too, as well as using my mom’s.

[bomberqueen17]

singelisilverslippers replied to your post “productivity~”

holy shit this is inspiring

I assumed this had to be sarcastic, but it’s possible my post did not make it clear how disgraceful a state my kitchen and indeed my entire house is in, that this was the state of it. And i suppose, there is something inspiring in flinging a drawer full of Tupperware across a room while screaming obscenities at it, whilst in a floor-length black lace gown and a calico apron with cross-stitched penguins upon the breast. (I don’t think I’d described that part.)

It was nice to know the floor was clean enough that I could just pick the Tupperware back up and put it away without running it through aggressive decontamination afterward. I definitely did something to my right triceps muscle though.

missbuster replied to your post “productivity~”

I frequently attempt to purge unneccesary plastic containers and my dad will rescue them from the recycling and keep them in the basement thus negating the act. 

Also, I vaccuumed out the fold-out couch layer by layer as I folded it into a bed for my mom who's allowed to sleep at home now!

ahh, Dude grew up in a house with a refugee grandmother who frequently garbage-picked things they threw out that were “perfectly good” so he learned as a young child to really bury any food or not-obviously-broken items he threw out. It sort of scarred him-- he says “it’s perfectly good!” with a particular very distinct inflection whenever he’s mocking me for hoarding something, which I know is an echo of his grandmother who died in the late 80s. 

But that’s great news about your mom! I mean, scary sort of, I feel like you implied that she’s possibly getting kicked out prematurely out of pandemic fears, but it’s wonderful to at least be able to see her and help. I hate being apart from my family at the moment, and they’re all fine. 

For now. 😬

nogling replied to your post “productivity~”

Love and sympathy. The Tupperware disaster in our house is over the stove, so I occasionally “accidentally” drop mismatched or stained or otherwise gross Tupperware on hot stove burners.

I’m the one who hoards it, I’m the one with trouble letting go of things, I’m the one with the problem, but I’m also the only one who can clean anything or take any care for our surroundings in any way, it is all always 100% my problem and my responsibility and i am really not equal to it. I broke one of the ones I actually quite like, but I was in enough of a state that I just threw all the pieces in the recycling and am not letting myself think about it.

[wheel-of-fish]

Hey if you have all these GIFS does it mean you have all the footage too?

Typically yes, though sometimes it’s clips and not full performances. 

[sholiofic]

PROMPT: A suspicious happening at a famous tourist attraction (like Yellowstone maybe? The hot pools can cook and dissolve a person if they fall in). Peggy and her boys are on "vacation" nearby and get called in to investigate. Jack thinks it's nothing and wants to get back to love-nesting but oops turns out it's a serious thing.

"I knew this was going to happen," Jack said. "I knew it. The woman is incapable of going anywhere without discovering a crime. I'd suspect her of killing people herself, except I know exactly where she was last night."

"Jack!" Peggy shouted across the cracked volcanic soil around the geyser. "Come over here and help me measure distances!"

"Duty calls, Prince Charming," Daniel said, patting his arm. "I'd help but ... crutch."

"Oh, shut up," Jack said, and went to hold a surveyor's stake for Peggy's efforts at mapping out the (alleged) crime scene.

[bomberqueen17]

missbuster replied to your post “missbuster replied to your photo “I AM JUST GOING TO SIT HERE...”

Oh!! That sounds like a great project. I know you don't work this way, but I can probably whip up a couple diagrams of where/how to add panels to resize a garment if you're interested. (You would also have to do the sleeves if you add panels to the sides, fyi)

I have resized one denim jacket just with side panels (and triangular insets to increase the sleeves to the elbow, yeah-- both for my proportional-human arms and also because yeah the sleevehead doesn’t fit otherwise) and then I added an additional box-pleated segment to the back under the collar to make it not tight, but that was a loose, hip-length jacket and I handsewed most of it because my fucking serger was such a bitch the whole time. 

but I would LOVE a diagram , I bet that’s the kind of thing a lot of people would find useful and I just don’t have the confidence in my skills to explain my trial-and-error bullshit versions of it. But like, that’s the main ReFatshioning work I need to do, fixing shit that is not big enough, and it’s the thing that goes wrong most often when I’m trying to do that kind of shit.

[copperbadge]

missbuster replied to your post “Sam, do u know what mbti type u are? I’m really curious, plz share if...”

Ok you buried the lead there Sam, let’s talk about your online dating profile and how that whole thing has worked out for you.

Well, do you remember that post I made that used “the annoyance of dating is not worth the payout of a relationship for me right now” as an example of figuring out what you want instead of what you’re supposed to want? 

That’s how well it went.  :D

Online dating is terrible, everyone knows this, but worse than terrible, it’s boring. I had very little success in matching up with people and when I did usually they turned out to be dreary conversationalists if they put any effort into it at all. I really had no idea how bad most people are at basic human interaction until I’d been on a dating app for a few months. I’m sure I’m missing some kind of “this is how the game is played” conversational gambit, but I just can’t be bothered to play games at this point, and if people don’t want to hold up their side of the conversation in even the most basic way, I’m not going to keep talking for both of us.