My girlfriend had a lot of untreated mental/personality conditions when I met her that I was unaware of. Over the first year, she couldn’t keep it together anymore and was doing drugs more, missing tons of payments on things, missing work, fighting with friends and coworkers, and just started being rude to people for no reason.

She was still really nice to me, but she just wasn’t behaving like the person I met anymore. I started considering breaking up with her, but by that point she was starting to get in trouble with the police. I kicked her out and sent her back to her family and she ended up checking into a mental facility.

I visited her pretty frequently while she was there. I told her she should have been more forthcoming because I couldn’t help her if I didn’t know what was going on. I told her I was ready to dump her because I thought she was becoming an asshole, but now that I knew she was just sick, we’d get her taken care of.

She went through a couple years of finding the right medications that she could stick with and did a lot of therapy, group meetings, and DBT classes.

During Covid she registered to go to community college and give that another try. It was a bit difficult getting back in after failing out before, but she got in and worked really hard. She was the favorite of a lot of the teachers, and she almost got all As through the 2 years.

She graduated this year and had a job offer where she was interning waiting for her, and now she has a job she loves, and makes decent money.

We repaired her credit over the years, and it’s getting back to near excellent. We got her a new car when she had to commute to intern and do in person class and she’s kept it in good shape and quit smashing into things. She has great relationships with people now. She’s really done a total and successful rebuild after hitting rock bottom, and she’s still a friendly, caring person who is fun to be around.

I was extremely proud to see her graduate. I feel that was a major milestone from where she started. I don’t think I could have gotten myself out of what she was in. She had to work tremendously hard, but she was dedicated and determined for the years it took to accomplish, and she’s never skipped backwards. I could not be much prouder of her.

I’m not doubtful about that either. I’ve seen a few posts over the years of some pretty sad looking lunches, and I seem to recall something about trying to pass off pizza as a vegetable, so I’m sure there’s been shenanigans and corner cutting.

At the same time, I hear friends talk about all the extra supplies kids need to bring these days, and my brother was complaining this week his kids needs dedicated gym shoes to leave at school, so they didn’t seem to be detected from passing along costs to parents anywhere else.

Carter was before my time, but so I’ve read about him, or at least his personal efforts seem positive. From a quick skim of his wiki, he seems to have had some notable accomplishments, but was hindered greatly by a mountain of unfortunate world events out of his control, and he did not seem to do politics by the good 'ol boy methods of the day, so he did not have much support from either side of the aisle.

It sounds more like he was unable to be effective, which probably does make one a bad politician, but I feel like since his time in office, more and more people seem to want someone who isn’t there to play party politics and who will just try to get things done because they’re things we should be doing.

Based off of all his work I can remember in my lifetime, post presidency, I’m inclined to believe he was a decent guy back then also. Especially by today’s standards!

Oh, I didn’t mean to imply it went to the food in any way, it seems a straight processing fee because we can thing. That’s why I was surprised the list price of the lunch was only $3.

My $0.85 in 1986 converts to $2.44 and $1.85 in 1998 converts to $3.57, so if the price of lunch is around $3, that makes it seem like it has been inflation proof, at least for out of pocket cost. I’m sure property tax and state tax has subsidized it, but cost to kids/parents sounds like it’s held flat.

My cheapest equivalent meal from the work cafeteria is about $10 while only being modestly higher in quality than what i remember school lunch being like,

Thanks!

Did I miss something or are all the proposals funneling taxpayer money to private industry while only suggesting people store guns safer by buying gun safes with tax credits to send money back to gun manufacturers and associates?

No children here, and the article didn’t give the average price of lunch. Google tells me it’s about $3.

Not to deviate too much from the article, which seemed to focus on how school lunchrooms have adopted outside payment options that use a Ticketmaster inspired fee model, but the lunch “base price” at least is better than I had expected.

The “back in my day” price was 85 cents in the mid 80s to I believe $1.85 by the time I graduated high school in the late 90s. For it to have ok not gone up about 50% since sounds better than the price increase on many other things, especially with food prices of the last few years.

It’s cheaper than the cheapest fast food meal and much less than my cheapest meal at work, while likely being nutritionally somewhere between the 2.

Any of you with kids have a more accurate real cost of feeding kids or more stories of these odd payment schemes?

I hope Bernie goes on fighting for the rest of his days. After Jimmy Carter is gone, there aren’t too many political elders to look up to and remind us there are(were?) some good politicians out there.

I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t promote the superb Owl!

Stealth

Great Eye Sight

Many have 3D hearing to “see” under leaves or snow

Near silent flight

Can rotate their head 270 degrees

Tremendously strong grip strength

Beautiful and effective camo for any environment

Have settled almost everywhere on Earth but Antarctica (so far!)

Great facial expressions

Diverse vocalizations

They can control positioning of individual feathers to either thermoregulate or to change the focus of their hearing.

Their eyes dilate individually to maintain peak vision when one eye is in a shadow, but the other in the sun.

Have a third eyelid to protect those special peepers while fighting, eating, or from dryness and abrasion in flight.

And I’m sure I forgot a few things, but that’s a good start to the amazing world of owls!

The hippo is the true king of beasts! So cute and plump, yet so deadly and fiercely protective. Also much faster than you would ever believe something that big can run on land, yet is almost stealth in the water until you’ve angered it. It also has one of the most powerful bites and skin 2 inches/ 6 cm thick.

I’ve become the go-to owl person of Lemmy, but I’m a long time hippo fan.

Crunchwrap, either the breakfast one or the lunch/dinner one. If hard pressed, I’d say the breakfast one is better.

I don’t like the Baja Blast personally, but you should try it as I think it’s the only place you can get it.

Diablo sauce I think tastes like a spiced ketchup or BBQ sauce, too sweet for me, but the girlfriend loves it.

Those are the most unique items to me.

I’d like to add a caveat here:

From CNN: You may now own a piece of Trump Media – and not even know it

“People might be owning some of that company, whether they know it or not — and whether they like it or not,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.

That said, Trump Media would only be a small part of funds that track the Russell. It would be dwarfed by the holdings of larger companies including Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple.

However, Stovall said the Trump Media situation underscores one of the disadvantages of passive investing: Some funds mimic indexes that automatically add stocks based on rules, not based on a careful evaluation of the business’s fundamental strengths and weaknesses.

“You can end up with real dogs that, in my opinion, are not really worthwhile owning. The flotsam gets swept up with the jetsam,” Stovall said.

In this case, the Russell 3000 captures the 3,000 largest US stocks. During annual updates, certain stocks are added — not necessarily because of their earnings potential or the quality of their products, but because they are large enough to qualify.

“Investors seeking to capture a strategy reflecting broad US equities performance can confidently choose the Russell 3000 knowing there are no subjective inclusion or exclusions of stocks,” according to FTSE Russell’s website.

Vanguard and other index fund owners are not choosing to buy Trump Media necessarily. Anyone holding Russell index funds or ETFs is getting stuck with it due to pumping of the stock price. Anyone owning index funds other than special ESG funds is sponsoring a lot of people they may not approve of personally, hence the conservative backlash against them.

Glad to be of service!

This was what I came here to say.

My HOA is thankfully decent, but I know many have but had positive experiences.

When we’re talking Lemmy instances, packing up and moving is one thing, but when we’re talking residence, who’s going to want their local dictator running things?

People like to hate on things like McDonalds or Budweiser and so on, but with that massive oversight and standardization, you gain a consistent product. With laws and their enforcement, it’s nice to have that consistency.

Worry about red/blue states is bad enough, let alone if we’re talking red/blue streets! Some things are better big and boring.

I’ll take this guy over the Moms for Liberty and MAGA school board people that have been keeping our area in the news the last year or so. At least this guy is somewhat entertaining…

Not too many situations that would not be improved with some piano!

Ethiopian is amazing! So much flavor, plus you get to eat the plate and utensils! 😁

I try to pick something I’ve never had before first my birthday meal every year. The best one was probably the Uzbek place. Everyone there kept trying to talk to me in Uzbek as we appeared to be the only native English speakers in the house, so I’ll assume it was authentic.

All kinds of grilled meats, multiple types of breads, fancy sodas (tarragon was awesome!), sour cherry pierogies with whipped sour cream, stuffed pasta… They had some of everything with their own twist on it. I had plov, the national dish, which was a rice pilaf with grilled meat. Absolutely delicious.

I’d say the hardest cuisines to find here are anything African or anything Eastern European. For that though, the secret is keeping an eye out for church festivals. The Greek Orthodox Church has one that has African and Eastern European, the Polish shrine has a Polish festival, and the Coptic church had Egyptian.

I’ve been starting to learn some Afro-Latin jazz as part of my piano study, and it’s gotten me into listening to reggae as well, and I’ve really been enjoying it. There were naturually a ton of repeat references to things I knew nothing about. The Wikipedia page on Rastafarianism was enough for me and a Youtube video about the significance of Haile Selassie to the belief system instantly set off a whole bunch of conspiracy theory alarm bells.

I’m not in the market for any religion, but even if I were, I don’t think this would be in my top 3. I’ll stick with learning piano instead.