I use shampoo maybe once per month, usually only when necessary to remove products such as bleach/dye. Just rinsing it with water is usually enough, but when my hair starts feeling more greasy (maybe once per week), I just use conditioner to help loosen up the dirt. If you’re curious, look up “cowashing” and “no poo” for more information.

Wait, what? My cat only spoons with me when I lay on my left side, so of course I prefer laying on my left side now. Does he know something I don’t??

Whoa! Checking out street view, I’m so impressed by the bike/scooter shares all being parked relatively neatly in designated areas at either end of the block where they aren’t blocking the pedestrian paths!

• A seed box (Whatbox). I’m paying USD 15/month, and they’ve actually upgraded my storage and bandwidth twice now without any price increases. I think I’ve been using that for roughly 10 years now. At this point, it’s cheaper than any single streaming service, while allowing me access to basically every TV show and movie ever produced, and I can easily share my library with friends via Plex. Now that I have *aars, it’s very little effort to keep up with my favorite shows.
• Whatever the YouTube music thing is called now. I signed up when it was brand new, and while I occasionally consider going back to piracy for music, it’s just not worth the effort for me these days, but I am extremely opposed to ads.
• Amazon Prime. I should probably cancel, but I don’t have a car and definitely utilize the same day delivery quite often.
• Housing. Do mortgage payments & HOA fees count as subscriptions? Lol. I definitely get a lot of value out of housing, and appreciate the fact that I don’t have to wonder if my landlord is going to renew my lease each year.

Sorry, lol, that was definitely not my intention! I’ve definitely heard about the “no tattoos” thing before, especially for those following Judaism, but I’d never read the relevant text before, so it definitely surprised me. I may have to ask my sister about it, since that’s definitely her area of study.

Reading through various translations, the first part seems to say "don’t cut/gash your body in honor/memory/mourning of the dead, but most of the translations leave it somewhat ambiguous (at least to me) as to whether it means “don’t tattoo yourself in honor/memory/mourning of the dead” or just, “don’t tattoo yourself at all”. Also, it sounds as though cutting/gashing yourself for other reasons is isn’t breaking any rules.

its why you want a headboard behind your bed.

I don’t understand… possibly because I’ve skipped the headboard for many, many years of my life. Could you please explain?

1. I do often wear them with nothing playing, but even that impacts my situational awareness, which is even more impacted if I put music on.
2. I don’t want to be listening to music, a podcast, etc., right now, I just want to hear the low, white noise of the environment. This is especially applicable when out in nature.

That’s actually something that varies from country to country.

the American style places commas and periods inside the quotation marks, even if they are not in the original material. British style (more sensibly) places unquoted periods and commas outside the quotation marks. For all other punctuation, the British and American styles are in agreement: unless the punctuation is part of the quoted material, it goes outside the quotation marks.

https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-style.html

I was living in a house with a few random housemates… people that I didn’t even meet until I had moved in. They were okay… nothing amazing, nothing too terrible. Somehow, the person I was on the date with realized that they used to know one of my housemates, and absolutely hated them, and wouldn’t stop talking about all of the reasons why my housemate was a terrible person.

Yes, when I used to order grocery delivery via Amazon Fresh, they always came in paper bags. And I was living in a pretty rainy city at the time, but never had any issues with the bags.

Yeah, um, those look pretty beat. I’ve heard 300-500 miles (~500-800km) for running shoes. I don’t own a car, so I walk a lot, and had been replacing my shoes every 3-4 months since I was wearing a single pair for almost everything. I recently decided to buy one pair for walking and just casual use, and a second pair that’s just for running.

I have definitely had times in the past where I began to notice some minor aches when running, so I bought a new pair of the same shoes, and the aches disappeared!

Maaaan. I’ve tried both the X10’s and the X20’s, and I really liked that they have soft, flexible ear hooks and physical buttons. Some of the other ones I’ve tried had stiffer hooks that would hurt my ears after a while, and/or the controls were via touch, not an actual, clickable button.

But both the X10’s and the X20’s had this weird skipping/stuttering issue whenever I was out and about (walking, running, etc.), but were just fine if I was stationary. I think it must’ve been some sort of interference issue, but I just don’t understand. I have some older bluetooth Soundcore earbuds that don’t have that issue, but they’re on their last legs, so I’ve been trying to find a replacement.

Can you direct me to any sort of source on that? I did a brief search, and I see some information about toxins found in tomato plants in general, (mostly stems, leaves, and green/unripe tomatoes), but nothing that specifically discusses a higher concentration in the “belly button” (I assume you mean the core/where the stem connects?) vs. the rest of the fruit.

So, that’s what makes all of his complaints even crazier! I’ve heard multiple stories about cats that wouldn’t even use a box after it’s been used once, or at least very high standards for cleanliness!

For mine, I have multiple different boxes for them, but they each have their own preferences. I have tried waiting until the box that my oldest prefers is so gross that he’s no longer using it, a d has moved to a different box, but even then, he gets crazy mad at me for touching it. I’ve tried sprinkling some used litter in the new box for him, so that it still smells like him, and he still gets very angry!

One of the boxes that he gets angry about me cleaning is automatic, but it’s a "PetSafe ScoopFree Crystal Classic", not a Litter Robot, so it only scoops solid waste to one side. The Litter Robots were too tall for the space I had previously, and as long as my current box works, I just can’t justify something a few hundred bucks on adding another box.

I foster, so I get to see a wide variety of illnesses and learn about their early symptoms, many of which are diarrhea or other abnormal poops. My foster fail had an intussusception, likely caused by irritable bowel disease/syndrome (IBD/IBS). As much as I would absolutely love to spend waaaaay less time thinking about/looking at poop, I just don’t see any practical way around it without putting the health of my cats at risk.

One of mine legitimately gets angry when I scoop his poop, and even more upset when I do a full litter change. I have to wait until he’s napping so that I can get at least part way through the process before he comes to yell at me. If I’m not fast enough, he’ll even nip at my feet and/or (soft paw) swat at me.

Have you talked to a doctor about it? Would you be able to get up and just go sit on your couch?

One of the things that has really helped me get (back) into habits is to break it into tiny, achievable steps, and once I master the first step, I build on it. For example, I was trying to rebuild my early morning gym routine, so my first step was just walking to the gym everyday, but not actually going inside. Once waking up with enough time to walk there and back was easy, I started getting up a little earlier so that I’d have time to go inside for a bit.

On a slightly separate note, I dug into a bunch of “sleep hacking” stuff a long time ago. A lot of it isn’t really useful to someone trying to live a relatively typical 9-5 type life, but one thing that I did find useful was understanding the basic sleep phases/cycle. One full sleep cycle typically lasts about 90 minutes, although this can vary from person to person, and also from day to day. If your alarm is going off in the middle of a sleep cycle, you’re probably going to feel like crap, but if your alarm is waking you up at the end of a cycle, you’ll probably feel more refreshed.

There’s apps for your phone (and probably for wearables) that can utilize various sensors to help wake you at the ideal stage. The one I used to use was called “Sleep as Android”. I would tell it what time I needed to be awake, plus a buffer of how much earlier it was allowed to wake me up, then leave the phone on my mattress. It would detect my movements to determine my sleep phase so that it could try to wake me up while in the ideal phase. It also had a variety of options so that you couldn’t accidentally turn off the alarm. For example, it could ask you to solve some math questions, or to scan a particular bar/QR code that you’d set up in advance. At one point, I set it so I’d have to scan my shampoo bottle to turn off the alarm.

Sure, but in the context of the post where waking up early may have desirable benefits, there are ways to make it easier on yourself while still getting a good night’s rest.

Honestly, I love that everyone else is still asleep when I get up. I enjoy the peaceful quiet of the early morning gym or an outdoor run at dawn, and if everyone actually took my advice, it would absolutely ruin it for me.