This may seem basic, but I think some people really need it. I have a hard time remembering things like birthdays and such. So I make sure to add people’s birthdays into their contact info on my phone. Then it will show up on my calendar as a different color and I can see it coming up and actively try to be on top of it instead of it passing and feeling guilty for forgetting. Maybe you don’t care about everyone’s birthday in your life, but I at least try to add my friends and family so I can reach out to them or try to remember to send a gift to little ones that are far away, etc.

I’m disabled!!

Agreed. Rollerblading is very 90s.

One story my husband shared with me was when he and my dad stopped into a local bar after working hard on home renovations all day. They planned to get some dinner and have some beer after a hard day’s work but needed to wash their very dirty hands first. So they went back into the bathroom and washed their hands. Well apparently that was too “gay” for the owner of the bar and they went over to the bathroom and started saying things like “I don’t know what you think you’re doing in there” and “I just need to make sure you’re not doing anything funny”. So they ended up just leaving while the guy yelled at them saying they had to buy something.

A slightly different version of this concept also happened to my husband. At one point, 2 of our lady friends were talking about fashion and my husband, who is MUCH more fashionable than I am, chimed in. They proceeded to tell him that he’s “not allowed to have an opinion because he’s a man” which is the most double standard bullshit I’ve ever heard come out of any of my friends mouths. It’s stuck with me for a long time now because I think it keeps me honest with myself about standards and reminds me to think about how opinions change when you flip genders.

I’ve been taking a video game break to play more board games. Zoo Vadis has been a top pick lately and I highly recommend.

And then there’s you did everything you possibly could yourself and you did your best and saved tons of money, but now you actually do need to pay someone to do the thing you don’t trust yourself to do so you saved money just for the thing, but no contractor will agree to come do the thing because demand is high and they would rather do commercial projects. So yeah… You can’t even pay a pro and you’re just fucked 🤷

When I was a kid, my mom either bought or was gifted a little plush snowman that would say “Happy holidays! Happy holidays!” When you squeezed it. It would maybe get squeezed a few times in December and then put in a bin until the following year. No one ever changed the batteries and it still worked each year for many years. Then it started to run out of juice. And slowly over each year it would sound more and more demonic, but it always played at least once before running out of power. It’s now been more than 25 years and we still check it each year to see if the demonic snowman is still alive. I’m not sure it will ever die if it was never alive in the first place…

This.

I KNOW WHOOOO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME

Best: twix, 100grand, candy corn, sweet tarts

Worst: bottle caps, heath, unnamed hard candies, tootsie rolls

We drove from Illinois to Florida and stopped at a local chain in Alabama along the way called Milo’s. It had great reviews and people said you had to get the burger with the special sauce or whatever it was called. Let me tell you that this “burger” was very reminiscent of my grade school lunches when they would serve “Salisbury steak with gravy” in the little paper containers that you had to pinch the corner to peel the film off and eat. Now while usually this would be a lesson in how terrible us school lunches are, this is more of a lesson in how bad the food in Alabama is in that the local people think that this is good enough food to pay someone real money for it.

I went to Meijer a week ago and saw they had a pallet of candy corn. I was like wow this early? And I bought a bag thinking it must be left over from last year or something, but no it was just the opposite. It was the freshest bag of candy corn I’ve ever eaten and it was very delicious. But it also made me realize that the reason I’m never getting fresh candy corn for Halloween is because they literally make it and ship it in late July/early August and then just let it sit there for 3 months until Halloween. But at least now I know when the best time is to buy candy corn… So there’s that.

Eleven tenty one?

Rolie-polies!!!

It was honestly some no name brand and I wasn’t able to find it on their site. But I did find this fan that’s almost exactly the same: Lowes High Velocity Fan

The last apartment I had, the AC was old and would always go out a few times each summer. By the 3rd time, I went to the hardware store looking for a box fan, but they were out and only had an industrial fan that was more expensive, like $40. I bought it out of desperation. But looking back it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Any time the AC went out, id whip out that metal beast and only ever put it on the first setting because the other 2 settings were way too powerful for an apartment. It’s never given me any trouble over the years and has saved us from some very hot weather. If I had known then how good this fan was, I would have gladly paid more for it. It’s currently being used in our house while we do renovations this summer and it’s working like a charm!

I mostly make chocolate based candies, but I dabble in other candies from time to time like caramels, candied nuts, candied fruits/ginger/etc. I like to make candies around Christmas time to give to family and friends as they make really nice gifts.

It’s really all going to depend on your tastes and lifestyle. Like I could recommend that you get a dog and start learning how to train dogs as a hobby, but that’s just not going to work for everyone. What’s important is that you explore things and maybe even try some hobbies that could potentially improve your well-being. Maybe you live somewhere near a good hiking spot and you could take up hiking to get outdoors and get more exercise. Maybe you could learn how to cook and explore how to make healthy meals that suit you better. Or maybe you just want to create something and you could take up woodworking or make model planes or something. The possibilities are endless, you just need to decide what you’d like to get out of it.

Personally, I spend most of my time for work indoors on a computer, so most of my hobbies involve using my hands and getting outdoors. I took up a lot of extra hobbies during covid for obvious reasons. So here goes my list of >!hobbies that will maybe give you some ideas:

• Cooking/baking/bread
• Candy making
• Jam making
• Gardening
• Canning (goes great with gardening!)
• Succulents
• Mixology
• Dog training
• Camping/hiking (this one is minimal only because I don’t live somewhere with good hiking spots)
• Board games, video games, and movies during the winter when I can’t go outside

Other things I’ve considered taking up but haven’t for various reasons:

• 3D printing
• Bonsais
• Home brewing

I had known for a long time that I wanted to do something creative. Throughout highschool I was lucky enough to be able to take various classes that would allow me to try out different things. I ruled out music and was struggling to decide if I wanted to be an illustrator of some kind or an interior designer or maybe an architect? But then I took a class called “computer graphics” which was a stupid name for the class. It was actually a class about graphic design and it seemed to fit into everything I do well just perfectly. Looking back it was way more obvious that I should be a graphic designer as I used to do things for fun like doodle out magazine layouts and make weird computer art for icons and things back when that was how the Internet worked. Like what kind of kid does that for fun? A future graphic designer apparently.

Last year I went blueberry picking the day before I had to leave for vacation. So I took a quart-size bag of blueberries on the plane with me and ate those the whole way there. 10/10 best plane snack I’ve ever had!