• Work is always busy with everyone rushing and demanding things so they can meet some arbitrary deadline for their time off.
• Supposedly the season of peace, love, caring but i see far more commercialism and selfish behavior.
• Gift giving is awkward. I don’t feel worthy of receiving gifts. People spend too much on junk I don’t need which oddly makes me feel bad for not being able to match that amount of spending. And it all just usually leaves me with a feeling that the people around me don’t really know much about me.

Oh, and we can only be in one place… with family/in-laws in different places we always miss the ones we can’t be with.

I’d love if they reshot that scene with a grown Macaulay Culkin and just about anyone else. Give us the “enhanced edition”.

Both!

Since my kids were young, we’ve made it a tradition to go out to forest service land and cut down a real tree (with a cheap permit), which helps with wildfire mitigation. The trees are usually kind of scrawny and awkward as they’re not grown on a tree farm where they’re all spaced apart and tended to during their growth, but the experience is fun. We put our cheap, lightweight ornaments on that.

Our main tree is a fake one that we can put up earlier.

In my teens in the mountains of Colorado there were tons of lightning strikes. One summer, a lightning strike in our driveway took out our garage door openers and a TV.

This past summer, I did a 40+ mi bike ride that covered some very open areas of the CO plains. At my turn-around spot I could tell a storm was moving in quick and thought, “ah well, some sprinkles will feel alright.” Then I rode for about 9 miles in a downpour with lightning crashing around me while on a dirt road with just about nothing else around me (me swearing aloud the whole time). Finally got to some relative safety of some tight rock outcrops with overhangs. I was still outside and not totally safe, but it felt good to get out of that scary situation as much as I could for a bit while the storm passed.

School board elections are about all I’ve got for this round, but I cast my vote to oust as many of the anti-CRT, anti-mask people as possible.

Boebert is trash.

Nah.

Thanks for the reminder to go delete my old comments and posts. Reddit is dead to me. I stopped using it two years ago. I’ll occasionally go there if there’s a legit looking search result for what I’m looking for, but I don’t bother logging in or interacting with the platform. Reddit is blocked by my work, which is typically what I’m searching for from there so it’s useless anyways.