I had ferrets for a while. they liked to steal and hide things. you learn to check under the couch weekly just so you don’t find things by smell. and hope it’s not somehow inside the couch.

mostly it was the one guy, who preferred his chips and sweets, but knew his sister liked other things. she didn’t eat tomatoes or apples or fruit, but he’d carry that stinky orange down stairs for her, lips peeled back so he didn’t have to taste it too much.

not the OP you replied to, but someone else who loves the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book.

I think 5 days is ambitious. but a lot of what the exercises are doing is training you to see a different way. so it’s not impossible.

someone neurodivergent may struggle to get what the exercises are trying to teach or to reach the point they’re aiming for, so it might take them longer. those more inclined to pick it up faster probably aren’t going to need the exercises in the book; it’s already natural to them.

as we grow up, we learn “this is what a tree looks like, this is a dog looks like, this is what a car looks like”, etc etc. the way we see a new car then goes through that filter of “this is what a car looks like”. those filters are great for quickly identifying things and generally being a human in the world, so you don’t get hit by a car while you’re still figuring out if it is a car.

but those filters get in the way of drawing accurately. your eyes aren’t literally filtering anything; that’s all in your brain. so you need to learn to stop that part of your brain when you draw. that’s the biggest part of being able to draw decently. the rest is technical skill you get with practice.

I’d still recommend the original OP look for an artist collaborator, since children’s books need the illustrations to be as strong as the writing. there’s no way to get there in just 5 days.

I’m sorry for this. I adore seeing men being fathers, being positive adults in the lives of children. my own dad was more absent than not, but my grandfathers taught me a lot about how to be a decent human being, how to have relationships with others.

please don’t be absent for your daughter just because too many people have forgotten men are also capable of being nurturing adults for children.

oh weird, Lexapro failed entirely at managing my anxiety. worked great on the depression side, which meant that dampener of the anxiety wasn’t in effect. spiraled quick, had to email the doc for an emergency appointment.

Effexor (venlaxafine) is the first SNRI I’ve tried and it’s been like magic.

it depends. I live in a studio, I still have a kitchen trash and bathroom trash, paper towels and cleansers in both. it’s just easier knowing I’ll always have quick access to clean up a mess. like cat vomit.

ideally I’d also have a flashlight and first aid kit stashed in both places, but those have been less necessary and so fell off the critical re-supply list.

I too am a new to Linux person. I started with mint, as the most like what I’m used to. I like seeing that there are options I might like better, along with why I, personally, might prefer them. as well as why mint didn’t rate high. and I like that it’s not just spitting out the creator’s favorite distro.

some people get decision paralysis, i get your recommendation. but you’ll also lose some people if you just give them the Linux that’s easiest and closest to what they already know, instead of highlighting how it’s flexible and customizable. we need both methods of recommending a distro.

there’s plenty of beginner guides telling me to start with mint. I like this picker that considers my interests. looks like I might be trying OpenSuse in the future.

then the correct answer from the Dr should’ve been a referral to a gyno, not “that shouldn’t be treated yet in my medical opinion”.

and she may not have realized it was perimenopause when she went to the Dr. fatigue and migraines alone could easily sap libido and be completely unrelated to anything “down there”.

not the guy you asked, but also .01%. I read. a lot. and I pretty much always have. mostly science fiction and fantasy, but I pick up the occasional nonfiction.

books were always around the house when I was a kid, and we went to the library a lot. my grandma taught me to read before I started school, so that’s about 40 years of exposure.

so nearly everything on that test, I’ve encountered in context and at least have a fuzzy idea what it could mean.

in my experience, there’s not even as much consistency therapist to therapist, psychiatrist to psychiatrist, as there is in the rest of the medical field.

I love my psychiatrist, but what I love is that she’s very much about staying up to date and knowing what she’s prescribing, and probing to see if it’s working (I am a terrible judge the worse off I am. no, really, it’s fine, I can just wake up a little earlier and add a panic attack to my morning routine, don’t change my drugs. huh…ok, since we upped the dose, I haven’t had a panic attack, I guess that was a good idea.)

I like this. in my family, I figured it out at about 3 or 4, promptly told the 2 year old, and broke the reality to the next two before they could even start to believe there was a real Santa.

instead, Santa was the spirit of Christmas, so any of us could be Santa if we gave presents with no expectation of recognition or a return gift. much more Secret Santa than magical man leaving presents.

this did lead to several years where the youngest would give away all their toys, only to then reclaim them after presents were opened. generosity isn’t an easy concept for the pre-schoolers.

I’d say it’s about $15-20 for an average lunch here, in Seattle. transit is fairly cheap, $5.50 to and from work unless you live far enough to go through a couple zones, at which point I think it’s still under $8 round trip.

I use onenote at work for all my notes. tabs and individual pages let me organize things so nothing is too long to scroll and find what I need. I can put text, screenshot, and hyperlink (to another part of one note or outside link), and a link to a pdf or excel file. I can add check boxes to whichever line items.

once I’ve got a nice set of notes, I can share either the entire notebook, the section, or just that page with the next person. or if they’re a bit of a luddite, I can print it out and maintain format (mostly). the most recent version broke emailing a page, but if you’re still running an older version of one note, it embeds it, with formatting, without being a pdf.

got something you need to paste in all the time? I’ve got one page where each text box is one copy/paste comment. clicking the header automatically selects all the text in just that box.

like OP, I tend to use one note at home for D&D, but if I can find something just as good I’m happy to try it. work leaves me with MS Office.

she doesn’t drink tea (yet), but she does know head butting my hand when I’m holding a cup is a bad idea!

My cat recognizes the tea kettle whistle as time to get off my lap. “Up” and “Down” mean the same thing (you need to get down so I can get up).

She’s not the brightest, but a warning that she needs to move means I get clawed less.

I knew a guy in real life who got into men’s rights and Men Going Their Own Way nonsense- basically, he had sex so he didn’t qualify for incel, but he held a lot of the same beliefs.

I was the only woman he seemed to have any respect for. He didn’t respect his mother or younger sister, felt they had taken advantage of his dad and were now taking advantage of him. The one girlfriend I know he had, was very manipulative and not a good girlfriend.

I pointed out all the issues with his thinking and his MRA, MGOTW sources multiple times. he’d come back around to being reasonable for a while, then wander back into the toxic wilds of the internet. eventually, I gave up; I can’t be the only voice of reason you bother to listen to.

I think there’s a human bias towards certainty, to believing in true facts. research is work, and when it undermines personal certainty, there’s an urge to just go with whoever does seem to be most certain. if you can’t be sure of the facts on a personal level, go with the guy who is loudest and most certain. and because people seeking to relay truth will make room for doubt, conspiracy theory guy wins.

understanding probability helps here - if 90% of climatologists are 90% sure of climate change, their doubt doesn’t make climate hoax guy right. the podcast 538 covers politics, but goes into polling theory, statistics, and probability in ways that make it easier for me to understand and apply in other areas.

I’m in my mid 40s, high school in Missouri. I wouldn’t say they taught media literacy, and despite having a computer lab with the internet, it wasn’t considered.

Research was finding sources to cite for a paper and was a big chunk of the grade in English one year. They did cover what were considered reputable sources, but that meant published non-fiction, news reports, and maybe firsthand accounts (consider the source reputation). They seemed to assume we knew the difference between, say, a real newspaper and a tabloid, or the difference between Channel 5 News and Jerry Springer. The idea that the NY Times or Channel 5 News might have bias in how they presented things, and in what they chose to present, wasn’t considered at all.

Since this was taught in English, it was much more about using proper citations, not full plagiarism, and writing persuasively. I know I couldn’t find enough actual books on my topic in the school or public libraries, so I padded my reference list with the list the encyclopedia used. It worked fine.

To be fair, I do still use questions i learned from that research paper to evaluate info. am I seeing the same info across multiple sources, including high quality ones? can I trace it to an original source, and how much do I trust that source? can I find several high quality, independent sources for a particular thing?

I’ve had several ferrets, and intelligence definitely varies in them, but it’s impressive what their little raisin brains can manage. watching them figure out a puzzle was the most fun.

but it wasn’t always fun. I had a ferret with some serious attitude, and he and my sister didn’t get along. one day, she shoved him aside with her foot and called him a little shithead. later that day, we found her phone, in it’s nice leather case, in his litterbox. he knew exactly how to get even.

same little guy would push open the bathroom door if he could, see I was ‘occupied’, and then get up to whatever bad idea was the current favorite. it took me a bit to catch on, but I got it after the cute little weasel poked in, then went and dragged a family size bag of m&ms under my roommate’s dresser, leaving a trail from my room to hers. little pest knew he had plenty of time before I could catch him at it.

my partner literally keeps track of my cycle better than I do, so he warns me it’s upcoming. he understands the complications that make birth control not an option, and provides condoms even though it’s difficult for him to find comfortable ones. he’s less troubled by the general mess of a period than I am.

even my brother, who has done his best to remain uneducated about such things, has a general understanding. he might not know exactly how birth control works, but he knows it doesn’t always work or has other effects. he knows we don’t have any control over a period, or pms, but that it shouldn’t make women crazy and incapable (PMDD sucks, but there’s medication so I can be a normal human instead of sobbing for a week).