I grew up in poverty, where we were always on the edge of eviction. If it wasn’t for school, my siblings and I wouldn’t have eaten. It left a large mark on me. I am much more financially conservative than my husband. I have also been the main breadwinner since we married. We need a cushion before even thinking about kids, it’s really important to me. But my in-laws don’t care!
My sisters-in-law grew up in luxury, graduated with degrees they never used, and married rich. Ever since we got married, they constantly try to pressure us to have kids. When I’ve said we want to be more financially stable, they blow me off and say that “families do it all the time” and that “God will provide.” I have told my mother-in-law and husband how condescending this nonsense is to me. They both said that everyone just wants the “best” for us.
Recently, my sister-in-law started in on me again with her breeding propaganda: How I wasn’t getting any younger (I turned 33 this year); That there “never a perfect time to have a baby;” and how “Divine Providence provides for everyone.” Well I finally lost my temper. I asked her where was God the times I went hungry to give food to my younger siblings? Or how is he providing for starving kids in war zones? She started to cry, so now I am the villain. My in-laws told my husband I need therapy. My reply is that maybe my actual life experience and personhood is worth a drop of empathy, and they should stop treating me like I was a sow at market. How can I get them to realize that not everyone is rich like they are and that some of us do need to save and plan for kids?
Almost two centuries ago, on July 4, 1830, a brigade of about 80 fur trappers and traders led by William Sublette, headed toward the Wind River region just to the west, paused to celebrate the Fourth of July — Independence Day in the young United States of America. They camped beside a massive, free-standing mound of bald granite along central Wyoming’s Sweetwater River. Sublette is generally credited with giving the monolith its name: Independence Rock, shown here in a photograph taken on June 19, 2025.
During the mid-19th century, this emigrant route over the Continental Divide and through North America’s Rocky Mountains was traveled by an estimated half-million explorers, adventurers, would-be gold miners, farmers, tradesmen and other settlers — men, women and children. All were walking, riding horses or seated on often oxen-powered wagons, and some were even pulling handcarts. The Oregon, Mormon Pioneer and California National Historic Trails and the route of the Pony Express all passed by this impressive outcrop. Independence Rock and the Fourth of July became goals for pioneers because the landmark was about halfway between their trek’s beginnings, near the Missouri River, and their Far West and Pacific Coast destinations, which they hoped to reach before snow started to fall in the Sierra Nevadas and other ranges later in the year.
In diaries and letters, emigrants variously wrote that the great mound looked like “a huge whale,” “a giant bowl turned upside down,” or “a big elephant mired up to its sides in the mud.” And on cliffs, in alcoves and caves, and on the rock’s rounded top, thousands of them scratched, chiseled or wrote with paint, axle grease, or tar their names, initials and dates onto the granite. Time, weather, erosion and rock-covering lichen have erased or obscured most of the inscriptions, but scores remain, as shown in the bottom photo (also taken on June 19). One of the earliest known signatures, made by “M.K. Hugh” in 1824, has vanished. But others, even from the 1840s and 1850s, can be found by determined searchers, especially along a path that encircles the rock.
The emigrants, as an informational sign at Independence Rock observes, probably did not realize they were beneficiaries of millions of years of geologic activity. The monolith — roughly 1,900 feet (580 meters) long, 850 feet (260 m) wide, and 130 feet (40 m) high — and other, more-jagged peaks nearby are composed of Archean granite, a hard, coarse-grained igneous rock that slowly cooled under the Earth’s surface. The rise and fall of the land and erosion eventually exposed the summits we see today. A highway rest stop along Wyoming 220 now provides viewpoints and pathways to the steep-sided mount, which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961, and which is managed today by the State of Wyoming as the Independence Rock State Historic Site.
Let’s struuuuuuuuggle… I took a call on the Lovecast this week from a woman who slept with a former professor when she was 19 and he was 27. They were both consenting adults, she wasn’t his student anymore, she pursued him… and then he dumped her for someone else. Years later, she reached out to … Read More »
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 06 secrets from Secret Submission Post #965. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
I'm writing a story where my main character stops his friend, a dad to a 13-ish year old boy, from purchasing some anime manga books because the main character knows the book series is too adult (sex, violence, both) for a 13 year old. The main character then recommends a different series because the story line is more appropriate for the age of the teen.
The story is the relationship between the main character and the dad, so this is a small piece of the larger story. But I know absolutely nothing about anime (or manga, obviously!) and would appreciate some recommendations of titles that would fit those categories.
Thanks!
ETA: I'm looking for currently available titles and perhaps where they are best purchased (a bookstore, a comic book store, a specialty shop, online?)
I'm a firm believer in celebrating just about everything with cake, and from the submissions you guys send in I'm clearly not the only one. However, there's celebrating, say, a new vasectomy or Daddy's parole, and then there's the stuff that some people might consider, well, inappropriate cake material.
Not me, of course. No sir! Heck, I say, you wanna get pregnant? Then SAY IT WITH CAKE:
Or you're happy you DIDN'T get pregnant? Say THAT with cake.
Let's say your friend Cory suffered a nasty seizure recently. That warrants a cookie cake, right?
(Remember, kids: It's "i before e except after c." Except in the word "seizure.")
And remember that time your friend lost a finger to the lawn mower? Just in case he doesn't, let's remind him! With cake!
I like how this is less a "get well" cake, and more an "IN YOUR FACE!With love from the Lawn Mower" cake.
Driving while intoxicated is a serious crime, so be sure to tell your friends you won't stand for such behavior. Also with cake.
I like to imagine the candles are mini breathalyzers.
(How cool would that invention be? Right? I'll make millions. MILLIONS, I say!)
The world is too success-oriented. We should be sending a better message to younger generations. A message that says, "Hey, no matter what, at least you'll get a cake out of this."
Dangit. Why don't I know any lady farmers to give this to? WHY?!
(PS - You misspelled "Awesome." But I'll let it slide, because melons.)
And finally, my favorite:
Hang on... we get cake for that?
WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME?!
Thanks to Anony M., Katelyn, KG, Paul S., Paige S., April B., & Stephanie K. for the inspiration.
*****
P.S. That reminds me of my Wonder Womb DIY, but if you're not feeling crafty you can buy this!
In spring of 2022, I tried out a kick scooter my husband randomly brought home, and loved it, which got me thinking about riding a bike. I needed something to do in the spring and summer, when ice skating is much less available. Back in 2020, I’d bought myself a little three-speed steel retro bike, with fenders and a Dynamo hub and a front rack, but I was too busy and stressed to re-learn how to ride a bike at that point.
So once I finally had the bandwidth, I took my bike out into the quiet parking lot of a closed doctor’s clinic on a Sunday, practiced mounting and dismounting (using a curb), and slowly got myself riding on quiet streets and getting my balance back. Riding a bike as a fat adult felt quite different than it had as an average-sized kid, and it took a while to get my muscle memory back. But with patience and letting myself go slow, it did come back. With a vengeance.
I started riding that granny bike everywhere, as fast as possible, on gravel trails and in the forest, and eventually for 50 km one summer’s day. Then I thought, “I’m gonna need a faster bike.”
All of this, from buying skates and taking lessons, to buying a bike and then needing a better bike, was all wildly intimidating as a somewhat shy person, but also as a fat person. Going into sports-focused stores does not feel comfortable as a fat person. I feel lucky that no one gave me a hard time, but they easily could have, and it would have been very discouraging.
I forced myself to go to a couple of bike shops and test ride some bikes…and then I fell in love, predictably, with the ugliest and most expensive bike possible: a Salsa Warbird with a carbon frame in millennial gray. I was immediately repulsed by the colour when they pulled it off the rack, but when I rode it, I found myself whispering sweet nothings to it, telling it how smooth it was, how fast it was, and how much I loved it, even though it was far too expensive for me. I went home and sulked for a week, and my husband told me to go back and buy the Warbird, so I did.
It was still ugly, and I still loved it more than I have ever loved an object before. It was and continues to be the most expensive thing I have ever owned. I rode it a bunch in the late summer and fall of 2023, culminating in an 85 km trip.
The following spring, I got hit by a car (thankfully it was a very slow, ridiculous crash and I was only a bit bruised), and had to replace a bunch of parts on my bike (which thankfully the driver’s insurance paid for), as well as the frame, which is now a beautiful, glossy black instead of gray. So now I’m even more in love with it, and that’s what I was riding this morning, yet another roller coaster in my life.
I did not think all this would happen when I decided to accept myself as a fat person and stop dieting in November 2000. I just wanted to experience peace in my body, stop caring so much about how I looked, stop experiencing the intense shame that I’d been taught to feel about my weight, and the guilt and confusion around food that came with it. I had no idea I was an athlete; I had no desire to become one. But somehow, learning to treat myself and my body with compassion allowed me to learn things about myself that had been hidden for years, decades.
As it turns out, I’m a small-time thrill-seeker, a diver, a skater, a cyclist. I’m still fat. Hills are hard, but I descend like a beast.
I may or may not have ridden my bike 50 km to eat a Fat Bastard burrito in front of an out-of-business Jenny Craig.
On March 16, 2025, probably around 8:00 pm local time, I stepped outside to have a look at the sky. It was fairly clear with only a few patches of clouds. As I looked almost overhead there was the International Space Station (ISS) passing over, a nice long pass of at least six minutes, I would guess. But then as the ISS was about to disappear towards the east there was another bright object following in its path, maybe just a minute or two behind. I couldn't believe it - it was the Space X Dragon capsule about to relieve Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from their extended ISS stay! I had no idea that this was going on and it was pure fluke I was outside at this time to witness it. Both passes were however on NASA's Spot the Station website with the time in agreement with what I'd seen. I was furious at missing this superb photo-opportunity because at 8:00 pm the sky was nice and dark, and I could have held the shutter open for the duration of both passes.
Two days later, on March 18, the SpaceX capsule was in the news once more as it was about to detach from the ISS and return home. I wondered, could I save the situation and actually get images of the ISS and the SpaceX capsule on the night of the 18th? I should say at this point that there was no entry for the SpaceX capsule's return when I looked at the NASA website on the 16th. But when I checked the site again on the 18th, there it was! The only problem was that the SpaceX capsule pass would occur shortly before 7:00 pm, with the ISS pass coming along some 15 minutes later, and the sky was still fairly bright that early in the evening. This is a nuisance for a photographer as it means I'd have to grab the passes in short exposures as a long exposure would wipe them out due to too much skyglow. In addition, to make things worse, SpaceX pass was fairly low in the sky, in the murk, which combined with the much dimmer appearance of SpaceX (compared to the ISS) and the skyglow would make this a VERY difficult capture -- much more so than the capture two days earlier.
Anyway, I set up my Canon 5D camera in bulb mode with a 15mm fisheye lens ready to capture SpaceX first. In the SpaceX image (top photo) west is to the right and you can see the 11 exposures capturing the SpaceX pass -- at left (east) in the lower half of the frame. Note that the tree you see on the right in this image is the same tree you see on the right in the ISS pass (bottom photo), which gives you some idea of the huge difference in elevation between the two passes. From memory, I believe the SpaceX pass was around 12 degrees, whereas the ISS pass was around 78 degrees. Some 15 minutes later, the ISS came over and you can see the six (longer) exposures I took on the bottom photo. So, at least I captured both the ISS and SpaceX and was thus a little less furious about losing the more ideal passes two days earlier.
But then there was a further setback. When I looked at the SpaceX data, the capsule was incredibly dim, and I couldn't create even a half decent image of the pass. I was down in the dumps again. Had I missed the photo-opportunity of a lifetime for a second time? Fortunately, not! My friend Noel Carboni, Photoshop practitioner extraordinaire came to the rescue and created the top image (of the two) that you see above.
Photo Details: Canon 5D MkII camera, in bulb mode; ISO 100; f#2.8; a Canon 15mm fisheye lens; processed in Photoshop.
New Forest Observatory, Hampshire, U. K. Coordinates:50.819, -1.590
Our house sits on a heavily wooded hill, and there isn’t much in terms of street lights—and no sidewalks. Though there are only a few houses on our bend of the road, we get people speeding through. We have new neighbors. The mother’s behavior is going to end in tragedy.
The neighbors have several very small children. The mom, for some unholy reason, thinks nothing of letting them bike in the street. She lets her babies ride around well ahead of her as she strolls leisurely several yards behind. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.
My husband has already had a close call with one of the kids. He was backing out and the toddler zoomed right behind the bumper. Luckily, my husband was paying attention and was fast to put his foot on the brake. Even going as slow as he was, just a few miles per hour, it would have been a tragedy if he hadn’t been alert.
The mother’s reaction was to lay into my husband for not being careful enough! The kicker is that she said her kids have a right to play in the street. (There is a park five blocks away, but that is too far for her to go, apparently.) My husband said it was a bad conversation.
What do we do here? It would haunt me if one of these kids got hit because their mother was too lazy to care.
Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).
What I'm reading now:
My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.
What I recently finished watching:
American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.
I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.
What I'm about to start watching:
Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.
What I'm playing now:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 13 secrets from Secret Submission Post #965. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
In a prologue that's very Terry Pratchett-esque without actually being funny, an enormous floating tower appears in England, becomes a 12-hour wonder, and is then forgotten as people have short attention spans. Then thirteen random people suddenly vanish from their lives and appear at the base of the tower, facing the command ASCEND.
I normally love stories about people dealing with inexplicable alien architecture. This was the most boring and unimaginative version of that idea I've ever read. Each level is a death trap based on something in one of their minds - a video game, The Poseidon Adventure, an old home - but less interesting than that sounds. The action was repetitive, the characters were paper-thin, and one, an already-dated influencer, was actively painful to read:
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cakewrecks_feed) wrote2025-07-04 01:00 pm
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