Hooray! Glad it turned out okay.

And yeah, from the experience of myself & those around me: the system may be backed up to hell, but when an urgent thing needs doing, it gets done with a quickness.

Thanks, lovely!

Thank you!

Ha! Perfect. Thank you!

Also: Have fun in Toronto! I unabashedly love that town: it's where I grew up (as much as I can be said to have grown up).

Either that, or "Yes, but the minimum wage is $17.85/hr, instead of $5." (Plus there's the shipping-things-to-the-island cost. Some shit just is expensive here. 🤷)

When we first moved back here, the prevailing theme of our conversations was:

@bitteroldpunk.bsky.social "HOW much for [x]?!? Jesus."

me: In your money, that's [x*.7].

BOP: Okay, that actually sounds reasonable.

Yeah, okay, you're probably right.

Happy birthday!

Oh, no. I'm so sorry.

No! Don't give up the dream! I think that kind of madness only happens deep in the woods where the srs pros operate. I guess with what some of the rarer edible mushrooms sell for, and how much a deep-woods picker might be carrying, it's worth it to someone.

We can stick to the edges.

It's also surprisingly dangerous. There's a lot of money to be made in those woods, if you know what you're doing, and apparently pickers getting robbed is not as uncommon as one might hope.

But I digress. Our wild mushroom woman picks in the local woods, and is unlikely to get jacked for fungi.

Right there with you. I dated a mushroom picker briefly: he was an interesting guy, and spent the spring and fall basically walking the length of BC (N-S in fall, S-N in spring) picking mushrooms and selling them at various waypoints in the bush. They're a special breed, the mushroom people.

Also shopping for Thanksgiving next weekend, which is why I now have 4 dozen eggs. 1 dozen are for ice cream.

Plus I love an excuse to buy some good local cheese & butter, which is a bit too much of a splurge for everyday.

Market day! You know you're in good with the wild mushroom woman when she throws a couple extra fat chanterelles in your bag. (I 🖤 the mushroom woman. She's French Canadian w/ a mess of grey & purple hair, & looks exactly like you'd expect a woman who lives in the woods gathering mushrooms to look.)

Clearly we are meant to start staying home with books and knitting and cheese and not do a damn thing after 6 pm 'til the light comes back.

I have! What the hell is up with that? Is this some new austerity measure? WHY ARE THE GODS PUNISHING US?

Same. We're almost at turn-on-the-heat temps, but not quite. We only got to can't-leave-all-the-windows-open temps last week!

Thanks. I try. She's an amazing person with a brilliant mind and a razor wit, and she neither needs nor deserves this shit. (Not that anyone deserves it, ofc.)

*bows, with both middle fingers righteously extended to those assholes*

Plus they're making my sick friend cry, and that alone makes me want to go scorched earth on their asses.

The thing is, she did the things they told her to. The problem got worse, and way faster than it should have. Maybe, in light of this, the solution isn't CLEANSE THE IMPURITY THROUGH FURTHER SACRIFICE YOU UNCLEAN SLATTERN!

Ye gods, this has seriously burned my britches.

/end rant. maybe.

It's just Puritan fanaticism dressed up as science, and it's not just making women's lives miserable, it's killing us. Rather like its predecessor, come to think of it.

Oh, man. Yes! This! She has a chronic illness that makes exercise difficult and possibly hazardous, and cases of the thing they're looking at now have upticked sharply in both frequency and severity since COVID, but yeah, it's her fault for eating eggs. EGGS!

Hugs to you, too.

You know what is definitely linked to bad health outcomes? Stress. Like the stress they add to when they hand her a list of things she can't eat and lecture her about how she lives without looking at context, implying that it's all her fault.

Maybe we could move the fuck on and treat the illness?

It’s a fucking persistent belief, though, isn’t it?” POINTED STARE.

but sometimes shit just happens. Unfairly. Even to people who don’t drink cooking oil by the pint. I think we got away from thinking of illness as a marker of sin quite some time ago, around the time that we decided that phrenology was racist bullshit and bodies aren’t controlled by the humours...

I suggested saying this at her next appointment:
Hey, I know it makes you feel safer when you blame people’s health problems entirely on their behaviour and act like it’s a moral failing that metaphorical self-flagellation will reverse and that you can avoid by being clean and pure, [...]

Friend is going through health stuff, complicated by the fact that she's a large woman, so they won't believe that her diet is actually healthy despite her logging what she eats for them. Instead (while admitting that what she's dealing with can just happen out of nowhere) they obsess about food.

That's a paddlin'.