Mel

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

I'm interested in the possibility of a genetic component to this. My baby brother died of SIDS in 1980, which made my child's pediatrician quite nervous when she was born. (Her dad also losing a sibling as a baby didn't help, although that death was understood. Only 3 heart chambers at birth.)

Are you coming to next month's live show? I don't think I'm going to be able to take the train all the way from Tucson this time.

Welcome to European socialism.

That is absolutely the downside of living near a decent sized hub. The airport gets pretty crowded & lines can be long. But I think it's made up for by the fact that I can usually avoid layovers, with their risks of missed connections. And the amenities at the airport are nice.

I've got 4 flights booked in the next month & every US airport I'm flying through is on that list.

Debating trying to change my domestic flights to train trips. It'll be $$ & slow, but I'll probably get where I'm going. Too bad there isn't a reasonable non-plane option for my trip to Munich.

Where Is @donoteat.bsky.social Now? Feels like a sort of Trivia Game.

I'll start. In the grocery store I usually get Pink Ladies or Evercrisp, when I can find them. Our favorite orchard variety is Northern Spies.

I was hoping this would devolve into a thread where people tell me their favorite apple varieties, because I'm always up for trying new ones. (Anything with delicious in the name is disallowed.)

There's some excellent Indonesian food in Amsterdam. Just don't think too hard about why that might be. And the central train station is beautiful. Too bad that you are too early for Christmas Markets.

A screenshot of the accessibility options in the Bluesky iOS client in dark mode. There's an option titled "alt text" with a slider for the option to "require alt text before posting". This should be turned ON.

I'm seeing so many excellent memes and screencaps today missing their alt text!

Please include *everyone* in your joy! Go to Settings > Accessibility, and turning on "Require alt text before posting." This way a reminder will pop up if you try to post an inaccessible image

I wish I could find a powdered laundry detergent that dissolves well in cold water, but that is probably an unreasonable ask.

But I've taken to washing all my clothes in cold water. It's better for the clothes & uses less energy unnecessarily. And I find the powder laundry detergent doesn't dissolve well & tends to leave a residue on my clothes. So I use liquid detergent (but never pods).

I agree with you for dishwashers. I always wash my dishes with hot water to sanitize them, which means the powder dissolves enough.

I am so lucky to live close enough to apple orchards to be able to get good apples for a reasonable price. But there is a lot of only buying varieties for the couple of weeks they are ripest. I recently found out that I have a friend whose favorite apple variety is red delicious. Horrifying.

it's time for journos to start asking Johnson meta questions

"Speaker, on 5 occasions last week you said 'I haven't seen it' when asked about news events w/big implications for public policy. Do you ever read the news, and do you agree it's problematic for the Speaker to be so woefully uninformed?"

And for anyone reading this who might be worried about a calcium deficiency, consider talking to your doctor about also taking vitamin D to help with calcium absorption. This is what I learned when I talked to doctor about my family history of osteoporosis & is how I learned about my D deficiency.

My other specialty is booking fun, unusual places to stay. We've stayed on a houseboat in Amsterdam, an old fashioned guesthouse in Switzerland, an old train station in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and a castle in the Netherlands. The train station had a sauna!

(Hotel & meals will be expensed to work. So very little cash outlay for this last minute trip to get to go to Christkindlmarkt for the first time since I was a kid.)

I was able to book a business class seat for a reasonable red eye to Munich and a decent daytime itinerary with two shorter flights & a reasonable layover coming home for the price of 60% of the the miles in his frequent flyer account & 50% of my credit card points. Which means I can join him.

I am very proud of myself right now. One of my partners found out one week ago that he was being sent to the Munich area for work over Thanksgiving week.

I love travel logistics. It's always a fun challenge, and the low stakes of absolutely everything involving travel being temporary makes it less stressful than a lot of similar challenges. And, often, the end result is a vacation!

B has family out here. We came out with his dad because we don't like letting him make that drive by himself anymore. But maybe I can convince some friends to road trip out here sometime & my schedule won't be entirely tied to a cranky old man.

I'm in that general area right now. Closer to Corning actually. But we drive home tomorrow & I don't think I can convince the rest of them to let me detour. Binghamton is the wrong direction.

Plus maintaining the building itself. High rises aren't cheap to keep up & the HOA has to do all of it: foundation, walls, roof, common areas, HVAC, plumbing, & electrical systems. It's just too difficult to split out the infrastructure of the individual units from each other.

Yay, Amtrak!

Why do so few of these listings include floor plans? We've looked at nearly 70 houses & it's by far my biggest complaint.

Mostly I don't understand choosing a school night for an evening event when Halloween actually fell on a Friday this year. The best reason I see to move it is to disrupt schedules during the school week as little as possible.

It doesn't help that most Americans don't understand our tax system. They only have the barest understanding of the differences between income, sales, & property taxes, and no idea about how payroll taxes fit into the system. Which makes it difficult to have a substantive discussion of policy.

Instead of trying to green cars so much why don't we just invest in trains. city trains. under ground trains. above ground trains. trains between cities. trains between countries. TRAINS

THE PEOPLE CRAVE TRAINS