Also depending on when and where in the world you grew up, the Brussels sprouts of today's may be a very different variety than the ones your mom served you as a kid, they're a lot sweeter and less bitter now.
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I'm wondering what exactly counts as a site for these purposes
I've been out of scouting for a long time now so I really don't know how they're working it
But I feel like different patrol areas at a lot of BSA summer camp sites probably offer more privacy and separation than there is at 2 adjacent sites at some non-bsa campgrounds.
I know at the summer camp my troop usually went to, you usually couldn't really see or necessarily even hear what was going on in another patrol's area, even though they were technically all part of the same site.
But at one state park we camped at a few times, we could pretty much see and hear everything that was going on in the adjacent group sites.
It's always been wild to me that steak houses are seen as sort of a fancy/high-end dining experience
Don't get me wrong, I love a good steak, and steaks can get pricey, so I get it from that angle
But steak isn't hard to do, even the fancy-schmanciest preparations usually aren't exactly complicated.
And the sides are usually pretty damn straightforward as well- baked or mashed potatoes, various vegetables that have basically been just been roasted or sauteed with some fat and seasonings
My wife and I have sort of a "no steakhouses" rule for our date nights. It's not that we wouldn't enjoy the food, but it's also mostly stuff that we could make at home for half the price and not much effort.
Sounds like you basically discovered Milk Toast
Normally the milk is warm or they get fancier and make a bechamel kind of sauce, and maybe add some sugar and/or spices
I had it once in a while growing up, haven't thought about it in years but I do remember liking it a lot, maybe I'll have some as a late night snack when I get home
As for my own weird food thing, when my wife is out of town I often grab myself a jar of pickled pigs feet. Not a common thing in my neck of the woods so I can't always find them. And it's not that my wife wouldn't be upset about me eating them or anything, it's just that I'd probably be cooking actual meals instead of sitting around in my underwear fishing chunks of meat out of a jar
A big part of the problem with girl scouts, in my opinion, is that a lot of the time the troops are kind of temporary.
Usually group of girls and their parents (usually moms, who may or may not have any scouting experience of their own) start up a troop, more-or-less from scratch when the girls are brownie or daisy-aged, and then that's pretty much it, they don't really do any ongoing recruitment, it stays just those same girls until they all either quit or age out of the program and then the troop dissolves.
Meanwhile, the (boy scout) troop I came up through is going to be celebrating its 100 year anniversary in a year or two. They have a garage full of troop gear, money in the bank, and decades of institutional knowledge of how to be a scout and how to run a scout program. We had one or two kids whose or father and I think even grandfather had earned their eagle from the same troop, the current scoutmaster was in the troop a couple years before me and his kids are in it now, the one before him was already scoutmaster when I started before his kid was old enough to join and stayed on for a few years after his son aged out, and every year we got a new batch of kids joining, some years more than others sure, but there was always new blood coming in
So there's a lot more continuity and something like generational wealth going on with the BSA. Girl scouts generally need to hit the cookies and fundraising hard because they're often kind of starting from 0 (not that there isn't some valid criticism about how the cookie sales work and how the money is distributed and used, but I don't know enough about that to really go into it)
And as far as recruitment, boy scouts made it really easy to find a troop, there's a website you can go on and find all of the ones near you, so if your kid just suddenly wanted to join, or if you moved and needed to find a new one it was dead simple to look that up. At least at the time when I was in, girl scouts didn't really have anything similar, unless you were already in the know about when and where the existing troops met you were kind of SOL if you wanted to join one. I remember one of our leaders talking about some sort of community event they were trying to put together, they had some representatives from a couple other local organizations and other scout troops and such coming, and they wanted to see if any of the local girl scout troops would want to take part, but he just couldn't get in touch with any of them, couldn't find contact info, when he reached out to their local council they basically stonewalled him
And unfortunately just by the nature of it usually being the moms who are the involved parents with girl scouts as opposed to usually the dads with boy scouts, there's often a bit less outdoorsy knowledge to build on (some of my best hiking/camping/fishing buddies are women, but until I was the one who started inviting them out, a lot of them had never done much that kind of thing, and unfortunately that's not a terribly uncommon situation, whereas guys tend to be more likely to grow up doing that sort of thing with their dads)
All that said, I've known a decent amount of girl scouts, and while a lot of them got stuck with shitty programs, there were a handful that actually probably went harder than we did in boy scouts. The odds aren't exactly in your favor of ending up in one of those girl scout troops, but with the right parents, kids, and resources they actually can put on a really good outdoor program (and their campgrounds are usually really nice as well) they just don't have the systems in place to make sure that all of their troops are able to do that to the same extent boy scouts can.
It can be used as a heat source sure
But the thing that makes steel steel is that it contains carbon
Dig iron ore up from the ground, and it's not going to have much if any carbon in it.
And unless you have some crazy particles accelerator/fusion reactor nonsense going on, nothing you do with just hydrogen is going to get carbon into that steel, because there's no carbon in hydrogen either.
Coal, however, is mostly carbon, so using as the heat source naturally tends to add carbon into your iron to make steel.
There's other ways of doing it, but at the end of the day most of them kind of rely on coal in one way or another at some point in the process because it's a really convenient source of carbon.
The next best alternative is probably cutting down a bunch of trees to process into charcoal
Would be really damn cool to be able to suck CO2 out of the air and use that carbon somehow, but to the best of my knowledge no one has figured out any efficient way to do that at scale.
I tend to reply "Thank, I grew it myself"
I don't exactly go respirator-shopping super often, and I of course have no idea what stores around you stock, but dn my experience, yellow and black are pretty widely available, and I don't think that I've ever personally seen white or green in the wild, but I've also never specifically gone shopping for them either, since my main use case is for things like spray paint so I'm mostly concerned with organic solvents fumes.
Another one I've gotten a lot of good mileage out of
I once joked to my wife that avocados need to get better prizes because I always seem to get the same one- a little wooden ball.
Now, anytime I'm in the kitchen preparing something with avocados, I'll let out an audible groan of frustration.
Which always prompts my wife to ask, usually from the other room "What's wrong?"
To which I always reply "Another wooden ball"
Always good for a groan and some eye rolls from the wife. She never seems to see it coming.
So you know how geese fly in that V-formation to reduce air resistance?
You know how sometimes the one arm of the "V" is longer than the other?
You know why that is?
Because that side has more geese.
Best told while you're just out shooting the shit walking around outside when you can point out some geese acting like you're just pointing out another fun nature fact.
Some of it is stress, but we get it just as much on the boring stuff too (we also handle a lot of the non emergency lines in my county) for things like a parking complaint where there's nothing urgent going on and the caller is cool as a cucumber, they're just completely clueless about anything I'm asking.
Like the other person said I think the question was about the ICE car
But I work in 911 dispatch, so I spend a good chunk of my night getting vehicle descriptions, you would be absolutely amazed at how many have no clue what kind of car they're driving themselves or can't even give a basic description
Me: What kind of vehicle is it?Caller: I don't know, I'm not really a car-person.Me: Can you tell if it's a sedan, an SUV, or a pickup truck?Caller: I don't know, I just told you that I'm not a car-person!
Also a shocking number of people don't know their own address, phone number, what the nearest cross-street is to their house (or even the nearest major road or big intersection,) what municipality they live in (it may be different than the "city" part of their mailing address,) what the address is of their work, whether their car has power locks and power windows (and in fact what that even means,) whether their spouse has any important medical history, where water shut-offs are in their house, the difference between a smoke detector going off and giving a low-battery chirp, etc.
There's no one answer
People work different schedules, the schedule I personally work has me working slightly more hours than average overall but I have more days off, so I'm free on a lot of weekdays, other people have more flexible schedules or work nights or weekends
Some people have PTO they can use, some have cool bosses who will just let them take time off whenever they want to, some people are those cool bosses or are self-employed and can set their own schedule
Some people are unemployed, some are retired (I've seen a lot of older folks at some protests near me)
Others are financially secure enough to be able to take the hit and think little to nothing of it
Others make sacrifices in order to make it work (if I had to take off without pay, I'd be out a few hundred bucks, it would hurt but I wouldn't be ruined for it, I might have to skip out on a few things I'd like to do, maybe cut some corners and buy cheaper groceries, cancel a subscription or two, borrow a couple bucks from friends or family, put a couple things on my credit card to pay off later that I otherwise might have paid for outright, or maybe work some overtime before or after it to make up the difference, but nothing I couldn't recover from fairly quickly.)
And with some exceptions, not everyone is going to every protest, some may only make it to a couple, some may make it to all or most of them, some may not be able to make it to any but may find other ways to help
N95 is probably better than nothing, but for these purposes it's probably far from good enough
Most pepper sprays and such are oil based, and n-rated respirators are not oil resistant. For that you really want an R-, or even better P-rated mask for oily mists.
Disposable masks suitable for that do exist, but more often you're going to find reusable cartridge-based ones which will have some additional ratings that probably aren't relevant to specifically pepper spray but could maybe be relevant for other
White labeled cartridges are suitable for acid gases like chlorine
Black labeled are suitable for organic vapors like from paint thinners and other solvents
Yellow are suitable for both
Green are rated for ammonia and methylamine
There's been a few studies on this, and most of the supposed remedies have been found to be little or no more effective than just rinsing with water or saline.
That said, in theory, I feel like baby shampoo is probably a pretty good bet, it makes sense on paper. Most pepper sprays are oil-based, soap/shampoo is a surfactant so it helps to rinse out those oily substances with water, and baby shampoo in particular is non-irritating to the eyes.
There's a few purpose-made products for this, I've seen a few recommendations for sudecon wipes from first-responder types. I have no recommendations about how to best get your hands on those sorts of products in case you're worried about leaving a paper trail.
For my own personal kit (that I just try to keep well-stacked for any eventuality, I have pepper spray on my dog's leash so I figured I should know what to do if I even accidentally mace myself) I've settled on sterile saline eye wash and baby shampoo. Haven't had to use it yet, so I can't attest to the effectiveness, but I figure it's gotta be better than nothing
And it makes enough sense on paper that I figure if nothing else maybe I'll be able to placebo effect myself into believing it did something.
Most shoes aren't really built to be resoled these days, they're out there and if they can be they usually make it a selling point of that shoe, they're usually a good bit pricier than other comparable shoes as well, probably gonna be about $250usd at the low end
Coincidentally I actually just sent my hiking boots out to be resoled. I have a pair of Danners, they cost probably around $450 new, and I'm getting their full recrafting service, so new heel counter, shank, resole, goretex lining, and if my shoe had any broken hardware that'd get replaced too, cost I think $260. Just a simple resole would be cheaper of course, and if you have a decent local cobbler they could probably beat that price.
I've had them about 4 years, and at this point the sole is pretty well-worn-out but the uppers are still in pretty good shape. They've been worn pretty close to daily, and have some hard miles on them.
I definitely feel that I've gotten my money's worth, before these I probably got new boots every 2 years or so and usually spent about $200 on a pair, so if these last me another 4 years (and I don't have any reason to think they won't, but there's no guarantee what misadventures my boots might go through in the next 4 years) I'll have even come out a bit ahead on them vs buying cheaper boots.
These are hiking boots, so I'm not exactly keeping them mirror-polished or anything, so care is pretty minimal, clean them with saddle soap once in a while, wipe them down with mink oil or whatever your preferred leather conditioner/waterproofing stuff is a couple times a year (I generally try to do at least twice a year, maybe a bit more frequently if they're getting a lot of hard use- getting really dirty, worn in the winter or near the ocean where they may be getting salty, etc.)
Also not shilling specifically for Danners, I've been very happy with them so far, but there's plenty of other brands out there that are as good or better, and of course everyone has their personal preference. My next pair may or may not be danners, I do have my eye on some boots from higher-end manufacturers if my budget allows.
We're already leaving the radio on for her (usually NPR, we figure that's mostly a lot of nice, calm, friendly-sounding voices)
And as it is, she has free reign of most of the house, which includes some dirty laundry in the hamper and, more often than I'd like to admit, on the floor of our bedroom which she never seems to pay any attention to whatsoever
And it's always really limited in scope, it's always just one or two things she gets into, not wanton destruction, I can't really know what's going through her head but it feels a lot like she just wants to do something bad while we're not there to tell her "no".
And often it's pretty benign with her not even trying to be destructive. She might steal a potato or a pack of ramen and carry it over to the stairs, not even bothering to chew on it, but the collateral damage of her getting into the potatoes might knock a bunch of stuff over and break a glass jar on the floor for example.
The time she got into the vitamins, I'm pretty sure her intentions were probably similar until she realized that the bottle rattled, and then she got curious and wanted to know what was inside.
As it is now, she's got a lot of access to our dirty laundry and she ignores it, and free access to our bed, so I'm not sure that getting more access to our smell would really help matters. And the things she steals usually aren't things we handle a lot or that would hold our smell. It seems like a lot of it is motivated by what she thinks would be fun to play with
Or things that would just cause the most confusion, although I think that's probably too abstract of a thought for even a smart dog like her, but it's kind of hard to explain why she fished a potato out of a bag to bring up to our bed otherwise.
And again, she's not a particularly destructive dog, for the most part she's not really even chewing on most of the things she takes, but her little acts of theft tend to cause other collateral damage and we really worry about her breaking something glass in the process (which has happened) and getting cut (which so far hasn't thankfully)
She has so many toys, big ones, small ones, toys that squeak, toys that crinkle, plush toys, harder toys to chew on, balls of all shapes and sizes, she's spoiled in that regard.
One summer my family adopted Scrappy
A friend of a friends daughter had him at college but could not longer keep him.
He was a really nice dog, some mystery combination of lab and who-know-what
But she had him in a house with a few roommates who all had different schedules, and this dog had never really been left alone, plus he was in a new environment with new people.
First few days we had him there was always someone home with him. He was great, meshed right into our family.
Then we tried to leave him alone and we discovered this dog had massive separation anxiety. We weren't gone for very long, maybe an hour, he destroyed a beanbag chair, and a bunch of blinds.
We tried crating him, he mangled the crate.
We tried locking him in the basement with some toys and such and this dog busted through the drywall to get out and cause havoc upstairs.
We got him over the summer, summer break was winding down and we knew we wouldn't have the time to work with him on this. It broke our hearts but we had to give him back.
Last we heard, he was actually in training to be some sort of service dog, he was still pretty young and was a very smart well-behaved dog as long as someone was with him, and I feel like a situation like that where he could always be with his human was a great fit for him. I hope it worked out for him.