Or you could live in a less urban area, specifically one where transplants are less common than people who grew up less than 30 min away. People who never left their home town, whose friend group also never left, still have all their friends from school and don’t need or want more. They don’t really want to be your friend even if you do click. You can meet them out dozens of times and have running jokes when you see each other, but they’ll never go out of their way to make or keep plans.

Everyone who moves to my current area says basically the same thing about how difficult it is to make friends here. People much more commonly get their friends hired with them than make friends with new people who get hired, so even that hasn’t been a super fruitful endeavor. Only people I’ve managed to make lasting friends with have also been from elsewhere and struggled.

That’s not to say people aren’t nice and welcoming, they are, they just aren’t welcoming into their social circles.

Wild, I refuse to go to packed restaurants because my experience will be markedly worse… my favorite time is between 2-4, because everywhere is dead then.

To each their own, I guess.

They are doing exactly that for a sometimes hefty markup. I got something like that with a gift receipt, so ultra lazy, looked up the item and it was $11 cheaper. Like that totally defeats the purpose of going elsewhere.

I reported the seller then returned it.

I’ve got heritage breeds, olive eggers and buff Orpington, and they fly just fine. The Orpington have really fluffy pants on, but both breeds are pretty lean (not really meat birds, more cold-hardy egg layers) and have no issues taking flight. They even fly across the yard for snack time, or when they spot a hawk/eagle.

They aren’t likely to be flying any significant distance, since they prefer running and staying home where they’ve got a good deal, but they could if they had to.

I think baby primates of nearly all varieties are adorable, personally. I got to hold a baby spider monkey at an animal sanctuary nearby and omg, it was the best! I just like primates in general. They are a fascinating glimpse of close but not quite familiar.

I wonder if dogs see other dog breeds that way, or if they are just used to the diversity.

I won’t tell you what to stock up on because other than food items that are difficult to grow in large enough quantities for yourself, I’m not sure that’s the right question for someone with access to a bit of land. What I would want to do in your position is start setting up systems for reusing what you have efficiently, and cutting down on future costs, since that’s where you’ll make the biggest impact. I’ve been on the brink of unstable for a very long time, and I’ve become very good at not falling over the edge, so this advice comes from there. Nothing you can stock up on will last long enough in useable condition to make a really substantial difference long term. Except maybe cinder blocks and bricks if you are handy enough to build stuff, and canning jar lids. Maybe a nice set of rechargeable tools, a bunch of fasteners, stuff like that.

Instead of buying fertilizer, chickens or quail and various kinds of compost are great options. You can make a couple different compost containers/piles using things birds can’t eat for worms and soldier fly larva, the birds love them and they are super healthy foods. Add the dirty bird bedding to the compost once you’ve let the birds eat the larva, let sit for a bit so it’s not so “hot” and till into garden soil. The bird-poo-rich compost is just amazing for plants. Worm compost runoff liquid (because it is done in containers typically), aka worm tea, is more of a potent liquid fertilizer you can use throughout the season as needed, so they work well together, and reduce your waste. Worm castings are a super great soil addition when you till or top-dress. Then you can supply eggs and fishing worms to people for income if you want. Plus chickens can eat most garden scraps, like leaves and spent flowers, so literally free food!

Look into permaculture plants that you can plant once and harvest for years to come with no effort, and give them the absolute best planting conditions you can manage based on whatever they need. Fruit trees, shrubs, vines, and bushes are great, but if you are willing to expand your horizons and plan ahead for maintaining them, there are plants that can be eaten in a variety of ways including as salad greens, and will come back for 2-20+ years. I would suggest to focus your efforts very heavily on stuff that will continue to bear food long term because it’s no effort for all that stuff, so you can put that effort into a garden of single season crops that round out your needs rather than struggling at addressing all of them. Plus you can plant smaller things like rhubarb, mint, chives, asparagus, strawberries, etc. around the footprint of the bigger stuff and everything is happier with the reduced direct sun (“full sun” doesn’t mean all day). A big key here is variety. You want as many different permaculture plants as possible growing (tho keep in mind cross-pollination requirements for things like apples and plums that need a bloom buddy) because if the local climate shifts and something fails, you are more likely to have things that survive and are already producing, no down time while you replace what failed, and that’s huge if you are relying on it for sustenance or income. You’d probably be really surprised at the sheer variety of things you can get to grow even in the frigid north. That’s what you want to stock up on now: permaculture plants. Seeds or cuttings or grafts, whatever you need get those going.

Set up rain barrels or create a pond that you can use for watering. Maybe set up an automatic drip irrigation system from it to reduce your effort and ensure consistency. If you want you can grow aquatic foods in a small pond or rain barrel, and/or raise fish if you have enough space. If you do rain barrels and they aren’t huge, you can put guppies in them seasonally, which will reduce mosquitos and produce a lot of guppies (they typically do not eat their own young) which can be harvested to feed to chickens or fish (like perch) as well.

Consider building a well-vented greenhouse to extend your growing window and help prevent weather related growing problems with more sensitive plants. If you live somewhere with cold winters, and you can source large used barrels (and if you live rural you probably can), you can fill them with water, paint them black and place them somewhere in the greenhouse that gets sun, and use them as freeze-resistance for your plants. Sometimes this is enough, if you build it right, to keep plants growing year round even up in Canada.

If you can, build a root cellar somewhere to store whatever you manage to grow, and learn how, and how long, to store each crop. It doesn’t have to be huge, but if you lose electric, it’ll still work when a fridge won’t. This doesn’t have to be a new space if you don’t want to build something and bury it, so if you have a weird empty basement room you can convert, or a crawl space or something, that might be plenty. I use a weird big cabinet the stairs down to my basement are built around and part of, because it’s otherwise a huge empty cold waste of space that’s inconvenient to access, with the door being on the stairs. A dark place that stays consistently cool and humid, but not stagnant, will keep produce good for considerably longer than refrigeration or sitting at room temp. If you commit enough space to it, you can use it to store home-canned goods (like in jars) in the dark to prevent light-related degradation.

If you don’t have one, invest in a large pressure canner, and as many jars as you can get your grubby mitts on for cheap (or free if you know people who throw out canning jars), and learn to use it. Find approved canning recipes, and save them somewhere offline. (the USDA actually has a ton of tested and safety-approved recipes for home canning, or you might be able to find books at local thrift shops. It’s wild what you can preserve with a bit of forethought!).

If you don’t already have solar, consider looking into it. It’s an upfront cost, yes, but it will save you down the line, especially if the grid, or the value of money, goes wonky. You can buy everything used from solar farms for well cheaper than new retail prices, and have someone install them or do it yourself if you feel comfortable, but then have it inspected and hooked up by a professional. The panels and stuff coming from solar farms still have most of their effective life left, they just cycle them out on a schedule to produce peak energy. If you go this route, make sure you have a way to disconnect from the grid if it goes down so you can continue using your solar. That might be standard, I’m not really sure. If you think inflation will make your savings worth less than not paying for that ongoing bill, it might be worth it. Keep in mind that you can always add more later if you need to, so don’t think you need a $20k system upfront. You might be good with $5-10k, which buys you a LOT of used solar capacity if you have space for it.

This is the trouble I’ve got. Deep red rural area that’s very clearly deep red. I don’t like going out around here because everyone supports Trump, and I have zero interest in supporting or interacting with people or businesses like that. Sure there are good people around, but finding them is incredibly difficult because they mostly keep to themselves because gestures at the entire area being regressive

I’d love to be able to actually find people to work with directly, but they would be very very very unlikely to actually be neighbors or even particularly local… so instead I’m focused on my diaspora. People I already know and care about, who are unfortunately not local to me anymore (1-5 hrs away), but who have less regressive communities, and more chance to extend the network themselves, and who I can help support in some way. I’m also working on some things that I hope will be able to help support people more widely. It’s not the community network I’d like, but maybe it’ll help. We can only do what we can do.

Weirdly, this post made me realize that not a single one of my siblings or cousins has reproduced, and that’s 7 on one side and 12 or so on the other, plus 3 for myself and siblings. And we are mostly mid 30s to early 50s.

I was honestly ready to whine about the timing and this not making sense… but no, turns out my timeline, despite being based on books that were supposed to be well-researched, was way off. And indeed the first chatter about mobile phones was around 1908. Til.

Have some Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

The floor definitely gives you a new perspective.

To be clear, those are usually for any handicap, as they are outfitted with wheelchair access and usually have extra adults riding along to help.

They are (or at least were in my area at that time) much more comfortable, similar to public transit busses. I got to ride along with a friend with a muscular problem on one a few times in the late 90s early noughties and it was lux.

I have a full size convection oven. I also have a really fancy countertop convection oven I got last year for like $120. I rarely use the regular oven anymore.

Why?

For one thing my full size oven is gas, and I’d rather use electric. My stove and furnace are the only gas appliances I have, but I try to run them as little as possible. For another, I live alone and often cook smaller portions. I don’t need to heat up that much oven for just a burrito or whatever, that’s wasteful.

And finally, my countertop convection oven has a suite of settings and features my standing oven can’t remotely compete with, and it can still cook something the size of whole chicken/roast and a side dish, just like my big oven. For example it has a meat probe that automatically shuts off the heating element when the internal temp reaches whatever it needs to be for the meat type and cook level you want. Perfect every time, no hassle, no guesswork, no adhd memory wipe leading to overcooked food. It also has a bunch of preset modes, and any changes I make to them get saved in the memory until I change or reset them, so when I find something cooks better at a different temp or time I can just save that on a setting I don’t use, and have to ready for next time.

It’s not that I don’t know how to use my oven. I do. I bought it myself 12 years ago and know exactly what it’s capable of with its luxurious 6 buttons and basic features. That’s why I wanted the countertop model.

My slow cooker is the same sort of thing - it’s an 8-in-1 pressure cooker, rice cooker, slow cooker, yogurt maker, etc. it does a lot of things and I use it frequently. It’s worth the hype.

I got weird rotary phone, GameCube, then that funeral video. I sort of thought this was some millennial meme I’m too out of the loop to understand. Lemmy is full of those.

If they were all the same size, perhaps amputee?

Or maybe a really specific fetish.

Maybe both.

Quite possibly a question best left unanswered, at least until you no longer live there

My partner just… waits… now… rather than repeating themselves, because they know full well I do this.

It’s very annoying when I legitimately didn’t catch some of it.

Oh fuck that would suck -hard-.

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I really want the context. Tho the really old jokes I’ve read have all pretty well sucked according to my present tastes, so…

Thank you, genuinely, for that resource. I love you passionately for it.

Thanks!

Despite being just south of Canada, I’ve never seen that stuff afaik. Then again it says dry areas and I’m in the wettest; Great Lakes region.