Former Member

Or maybe not… ;–)

So things are looking up for me! ;–)

Ezra is Trans – and a Republican like her hero, the decathlete? ;–)

Sorry this isn’t a recipe, but I thought you all might appreciate it anyway: ;–)

We need to remember that this is a small high school team. This is not a professional team. This is not even a college team. @travlbug is right, they should play to have fun! ;–)

Many people born or raised in Hawaii leave, often for California, because there are few opportunities in what is basically a small town. There are large communities of Hawaiians spread throughout the Golden State. Familiar foods are available in restaurants and major grocery chains like Safeway. At least one small store in San Francisco sells King’s Hawaiian Sweet Bread flown in from Hawaii – because they claim it tastes better than the ’same’ bread baked in Southern California (Honolulu is closer to SF than it is to LA). ;–) Many leave the state to attend college and find employment on the mainland. It’s not as difficult a choice as it was even into the Seventies. Unlike the pre-jet age when ships took weeks to cross the Pacific, it now only takes a few hours to return home.

Museum of Bad Art? ;–)

If the team loses, they’ll have to deal with the disappointment. However, no one ever expected them to do so well when the season began. They should take pride in their accomplishments, no matter the eventual outcome. They’ve done so much already! ;–)

Now I really feel like an old grandpa! I have no idea what those initials mean other than that they refer to some sort of game – which like ‘Dota’ I’d never heard of before! Then again, this old man only plays Civilization… ;–)

I’m not a sports-kind of guy at all, but even I can see that baseball* has been a good distraction for Artie. He tends to get to caught up inside his thoughts. This is helping him become a more well-rounded person. ;–) * Here’s where I was tempted to quote SNL’s “Chico Escuela’ (Garrett Morris), ‘Baseball… bean berra, berra, goud… to me.’ But since he appeared in 1975 – 1980, some of your parents were barely alive yet! Very few of you have any clue what I’m talking about… ;–)

Congratulations Toronto. Congratulations Canada on your very first World Championship ever! Well played. From the other CA. ;–)

Nope. Dictionary.app is preinstalled with the Oxford dictionaries (US & UK versions) and accesses Wikipedia. This time it was all dictionary definitions (except the pointless trivia).

There. I corrected that for you! ;–)

Isn’t that just what Michael did for Heathcliff, tell him he’s falling for Aidan? ;–)

I still think Brandon is a jerk. He’s always been a jerk. And he’ll always be a jerk! It was never his business to discuss with Jeremy.

That sounds like an admission that the ingredient list is not a transparently honest statement. Many ingredient lists are legally correct, but misleading to consumers in the way that they are written. There are several ways to describe variations on high-fructose corn syrup that don’t use those words in order to suggest to a casual reader that the product doesn’t contain the overly-processed ingredient that many consumers are trying to avoid. While there are legitimate reasons for a producer to use high-fructose corn syrup other than as a cheaper-due-to-US-government-subsidies sweetener than regular sugar, most often the ingredient is just a cheap sweetener that appears to be closely linked to increases in obesity. The US government allows a product (such as soap) to be prominently labeled ‘unscented’ even though the ingredient list clearly includes ‘fragrance.’ Many chemical names are used instead of more common terms to obfuscate and mislead. On the other hand there are a few brands that go out of their way to have simple and clear ingredient lists (Tlilamook ice cream and Method soaps and household cleaners come to mind).

Wow! Mary Poppins only claimed to be ‘practically perfect.’ No wonder Aidan doesn’t believe Heath is being honest with him! That’s one of the most over-the-top compliments I’ve ever heard – especially to a guy known to have self-esteem issues like Aidan. Heathcliff doesn’t seem to realize how his compliments feel to Aidan. ;–)

I remember my father working n his sermons, handwritten on those large yellow legal pads. Later he bought an Apple PowerBook 100 when it was being cleared out at Costco (I later added RAM for him and I still have the now-non-functional laptop that was designed and built by Sony for Apple). He had regular office hours every weekday, plus he attended almost every meeting that was held in the evening (prayer meetings, Board meetings, Deacon’s meetings, etc), and Sunday services. And then there were meetings associated with the denomination and other organizations that he attended as the church's representative. Add in hospital and home visits and random phone calls at any time of the day and you begin to realize how consuming his profession was. But it was a life he chose. On the other hand, I had no choice in his decision, yet I was forced to suffer anyway. People expected more of PKs than they did of any other of my peers. In a pre-answering machine world, I learned to take very detailed messages at an early age, including a contact number and the time of the call. Children should not be seen as special because of who their parents are (either positively or negatively) – all children should be expected to be well-behaved and polite to everyone, but they shouldn’t be expected to be more perfect than any other child.

A great week for GA's newest Signature Author! And if you haven't seen it yet, please check out the collected tributes for the Pulse victims and survivors @Mikiesboyposted for us

This made me wonder if it was related to Mark (as in Denmark). So I looked it up in Dictionary.app and Oxford mentions both the Welsh and Scottish border areas. It also references Marche, a region of east central Italy. The word is of Germanic origin (related to Mark) by way of Old French (marche, marchir). Mark shares its root with the Latin margo (margin). To quench your thirst for trivia: Denmark, Wisconsin was involved in the Big Bribe of 1854. That year, residents of Brown County voted on whether Green Bay or De Pere would become the county seat. Residents of Denmark wanted to build a church, but didn’t have the money. A man from De Pere offered a bribe of two dollars for every vote from Denmark cast in favor of De Pere. On election day, 15 men and boys voted in favor of De Pere and the town was given $30. But instead of building a church, the town built a school. This is either an example of politicians being politicians or an example of the separation of church and state. ;–)

But I got you to Comment! ;–) I’m guessing Butcher just took the words out of your mouth or something. ;–)

So since @Butcher56 Commented first, @Wesley8890 won't? ;–)

In the Eighties I had an annoying, redheaded manager named Bart who was Gay (and rumored to have a cocaine problem), but the overwhelming association for me is with the rail transit system. When I did a DuckDuckGo search on firefighting training in California, I found out that my state has its own training center, the CalFire Training Center, located in the Sierra Nevadas. This is unique within the US. There are also courses in firefighting in about a dozen colleges, most community colleges, scattered across the state.