Monterey sea lemon, Hood Canal WA USA

Ask and ye shall receive! Giant nudibranch, Sinclair Inlet, Bremerton WA USA

These nudis are very common on the docks where I moor my boat. This picture has the saturation punched up, but still fails to convey just how trippy they, and most other nudibranchs, look in person. The iridescence in the rhinophores and cerata is something that can be tricky to capture with imaging. Here is a different angle of the same species.

You and me both! 😆 We continued to live together and were besties for another four years, and she would never talk about anything relationship-related, even as her next three relationships imploded.

I had a partner for eight years. We met when we were both 31. She was my first monogamous relationship theretofore because I decided to give monogamy a try. She was utterly, screamingly boring in bed. There was nothing else notably wrong with the relationship, except for her unwillingness to communicate on anything beyond household, workaday topics. No oral (give or receive), no anal, not into foreplay, and she would just lay there. But no conflicts either. There was the advantage of she was always willing and ready to go without any foreplay or lube. She got off and claimed she was absolutely sexually satisfied. Sex wasn’t even fun in the context of Free Use, which is a kink I enjoy. I tried to engage her in all kinds of Gottman Method relationship work, but she bluntly and explicitly refused.

At one point early in our relationship, she moved and clamped her vagina in a way that was quite enjoyable. “Honey, that was great! Please do that more.” And for the rest of our relationship, any such complement was a sure-fire way to make sure it would never happen again. After eight years of nearly daily, invariably terrible sex, I stopped approaching her sex for three weeks. She never said a thing. On day 22, I broke up with her, and she was absolutely gobsmacked, claimed that I was throwing away eight years of great history. She hadn’t even noticed that there had been no sex for three weeks.

Yes, someone please come free us! I am being held hostage by Windows and Autodesk Inventor.

We never got rid of slavery in the US. We merely shifted cost of ownership. Quite successfully. The laws have been advanced and tweaked to make everyone a potential criminal, especially if a minority. Prison labor is absolutely legal. The prison system is mostly privatized and for-profit. Healthcare is tied to employment, with dental care (a foundational element of good health) often being an add-on to employer-provided health insurance.

Stop the country, I want to get off.

Refs:

• Hacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig
• New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen

My goto for all things savory is Serious Eats, and specifically J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s work on the topic: https://www.seriouseats.com/search?q=sous+vide

Freezer burn is a function of air reaching the food while frozen. Use a chamber vacuum sealer that can pull vacuum into single-digits mmHg. We live on a sailboat, and our freezer is set at 22F/-5.5C for energy conservation. Never had freezer burn.

Here’s some more info on food safety with sous vide cooking: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/articles/1131-is-sous-vide-safe

Well, goddammit, I just had a huge reply typed out, and the website deleted it when the text window lost focus. Okay, super short version: /u/akrot raises a good point, and we would all do well to apply harm reduction and awareness of EDCs in our lives. They are ubiquitous and insidious. In my case, sous vide cooking is one of the very few explicit uses I concede to single-use plastic in my life. It is also one of the few points in my kitchen that food touches plastics.

We must all pick our own battles, and everyday EDCs demand some awareness-raising.

Sous vide cooking. It’s easy to buy a bulk quantity of food, vac-pack and cook it, then freeze it. This saves time and money both on purchase, initial prep, and mealtime prep.

For example, we buy a whole, locally-grown, grass-fed chuck flap. We trim, bag, and cook the entire flap in one day. This provides my partner and me about six weeks of meals with high quality protein. Added bonus: the juice and gelatin in the bag after cooking makes excellent soup stock or cooking liquid for beans. Double added bonus: a sous vide chuck steak is just as good as the best ribeye fillet.

Also learn to use an entire chicken. For example, spatchcock and roast the chicken for dinner. Break down the carcass to get every scrap of meat. Make chicken salad the next day. Roast the bones, make a mirepoix, and make chicken stock. Use that to make chicken and dumplings or chicken soup. The two of us eat for a week from one chicken.

Learn about food preservation and safety: reusable containers, dangerous food conditions, fermentation, canning, making stocks… A huge part of saving money on food is not wasting any of it. Being able to buy in-season food when it’s cheaper and more nutritive is a big deal.

And on that note: avoid cheap, low-nutrition food. Sure, that industrial, NPK produce and ultra-processed box meal might be “affordable.” But those tend to be empty calories; you have to eat more of it to feel sated and get the nutrition you need. Locally grown, in-season foods tend to be better food values since you need to eat less of them to get the same micronutrients. See: “The Doritos Effect,” by Mark Schatzker.

In my case, Inventor and AutoCAD. I hate AutoDesk with the fury of a thousand suns, but FreeCAD just isn’t stable enough.

Oh, and currently needing .NET automatic source generation (long story), which is very difficult to develop on anything other than Windows.

The acid is not the problem. It’s the sulfation of the plates (or mats) in flooded cell (and absorbent glass mat) batteries that ruins the batteries.