Mlle. Zabzie

Agree on the money thing with both of you….And, this may become an issue for me. But we shall see. I may have my first update here next week. Stay tuned. I’m getting the best coaching behind the scenes.

Update. The crawling has commenced… @Madame deVenoge is wise in the way.

Thank you! I’m not sure if he is going to crawl back. I don’t really care. OMFG I do not care. I think I’m going to be ready pretty soon. My college reunion was…eye opening (note that all behavior was of a standard that behooves a lady - absolutely nothing untoward occurred).

Many thanks!!!

Congratulating. Should have done it a while ago. Trust me, reconciliation is completely, utterly, and entirely out of the picture. I am D.O.N.E. I’m sort of holding it together to keep the divorce as low key as it can possibly be, but I want as little to do with his ass as possible. So, anyhow, adventure time to come!

Announcement: After a 20 year hiatus, Mlle. Zabzie is now back on the market. Stay tuned for adventures, coming soon to a post near you this summer.

I have a friend who is an ER doctor who calls motorcycles “donor cycles.” Apparently it’s a pretty common view among ER types… The husband person is an aggressive driver now and was a VERY reckless driver as a young man (before I met him). I don’t like getting in the car with him when we are going any kind of distance. He knows it - and sometimes gets annoyed when I’m clutching the handles. With no traffic, the drive from the city to our house takes me an hour and four minutes. He does it in 52 minutes. He’s done it in 37 (not with me in the car thank goodness). My last traffic ticket was in 1997 (speed trap town - my own dang fault; it was night and I didn’t see the sign going from 55 to 35 in like 200 yards). His was … well, let’s protect the guilty shall we? Anyhow, to everyone’s point, bragging about it is NOT CUTE. It’s what the kids used to call a red flag (which, for those who don’t know is the opposite of a beige flag). It suggests a certain self-centeredness and disregard for the well being of others. I knew about all this stuff including the teenage shenanigans of the husband person and I married him anyway, but in retrospect, it’s definitely symptomatic of other behavior that drives me crazy.

This is my second trip to London already of 2024. Since it is a work trip, I will be staying at the Corinthia (yes I know Lah di dah). There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Corinthia.

Feel like the biggest issue will be customs given that I live in the (former) colonies… But I’ll be in London in a couple of weeks

I’d be potentially up for outdoors. But I’m a lazy gardener… I currently have (anemic) strawberries - would like to do better. The plants are a few years old and have never really flourished where I have them so I was toying with digging them out and starting over in a different bed. I put in tomatoes every year (but only do cherry/grape types) and get a bonanza, squash (both gourds and summer squash), okra, cucumbers. I often put in shishito peppers. I like putting in melons, spring peas and beans of some variety. I have had poor luck with root crops. My big pest issues are rodents (freaking evil bunnies) and squash bugs. I have seen cut worm and cabbage worm (when I do broccoli/cauliflower/brussels sprouts). Depending on the year I have issues with aphids/powdery mildew though I have an (organic) system for that now. I have had black spot and mosaic issues (had to dig out soil and refill - ugh).

I am out of the habit of reading spec fic right now. Need to find some good stuff. However, recent excellent reads: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. It’s schmaltzy but enjoyed it. Nothing too deep. The Wolf Age by Tore Skele (in translation). History of the Vikings in the 9th-11th centuries. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles The Hapsburgs by Martin Rady The Middle Kingdoms by Martin Rady The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason Next up: The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years, The Young Queens, Starling House

Surprised not to see here the story of Joe Lewis pleading guilty for insider trading. He gave stock tips to his private pilots and chauffeurs because he didn’t establish a retirement plan for them and felt bad…

Not my area. May be classified as a “gift” rather than “income” so in the estate and gift regime rather than the income tax regime, but honestly not sure, don’t have enough facts, and not worth going to the rabbithole tonight.

I came here thinking this would be about the NYT suit against Open ai and Microsoft. And in fact the suit alleges that the AI is just theft/generating plagarism. If you read the articles side by side to a layperson they have a point.

Would folks be interested in a chain holiday card instead? My husband's family does this. First person buys a card and signs it with a nice message/book recommendation (sometimes people put in a paper crane or other origami in my family) and then a stamp so it can be sent on. Anyhow, it goes around the family until it goes back to my father in law and then he takes a picture and sends to everyone. It's a lot less a commitment and the cost of an envelope and stamp

Absolutely no judgement, as you know, but I would be hesitant to get reinvolved here. Is it worth the potential heartache or better to focus on healing?

OMG! This is so fun. Sure - I’ve been absentee for a bit and xiii seems like a good sequel for me to reappear.

I am so sorry. Poor boo.

Well, and it bleeds into the pernicious fallacy of the "deserving" poor. I'm not into all of the recent "you deserve this" point of view. No one deserves anything at least in the way that is meant (I mean yes, choices have consequences and all that, but that's a different sense of deserving).

Look, I shouldn’t (and don’t) count the time I spend faffing around the board as “work.” But what to you IS work? Like I said, I’ve had to revise my thinking as I get a broader perspective and some maturity. Am curious what you are counting as “working” versus “goofing off”?

Complete tangent to the thread, but I’m interested in what you qualify as “real work”. One thing I’ve learned over time is that there are things that I did not value as a younger person (I.e., small talk at work) that are actually “real work” and are super important as you start to manage people (up and down). It is an important part of my day (which I actually set aside as a calendar block) to find time to connect with different groups of people. It’s much easier to care about people that you know on a personal level and not as the person who sends you sort of mediocre drafts or horrifying assignments. But to do that, you have to invest the time. That is work, and it counts just as much as time spent thinking creatively, time spent implementing ideas, time spent in analysis, etc.

I get to bear witness and not hobbits? Boo. I should at least get a wizard.

Nah, you are undervaluing the difficulty of their skillset and the importance of meetings and actually underestimating the amount of time spent thinking and doing. I deal in my job with a LOT of CEOs. They are a mixed bag. But a good CEO works incredibly hard and is the end decisionmaker point for an entire organization. That is a very particular skillset, if done right. It involves incredibly hard work, really good listening skills (which, hint, can't be done well over email), the ability to understand and synthesize vast amounts of information from lots of different (can't believe I'm using this word) stakeholders, attention to detail but also, and simultaneously, the ability to tune out detail and derive signal from noise, and a certain sociopathic ability to take a decision even though it will not please everyone. I actually think the job is very, very stressful, is often done poorly, but, and I will agree, is often WAY overcompensated. The job does attract some pretty unfortunate types too. There are the visionaries and dreamers (can't get them to look in the mirror honestly), the cult of personality types (OMFG), and the jackasses (enough said). But a lot of the very most contemptuous people I have ever dealt with are the next rung down, and not the CEOs. This exactly.

I have slugs and snails, which are worse because they don’t even provide the joy of bright birding.

Ooo ooo, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” or something like that….