My mother's family was from the Ozarks and there were 12 born to my grandmother, two boys died before they were one. My grandmother was married at 14 in 1904, my mother born in 1920 and was a middle child, so my grandmother continued to give birth after her for many years. An uncle had polio, my mother scarlett fever. My grandfather got TB which forced them to move to New Mexico for the dry heat. Poverty was a real thing for so many across the United States and still is, though it was diminishing. Mom could relate to both Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton's early lives.
I got my inoculation for measles, mumps, scarlet fever, bronchial pneumonia, chicken pox the old-fashioned way - my brother brought them home from school and gave them to me.
The first medical inoculation I received was smallpox, I took a test for TB - I think those are the only two things that were required then to start school. And the others, like TB, had no vaccines yet.
I remember getting the Salk vaccine (polio, and yes, people in America were still contracting the disease) which was given in a sugar cube. Yum, medicine!
I am hoping I can go back to my old day program. If I have to go there 5 days a week, I rather go there than my current one. There is nothing the current one can do unless they move into a place with more rooms for groups.
Non-complaint: support payment finlly dropped! Woot woot!
Great news.
I'm sorry about you and other folks who have awful ex- and current family members. Been there/done that. My parents divorced when I was 10 or 11, with Dad getting full custody*; after I was 14, I had no contact with my Mom - 100% my decision** - except for some her making harassing phone calls and perhaps stalking, neither of which were illegal 50 years ago.
*Which was unheard of in the 70s, which should tell you something
**Dad supported my decision & would also have done his best to help me keep in touch with her if that had been what I wanted.
Non-complaint: support payment finlly dropped! Woot woot!
Great news.
I'm sorry about you and other folks who have awful ex- and current family members. Been there/done that. My parents divorced when I was 10 or 11, with Dad getting full custody*; after I was 14, I had no contact with my Mom - 100% my decision** - except for some her making harassing phone calls and perhaps stalking, neither of which were illegal 50 years ago.
*Which was unheard of in the 70s, which should tell you something
**Dad supported my decision & would also have done his best to help me keep in touch with her if that had been what I wanted.
I'm so sorry you didn't have a mom worthy of the title.
I got lucky in that the ex hasn't tried to keep in touch or be involved in the kids' lives once it was established that he wouldn't be allowed unfettered, private access to Teen Kiddo. Teen Kiddo requested to refer to him by his first name instead of "dad", and has made it clear that if he ever does surface, they don't want anything to do with him. We found a good therapist for them, and it seems to be helping. (They did a literal dance of joy when I told them I was having divorce papers served... so no transition grief there.) And Little Dude was just a baby when we left, so our little family configuration just seems like the default to him. He was really fond of the "Families are Different" song on Daniel Tiger for a while, and I think that helped. (It's awesome how deliberate that show is in representing different family setups.) Overall, I got the best outcome of a poopy situation.
Non-complaint: support payment finlly dropped! Woot woot!
Great news.
I'm sorry about you and other folks who have awful ex- and current family members. Been there/done that. My parents divorced when I was 10 or 11, with Dad getting full custody*; after I was 14, I had no contact with my Mom - 100% my decision** - except for some her making harassing phone calls and perhaps stalking, neither of which were illegal 50 years ago.
*Which was unheard of in the 70s, which should tell you something
**Dad supported my decision & would also have done his best to help me keep in touch with her if that had been what I wanted.
I'm so sorry you didn't have a mom worthy of the title.
I got lucky in that the ex hasn't tried to keep in touch or be involved in the kids' lives once it was established that he wouldn't be allowed unfettered, private access to Teen Kiddo. Teen Kiddo requested to refer to him by his first name instead of "dad", and has made it clear that if he ever does surface, they don't want anything to do with him. We found a good therapist for them, and it seems to be helping. (They did a literal dance of joy when I told them I was having divorce papers served... so no transition grief there.) And Little Dude was just a baby when we left, so our little family configuration just seems like the default to him. He was really fond of the "Families are Different" song on Daniel Tiger for a while, and I think that helped. (It's awesome how deliberate that show is in representing different family setups.) Overall, I got the best outcome of a poopy situation.
Incidentally, those are my adoptive parents, the only ones I knew. Back in the early 60s, open adoption didn't exist AFAIK & I imagine might've generated more pearl-clutching than premarital "relations LOL. For most of my life never considered seeking out biological relatives, which was of course quite hard until very recently. Maybe this will be the year I take my daughter up on 23 & Me for Christmas.
In Mom's case, there were mental health issues, but I don't think that was all of it. Since it's been so long, I do try to dwell on what good memories there were - take my decades-long effort to find her fudge recipe. I succeeded!
Non-complaint: support payment finlly dropped! Woot woot!
Great news.
I'm sorry about you and other folks who have awful ex- and current family members. Been there/done that. My parents divorced when I was 10 or 11, with Dad getting full custody*; after I was 14, I had no contact with my Mom - 100% my decision** - except for some her making harassing phone calls and perhaps stalking, neither of which were illegal 50 years ago.
*Which was unheard of in the 70s, which should tell you something
**Dad supported my decision & would also have done his best to help me keep in touch with her if that had been what I wanted.
I'm so sorry you didn't have a mom worthy of the title.
I got lucky in that the ex hasn't tried to keep in touch or be involved in the kids' lives once it was established that he wouldn't be allowed unfettered, private access to Teen Kiddo. Teen Kiddo requested to refer to him by his first name instead of "dad", and has made it clear that if he ever does surface, they don't want anything to do with him. We found a good therapist for them, and it seems to be helping. (They did a literal dance of joy when I told them I was having divorce papers served... so no transition grief there.) And Little Dude was just a baby when we left, so our little family configuration just seems like the default to him. He was really fond of the "Families are Different" song on Daniel Tiger for a while, and I think that helped. (It's awesome how deliberate that show is in representing different family setups.) Overall, I got the best outcome of a poopy situation.
Incidentally, those are my adoptive parents, the only ones I knew. Back in the early 60s, open adoption didn't exist AFAIK & I imagine might've generated more pearl-clutching than premarital "relations LOL. For most of my life never considered seeking out biological relatives, which was of course quite hard until very recently. Maybe this will be the year I take my daughter up on 23 & Me for Christmas.
In Mom's case, there were mental health issues, but I don't think that was all of it. Since it's been so long, I do try to dwell on what good memories there were - take my decades-long effort to find her fudge recipe. I succeeded!
You can find out a lot from a DNA test. I did Ancestry a few years back and found out that both biological parents have passed (as have my adoptive parents). But I found out I have one half brother on bio mom's side and a half brother and half sister on bio dad's side. Plus various extended family.
@SilverGirl : I'm glad your money came through. That must be such a relief.
Incidentally, those are my adoptive parents, the only ones I knew. Back in the early 60s, open adoption didn't exist AFAIK & I imagine might've generated more pearl-clutching than premarital "relations LOL. For most of my life never considered seeking out biological relatives, which was of course quite hard until very recently. Maybe this will be the year I take my daughter up on 23 & Me for Christmas.
In Mom's case, there were mental health issues, but I don't think that was all of it. Since it's been so long, I do try to dwell on what good memories there were - take my decades-long effort to find her fudge recipe. I succeeded!
Hey! A good fudge recipe is worth everything!!!
@SilverGirl : I'm glad your money came through. That must be such a relief.
Boy howdy is it! I know it's just a matter of time before the bottom falls out of the whole thing... but today is not that day, and I'll take what I can get
I mainly use AI to make my pictures look more the way I would like. It’s fairly good at that.
I think the problem is people, mainly decision makers at corporations, have been trying to force AI to be useful. One example I saw was when I was watching Leo Laporte talk about how McDonald’s was experimenting with a scale that can determine if your order was done right, by weighing the bag and offloading the data to the cloud where it would supposedly be processed by AI.
So the list of items ordered is sent to the scale, and it knows the weight of each item plus the bag. And when you put the bag on the scale, if the bag weighs the same as the items ordered, then it knows you got the order right.
It is absolutely stupid for them to send this information off to a data center for processing. Adding the weight of all these items and seeing if it equals the weight of the bag is a simple algorithm that could probably be done by the processor in that Timex watch from the 80’s that takes a licking and keeps on ticking. If the scale has enough processing power to connect to the internet then the whole process could be run locally in the scale itself for far less money and electricity than a data center.
Of course things are definitely not as dire as my desecration of greatness (also known as parody - thank you, Mad Magazine) would have it. I'm still rooming with my older brother, and as soon all our medical stuff is finished here, we'll be shuffling off to middle Tennessee. Now the festivities are over, I'm drifting off to dreamland.
Comments
My mother's family was from the Ozarks and there were 12 born to my grandmother, two boys died before they were one. My grandmother was married at 14 in 1904, my mother born in 1920 and was a middle child, so my grandmother continued to give birth after her for many years. An uncle had polio, my mother scarlett fever. My grandfather got TB which forced them to move to New Mexico for the dry heat. Poverty was a real thing for so many across the United States and still is, though it was diminishing. Mom could relate to both Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton's early lives.
I got my inoculation for measles, mumps, scarlet fever, bronchial pneumonia, chicken pox the old-fashioned way - my brother brought them home from school and gave them to me.
The first medical inoculation I received was smallpox, I took a test for TB - I think those are the only two things that were required then to start school. And the others, like TB, had no vaccines yet.
I remember getting the Salk vaccine (polio, and yes, people in America were still contracting the disease) which was given in a sugar cube. Yum, medicine!
I am hoping I can go back to my old day program. If I have to go there 5 days a week, I rather go there than my current one. There is nothing the current one can do unless they move into a place with more rooms for groups.
Non-complaint: support payment finlly dropped! Woot woot!
And now Tim Curry has left the building ......
Great news.
I'm sorry about you and other folks who have awful ex- and current family members. Been there/done that. My parents divorced when I was 10 or 11, with Dad getting full custody*; after I was 14, I had no contact with my Mom - 100% my decision** - except for some her making harassing phone calls and perhaps stalking, neither of which were illegal 50 years ago.
*Which was unheard of in the 70s, which should tell you something
**Dad supported my decision & would also have done his best to help me keep in touch with her if that had been what I wanted.
I'm so sorry you didn't have a mom worthy of the title.
I got lucky in that the ex hasn't tried to keep in touch or be involved in the kids' lives once it was established that he wouldn't be allowed unfettered, private access to Teen Kiddo. Teen Kiddo requested to refer to him by his first name instead of "dad", and has made it clear that if he ever does surface, they don't want anything to do with him. We found a good therapist for them, and it seems to be helping. (They did a literal dance of joy when I told them I was having divorce papers served... so no transition grief there.) And Little Dude was just a baby when we left, so our little family configuration just seems like the default to him. He was really fond of the "Families are Different" song on Daniel Tiger for a while, and I think that helped. (It's awesome how deliberate that show is in representing different family setups.) Overall, I got the best outcome of a poopy situation.
Incidentally, those are my adoptive parents, the only ones I knew. Back in the early 60s, open adoption didn't exist AFAIK & I imagine might've generated more pearl-clutching than premarital "relations LOL. For most of my life never considered seeking out biological relatives, which was of course quite hard until very recently. Maybe this will be the year I take my daughter up on 23 & Me for Christmas.
In Mom's case, there were mental health issues, but I don't think that was all of it. Since it's been so long, I do try to dwell on what good memories there were - take my decades-long effort to find her fudge recipe. I succeeded!
You can find out a lot from a DNA test. I did Ancestry a few years back and found out that both biological parents have passed (as have my adoptive parents). But I found out I have one half brother on bio mom's side and a half brother and half sister on bio dad's side. Plus various extended family.
@SilverGirl : I'm glad your money came through. That must be such a relief.
Hey! A good fudge recipe is worth everything!!!
Boy howdy is it! I know it's just a matter of time before the bottom falls out of the whole thing... but today is not that day, and I'll take what I can get
Cheers to good news, @SilverGirl
@SilverGirl ...indeed m cingratulations.
Now I'm Seventy-three
(Apologies to Mr. McCartney)
When I was younger, losing my hair
Not that long ago,
No one was sending me valentines,
Alcohol? Can't even drink wine.
If I get up for my three a.m. pee,
I can't find the door.
Nobody needs me, but they still feed me,
My whole body's sore. Ooh
You'll be older too.
Ah, and if you say the word,
I'll move in with you.
I can be grouchy, blowing a fuse
When your nerves are fried.
I've been told I have a really grating laugh,
But I just say, "Man, don't have a calf."
Watching the T.V., Gilligan's Isle,
Filling me with glee.
Nobody needs me, but they still feed me,
Now I'm Seventy-three.
Ev'rytime I turn around I wonder
Where the heck I am, and what I'm doin'.
I could help with rent
Would ten bucks be enough?
The rest has all been spent.
Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Let me know real soon.
I'll be here awaiting just to hear from you
It's not like I have much else to do.
Give me your answer, please let me know,
Before I'm on the street
Nobody needs me, but they still feed me,
Now I'm Seventy-three.
Wait...it is 73 isn't it?
'...
Bravo
...and a very happpy 73rd (or is it 71st?) trip around our central stellar primary.
I mainly use AI to make my pictures look more the way I would like. It’s fairly good at that.
I think the problem is people, mainly decision makers at corporations, have been trying to force AI to be useful. One example I saw was when I was watching Leo Laporte talk about how McDonald’s was experimenting with a scale that can determine if your order was done right, by weighing the bag and offloading the data to the cloud where it would supposedly be processed by AI.
So the list of items ordered is sent to the scale, and it knows the weight of each item plus the bag. And when you put the bag on the scale, if the bag weighs the same as the items ordered, then it knows you got the order right.
It is absolutely stupid for them to send this information off to a data center for processing. Adding the weight of all these items and seeing if it equals the weight of the bag is a simple algorithm that could probably be done by the processor in that Timex watch from the 80’s that takes a licking and keeps on ticking. If the scale has enough processing power to connect to the internet then the whole process could be run locally in the scale itself for far less money and electricity than a data center.
Also Happy Birthday
...bloody bad gateway again.
I thought those only occurred in Frederik Pohl's universe.
Thank you to kyoto kid & NylonGirl.
Of course things are definitely not as dire as my desecration of greatness (also known as parody - thank you, Mad Magazine) would have it. I'm still rooming with my older brother, and as soon all our medical stuff is finished here, we'll be shuffling off to middle Tennessee. Now the festivities are over, I'm drifting off to dreamland.
Nighty-night!
John