• Dragonslayer
• Excalibur
• Time Bandits

You missed “become poor” and “have his family turn on him”.

I only recently learned of this:

https://youtu.be/olFmklCCccE?feature=shared

Time is the coin of your Life.

It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.

Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

And when you spend it, spend it wisely so that you get the most for your expenditure.

~Carl Sandburg

Thank you for seeing me. Some days, the worst is the feeling that all of the struggle is not only insignificant in the end, but also invisible. I think of all of the rest that are in situations like me and that I’ll never know them.

Most of those are due to COVID. Not that he didn’t make it all worse…

I’m doing the exact same.

Rough patch.

My wife is going through chemo for colon cancer. Prognosis looks good. But the treatment is hell. Halfway through next week.

Her aunt lives with us. She has Parkinsons. Starting to really slide. Needs bathroom help every 2 hours - 24x7x365. No one sleeps much here. She’ll need to go into assisted living real soon now. Will she live longer than her money? Maybe.

My kid is 14. Good kid. Smart. Well-intentioned. But 14 is hard. And he’s a total slacker.

My mom just had gallbladder surgery at 80. She’s recovering well. But lives on her own and needs extra attention. We all worry she will need to go into assisted living, too. But she’s mostly broke. Not good.

The place I work was bought out a few months ago. My job is likely safe through the end of the year. But after that… well, we all know how it usually goes. At least my wife’s chemo will be covered until then.

I’m over 60 and overweight with HBP. No heart attack… yet. But that can’t be too far off.

So… plenty of pressure all around. But I manage to keep to the Stoics’ philosophy and accept the world as it is. Be patient and kind and let things happen as they happen. I keep trying to loose weight.

Either we get through this, or we don’t. But I can easily accept that we all did our best.

I have an old-school D&D campaign planned out. 1st-level, rural town. Like a reverse scooby-doo - small trivial problems like lost livestock resolve to hint at deeper mystical evil. As they level up they’ll find dark cults and demonic influences. The peaceful rustic countryside is far from what it seems.

But the players never get it together enough to set up a good date. The last campaign was fun, and they all said they wanted more. So I just keep writing more NPCs and extending the setting.

Starve? Die from lack of medicine/doctors? Get killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

My current job.

Many SQL servers use scripts that run as domain administrator. With the password hard coded in.

Several of the various servers are very old. W2K, 2003, 2008. SQL server, too.

Several of the users run reports via rdp to the SQL server - logging in as domain admin.

Codebase is a mashup of various dev tools: .net, asp, Java, etc.

Fax server software vendor has been out of business for a decade. Server hardware is 20 years old. Telecom for fax is a channelized PRI carrying POTS - and multiport modem cards.

About a 3rd of the ethernet runs in the office have failed.

Office pcs are static IP. Boss says that’s more secure.

We process money to/from the Fed.

My wife and I, too. I hope your treatment goes well and you recover to full health.

That’s how I make sure I’m dreaming - I look for anything written. Written words in dreams are always changing and illegible.

That assumes a normal distribution. Wealth/income is not. An excellent resource is: Social Stratification in the United States: The American Profile Poster of Who Owns What, Who Makes How Much, and Who Works Where https://a.co/d/09LVTyYi

I think you mean TST.

I did this myself a few years ago. Put a planter full of coir in the closest bush I found it near. Fed twice a day on mealworms. Disappeared after 3 weeks. Mine was either a starling or a grackle.

I get fundraising texts occasionally. I don’t know why. But the one that came on the heels of the conviction had a section of fine print declaring what the money was for. It included a “recount challenge fund”. This is in the open.

My wife and i went to Tortola in '99. Everything went wrong, and we still had a good time. If things had gone right, we might have never left.

That said, the off-trail areas of the state parks of north NY, NJ, PA, up to Canada and into Vermont) are where I feel most at peace. A quiet cabin on a lake ten miles from a small town would be a perfect place to retire to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_Capo

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