I have one idiot coworker who supported Trump (I’m unclear if she actually voted for him, in the past she’s been proud that she’s never voted, like I said, idiot) largely because of something he said during the campaign about lowering costs for IVF

She doesn’t have kids, as far as I know doesn’t want them.

She was in some kind of poly relationship, is going through a divorce, is wiccan, we work in the public sector (county level so kind of insulated from DOGE type bullshit, but not that insulated because of course we get a butt load of federal funds) and has a few health issues.

It’s like she’s aiming to be the poster girl for getting her face eaten by leopards.

I kind of think of myself as “prepper light” I keep a small stockpile of food and supplies around, have at least general plans for most emergencies that might arise, like I live close to a nuclear plant so I know the evacuation route I’m supposed to take from my home if something ever happens there, what radio station is going to have information, etc. I know what I’m doing if we lose power for an extended period of time, etc.

But I’m not devoting a significant amount of my time to it. A few minutes or hours here or there, a little casual research, the occasional “roughing it” camping trip for fun and practice

But most importantly, I have friends. I’m a pretty all-around capable guy, but there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. When it comes to fixing cars, spinning yarn and weaving cloth, more advanced construction, plumbing, gardening, etc. I’m kind of clueless. But I have friends who are really good at those things. If shit ever really hits the fan in whatever sort of “end of the world as we know it” sort of scenario you might be imagining, none of us are going to cut it long-term by ourselves, but with all of our various skills put together we might just stand a chance.

And also I like those people, I want to make sure they make it through it with me.

US

My situation is a little fucked up because I work 12 hour shifts, but PTO is based around 8 hour days because that’s what most employees here work and they haven’t made any special exemptions for us. These numbers are going to be based around 8 hour days because I don’t feel like doing the math

Vacation time- 10 days for new hires, and you get 5 additional days at 5, 13, and 19 years, so assuming I stick around for 19+ years I’ll have 25 days. You can carry over up to 15 unused days to the next year

5 personal days, no carryover

Sick days accrue at 1 day per month, so essentially 12, with unlimited carryover,

1 personal holiday

Certain things like perfect attendance, coming in for overtime, etc. can earn you “flex time” which actually is usually awarded in 12 hour increments.

I’m kind of bad at using my PTO. My schedule is kind of wonky and I work less days overall than most people and tend to just slot most of my vacation plans into that. If I plan things right I also only need to take 2 days off to get a whole week, and every other weekend I have a 3 day weekend. I don’t tend to take a lot of elaborate vacations, 3 day or less trips are kind of my norm. Every couple years I’ll do something a bit more elaborate and take a week or more, but more often my PTO tends to get used for other things besides going on vacation. I have a week coming up that I took off to paint some rooms in my house for example.

FWIW, if you haven’t already, it may be worth giving the packaging of your “regular” bacon and such a good looking-over

I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, it’s just something I tend to notice because like I said, I dabble in cured meats as a hobby, but at least around me a lot of bacon, hot dogs, etc. across the whole spectrum from bottom of the barrel store brands up to the fancy high-end name brands are touting that they’re “uncured,” and even if they don’t outright say that as a selling point they’re only listing celery powder and natural flavors in the ingredients and no sodium nitrite/nitrate

It’s not all brands by a longshot, but it’s a lot of them.

Not trying to push any kind of cured meat agenda, just kind of giving you something else to look out for, maybe it will give you a few more options or help you discover some other things you should avoid.

I think possibly the best steak I ever had/made was a cheap chuck steak that I gave a nice long sous vide treatment

There is a whole lot of flavor there, but it can be as tough as shoe leather, but with sous vide it came out as tender as any filet, but way beefier

Those are great, definitely gonna be saving those

I basically want that kind of guide for curing meats and other such things

Also there are some blind spots, something I was just looking for recently is canning some of my home-cured meats to save some space in my freezer. I know it’s a theoretically possible undertaking, I can go to the store and buy a can of corned beef after all

But reputable sources like the USDA and NCHFP are kind of silent on it and pretty much leave it at “we can’t recommend doing that, curing can change the density and water content and such and we haven’t gotten the funding to test it.”

I can find people who have canned their own bacon and such, and apparently not died of botulism, but I don’t exactly trust the processes cooked up by some off-grid homestead tradwife mommy-blogger.

FYI, a whole lot of “uncured” meats, at least in the US, are just kind of using loopholes. Often there’s a little asterisk next to the word “uncured”

And if you follow that asterisk to the bottom of the back side of the package or wherever they decided to hide it in small print you’ll see it says something like “contains no added nitrites or nitrates except those naturally occurring in celery powder or other natural ingredients”

And spoiler alert, celery has kind of a lot of nitates and nitrites.

And while there are regulations about how much pure nitrates/nitrites they can add to your food, there’s no regulation on how much celery powder they can add because it’s just considered a “flavoring” ingredient and not a curing agent. “Uncured” bacon or hot dogs or whatever could technically contain far more nitrites than would legally be allowed in their cured counterparts (though in practice I’m sure they’re probably roughly the same amount)

Regardless of if those nitrites are pure or coming from celery powder, it’s the same chemical doing the same thing in your food and body.

Other veggies contain a lot of nitrites/nitrates too, cabbage for example. I’ve occasionally had it happen when I make cabbage rolls in a pressure cooker that despite being totally cooked through the ground beef is still a pretty vibrant red/pink like corned beef because of the nitrites from the cabbage.

I’m not saying this to scare-monger or anything, there are valid health concerns about nitrates and nitrites in general, and of course people like you who have a particular sensitivity to them, and it’s well worth being aware of all of that. That said, I’ve been dabbling in curing my own meats and have a big jar of Prague powder #1 in my pantry which is 6.25% sodium nitrite, so clearly it’s not something that’s particularly high on my own list of concerns. I also intend to try curing my own corned beef at some point with celery juice and other natural sources of nitrites, not because I think it’s any healthier but because it sounds like a fun experiment.

Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook

I’d really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.

I’ve recently been experimenting with curing meats, I’ve done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.

And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.

And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren’t dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.

I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it’s a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and…

When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I’ll ever work with, and also doesn’t scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I’m not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.

Luckily most people with those sorts of implants I’ve seen are fairly scientifically-minded, and I’d like to think that’s the sort of thing they’d think of and would wear some sort of appropriate medic alert bracelet.

It’s not like there aren’t other sorts of medical implants, piercings, situations like people with shrapnel embedded in their bodies, etc. out in the world that could potentially cause issues with an MRI machine.

I read about people getting magnets implanted so that they can feel magnetic/electrical fields

Not quite ready to commit to implants, but i did try gluing some tiny magnets to my fingernails once.

I suspect that the implants are a bit more sensitive since they can kind of wiggle around under your skin more, but I could definitely feel some things, the two that stuck out to me were a forklift charger and an electric pencil sharpener.

I also got really used to picking up paperclips and other small metal things like that with them. I only had the magnets for maybe about a week, but I caught myself still trying to pick up paperclips with them for probably about a month afterwards.

All 3 of them, but no one’s home

He’s got a few other stupid tattoos. He’s got some more words tattooed above the stoplight in sort of a fancy script, but I can’t really make them out because he’s always wearing a hat. Some knuckle tattoos I can’t make out because in all his pictures he’s either holding a 40 of old English or flipping off the camera (or both) so his hands are always contorted weirdly, a few words that he probably thought sounded tough, some symbols I don’t recognize, and a crucifix on one arm and a devil holding a cross on the other that might be actually kind of well-done but I don’t have a great eye for tattoos.

He’s a shrimpy white guy with a patchy beard, who grew up in what passes for the ghetto in an otherwise pretty nice suburban area (not to sell it short, it is a pretty shitty town, once in a while it manages to crack some “Top X Most Dangerous Cities in state/country” sort of article, but compared to the “bad neighborhoods” in pretty much any major city it’s nothing)

I could go on for quite a while about him and the rest of that branch of the family, and all the dumb bullshit they’ve done even though I’ve never met most of them, their reputation far precedes them. All through grade school the prevailing advice from my parents was “if anyone asks if you know/are related to any other [our last name]s, just say ‘no’” and that’s always served me well.

None of his profiles seem to have been updated in about 10 years, so with any luck he’s locked up somewhere, or maybe dead. Or maybe he had just enough sense to stop broadcasting his dumbassery out onto the open internet.

I have a distant relative with a traffic light tattooed in the middle of his forehead, just a black rectangle with red, yellow, and green circles.

And on either side he has some graffiti style writing that I’m pretty sure says “con man”

I became aware of him because we share a fairly uncommon last name, and one day police came to my house grasping at straws looking for this guy because he had been breaking into cars, so the basically went to the first person with the same last name they could find to see if we knew where he was.

It was the first time I’d heard of him, we’re not at all close with the extended family. Eventually I looked him up and found his social media with those stupid tattoos.

The stick also has the advantage of being easier to drop than the finglonger in case whatever you happen to be poking decides it wants to grab hold and pull you down

I don’t know what actual products are out there, but there are other time signals that could potentially be used, for example GPS.

Off the top of my head I don’t think I’ve seen a gps-synced clock, let alone one with a pendulum, but I’ve also never really looked for one either. It certainly feels like a product that probably exists somewhere to me, I’m sure there’s someone out there who would appreciate a clock that can automatically detect the timezone, whether the region your in observes daylight savings time, etc.

That’s true for mechanical clock movements, but I think OP is looking for a quartz movement that includes a simulated pendulum for aesthetic purposes, which isn’t particularly uncommon, unless your circles include a lot of antique enthusiasts, people who inherited an old grandfather clock, or people who just really dig mechanical clocks (and I won’t knock that, I certainly think they’re neat) odds that a lot of clocks you’ve seen with a pendulum are that type, powered by a AA battery and stuffed into a fancy wooden case

Aside from not needing to adjust the time, is there any particular reason it needs to be WiFi enabled?

Because that kind of feels like an overly complicated solution to a problem that was solved decades ago with “atomic” clock movements.

Which aren’t actually atomic in any way on their own, but contain an antenna to pick up the signal from an NIST atomic clock to set the time (and I believe other countries and regions have their own equivalent if you’re not in the US)

As far as finding a pendulum movement, I don’t really know what is out there, but it may be another avenue for you to look into.

Probably the best thing I ever did to get random people to talk to me was growing a big curly handlebar moustache, now complimented with a long bushy beard.

My fashion choices also tend to make me stand out a bit- brightly colored Hawaiian shirts in the warmer months (I have one with pictures of the dog breed I have on it, that gets a lot of people approaching me,) occasionally a kilt (people love to ask about the kilt) interesting sunglasses, hats (used to wear a bowler occasionally, I’m less of a fan of it these days, panama hat in the summer, etc.)

Clothing and style choices are a little tricky. There’s kind of a fine line between wearing something interesting that makes people want to talk to you and coming across as a fedora-wearing neckbeard who’s trying too hard. Those choices have to look good on you, you have to like them and give off a bit of confidence while wearing them, and it has to be something that will catch the attention of the kind of person you want to attract.

And most importantly, you need to be able to carry a conversation from there. That’s the hard part.

Having some story or a joke at the ready is a pretty good crutch to kind of get yourself over that last part. For example my go-to when people come up to me to compliment my beard/moustache is to joke that “I grew it myself” which is usually good for a chuckle, and then the ice is broken, and you can kind of try to steer the conversation from there.

I’ve had a lot of fun conversations with strangers and made a few friends along the way. I never personally had much luck turning that into a romantic relationship, but that was also never something I actively pursued much in general, I just kind of let things go from there and through friends who I met that way I eventually met my wife.

I’d be pretty hard-pressed to name any of my friends who graduated “on time”

I’m well into my 30s now, a couple of my friends are still working on degrees or just graduated.

Changing majors, bullshit scheduling nonsense, life

Shit, there was a whole fucking pandemic that fucked up a year or two of your high school years, it’s pretty damn amazing that anyone your age is graduating even roughly on-time as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe it’ll throw a bit of a monkey wrench into your social life because you gotta skip out on a couple things because you have class. That’s life as an adult, we all got scheduling conflicts all the time.

Otherwise, it’s never gonna matter. You’ll have a degree, that’s the only “important” thing about graduating. Unless you’re looking to get into some highly-specialized, super-competitive field, no one gives a shit how long it took you to graduate, how your gpa stacked up against the rest of your class, etc. It’s like the old joke “What do you call the person who graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school? You call them ‘Doctor.’”

The Shanty Swing Band

One drunken night in a tiki bar, a bunch of my friends cooked up this idea for a band that was entirely too crazy to ever work, especially with our musical and organizational skills.

The idea was for it to be sort of a folk-metal/jazz fusion thing that played sea shanties.

I feel like it’s also worth mentioning that this idea came about well before COVID when sea shanties had a little moment.

I think by the time we all sobered up the next day we realized it wasn’t going to work, but we sure as hell left the bar that night thinking we were onto something.

Part of the concept also involved a “gun player” who would fire off some blanks from a flintlock pistol, sort of like a budget-friendly 1812 overture because something something pirates.

Regardless of the actual feasibility of this project, I still really dig the name.

There’s a small (and best of all free) museum in Philly called the Science History Institute.

Until a couple years ago, it went by the Chemical Heritage Foundation

Which I personally thought was a much cooler name.

Officially the name change was to reflect that their focus includes more than just chemistry,

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of the reason for the change was that the old name just kind of creeped people out, and I’ll admit it had a bit of a mad scientist ring to it.

Anyway, cool little museum for anyone who finds themselves in Philly, do recommend.