[Slow Ben]

 Raymond Luxury Yacht, on 24 December 2024 - 11:26 PM, said:

lol I forgot to mention the shooting headaches I’ve been getting every day in one specific spot on the back of my head. Going to the doctor for that one after Christmas for sure. I’m sure it’s fine.

Damn son, that’s a lot.

Hope 2025 brings better things.

[Slow Ben]

 champ, on 30 December 2024 - 04:42 PM, said:

Got a phone call from my Dad on Christmas Eve around 9:30pm... drunk as usual... basically straight up told me he's dying and diagnosed as terminal with not long left to live...


What festive news and what a time to break something like that to your son... especially when he has known about this for 5 years now but didn't tell anyone. Safe to say it was an awesome Christmas...


It would just be nice for a bit of peace in my life for a change ya know... like fuck me...

Holy crap, that’s a shit move.

Sorry Champ.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Got woken up just after midnight on New Year's Day not by the fireworks (I think) but by gas trapped in my intestines again. Fever, nausea. So I spent the next three hours alternately

Spoiler

vomiting and having explosive diarrhea

before my stomach and my bowels settled down. Slept an hour later than usual to compensate. Feeling largely better now, taking it easy on my stomach, still a sort of unpleasant sensation and pressure in particular parts of my bowels.

Now for the detective work. Of course one option would be to just throw away my supplies of everything I ate over the last few days, but that seems excessive.

Suspect one: the roasted cashews I got on Monday. Some roasted cashews were recalled this year for listeria contamination. I had about a quarter cup of them on Monday, no issue. But listeria symptoms sometimes only show up after three days. I ate a lot of cashews on New Year's Eve (bit of holiday gorging).

Suspect two: new probiotic apple cider vinegar I started using on Tuesday. Whole Foods store brand. I'd been using small amounts of the old apple cider vinegar---the one I think may have caused my last gastrointestinal ordeal when I drank too much of it---without issue. The newly opened Whole Foods bottle was very full and I accidentally poured more than I intended to, but it didn't seem like all that much---maybe two tablespoons? From now on I'm going to actually measure how much apple cider vinegar I use.

Suspect 3: my hands. Could be norovirus, adenovirus, etc. Apparently it's possible to recover from a norovirus infection and then get infected with a different strain of norovirus within a week. Norovirus can't stay dormant for long periods of time, but return of symptoms within a month could actually be from the same initial infection.

Suspect 4: "By our powers combined"... I could have gotten constipation and gas from the roasted cashews and the raw apple cider vinegar. Cashews are high-FODMAP (basically fermentable carbohydrates that can be difficult to digest) and can consequently cause digestive issues. I've eaten lots of cashew nut butter in the past without any issues---but apparently cashew butter is somehow lower FODMAP. But pistachios are also high-FODMAP, and I've eaten similar quantities of pistachios without issue. Then again maybe cashews are different. Or perhaps it was the combination of too many cashews with a little too much apple cider vinegar. In total I ate almost half of a 2.75 pound bag (1247.38 grams).

Haven't decided yet whether to throw out the cashews and the new vinegar. But I'm certainly going to hold off on having any more for a while. If I do try them again, I'll try to time it so that if I have symptoms they'll be on a relatively convenient day. (Like today, actually....)

Incidentally: some assholes were still setting off fireworks at 12:55 AM. Almost enough to make me hope those were actually gunshots, and they were slaughtering each other... okay, no, not really.



[Edit: to be more precise, I felt feverish. I didn't actually check my temperature. If I did have a fever that would imply more than just constipation and gas. But since the apple cider vinegar contains bacteria, my body also could have been responding to an excess of them.]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: Yesterday, 01:32 PM

[amphibian]

What are you allergic to?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

amphibian, on 01 January 2025 - 04:37 PM, said:

What are you allergic to?

I've never had any food allergies. And my aim for much of my life was to gorge on everything. Traveling the world to eat (among other things... but largely to eat). Didn't eat anything in the last month that I haven't had before. Seems unlikely that I'd suddenly develop any food allergies now. Too much apple cider vinegar might have caused my previous episode, but I was having more from the same bottle (as the previous episode---in more reasonable quantities) on a daily basis since then without issue (though IDK if the new bottle---which is also a different brand---might contain a different set of varieties of bacteria).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: Yesterday, 04:46 PM

[Mezla PigDog]

I have had a living Christmas tree for the last 6 years. Not the same tree. The first one died the first summer because I left it in full sun and forgot to water it. But the second has been going strong for 5 years now. It looks pretty shite - it hasn't grown evenly, has about 3 different greens on it and has a big bare patch of trunk near the top. Once it is decorated it passes for a Christmas tree and it makes me feel good to not be chopping down trees or buying plastic. But we have to cover it with a shed load of tinsel cover up the dodgy parts and to make it look alright.

But.

You can only bring a living tree into a warm house for so long before it starts to do things it shouldn't be doing in winter or in your living room. I estimate two weeks indoors maximum. This year my kid persuaded me to bring it indoors to decorate a week earlier than I wanted to so there were consequences. The first sign was on Christmas Eve when we spotted some of the gifts under the tree were covered in dripping sap. The second sign was coming home yesterday from a few days away to find about 50 dead aphids amassed on the floor around the base of the tree. I cleaned them up, accidentally spreading the new sap puddles around the house, only to find about 50 or so more corpses under the tree this morning. So I got to taking the decorations off, spreading sap and dead aphids everywhere and found myself at 9am on new years day WASHING tinsel! You can't take the carbon friendly Christmas tree route and then bin all of the plastic decorations when smeared with sticky tree sap. No, you have to try to do the right thing and wash them for reuse. I had to sponge down the lights as well. And some baubles are drying out on the radiator.

My clothes dryer is festively draped in tinsel now. It looks feasibly recoverable for next year. Most of the sap is cleaned up. I find the odd sticky patch now and then.

Why is trying to do a good thing so often a pile of bollocks?

Rest in peace many hundreds of aphids.

[QuickTidal]

Was asked to come into work on a holiday day today, and every single piece of tech and machine here has gone for a shit while we are closed for the holidays, and I'd say half my day has been trouble shooting them into working order so I can use them...it's been one thing after another for 8 hours...my back is aching, and I have to do it all again tomorrow. And since the plant is technically open, it's not overtime. SIGH.