I for one am all ears. Please?

Thank. You.

Right now my husband of 15 years is 500km away with his girlfriend of 25 years. And I’m pissed because they’re having sushi and there’s no sushi restaurant around us. I want sushi.
That’s my latest poly story. I don’t mind that he’s having a romantic weekend with another woman (well, I’m happy for them), but I’m jealous of their dinner.

Pareil, mais à l’envers. Je veux dire que je minimisais, oui, mais c’est mon entourage qui m’a donné de la légitimité.

Quand le merveilleux flics de la brigade des mineurs qui s’occupait de mon affaire s’est platement excusé des mois écoulés entre le signalement et le début de l’enquête, je lui ai répondu que je comprenais très bien, que dans la salle d’attente j’étais seule (très) adulte parmi 10 mômes/ ados et que je préférais qu’il s’occupe en priorité des victimes actuelles plutôt que d’un truc vieux de 20 ans.
Il m’a regardée comme si j’avais deux têtes et a soufflé : “Madame, votre viol n’est pas moins important que les autres.”

Literary translator here. An average-sized book takes 4 months to translate, and I bill around 12k€.
90% of books don’t sell enough copies for the publisher to recoup the costs. And that’s books that have been picked amond hundreds because they’re good and/or might sell.

Additionally, you’d need armies of competent translators. It’s a complex skill that takes years to hone. Who would do it?

And if you don’t watch Stranger Things, you die.

Recently, I was house-sitting for friends, and the dishwasher broke. I had to pause it every few minutes to empty the water by hand. It amounted to 2 shallow oven dishes’ worth of water. And not filled to the brim, either: I had to be able to bring them to the sink without spilling.
It was a really, really small quantity of water.

Churches? For real? Never occurred to me that was a possibility. Where are you from?

In my neck of the woods it’s city hall and schools. Public, secular buildings.

It means the age when 50% people are in menopause, and 50% aren’t yet. It’s often a better metric than the more common average, which is skewed by outliers.
Like, in a country with 10 million people, 10 billionaires make the average income out of synch for the 9,999,9990 normal people. The average income in that country could be 100,000, but the mean income is 70,000. Much more representative of what life actually is for the population.

I’m in France, but I don’t think I understand your question :)

In Western Europe, the MEDIAN age for menaupose is 51, and perimenaupose has a MEDIAN length of 7 years.
She’s not too young. She’s very close to the median.

France. It’s a national bank holiday. It also falls during the 2-week-long fall school vacation. Older people tend to visit their loved ones’ graves. Florists sell lots of those ugly flowers that are only for the dead (never can remember their name even in French, that’s how ugly I find them.)

The (usually…) long week-end is an opportunity for many people to visit friends or family.
There’s no special food, unlike Easter lamb or Christmas foie gras.

In the last 2 decades Halloween became kind of a thing, with spooky shop windows, scary books on display at the public library and stuff, but I only get 0 or 1 group of trick-or-treaters every year. It’s mostly an excuse for high-school and college student to party and get drunk.

And a space.

Read that as “the most suave president”, and you didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I see what you did. Nice.

Butting in to say: your post may be the help I needed to actively consider switching.

As a French citizen it drives me nuts. Yes, my take-home pay looks low from a US perspective. But my 6 years at college/university were free, my monthly hospital stay for a chronic illness costs me exactly nothing, having a kid cost me around 100€, the way-too-expensive daycare was 400€ a month, Internet is like 15 a month…

Moi je me suis fait une journée cuisine. C’était le pied.

Ce matin j’ai préparé une grande plaque de caramel au beurre salé au poivre de Sichuan (du jardin) avec une petite croûte de chocolat hyper-noir. Ensuite un gratin de chou-fleur (du voisin) avec une bonne béchamel bien parfumée, pour le déjeuner.

L’après-midi je suis allée chercher ma kombucha chez les voisins (elle fermente là-bas, il fait trop froid chez moi), mais elle n’était pas tout à fait prête. Je suis repartie avec des grains de kéfir. Puis j’ai fait des raviolis maison avec les œufs de la voisine, les épinards du jardin, et le fromage des chèvres d’un autre voisin.

(Les raviolis étaient ratés : première fois que je faisais des pâtes. Trop épais, trop durs. Je suis preneuse de conseils s’il y en a.)

Edit Je savais bien que j’oubliais qqch ! J’ai aussi fait 4 kilos de filling pour apple pies étatsuniennes. Premier essai. Comme c’était une recette US, c’était beaucoup trop sucré ; j’ai remplacé la moitié de l’eau par mon vinaigre de kombucha aux mûres, acidulé et parfumé. Le résultat est top. Jaipuka en faire 10 fois autant pour écluser les pommes à mesures qu’elles mûrissent, et on aura de quoi se régaler de pâtisseries jusqu’à la récolte de l’an prochain.

So :
Yes, I wash up after breakfast anyway.

No. I resent even having to go pee.

I love not having to get up, saying toasty in bed (my house gets very cold 6 months a year–around 12C). Also, we tend to make better breakfasts in those cases. With a flower from the garden and everything.

Additionally, in my 9 year old’s case: since she was born, she had at least 80% of her breakfasts in bed. She likes to wake up slow, she reads for a while after waking up, and since she started middle school her days are hectic, so we pamper her that way. It’s twenty minutes of comfort before she starts her 10-hour days.

Probably Syria. Lived there for some years (had to leave because of the Arab Spring.) Amazing people, fascinating culture, loved the language, the open-mindedness, the thriving art scene in Damascus, the sheer beauty of the architecture, the desert, the mountain, the oasis.
Least favorite… Honestly, the US. I lived in DC for a year, moved back to Europe as soon as I could (and I could have gotten a Green Card). People were well-meaning and nice, but so fucking insular. Even the well-read, well-travelled, worldly people I knew honestly thought, at the end of the day, that their country was the best, almost by definition. Or… the one other countries had to measure up to.