QualifiedKitten

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Is that a belly button I see?

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Nah, I don't do things on weekends. Or Mondays. How about the following Tuesday?

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Maybe, but I might be busy avoiding responsibilities next week.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

I’d love it if I only needed to eat once a day and could focus on having that one meal be really good.

OMAD (one meal a day) or intermittent fasting might be worth trying. There was a good while where I was restricting calories and only eating in the evenings, with a pretty decent morning gym session (60 min weight lifting + 30 min running), and it seemed to work well until COVID lockdowns messed up my routines. I was never hungry during the day unless I ate whatever random junk someone brought to the office.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

If you happen to have a Trader Joe's nearby, I've been liking their "Ultra Hydrating Gel Moisturizer", although sometimes it feels a little too light for winter. I also sometimes use the CeraVe PM Facial Moisturizer, but that one can sometimes leave me feeling kinda greasy after a while. I'm traveling and using a different face wash at the moment, so I don't know how much of my issues with the CeraVe moisturizer are due to the face wash vs the climate, because I don't recall it ever feeling greasy back home, but I only started using it a few months ago.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

TIL that I'm a man.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

In the US and currently fully WFH, but if I need to go into the office for some reason, it's a 10-15 minute walk.

Walkability is pretty important to me, so I moved to a city with decent public transportation and don't currently own a car. I use ride sharing apps or traditional car rentals on the rare occasion that I need a car, and even though they feel expensive, my annual car expenses are still significantly less than what I'd pay for parking alone if I owned a car.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

I almost exclusively browse by hot, so I very rarely see any spam (of course, that's thanks to those of you who browse by new!), but I have another account on lemmy.world, so I got to spend some time yesterday scrolling there and blocking LOTS of communities from my feed. Mostly just stuff in languages I don't know, but still, a different set of "junk" to work on filtering out.

I'm also still very much down with kbin.social, and I don't even use the microblogging features at all. I figure, if I want something polished with minimal downtime, I could always go back to the old places, but I'd rather see/help something better grow.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Looks like Sonarr grabbed it for me from a private tracker about 5 hours ago. I'm sure it will hit public trackers later today, if it hasn't already.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Her poops shouldn't smell like roses, but the smell shouldn't be so terrible that you can smell it from the next room either.
Are her poops solid? If they're not, definitely talk to your vet, as she could be sick, and diarrhea is especially dangerous in kittens.
Assuming it's not a medical issue, looking at the ingredients of that food, I think you might find the smell improves if you try a different food. One of my cats has a very sensitive stomach, and my vet said that ingredients such as fish, beef, lamb, corn (maize), soy, and wheat are frequent triggers for cats. I see that the first three ingredients of that food are on that list. For proteins, poultry (chicken, turkey, duck) or rabbit tend to be well accepted. I've had to switch my cats to 100% wet food, but my vet previously suggested Dr. Elsey's chicken kibble, and they both liked it.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

And at the opposite end of the spectrum, there's cats who intentionally don't cover it, as a way of marking territory. One of mine has a lot of "dominant" tendencies, including a habit of not even trying to cover his poops.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

He's pooped in that stance since he was a tiny kitten. We have litter boxes of various styles and sizes, and I've even tried setting up an identical box for him, minus the lid, but he seemed to prefer the one with the lid. 🤷

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

As I read other people's comments, my diagnosis experience seems somewhat unique. I may be misremembering the exact sequence of events, but I'll try my best.

As a young kid, I did okay in school. My report cards often noted that I did really well on the tests, but I often forgot to do my homework, and since homework was a large portion of the grade, I had lots of Bs and Cs. On the standardized testing we did each year, I'd score well above my grade level on everything except the listening portion, which was just average. In junior year of high school, I made it a point to have no missing assignments. Even if I didn't finish my homework, I'd still turn something in, and suddenly I had straight As.

Around the time I was 18, I began trying a variety of antidepressants, mostly SSRIs.

I was probably 20 years old when my parents suggested that I see "Dr. Feel Good". In their experience, he handed out prescriptions like candy, so he'd probably give me whatever I asked for. When I went to him and explained my struggles and how I felt they were indicative of ADHD, he told me that I couldn't possibly have ADHD since people with ADHD don't get depressed. I think he did end up giving me a 30 day prescription though, and suggested I find a more specialized doctor.

I think it was after that that I began seeing a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist again put me on an SSRI, I think Zoloft. I took it for a while, but eventually got fed up and just stopped taking it. I think it was when I told him that I stopped taking it that he finally gave me a prescription for Adderall. Or maybe my time with him overlapped with the next paragraph.

Somewhere around that same time, I had dropped out of university and decided to take classes at the local community college while I figured things out. Somehow, I learned that the community college offered learning disability testing, so I signed up. From what I remembered, I did really well on everything except (surprise, surprise) the listening portion. I was told that my results indicated that I have an "auditory processing deficit". I eventually wound up taking the test results to a new psychiatrist, and they put me on Adderall right away.

Honestly, I'm still not totally sure if I'm "officially" diagnosed as ADHD, but I've moved around a bit and changed doctors a few times, and 15ish years later, I'm still getting ADHD meds.

All this is to say that there's lots of doctors out there that won't take you seriously, and/or have outdated understanding of mental health, so whether or not you have ADHD or anything else, don't give up until you find a solution that works for you.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Are you guys browsing by new? Do you moderate active communities? I'm just curious to understand why we seem to have such different experiences since I only encounter spam once or twice per week, but I definitely spend way too many hours scrolling.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

In the places I've lived (all US), no businesses could sell alcohol between the hours of 2am and 6am, and some alcohol licenses have even more limited hours. I'm pretty sure I overheard a cashier at the Target near my parents' place telling a customer that they couldn't sell alcohol until 8a, and I believe I've encountered some alcohol licenses with a cutoff as early as 10p.
I hear that some regions don't allow alcohol sales at all on Sundays, but luckily I've never lived in any of those places.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a "one time" cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents' Netflix account, and every once in a while, I'd try it out, but I'd always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Depends on how thick/firm they are. My bed currently has 2 thin/soft pillows that sit between my head and the wall, plus one extra firm pillow between my head and the mattress.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

I don't have any experience with Usenet or any current DDL sources. I generally check public trackers first, then private trackers, and mostly use private trackers when I can't find something on public trackers.
My selfish reasoning is that with public trackers, I don't have to worry about my seed ratio, etc. I generally seed to a 3.0 ratio, and I do have some older/more niche stuff set to infinity, but when I need to clear some space in my seed box, it's nice to be able to delete stuff without worrying I'll be penalized.
From a less selfish perspective, if it exists in decent quality on public trackers, I'd rather contribute to keeping it alive there, where more people can access it.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Cons: The side effects. It wasn't always this bad, but they increase my tendency to clench my teeth, which can lead to enough pain by early afternoon that I can no longer focus on anything but the pain. I'm on a relatively low dose (10mg XR), and didn't notice any benefit when I tried a non-stimulant medication.

Edit: I just need to shout into the void about this for a moment. No Adderall for at least 5 days, and no coffee/soda/energy drinks for even longer. It's the weekend and I'm just vegging, so not a whole lot to be stressing about, but for some fucking reason I'm clenching and my jaw fucking hurts. 😬

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

I do often put my tongue between my teeth in an attempt to recduce damage to my teeth, but I still bite my tongue, which I think still makes the muscle tension worse. My current approach is to open my jaw as wide as possible and hold it for like 30 seconds to stretch the muscles. It seems to kinda help, but depending on where I am, it can be kinda awkward.

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

Right as cold/flu season was taking off, the location near me went and removed over half of the equipment cleaning stations (paper towel dispensers & spray bottles), so I decided to cancel my membership. After hearing so many horror stores like yours, I was shocked at how easy it was, since I was able to cancel mine online.
Although, I did quickly learn that I had also effectively prepaid for another 3 months, so even though I cancelled on October 31st, and was not charged for anything after that date, my access didn't end until January 31st. I think part of it was credits from the COVID times, but I never went back to test it, so if anyone reading this is thinking about cancelling, be aware that you may have access for quite some time after cancelling!

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

I'd be hesitant to buy anything of the sort off Amazon due to the higher possiblity of fake products. I checked target.com, and I think this is the blue gel, but there's a handful of reviewers noting burns also.
https://www.target.com/p/old-spice-wild-collection-bearglove-deodorant-3oz/-/A-14898298#lnk=sametab

QualifiedKitten, 3 months ago

If you live somewhere where the 2 day shipping actually gets to you in 2 days, you live close enough to a brick and mortar store where you can get whatever you need even faster.

I'm always looking for ways to avoid Amazon, and if I had a car, this might be true, but because I live in the downtown core where parking is extremely expensive and transit covers most of my needs, I don't have a car, although a significant portion of the retail stores near me have shut down in the past few years. So, if I want to buy things from a brick and mortar store that's not a grocery store or random boutique, I have to spend 45+ minutes each way on a bus to the stores in the suburbs. And since I'm on public transit, picking up bulky items, heavy items, or a large quantity of items is not very practical. A large selection of Amazon's items are available to me via same day or next day shipping (and they show up on time ~97% of the time), so they actually do get to me faster than figuring out how to get the same items from a brick and mortar store. I have most definitely wasted 2 days running around to various stores only to return empty handed, and eventually order it from Amazon anyway.