I had a vanity plate for years that read Whimsy. I miss that plate, but now my plate looks like this:
So I’m okay with that.
Someone sent this to me this past spring, but it was WaPo link and didn’t have pictures. Cleaning up my files I was re-reading it and randomly clicked on a link in the pdf. It took me to the original article in Hometown.com
Don Powell opened his mailbox one day last August and found, along with the usual mix of bills and pizza coupons, two small dolls sitting on a miniature couch near a tiny table.
The pair and their furniture came with a note: “We’ve decided to live here. Mary and Shelley.”
Powell first thought the homely wooden figurines – a man and a woman – were put in his mailbox by mistake. He wondered if someone in the neighborhood was playing a joke.
“I went around to the other homes on the cul-de-sac to see if anyone else had gotten dolls in their mailbox,” the 72-year-old said. “No one had. There’s a neighbor across the street named Shelly; I knocked on her door and asked if she had done it, but she said no.”
…….
He was amused, but his first thought was to evict the couple and their belongings into the garbage can. But then, struck by a change of heart, he pushed the couple and their belongings to the back of the mailbox and went about his business.
That was just the beginning of the story. When Powell wasn’t looking, someone dropped off a dog for the couple living in the mailbox, along with a rug and even some art for the wall. Then came a four-poster bed.
The article is free to read, so click on over, because there’s so much more – Halloween costumes, Christmas decorations and hopefully a children’s book to come. And if you sent this to me, please identify yourself in the comments. It brought me a lot of joy.
=============
These people belong in our tribe for sure:
If you need more of these cute kitties, there’s also a Dodo video here.
=========
This is so heartwarming:
=========
How about we finish up with some whales enjoying music:
Just a note: If you sent me any good news twitter links, most don’t work now, I found as I was cleaning out my email files. Maybe the change over to X or people just leaving in droves and deleting their accounts.
Hope that ends your week on a high note. Share some good news in the comments
Sixteen cats! Wow. Good news, I found a pair of earrings that I thought I had lost, made from diamonds from one of my late mother’s rings. Very happy.
2.
cope
When we lived in Florida, there was a tree in the median of one of the streets. It had a major cavity in the base of it and over time, it became populated by a small group of gnomes. Decorative mushrooms, furniture, flags, banners and other such things were added through a period of a couple of years. We added a small plastic door with a Gothic arch shape in the back of the hollow. It always made me smile to see as I drove by.
Sadly, it all disappeared a few months before we moved away. We never knew what happened but, given the dickishness of the HOA, they are my prime suspects. I suppose I could do a deep dive into Nextdoor but I don’t want to.
This Hometown Life story is a real hoot! The person or persons who created these dolls and their accessories have real talent and I hope they keep up the great work.
I absolutely love that mailbox-turned-dollhouse story. Whoever is behind it is my new favorite person in the world.
TaMara, I thought of you and your pups when I saw this video from The Dodo about a rescue Great Dane. It’s so sad to watch at first because the poor guy was just skin and bones, only weighed 58 pounds when he first came to the rescue org, but they got him healthy and happy and running around pretty quickly! Then before he got adopted out, they took him on a “field trip” to the pet store and let him pick out his own toys, and then he got his first doggie ice cream.
6.
cope
@eclare: That’s the only reason people become HOA snitches or Republicans.
I think that’s what they do for fun, or at least as close to fun as they are capable of experiencing. Mindless conformity is a way of life for them, and they’ll smash anything that stands in its way.
8.
Scout211
This acts of kindness story really touched me yesterday: (video at the link–after an ad)
SACRAMENTO — A single father of six children, ages 3 to 19, got the gift of a lifetime Thursday.
For six months, he has braced the Sacramento heat to get to work. His family’s only car was totaled in an accident and Isaac Taylor knew he had to keep food on the table.
For months, he biked 16 miles roundtrip to get to work every day. Then when he got home, he would walk his young children to school.
“It was early in the morning after working a full graveyard shift, 10-hour shift. It was very tough,” said Taylor.
He kept a positive attitude the whole time, though. He even thought of it as “not so bad” and kept his nose to the grindstone.
“I’ve been through a lot, so struggle is just part of getting to the next big thing,” said Taylor.
The next big thing came with a big green bow Thursday morning.
He was gifted a car, a newly restored 2019 Hyundai Elantra, paid in full.
“I cried like a baby,” said Taylor. “Tears of joy. Tears of feeling the pain of riding the bike back and forth. It all set in — what I went through to get to where I’m at now.”
It’s thanks to Caliber Collision Roseville, Travelers Insurance and Family Promise of Sacramento in collaboration with the NABC Recycled Rides Program.
The vehicle was donated by Travelers and refurbished by technicians at Caliber Collision Roseville who volunteered their time and skills to restore it.
. . .
He says he is wishing now for the day he can pay it forward to someone else.
“It’s amazing, I’m living the dream right now. This is my best life right now,” said Taylor.
Caliber Collision, Caliber Auto Care and Caliber Auto Glass have donated more than 500 vehicles to people in need and their families.
He and wife Nancy ordered a custom mailbox after moving into their Orchard Lake home about five years ago.
At 26 inches deep, the mailbox was designed to look like the Powell’s home. It features a spacious interior with an open floor plan and plenty of windows to let in natural light. Solar powered ceiling lights illuminate the mailbox at night.
Wow! Impressive. Some neighbors have a little library in front of their house that is a replica of their house, down to the color. It’s not that fancy, though.
It’s a great story, but it seems like we need a society-level change to really tackle problems like this. Wouldn’t it be great if his job paid enough so he didn’t have to depend on a gift for a car? Wouldn’t it be even better if his area had affordable housing closer to where he worked, and decent public transportation so people without cars could get where they need to go? Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m slagging the people who helped in this case, but we need to work on fixing the big problems so we don’t have to do stuff like this in the future.
I locked my acct and downloaded & deleted my tweets when the Leon Skum deal went through. Xitter is going to change their TOS on 9/29 – that Thursday is likely the day I delete my acct. I’m going to need to remember to do it early in the day though: at 12:30 I’ll be at Glidden Point Oyster Farm, enjoying a sauna, oyster pen plunge, some bivalve shucking and a beer or two. 🦪🍻 I’ll prob forget if I wait until the afternoon.
I’m on Bluesky and I’m really enjoying the “early days of twitter plus lessons learned” vibe.
14.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Roger Moore: You are meddling with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Moore.
15.
Rebel’s Dad
This made my green heart grow three sizes bigger.
Also, Gov. Murphy has called on Menendez to resign from the Senate. It’s on now!
16.
Jay
Far from home, young Ukrainian hockey players meet with Zelenskyy in Ottawa
@Scout211: That is a wonderful story of kindness and generosity. But it also points to the crap public transportation infrastructure we have in this country. Mr. Taylor would not have had to rely on the kindness of strangers had we decent public transportation.
ETA: ninja’d by Roger Moore.
18.
trollhattan
Never heard the whaling song titled “Holy Shit!” before. What a grand experience. Guessing the hull transmits the sound right to the water. Something to be said for shutting off the engine and just drifting–the opposite of a wasted day.
19.
HinTN
@Doc H: I’ve settled on Lone Skum. Happy bivalve doings.
@Ken: Info here.
This part may put Nitter out of business.
The new terms say (emphasis ours):
NOTE: crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited
Sure, that says that somebody could scrape if they have written consent. But I can’t imagine that permission is something X is going to be handing out very often.
This part is maybe why more people will leave:
X is also planning to put a new privacy policy into place on September 29th. That new policy says X will expand the volume of data it collects on users, including biometric data and employment history.
28.
Emma
Aw, I love the whole genre of “animals checking out the hooman sounds” videos. My cats view me playing my piano merely as a lap station that doesn’t give enough scritches.
There’s sort of a bat version of the 16-cats-discovered video going on a couple hours north of me, in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island for those who know western WA. An unscrupulous Redfin realtor and home inspector took advantage of our lax estate sale laws and fooled a young couple into buying what they thought was their dream house… but is actually home to a gigantic bat colony. They started an IndieGoGo as a last-ditch effort to overhaul the house and turn it into a bat/vampire-themed B&B, with bat houses next door as the safe alternative habitat for the batties. Just thought I’d post it here, since the money has barely moved since I donated 10+ days ago (the $4k goal was the absolute minimum, like just to buy materials for the bat houses). Unfortunately, foreclosure and bankruptcy are still very much in the cards for them, since apparently there’s no law against fraud if you buy from an estate sale in WA :(
29.
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Executives in air conditioned offices in Houston and Dallas do NOT approve!
@Ken: This is all “at a glance/secondhand” stuff – my only interest in xitter at this point is to laugh and mourn – but there was an “we have rights to use any of your tweets any way we want” (I’m assuming to train Skum’s Large Language Model) and some rumbling about CC info. I ignored the CC info piece because it’ll be a frosty day on the surface of Venus when I give him anything like that.
@Alison Rose: Biometric data would be to get rid of bots, I would guess; I would also guess that Musk himself will not like what that does to his follower count. Employment history might be billing related, or part of his plan to have everyone do their banking through Xitter.
Either that, or it’s to select suitable worker breeding stock for Lord Musk’s Mars colony.
37.
Ken
@Yarrow: I find it whimsical to mock Musk, and I’m being very kind considering what I might say about him.
38.
JoyceH
Hey, what do you guys think of Whimsy as a dog name? For Jazzy’s potential little sister, so think Samoyed.
Also – according to Twitter, folks were expecting the Rapture today. My response will be “Oh sure, that already happened. You weren’t notified? Huh.”
you don’t actually have to do anything, other than not log into your twitter account. Every dormant account costs Apartheid Clyde money, either to store or to weed through and delete.
A federal judge with a penchant for fiery rulings and strong leanings toward the Second Amendment issued an injunction Friday on California’s ban on ammunition magazines with more than 10 rounds, the latest ruling in the now six-year-old legal challenge. U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez, a President George W. Bush appointee [the gift that keeps on giving] serving in the Southern District of California, did not hold back in his opinion on Duncan v. Bonta.
“This case is about a California state law that makes it a crime to keep and bear common firearm magazines typically possessed for lawful purposes. Based on the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, this law is clearly unconstitutional,” Benitez wrote.
Benitez said that efforts to limit ammunition magazine capacity have been largely arbitrary, with different states arriving at different numbers for how many rounds to allow in a magazine. “The fact that there are so many different numerical limits demonstrates the arbitrary nature of magazine capacity limits,” he wrote. In his footnotes, Benitez listed several cases where he said ammunition capacity was a matter of life and death for lawful gun owners.
“There have been, and there will be, times where many more than 10 rounds are needed to stop attackers,” he wrote. “…Woe to the victim who runs out of ammunition before armed attackers do. The police will mark the ground with chalk, count the number of shell casings, and file the report.” [Tell us all about “that time back in ‘Nam” you shitheel.]
Benitez also repeated an argument he has made in the past, that mass shootings are the actions of a “few mad men.” [Just how many comprise “a few”? Show your work.]
There have been 34 mass shootings in the state of California in 2023 alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The judge’s ruling was bombastic but not shocking. He frequently rules in favor of Second Amendment challenges to California gun control laws, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to once label him “a stone cold ideologue” and “a wholly owned subsidiary of the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association.” [You’re not wrong, governor.] Benitez previously struck down California’s ban on assault weapons, likening assault rifles to Swiss Army knives that are “good for both home and battle.”
I suppose I could do a deep dive into Nextdoor but I don’t want to.
You could, but do you want to spend the weekend hating humanity?
51.
NotMax
Impocerous, almost.
Placed a reorder for cigars by phone about 6 a.m. (Maui time) Wednesday. Company located near Miami*, so noon their time. Postal person dropped off the package here at 1:15 p.m. today (7:15 p.m. blog time).
*I know – Florida – but I’ve been dealing with them since long before DeSantis.
Great roundup of some fun stuff TaMara! Good stuff.
I love the cat story (surprise). And of all the other sweet stories I think I really like the man getting a new car and the Southwest family of pilots best. It’s just good to see. Oh, and the mystery of the mailbox family! That’ll be a great kids book.
There is a real danger of inactive accounts being hacked and used for something bad. I saw it happen in the pre-Musk days, and I sincerely doubt they’re any more careful about protecting accounts from being hacked today.
If that were actually your license plate, which I thought it was for a moment, it would be amazingly cool! I think you should try for it
59.
Lyrebird
@Emma: Thanks for posting that! I don’t know if I can put in much, but I will try.
60.
CaseyL
Well, that story about the 16 kitties took me down a lovely rabbit hole: Freedom Farm House is on the Book of Faces, and though I don’t have an account, I was still able to read about two years’ worth of posts. They – the humans, not the cats – have also offered sanctuary to a bunch of donkeys.
Owning a farm-turned-animal-sanctuary is exactly the sort of thing I’ve dreamed of doing. Fortunately or unfortunately, though, I’ve subscribed to enough YT farm/homestead and sanctuary channels to realize just how much constant, never-ending, hard physical labor is involved, which I am simply not up to. (Not to mention the finances; I’d have to win a lottery or something.) But it does warm my heart to see so many people are up to it, happy and eager to do it, and providing so many animals with safe, loved, happy lives.
61.
MagdaInBlack
@Scout211: I think that Recycled Rides program is a great program. That Caliber Collision connection is interesting to me because my company is a direct competitor, and is involved in that same program. Except I never see any PR releases from corp that “we” have actually done anything.
62.
Betty
@Doc H: I have a blue sky question. I seem to get numerous posts, dozens even, from one person that prevent me from seeing posts from other people. Is that normal?
63.
MagdaInBlack
@CaseyL: I have that sort of thing on my “Lotto List” too ❤️
64.
Maxim
@Emma: I clicked through and it says they’re over $11k, so hopefully that’ll be enough for them to do what they need to. But even if there’s no specific law against fraud in estate sales, there should be laws against fraud on the books in WA. I’m guessing they could sue if they wanted to, though it may not be the best use of their time and money.
I really would have loved to sing with some whales today, or hell, any day. That’s so beautiful.
67.
Emma
@Lyrebird: for what it’s worth, they haven’t spent any donor money yet because they want to be able to refund everyone if their bank absolutely refuses to pause or at least refinance their mortgage. Which is so decent of them, but so sad.
@Maxim: you’d think, but I had been emailing them to offer what little advice I could give, and every attorney they consulted on this said that their chances of winning were close to nil without the laws changing. (Honestly, they’re much more with it than I ever would be with a baby and a new house secretly dripping with a decade-plus of guano. They had even put together a draft of a law that fixed this loophole in estate sales.) Replacing the roof alone was quoted at $80k, and then they’d have to tear out the drywall, etc. etc. For all the work John had to do on his house when he first bought it, he should thank FSM that it deigned not to inflict a bat colony on him…
Whenever I’m in a new town I’m going to mail Shelley and Mary a postcard. . .
We had some figurines that were coyotes howling at the sky in our front yard. The gent who did the initial landscaping had found them in the dirt, cleaned them up a bit and left them in place when he was done. . .
Later that year, before Halloween they were all decorated ups along with a small area around them. . . This continues for years. . . It was hysterical. . . Finally it stopped and the neighbors who did it admitted they had to quit because they were afraid of falling down. . . priceless. . .
I have painted my kitchen walls and the color turned out great (Glidden Ghost Whisperer in an eggshell finish, works nicely with the blue/gray marbled Formica).
Of course the reward for a job finished is another job or four (going through the kitchen stuff, painting the window trim, the ceiling, and refinishing the floor are the next big things on the list) the backsplash is now lower down the list until we figure out if we need it or not
However, I think that I will have the taller person in the house handle the ceiling work, as I was having trouble with the high areas on the walls, although I may be waiting for that until we sell the house or Judgment Day…
And from what I found while washing down the floor, the original floor was a pink and cream tile print, and the last owner put white/gray tiles directly over that. So now I’m looking at flooring…
I think the original color scheme was yellow walls with light blue trim, and the previous owner painted gray over the walls and white trim.
70.
moonbat
The videos of whales grooving to people music were wonderful! Bottom of my heart, thank you for sharing those. <3
71.
Ken_L
I first read the headline as ‘What’s life without whisky?’, which seemed a question to which the answer was obvious.
72.
JAFD
@Scout211:
A couple of decades ago, John ‘Spider’ Robinson wrote a short story “The Magnificent Conspiracy” imagining a charity like that. Wonder if he’s gotten any acknowledgement ?
@Betty: Betty, look in your account settings and make sure they’re set to view all. I think the default is view “top” skeets. Also, it’s dependent on who you follow and how often they post.
eclare
Sixteen cats! Wow. Good news, I found a pair of earrings that I thought I had lost, made from diamonds from one of my late mother’s rings. Very happy.
cope
When we lived in Florida, there was a tree in the median of one of the streets. It had a major cavity in the base of it and over time, it became populated by a small group of gnomes. Decorative mushrooms, furniture, flags, banners and other such things were added through a period of a couple of years. We added a small plastic door with a Gothic arch shape in the back of the hollow. It always made me smile to see as I drove by.
Sadly, it all disappeared a few months before we moved away. We never knew what happened but, given the dickishness of the HOA, they are my prime suspects. I suppose I could do a deep dive into Nextdoor but I don’t want to.
eclare
@cope:
Some people ruin everyone’s fun.
Wyatt Salamanca
This Hometown Life story is a real hoot! The person or persons who created these dolls and their accessories have real talent and I hope they keep up the great work.
Alison Rose
I absolutely love that mailbox-turned-dollhouse story. Whoever is behind it is my new favorite person in the world.
TaMara, I thought of you and your pups when I saw this video from The Dodo about a rescue Great Dane. It’s so sad to watch at first because the poor guy was just skin and bones, only weighed 58 pounds when he first came to the rescue org, but they got him healthy and happy and running around pretty quickly! Then before he got adopted out, they took him on a “field trip” to the pet store and let him pick out his own toys, and then he got his first doggie ice cream.
cope
@eclare: That’s the only reason people become HOA snitches or Republicans.
Roger Moore
@eclare:
I think that’s what they do for fun, or at least as close to fun as they are capable of experiencing. Mindless conformity is a way of life for them, and they’ll smash anything that stands in its way.
Scout211
This acts of kindness story really touched me yesterday: (video at the link–after an ad)
Sacramento father of 6 surprised with free car after biking miles to work for months
eclare
@Scout211:
What a great story, so happy for him.
NotMax
Maui’s most famous mailbox.
;)
Yarrow
Wow! Impressive. Some neighbors have a little library in front of their house that is a replica of their house, down to the color. It’s not that fancy, though.
Roger Moore
@Scout211:
It’s a great story, but it seems like we need a society-level change to really tackle problems like this. Wouldn’t it be great if his job paid enough so he didn’t have to depend on a gift for a car? Wouldn’t it be even better if his area had affordable housing closer to where he worked, and decent public transportation so people without cars could get where they need to go? Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m slagging the people who helped in this case, but we need to work on fixing the big problems so we don’t have to do stuff like this in the future.
Doc H
I locked my acct and downloaded & deleted my tweets when the Leon Skum deal went through. Xitter is going to change their TOS on 9/29 – that Thursday is likely the day I delete my acct. I’m going to need to remember to do it early in the day though: at 12:30 I’ll be at Glidden Point Oyster Farm, enjoying a sauna, oyster pen plunge, some bivalve shucking and a beer or two. 🦪🍻 I’ll prob forget if I wait until the afternoon.
I’m on Bluesky and I’m really enjoying the “early days of twitter plus lessons learned” vibe.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Roger Moore: You are meddling with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Moore.
Rebel’s Dad
This made my green heart grow three sizes bigger.
Also, Gov. Murphy has called on Menendez to resign from the Senate. It’s on now!
Jay
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ukrainian-hockey-player-meet-zelenskyy-1.6975750
twbrandt
@Scout211: That is a wonderful story of kindness and generosity. But it also points to the crap public transportation infrastructure we have in this country. Mr. Taylor would not have had to rely on the kindness of strangers had we decent public transportation.
ETA: ninja’d by Roger Moore.
trollhattan
Never heard the whaling song titled “Holy Shit!” before. What a grand experience. Guessing the hull transmits the sound right to the water. Something to be said for shutting off the engine and just drifting–the opposite of a wasted day.
HinTN
@Doc H: I’ve settled on Lone Skum. Happy bivalve doings.
NotMax
@Doc H
Trivia:
King Farouk of Egypt (who was brought up earlier today in a different context) was rumored to eat 600 oysters daily.
Alison Rose
@Jay:
💙💛
Ken
@Doc H: Not that it affects me, but what are the new Xitter terms of service? “Give us a credit card number so we can bill you $8 per month?”
trollhattan
@NotMax: At’s-a lot-ta Farouk!
Villago Delenda Est
What is life without whimsy? BOR-ING!
eclare
@NotMax:
Sharif don’t like it….
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: He had a harem to service.
Yarrow
@Ken: Info here.
This part may put Nitter out of business.
This part is maybe why more people will leave:
Emma
Aw, I love the whole genre of “animals checking out the hooman sounds” videos. My cats view me playing my piano merely as a lap station that doesn’t give enough scritches.
There’s sort of a bat version of the 16-cats-discovered video going on a couple hours north of me, in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island for those who know western WA. An unscrupulous Redfin realtor and home inspector took advantage of our lax estate sale laws and fooled a young couple into buying what they thought was their dream house… but is actually home to a gigantic bat colony. They started an IndieGoGo as a last-ditch effort to overhaul the house and turn it into a bat/vampire-themed B&B, with bat houses next door as the safe alternative habitat for the batties. Just thought I’d post it here, since the money has barely moved since I donated 10+ days ago (the $4k goal was the absolute minimum, like just to buy materials for the bat houses). Unfortunately, foreclosure and bankruptcy are still very much in the cards for them, since apparently there’s no law against fraud if you buy from an estate sale in WA :(
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Executives in air conditioned offices in Houston and Dallas do NOT approve!
Alison Rose
@Yarrow: Biometric data and employment history???????
Doc H
@Ken: This is all “at a glance/secondhand” stuff – my only interest in xitter at this point is to laugh and mourn – but there was an “we have rights to use any of your tweets any way we want” (I’m assuming to train Skum’s Large Language Model) and some rumbling about CC info. I ignored the CC info piece because it’ll be a frosty day on the surface of Venus when I give him anything like that.
Roger Moore
@Doc H:
You don’t have to wait until the day Xitter changes their policies. You could delete your account today.
Doc H
@Yarrow: thank you – a better answer than mine.
Yarrow
@Alison Rose: Yes, but we’re risking the wrath of TaMara if we talk much more about it. This is not an Open Thread.
Doc H
@Roger Moore: I’m not finished grieving.
Ken
@Alison Rose: Biometric data would be to get rid of bots, I would guess; I would also guess that Musk himself will not like what that does to his follower count. Employment history might be billing related, or part of his plan to have everyone do their banking through Xitter.
Either that, or it’s to select suitable worker breeding stock for Lord Musk’s Mars colony.
Ken
@Yarrow: I find it whimsical to mock Musk, and I’m being very kind considering what I might say about him.
JoyceH
Hey, what do you guys think of Whimsy as a dog name? For Jazzy’s potential little sister, so think Samoyed.
Also – according to Twitter, folks were expecting the Rapture today. My response will be “Oh sure, that already happened. You weren’t notified? Huh.”
NotMax
@Yarrow
Gated community for Nazis.
Yup, that’ll bring the advertisers flocking to throw money.
Scout211
deleted. Nevermind.
Villago Delenda Est
“I’ve never owned a cat before.”
And you never have. Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.
Jay
@Roger Moore:
you don’t actually have to do anything, other than not log into your twitter account. Every dormant account costs Apartheid Clyde money, either to store or to weed through and delete.
trollhattan
Grrr, fvcking activist judges, again. Double-grrr.
Yarrow
@Ken: That’s fine. TaMara might have a different opinion. It’s her post.
Jay
@JoyceH:
If I had known about that in advance, I would have bought a ton of life sized inflatable dolls and a tank of helium.
Alison Rose
I absolutely love this photo of Olena Zelenska and FLOTUS together. Two amazing ladies!
Odie Hugh Manatee
Can you get a personalized version of that plate? If so, AC on one side, DC on the other…lol!
Snarki, child of Loki
Motto for the custom mailbox, and its new inhabitants:
“If you build it, they will come”
252man
@cope: I think HOA is an acronym for Haven Of Assholes
mrmoshpotato
@cope:
You could, but do you want to spend the weekend hating humanity?
NotMax
Impocerous, almost.
Placed a reorder for cigars by phone about 6 a.m. (Maui time) Wednesday. Company located near Miami*, so noon their time. Postal person dropped off the package here at 1:15 p.m. today (7:15 p.m. blog time).
*I know – Florida – but I’ve been dealing with them since long before DeSantis.
WaterGirl
@Alison Rose: Suddenly all the words on this page are blurry.
satby
Great roundup of some fun stuff TaMara! Good stuff.
I love the cat story (surprise). And of all the other sweet stories I think I really like the man getting a new car and the Southwest family of pilots best. It’s just good to see. Oh, and the mystery of the mailbox family! That’ll be a great kids book.
Roger Moore
@Jay:
There is a real danger of inactive accounts being hacked and used for something bad. I saw it happen in the pre-Musk days, and I sincerely doubt they’re any more careful about protecting accounts from being hacked today.
NotMax
@NotMax
I suppose partially attributable to there being much more spare space in the holds of flights to Maui than usual?
WaterGirl
@JoyceH: perfect!
mrmoshpotato
@Doc H:
Cannonball!
Ivan X
If that were actually your license plate, which I thought it was for a moment, it would be amazingly cool! I think you should try for it
Lyrebird
@Emma: Thanks for posting that! I don’t know if I can put in much, but I will try.
CaseyL
Well, that story about the 16 kitties took me down a lovely rabbit hole: Freedom Farm House is on the Book of Faces, and though I don’t have an account, I was still able to read about two years’ worth of posts. They – the humans, not the cats – have also offered sanctuary to a bunch of donkeys.
Owning a farm-turned-animal-sanctuary is exactly the sort of thing I’ve dreamed of doing. Fortunately or unfortunately, though, I’ve subscribed to enough YT farm/homestead and sanctuary channels to realize just how much constant, never-ending, hard physical labor is involved, which I am simply not up to. (Not to mention the finances; I’d have to win a lottery or something.) But it does warm my heart to see so many people are up to it, happy and eager to do it, and providing so many animals with safe, loved, happy lives.
MagdaInBlack
@Scout211: I think that Recycled Rides program is a great program. That Caliber Collision connection is interesting to me because my company is a direct competitor, and is involved in that same program. Except I never see any PR releases from corp that “we” have actually done anything.
Betty
@Doc H: I have a blue sky question. I seem to get numerous posts, dozens even, from one person that prevent me from seeing posts from other people. Is that normal?
MagdaInBlack
@CaseyL: I have that sort of thing on my “Lotto List” too ❤️
Maxim
@Emma: I clicked through and it says they’re over $11k, so hopefully that’ll be enough for them to do what they need to. But even if there’s no specific law against fraud in estate sales, there should be laws against fraud on the books in WA. I’m guessing they could sue if they wanted to, though it may not be the best use of their time and money.
Maxim
@Alison Rose: That’s beautiful.
HumboldtBlue
I really would have loved to sing with some whales today, or hell, any day. That’s so beautiful.
Emma
@Lyrebird: for what it’s worth, they haven’t spent any donor money yet because they want to be able to refund everyone if their bank absolutely refuses to pause or at least refinance their mortgage. Which is so decent of them, but so sad.
@Maxim: you’d think, but I had been emailing them to offer what little advice I could give, and every attorney they consulted on this said that their chances of winning were close to nil without the laws changing. (Honestly, they’re much more with it than I ever would be with a baby and a new house secretly dripping with a decade-plus of guano. They had even put together a draft of a law that fixed this loophole in estate sales.) Replacing the roof alone was quoted at $80k, and then they’d have to tear out the drywall, etc. etc. For all the work John had to do on his house when he first bought it, he should thank FSM that it deigned not to inflict a bat colony on him…
Prescott Cactus
@Wyatt Salamanca:
Whenever I’m in a new town I’m going to mail Shelley and Mary a postcard. . .
We had some figurines that were coyotes howling at the sky in our front yard. The gent who did the initial landscaping had found them in the dirt, cleaned them up a bit and left them in place when he was done. . .
Later that year, before Halloween they were all decorated ups along with a small area around them. . . This continues for years. . . It was hysterical. . . Finally it stopped and the neighbors who did it admitted they had to quit because they were afraid of falling down. . . priceless. . .
Kayla Rudbek
I have painted my kitchen walls and the color turned out great (Glidden Ghost Whisperer in an eggshell finish, works nicely with the blue/gray marbled Formica).
Of course the reward for a job finished is another job or four (going through the kitchen stuff, painting the window trim, the ceiling, and refinishing the floor are the next big things on the list) the backsplash is now lower down the list until we figure out if we need it or not
However, I think that I will have the taller person in the house handle the ceiling work, as I was having trouble with the high areas on the walls, although I may be waiting for that until we sell the house or Judgment Day…
And from what I found while washing down the floor, the original floor was a pink and cream tile print, and the last owner put white/gray tiles directly over that. So now I’m looking at flooring…
I think the original color scheme was yellow walls with light blue trim, and the previous owner painted gray over the walls and white trim.
moonbat
The videos of whales grooving to people music were wonderful! Bottom of my heart, thank you for sharing those. <3
Ken_L
I first read the headline as ‘What’s life without whisky?’, which seemed a question to which the answer was obvious.
JAFD
@Scout211:
A couple of decades ago, John ‘Spider’ Robinson wrote a short story “The Magnificent Conspiracy” imagining a charity like that. Wonder if he’s gotten any acknowledgement ?
satby
@Betty: Betty, look in your account settings and make sure they’re set to view all. I think the default is view “top” skeets. Also, it’s dependent on who you follow and how often they post.
WaterGirl
@Ivan X: Did you see that they rejected YOMAMA for a license plate?