Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Getting to be alone with the pets when the owner is out of the house (pet sitter)
Username disgustingly checks out.
This sounds like it could be fun and interesting, depending on the house owners.
Have there been any funny or interesting stories that came about from dog sitting at someone's house?
Figuring out which parts of the vendors' documentation is lies vs. what isn't
I'm unemployed, so I stay home to run errands, manage finances, cook, clean and otherwise manage the house.
I would say cooking is the most intriguing part, as it can be quite complex, involves creativity and skill, and can be quite rewarding.
Anyone who says being a 'stay at home' partner and are pretty good at it, isn't a job unto its self, hasn't seen someone do it right or are full of it.
What is your favorite dish/meal to make?
Yes, I treat it like a full time job with explicit responsibilities and a rotating schedule to keep myself busy. (Which is a lot, tbh - daily life is already stressful enough ... my lease is up in a couple months and I am struggling to find affordable housing in a particularly bad housing market - it's very stressful.)
I'm not sure I have a single, all-time top dish, but here are some repeat favorites:
- bierocks
- enchiladas
- chili (and variants: pumpkin chili, beet chili)
- Cornish pasties
- pizza (I like to stuff the crust with pepper jack cheese)
- cheeseburgers & fries
- nachos
- Nambian Butternut Squash Soup (this is a favorite - if I make this, my partner will eat through the whole pot in a few days, lol; I add red lentils to give it more protein and make it more filling)
- Souvlaki in a pita - basically Greek style grilled meat in a pita bread with french fries and tzatziki sauce, and fresh red onion and tomatoes - this dish is a total indulgence
- Thai curries (mostly panang, red curry, and Masaman)
- Indian curries (e.g. Punjabi rajma masala, butter chicken, etc.)
I could keep going, but I'm getting hungry and I should stop 😆 I love food, and I love cooking.
Nice. I have those “souvlaki in a pita” ingredients waiting in my fridge but have been putting that off all week
Oh my goodness! Can I come over for dinner!? :D
Seriously, I'm having a hard time stopping my mouth from salivating right now.
Nearly all of these seem like things I would want to make. Thank you very much for sharing! You've inspired me to take another serious attempt at cooking proper meals again.
ironically I put more effort into my cooking before I lost my job - I think it was a coping strategy, the worse my life got the more I relied on tasty meals to keep me wanting to be alive (and to stay busy cooking so I didn't have to think about anything else).
Cooking is great - besides saving money, I just can't get the quality I can make at home from a restaurant.
Cooking is SO rewarding. I wish I were retired, or at least unemployed, so I could just cook for my loved ones.
yes, this was originally more of a retirement plan that I would eventually quit my job once we had enough saved up and it wouldn't be too much of a financial burden for me to be unemployed (like, we were hoping there would be a point where we felt life would be overall be less stressful and better if I picked up the domestic labor full-time than if I worked a job full-time while still doing the domestic labor - I'm doing the cooking and laundry no matter what, so retirement is mostly a stress-reduction strategy).
But then I was unexpectedly pushed out of my job, so we found ourselves in this situation a bit too early. I'm constantly stressed about finances now and trying to find a path to get us into a financially viable situation (right now we are far from financially sustainable, the housing shortage and having to flee across state lines meant we were stuck in a massively over-priced housing situation).
Hopefully we find a path to cheaper housing and the stress settles down (and we don't have any major health emergencies or other sudden extreme expenses - e.g. we were in a bad car wreck and we had to replace our car, and let's just say the car insurance didn't suitably cover the cost of replacing it, etc. we can only take so many blows).
But yes, theoretically there is a way this could work out that would be like a dream scenario where I am just taking care of the domestic labor I was doing anyway when I was working full-time, and that life is just easier and happier for it.
I wish I were retired, then.
But more than that, I wish the best for you and your family.
haha, three cheers to that - financial independence is the dream.
I tend to be very frugal, but you can only save so much money by being cheap (and a lot of the strategies take up your time rather than your money, and you also only have so much time).
And thank you, that is very kind. I think we'll be OK - just in a stressful period with a lot of uncertainty, but objectively we are very privileged and I don't really feel I have room to complain.
Your life could be better if selfish people weren't making it worse. You should never feel shame for calling that out.
I miss this - when my kids were at home I was always so motivated to do a good job, to find and make new things, to spend extra tine. Cooking was interesting.
Now it’s just me at home and it’s really not a motivation anymore
I am a janitor at McDonald's. Sometimes I find a whole-ass burger behind the fryers and it had to be there for at least a week, with how often we clean behind them, and they are perfectly fucking preserved other than the fact that they are rock hard.
IDK what they put in the food, but real food rots. I'm extremely wary of eating food that even microbes won't touch.
This has been so thoroughly debunked. Food doesn't decompose if it dries out before it has the chance to, and thinly-sliced meat patties easily lose water to evaporation.
If you want to see a McDonalds burger decompose, keep one in a fridge for a few weeks, which will keep it moist.
Watching my designs come to life from CAD. The tooling I work on has hundreds upon hundreds of parts. I have had bills of materials that are 60 pages long. We have our own CNC machines, and an enormous industrial 3D printer. So, I get to watch my parts grow, and be released from blocks of raw aluminum. Then, slowly over the course of a month, the parts gradually come together to something resembling a machine. When air and power get plugged in for the first time and it comes to life? Magic every time. Those first parts are like newborns to me. Even if they are scrap/ugly. When they finally get tuned in to produce good parts every time, I'm always giddy. I made this. This is my baby.
I think the craziest tool I have had to design was roughly 2.5 x 1.5 x 1 meter. It made one part at a time. It had 25 "edgefolding" units, 7 slides, retractable skin pins, a retractable skin clamp, suction cups, grippers, two-stage vacuum for the skin, and three forms of heat. Hot air, hot water, and a big IR shuttle that came in and heated both the upper and lower tool and had to retract and close in 2 seconds.
The behind the scenes of a college campus.
Is this more indoors or outdoors? People facing or in the background?
All of the above actually. What I found interesting is that when I attended college, there was an aura of superiority surrounding the institution and all the people involved in it. Now I realize, it's all just being held together with glue by regular shmucks that are trying to figure out their own lives.
sorry can't tell you classified
I can assure you. I have the clearance for these classified details. Here's the pass-phrase. Red frog, green log, brown bear, sit there.
Would you kindly
How intriguing!
You learn some interesting things sometimes when reviewing medical records
The amount of R&D and the sheer amount of technology that has gone into drastically reducing truck exhaust pollution over the years is amazing.
One of the things I do at my job is emptying the trash bins of the car park, people throw away all sorts of things, some of them are useful, some of them are disgusting, some of them are intriguing. Then there are the patterns and trends.
I'm talking about a pay car park, all interior inside a building. There's this spot where each week there was a gin bottle in the trash with three or four cans of tonic, but no plastic cups. Each week for maybe ten years then one day it changed to a bottle or two of Ballantine's for two or three years and just recently it changed again to a herbs liquor popular around here.
Other times, not often enough, there are rejected presents, like a pair of new shoes that some guy tossed in the trash. How do I know it was a rejected present? Because it included a birthday note that read something like:
I've never forgot your birthday, I hope you enjoy it my dear [Joe], even though you hurt me that much you might know why you did it.
Sincerly [Jane]
My friends tell me that I should write stories about the stuff I find but I'm really bad at that, it would be fun though.
figuring out other people's mistakes when trying to replicate their results, closely followed by figuring out my mistakes when trying to replicate my own old results
Ill tell ya when I get some.
The process of in many cases slowly but methodically figuring out the solution for a problem. I work in R&D for electronics. I have to do a lot of paperwork, but sometimes I get to dig deep into the technical stuff. Recently we had an issue with one of our products. Line stop, management meeting, everybody loosing their mind. Got me some long days, but man, putting everything else aside and just running experiments to find the issue was a blast.
My security clearance certificate has me listed as a Government Agent.
Do you sing the secret agent song every time you go to work?
Not any more, for shame! (I don't work for a government any more, it just says that for some reason)
That I get paid what I do for the job I do. It brings no real benefit to society but it’s a living.
How much of the global telecommunications infrastructure is held together with cable ties.
How bafflingly incompetent my supervisors are. I am entirely convinced useless retards are promoted to management positions on purpose because if they did actual work they’d just fuck everything up.
I just fix problems.
Processing data broken? I’ll fix it.
VPN broken? I’m on it.
New server needs installed? Yeah I’ll do that. (I love hosting Minecraft on a server that costs more than my car)
Old server needs removed? Cool free stuff.
It’s always something different, and I get to explore new things and possibly get free stuff.
Watching people make connections.
I work in materials testing so when a material doesn’t perform as expected, I get to go into troubleshooting mode. If all my equipment and a self-critique of my test procedures checks out, then we start looking into the material itself. If it’s a raw material, was there a flaw or inclusion in the sample itself? Does that flaw permeate through the rest of the supplied material? We’ll work with the supplier to figure out the issue. If I’m testing a fastener, are there clues in the way it’s manufactured that might indicate a problem? Was it heat treated properly?
Testing failures are disruptive and usually end up causing manufacturing delays and wrecking deadlines. It doesn’t happen often but when it does all our brains kick into high gear.
Audrey.
Don't tell her. I think she knows, but it's a bit awkward right now.
Crawling around inside the guts of ancient ass buildings. I used to be obsessed with whatever was inside the walls when I was a kid. Daydreaming about climbing around. Now I get to see it. Also liminal spaces after working hours.
For me, it is bringing together a technical design that fits the best case for the various stakeholders and the client. It turns out that is a complicated thing to do.