southsamurai

Pretty much, yeah, though it doesn't have to be low, iirc. It can come from higher in the throat, and thus sound higher pitched as well.

Isn't that a version of fry?

I'm pretty fucking old in my head lol.

Yeah, it'll be a while yet

I would have tried that, but even during the brief time they were in the enclosure, it was a pain in the ass to clean it without them trying to escape. Over a year or two of life, I can't imagine the hassles of that

I missed that part!

That would change the risk factor a good bit for sure

Mostly only instrumentals. I suck at singing, but it brings me joy, So I do it anyway.

That being said, there's a few I can't really sing along to most of. If we were vampires, by Jason isbell is one. There's parts I can follow, but most of the song, my voice just breaks on, so I more just hum along with, or mouth the lyrics.

Fuck, I don't even know for sure.

I think it was for a patient back in the early to mid nineties. I'm dubious on which patient, and whether or not that was the first time or just the first I remember.

If it's the one I think, the guy had a stroke, and I knew pretty much right away what was going on, so I was dialing before I got to him (this was pre-cell phone ubiquity, so it was a cordless phone via landline). It's kinda muddy in memory now, what with about two decades of other patients in similar situations, but I recall thinking "fuck, fuck, fuck" a lot while I was moving to him, and my heart pounding with the adrenaline of it.

Dude survived, and even partially recovered before another took him out.

However, it's possible he wasn't the first, and I'm mixing things up. But I'm mostly confident that I had never needed to use the service until I was working home health. Those early years blur really hard nowadays. I used to remember most of the patient's names, stories they told, etc, but there's rarely been opportunity to call on those memories, so they've faded.

Until I started having health issues of my own in my late thirties, I had never called 911 for anyone but a patient that I can recall. Even when I would witness something like a car wreck, someone else was already calling by the time I'd have been able to.

Generally though, since it was on the job, I was mostly focused on giving clear, concise information to expedite a fast and appropriate response. You default to training and let things go on autopilot so you can handle both the call and whatever help you're providing. Like, you can't think through CPR while also giving info to a dispatcher, monitoring the patient, and stuffing the emotional side of things down. There's no room for thinking in any appreciable way.

I did have the fucking Beegees running through my head at one point though lol. Caught myself almost singing underneath the panting I was doing while trying to keep the pace up because all the instructors back then would use "staying alive" as the perfect rhythm for chest compressions.

That was still better than the first time I ever had to do CPR, but that's a different subject.

Anyway, yeah, that's what it was like that time, and I think it was the first.

I also remember the dispatcher having to ask me to repeat things because CPR is hard fucking exercise lol.

Thing is, most of the times i had to call 911 on the job were kinda dull? Heart attacks, falls, strokes, when you're following procedures and are providing the kind of care you trained for, it doesn't hit the same as when something is outside your training. Something like a plane crash, I'd have no clue what to do, so I expect I'd be wound up like a stolen watch. But basic first aid, CPR, that kind of thing, there's not usually a reason to get worked up. It's one of those things where the knowledge and familiarity really do make something that's a major event on one hand just another day at work. You do the job, you do CPR and get EMS on the way, and then you go home.

There's stuff that happened on the job that I never even mentioned when I'd get home because why would I? It was "just" another bad thing that got handled and was over. My best friend, it was only a few weeks ago that I mentioned having had human flesh fly in my mouth and get swallowed. You'd think I'd have had a story to tell when I got home, but nope. It happened, it was over, and I just wanted to chill and watch some tv, or play some d&d.

It's fucking weird how my brain compartmentalized/s stuff like that. There's this section that got labeled "weird work shit" that would only get pulled out when story time happened, and that wasn't very common by that point.

It took really heavy shit for me to get home and want to talk about it. And by the time I was doing home health I had burnt out once or twice already in the nursing homes, so my threshold for heavy had shifted. You see enough death and misery, you don't really get het up over a heart attack or stroke. So I don't have many clear recollections of the 911 calls on the job.

Now, some of the other ones? Like when my parents had their heart attacks, or when I thought I was, those hit different. Mind you, I still compartmentalized the fuck out of it during the event, but I broke down hard once things were out of my hands. The 911 calls though, I was icy as fuck.

Tangential, but in the ER when a nurse was taking me back to my dad, she said that I seemed to be handling it really well because I cracked a joke of some kind. I didn't even think, and said I was faking it until I could fall apart, which was the truth. I had crammed all the fear and worry down into a box in the corner so I could handle shit. And handle shit I did.

Then I went home and fell apart lol.

They're talking about surviving the ocean drops.

Which is feasible, people have survived days to weeks floating in the ocean before, it isn't like 30 seconds is an automatic death sentence. But they specify the possibility of showing up with critters circling, which could make things very risky since the wrong bite wouldn't even have to kill you immediately to fuck things up.

But, assuming that the only factors are ocean surface and wildlife threats, it's doable. You don't even have to swim unless things are pretty bad. Just floating and treading water for that long is realistic for anyone with a fair degree of mobility.

Unless it's crazy shit. Thirty seconds in a storm, shit can go bad fast on land. You magic your way back with lungs full of water, and it might not drown you, but you're not going to be doing great. Worst case scenario, you end up with some kind of infection as an outcome which could kill you.

Anyway, point being that the proposed scenario isn't purely about being wet. There's a stated assumption of danger since you have to survive the trips.

Yeah, it's a big fucking ocean and you aren't likely to land right on top of a breaching great white. But it ain't all that safe either.

Not that I'd turn it down, I'd go for it. 100 mil is plenty when it's tax free as stated. That's enough to maximize your chances at surviving it because unless something directly kills you in thirty seconds, you'll still pop back to where you can call an ambulance. Or, keep an emt/nurse/doctor/whatever on salary for those events to make sure you recover very well.

But, we all get old. At some point, you'll die. You have a bad enough stroke, and your next dip in the ocean becomes life threatening even in wonderful conditions. That's not exactly a reason to say no. Hell, it's a reason to say yes, because there's at least a chance that if you're stuck in a failing body, you might get lucky and wind up on top of a breaching great white.

So, yeah, I'm doing it, but I'm not fool enough to pretend that it's some kind of cake walk

Human stupidty and arrogance.

Even when I share the purported beliefs of someone, the vast majority of people are so fucking smug and insistent on being right, that discussing politics ain't likely with me.

Then, you run into the fact that people tend to treat it like an identity and just mouth what they think they're supposed to believe without ever actually thinking about it. It isn't even just the people that are raised in one party/bloc/whatever and stick with it. Even the ones that change allegiance tend to treat it as some kind of granfaloon, but not the harmless kind. Shit, that's that case with unaffiliated people too, it isn't limited to party members.

Like, yeah, we all think we're right, but when that turns into smug self aggrandizement, fuck that.

That's the shit that bothers me about politics, that people can't just fucking chill and vote their conscience, they gotta be right, and feel superior about it.

That may not seem to be the kind of thing you're asking about, but it's one of the sessions those abysmal laws happen.

The teeter-totter works.

But I gotta be real with you, mice do not do well with catch and release. Their survivability is low. For one thing, they now have to contend with whatever other critters fill their ecological niche in the release area. Second, if a mouse is sheltering in human homes, chances are that a properly wild area is going to have a very steep learning curve on food finding, predator avoidance, and shelter. Then, you have to actually find somewhere far enough from other humans that you aren't just passing the buck to the next person (which is really shitty).

I couldn't find the stuff I looked up back when we had a bunch of the little buggers swarm us, but survival rates of mice were something like 1/100 or worse, iirc. It was definitely a high enough range that I opted to go with as humane a death as feasible rather than have a high chance of it just making their remaining life miserable.

For real, if the things get dropped off within a mile or so of human habitation, it's going to go back to what it knows. So you'd just be killing by proxy when the next person lays out kill traps or poison.

Hell, there's also the disease factor. Moving an animal of any size into the habitat of others is going to risk spreading any diseases they might have. You save that one mouse, but kill ten others because whatever strain of bug it survived isn't the same as the rest.

But the only realistic way to do it on a budget that I've run across is the teeter totter thing with a bucket/trash bin and bait on a stick. Not that no-kill traps are very expensive, and they are reusable. They also have the benefit of being able to catch multiples, which the bin method usually can't reliably what with the chances of the stick coming loose.

We had a major surprise back then, btw. The trap we first used, I dropped while trying to transfer the mouse, a very pregnant female. She got away. Next bloody night, she was back in the thing with nesting material. Little thing seems to have decided that was a great place to give birth. We put her in an enclosure since the weather was icy and freezing. She had her young in that, and one survived (she ate the rest). Fuckers got a month in the enclosure being fed and sheltered lol.

Deer mice in specific are really territorial too, it turns out. So releasing them is essentially guaranteeing a fight since any area that is supporting one will be able to have a sizable population.

I fucking despise having to kill an animal that's just trying to survive but crosses into human zones and can't be allowed to stay. I just couldn't find an alternative that wasn't essentially having someone else handle the killing.

That's difficult, and the answer would change over time because picking a "favorite" is as much a product of what the mind is like at the time of asking as it is from an objective internal perception of favorite.

That being said, narrowing it down some helps.

First, ima wipe out anything generated by a streaming service. That narrows the field a lot, and it's no more arbitrary than any other criteria to do so.

Then, ima wipe out any serial shows that didn't get a finish of a reasonable kind as part of the original run. That's because I can't genuinely highly rate a show that isn't over. The story is "pending" for me, and that always makes a show a disappointment. It does, unfortunately, eliminate firefly since its "ending" wasn't aired. By aired, I mean shown on a network of some kind, be it cable or actual broadcast over the air. I also exclude anything not yet finished because how a show ends matters.

This eliminates thousands of shows, so I can maybe process things.

As contenders, there's wide range. Winnowing those, I have to factor in repeatability. If the show suffers over repeated viewings for me, that's a major loss. Something like Bones as an example, that I liked well enough when it was being aired, but has killed almost all enjoyment of it when watched one episode after another over a few weeks.

So, I have to decide if I want to include or exclude shows that aren't serial. Now, I can automatically eliminate sitcoms because even the ones that are properly serial can't hold up for me. But there's sketch comedy ala snl and madtv. There's stuff like the Twilight zone as well. Because of the quality of sketch shows and anthologies, I gotta leave them in. But they're usually prone to more full on bad episodes than other types, so it leaves gaps.

All of which, nobody but me really cares about, but I'm bored and wanting to think this through in writing.

It does lead me to a few finalists though. Buffy has to be in there, though its ending was barely an ending, but counts enough. Monty Python has to be as well; even the weakest episodes still make me laugh. Trek has to be a possibility, but which iteration? Then there's quantum leap that manages to be nostalgic without feeling super dated (unlike a show like knight rider that's still fun, but really feels less enjoyable than it did in its era).

Since narrowing Trek down is nigh impossible for me, I think that disqualifies any individual series from making the grade. Tos and tng are just too closely tied to pick one.

Quantum leap though, damn. I've seen it front to back a dozen plus times and still enjoy it, even with the era's proclivity towards cheese.

However, Buffy manages to be cheesy and it not (for me) trigger the rueful chuckle, so I guess that bumps leap down a notch.

That essentially leaves me picking between Buffy and Python.

Which one I'd cue up first isn't certain on any given day. That being said, I think the fact that I could always just shrug and default to Python if I didn't know what I was in the mood for bumps it into favorite status for me.

Yeah, that's as good an answer as any other.

I will say that some shows, like the walking dead as a perfect example, could push those down if the overall series hadn't been mismanaged.

Then there's shows like Dr Who that I've spent more years and hours watching, but suffer from a ton of bad sections that make it hard to weed out; I'd have to pick a favorite doctor to be honest with myself about the show's overall enjoyment factor. Like, Tom Baker era, or the Tennant/Smith era, they top Buffy for sure, but those are small segments of the show as a whole. Plus, the show technically hasn't ended only individual eras have.

Loooota caveats in there though lol

Good rant.

That being said, ten years with a cheap pair of buds is kinda rare. The uber cheap ones sometimes won't last one year, even with light use. I don't think I've had many buds in that price range not fail inside of two or three. Wires wear out, the drivers get screwy, something.

But, as you've said, putting money into buds for the kind of use case you're using them for doesn't make sense.

The only cheap buds I've had last decently are Klim. The sound is definitely meh at best, but there is bass presence. They handle being shoved into pockets well though, and that tends to be harder on buds than regular use. I'm almost at the three year mark with the first pair and so far they're holding up. The original tips were foam rather than rubber or silicone, so they're long gone, but they came with extras, and the size is easy to find. Since tips are inherently going to degrade over time no matter what they're made of, I don't consider them a factor in the overall usability.

I do have a pair of sony buds that have held up okay, but they're in the next price tier up, as in under 20 by a few cents.

Yeah, and 6.9 is something nice broken up by a period

I think it gets over pooed on, and people miss the underlying emotional depth of the episode because it's so easy to get lost in the mostly middling to poor singing.

But the musical episode did a great job at inverting musical tropes and conventions. And it did so while staying true to the Buffy "vibe". It was dark and ugly and an emotional roller coaster.

Like, the off key stinger of "I was in heaven", the way her voice broke and the droning behind that. Fucking genius.

Musicals tend to err on the side of pleasing the ear more than telling a story. OMWF does the opposite in a lot of ways, and that's why it sticks out in my memory more than all but a small handful of episodes.

Shit, I don't leave the house unless there's no other choice as it is

Have you seen the postage rates for air mail in middle earth?

Our neighbor has said similar, and we don't even have many