22
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Where would you like to be at the moment?
Another country, another city, another street, another building, another room, another chair... temporarily or permanently; where would you like to be ATM?
Another country, another city, another street, another building, another room, another chair... temporarily or permanently; where would you like to be ATM?
Right where I am, in an alternate universe where California wasn't quite so much on fire and blanketing everything not on fire in a dense layer of smoke.
Stay safe my dude.
The same, except mass shootings don't happen. 😿
Lisbon.
If I wasn't as broke as I am, I'd spend whatever I have to relocate to Lisbon. It's just so beautiful. Modest, colourful, cheerful, right besides the sea. It all started with reading Saramago, then Pessoa, and I first fell for the literature, and then I fell in love with the language, then the city, and then the country. IDK where life will lead me to, but I really desire moving to Lisbon one day.
Istanbul is beautiful, but I don't have any opportunities here anymore. Universities have become completely dysfunctional, most of them don't count as one anymore if you ask me. The politics are unavoidable, and it's suffocating me. Prices are climbing, tension is escalating, all because of nothing but idiocy. So I need to go somewhere I can focus on my studies and live peacefully. Hopefully I'll be able to do it through my PhD, but I have to start and complete my MA first. And I hope I can do that in Lisbon.
Keep the faith! I don't know you but I don't have to - I believe in you!
Thanks a lot! I really believe that if you really want something that is with good intentions and is possible within the limitations of human nature, and put in the effort, you'll do it at the end, so I have no intentions to give up on anything I'm planning.
Right where I am. In my bedroom, eating abará and watching Friends with the AC on. I’m a simple man.
Don't let anybody knock you for it either. Shelter, food, climate control and entertainment ... it's awesome you don't take it for granted.
Oh wow, I want to try some of that now. Looks delicious.
http://flavorsofbrazil.blogspot.com/2010/09/recipe-abara.html
Oh, it's wonderful :)
It's also very hard to do, and the women who sell them are usually of humble origins and take the bus from distant neighborhoods carrying lots of weight, frequently helped by their young sons. That's why I never complain about the price..., some people gladly pay R$ 30 on McDonald's but think R$ 10 is too much for an abará. Not me!
Acarajé and abará (they're made from the same dough: the first is fried, the second is cooked) are usually sold by baianas de acarajé in the northeast of Brazil, and are some of the many things we adapted from our African heritage. It has ritualistic significance in Candomblé, a Brazilian religion of African origin. In Salvador, the city with the largest black population outside Africa, the recipe is literally law: you cannot alter it, nor associate it with different traditions. It's a serious matter and a point of contention with neo-charismatic "baianas" who go against the law to sell the same product using the name "bolinho de Jesus", or "Jesus cakes". They do so because, for them, religions of African origin are literally "the Devil".
If you're ever in Brazil, be aware that this cuisine is typical of the state of Bahia. You may find some good ones in other northeastern states, but acarajé or abará in any other region will be probably awful. You may eat it, of course, but don't give up until you taste it in Bahia ;)
If you want a recommendation, this one is great.
It's getting to lunch time and I'd like to be at In-N-Out. Double-double animal style with chilis. Animal style fries. Strawberry and vanilla shake. You can't go wrong.
Outside. I stay home with my 15 month-old son during the week so my wife can go to work, which means that on Saturdays, I generally have to spend the day working. But I'd much rather be outside. If the ground weren't covered in snow, I'd want to be working in the yard--probably mulching up the leaves with my mower (I've collected 32 bags of them from a town nearby, as they're valuable for composting and just building up organic matter in my soil, but I also have a ton on the ground that have fallen since the last time I collected them), but maybe working on sheet mulching the area I have planned for a garden next year, collecting logs or fallen branches for my hugelkultur, or cutting down some of the oak trees that I plan to clear out to make room for evergreen trees I want to plant to eventually give us privacy/noise protection from the road.
With snow on the ground right now, though, I probably wouldn't do any of this work. I live next to the Manistee National Forest, and I'd love to throw on some warm clothes and spend the day in it. When we first moved here, my wife and I would go for three hour hikes pretty much every day after work; now, I sometimes go a month without setting foot in the woods. I wouldn't trade my son for anything, but I wish I could both have him and have my freedom back. The forest is beautiful, and walking in it is calming and grounding. I should probably take a break at some point and head out there, whether I have time for it or not.
Couldn't you use a baby-carrier bag thing (those used to carry the baby on one's chest and look like a backpack) to take him with you to your walks? I've seen ones that look quite warm, but I have to admit IDK much about childcare.
Actually, we do have one of those, and we use it on occasion. The problem is my lack of energy. He has never slept well. He's up pretty much every hour all night long. Sometimes he has two hour stretches, and once, a long time ago, he had a five hour stretch, but he's also sometimes up every 15 minutes. Lucky, it's usually easy to get him back to sleep. My wife and I kind of take turns sleeping--I stay up until 2 or 3 so she can get a good stretch of sleep, then she takes over for a while when he wakes up so I can get a decent stretch of sleep--but it's still far from optimal. So I have little energy throughout the day and don't end up doing a lot of extra stuff.
Plus it's just hard to fit it into the schedule. If he and I wake up at 10 AM, he generally doesn't want breakfast right away and just likes to play a lot in the morning, so going for a walk with him doesn't work out super well. By 1 PM, he's had breakfast and is ready for a nap, and obviously I can't leave the house while he's sleeping. He'll get up from his nap at 3, and that would sometimes be an opportunity to go out, depending on how things go. If he lets me continue doing dishes/cleaning up (generally what I try to do during his nap), then I wouldn't want to, since it's hard to find time for that stuff, anyway. Then he'll have some food when my wife gets home and I'll get started with dinner/cleaning or paid work.
There are definitely a couple opportunities in there, but it's hard.
Sorry for unloading on ya, there, in response to your helpful comment... But it helps to get this off my chest a bit! Parenting is rewarding but stressful and tiring.
It's a tough area to find parenting support and playgroups in, as the population tends older and people live further apart. Everything's trade-offs...
One of my guys went through this with his younger son. Hopefully, in another couple of months as your son starts getting better motor skills, he'll tire himself out enough to sleep regularly.
You'd think he would be tiring himself out--he's been walking for maybe 6 months, now, and has started climbing on the furniture. He's a handful! Luckily I do have a bit of hope on the horizon. We're thinking about getting him into daycare at least once or twice a week (it's only $30/day at the place we're considering, so not bad at all), so that would give me more of a break to get some stuff done around the house.
My wife also has a friend who went through these same sleep issues for five years and, upon giving her son the supplement, Protandim, he started sleeping. My research of the supplement suggests that it's a load of bunk, but at this point, I'm willing to try just about anything that isn't harmful.
Nevermind! That's totally fine. I actually read that with a smile because my parents tell me at times that I was similar to your baby back when I was his age with my sleep. Unpredictable, always seeking attention (I was also a huge troublemaker). Hope he starts to get normal sleep soon (AFAIK they always eventually do)!
You live next to the Manistee National Forest???
Fingers crossed, I'll be moving to your neck of the woods in the not-too-distant future. Northwestern Michigan is indeed one of the most beautiful places on Earth, though it's stayed that way through remoteness from most urban centers.
Awesome! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help with your move. For privacy's sake, I'd rather not publicly share more information about my location than I already have (although I'm kinda wishy-washy about that...I'm only sort of paranoid), but I'd be happy to talk about it more privately. And either way, good luck with those plans!
Completely understood, I think most of us are maintaining the veil to some degree or other. Thank you for the offer, and I'll look forward to the possibility of plotting together over our respective Zone 4 - 5 gardens!
On the ISS.
Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite NP. Probably really cold but at least it's not on fire. Got a couple unfinished climbs out there that I'll try to get on next summer.
I'm thinking this is a weird little trend on Tildes - I'd be very curious about the sociodemography that leads three random Tilders to sort themselves into northern Michigan. My spouse's go-to tag line is, "I'd rather be on fire in Traverse City than on a patio in South Florida."
Footnote: I'm rather hoping we're not all interviewing for the one available job.
We were just there the week before last for the annual vacation and old home week with family and friends from Ann Arbor and Lansing.
Traverse City housing is painfully expensive right now, easily on par with major metro area suburbs; we'd be looking at a one-for-one exchange with South Florida housing costs, and the rental market is worse with tourist bookings. Frankly, there's a building boom around the area that's resulting in traffic jams (!) and overused services.
I'm looking farther down the western coast of the state in the hope that we can get some land cheaply.
That's where the spouse and I are at - no kids, he's got a portable job and I may have the option of remote work or changing jobs to something up there.
I'm glad you're comfortable with the change, and wish you the best of fortune in your endeavors.
The timeline is currently beginning of 2019. We're short-term financially stable enough to move, but long-term, not ready to do it on just one reliable income. I had an interview up there while on vacation; the general result was positive, but I haven't had an official response yet. There's some work to finish on the Florida house to ready it for sale, and that's going to provide the capital for a new homestead.
I'd quit my current job in a heartbeat, except that I feel some responsibility to my team, particularly the family man I just hired. I don't trust the company to reorganize things in a way that gives them beneficial leadership or stable employment. My current boss is probably leaving (or being pushed out) at the end of the year, and I might get the option for remote work that's available to others once he's out of the way.
That's essentially our thought process about the Michigan relocation (and yes, we've been scoping things out for the last decade - moving to Florida was for work not love).
Sell in Florida before a market crash, live in rented housing, and keep our powder dry to buy on the downswing.
I'm sorry your partner's family bought into that whole swampland in Florida madness.
My gayest friend, who has ties and connections with most of the local governments in the state, was one of the people we visited with. So I have it on good authority that Marquette is a cheerfully diverse, up-and-coming blue spot in the U.P. wilderness.
There's Michigan Tech, good libraries, and some other dignified relics of mining money still driving tourism and cultural exchange.
Just out of curiosity, where are you moving from, and have you lived in Michigan (or any of the cold, dark states) before?
If you're living in mid-Michigan, the northwestern lakeshore will be an improvement - less days of cloud cover. More days of snowfall, but less mucky, damp chill. I was an avid cross-country skier, but there were never enough good days downstate.
I joke with Florida people about having lived with "six months of darkness" in Ann Arbor, but mid-Michigan actually has fewer hours of sunlight annually than Seattle.
If you mean the tribal identity, "Wolverine!", then no. If you mean, graduated from U of M, then yes.
I know exactly what you mean about yearning for a small enough place to build community, where there isn't a helter-skelter mosh pit of strangers everywhere you go, and where there's time for a quiet that people don't feel obliged to fill with noise.
I have this terrible, sneaking suspicion that we may have been acquainted, once upon a time - you don't have to answer this, but were you ever involved with MNet?
More or less in the same boat - the spouse and I are early 50's and there's never going to be a better time to get this done. It does feel final in the sense that we're tired of pulling up stakes to chase the labor market all over the country, and looking to set down genuine roots again.
For us, it's worrisome in the sense that the job uncertainty which set us in motion away from the Detroit area is never going away. But if you've seen enough of the country, you'll know there are no perfect places, only ones familiar enough and comfortable enough to call "home".
Further footnotes on Traverse City: I'll confess that I think of myself as a climate refugee getting out now to avoid the rush. We've been vacationing in TC for twenty-plus years, chasing the changing trees, and Autumn color has receded by three weeks during that time.
We're friends with some of the local winemakers, and they're harvesting more erratically (freak thaws and freezes, hailstorms) and later. A random chat with fishermen in Leland revealed that Lake Michigan surface temperatures are driving the whitefish deeper, they're not breeding effectively, but lake trout are replacing them. Some of the cherry farmers are talking about starting peach trees...
My hunch is that the area will become quite crowded, as people continue to chase livable temperatures, fresh water, and arable land.
I'm more than content to stay in the house, smoke weed, eat "conveniently" and explore all the art at my fingertips. I've traveled and moved around enough, and the bucket list only has one item left that gets chipped away at when I damn well feel like it.
Probably somewhere in Europe. Things are getting pretty bad for trans people over here. I've always liked Germany. Seems like a pretty varied place.
Where is "here" if I may ask?
Southern United States.
Right now it's a cold rainy day and I'm sitting in a hot tub eating a slice of French Silk Pie and drinking a glass of milk while playing on my phone. I'm having trouble coming up with a better place to be at the moment.
I would love to be camping at Fort Jefferson right now. It's the largest brick masonry structure in the Americas, built in 1846. The fort is 60 miles west of Key West, FL in The Dry Tortugas, basically in the middle of the ocean. Only a couple dozen people are allowed overnight there at any given time, you have to fly in or take the ferry. It's my favorite national park in the USA, and this is the perfect time of year weather-wise. It's crazy that this place exists at all. I brought my telescope last time and it was amazing, it is extremely dark as it's in the middle of the ocean. Snorkel and kayak all day, catch fish for dinner, stargaze all night.
Photos
Wikipedia
Official Site
Wow, that's really cool. I really want an opportunity to stargaze in pitch dark, I live in Istanbul and we have a huge light pollution problem here. I've heard about a place by the Aegean sea where it's quite dark in the night, and I want to go there next summer for camping (which is something I really want to pick up in and of itself). I'll make note of this place, maybe if I ever visit the US, I may also visit this little fortress too.
Wherever my friends are
Nauru, on the beach.