My wife generally works from home and the kids come and go from school, so the house is usually noisy.
Today though wife had to go in and she decided to take the kids to grandmas. The silence is deafening. I'm not sure what I should do first: ice cream, browse /gw, play video games, nap. I think I'll do all the above at the same time.
I hope you get some time alone soon!
I 42 F recently remarried a man 41M after a messy divorce with my ex 55M. Our relationship was toxic and abusive, but it took me a long time to accept that. I have two kids 17M and 14F.
My new husband is Jewish, and so is my new stepdaughter 15F. My husband is an atheist, but he still abides by many religious laws because they are part of his culture. His ex-wife is more religious, and my stepdaughter is still figuring things out, which, duh, she's a teenager.
My stepdaughter keeps stricter dietary restrictions than my husband, the same ones used in her mother's house. Utensils, dishes and cookware that are used for meat can't be used for milk and vise versa. We color coordinated the kitchen to facilitate this. However, my kids, especially my son, have been ignoring the color coding system. Several plates have been "ruined" in the sense that my stepdaughter can't eat food off of them anymore.
When my husband and stepdaughter first moved in, we banned pork and shrimp (and other forbidden foods) from the house. My ex raised a huge stink about this. So did my son, although it was just to be rebellious, becuase he can eat all the shrimp he wants on his dad's weeks and rarely eats pork anyway.
Well, recently I decided to ban all meat, because my kids couldn't honor the color coded system and were creating huge headaches for everyone. Predictably, my ex and son pitched a fit. My son reports everything I do to my ex, who always reframes it as me being evil, which my son always ends up agreeing with, because he prefers his dad and hates my new husband. (My ex has a 27 yo girlfriend now btw, that my son has no issue with because she's "cool")
What I didn't expect was for my daughter to also be angry, as she's usually the level headed one. She said I'm favoring my stepdaughter. Her reaction gave me pause. Did I go too far?
Update: I know you guys aren't going to like this update, but I'm positively giddy about it, so I needed to share. To keep it short, after breakfast I offered my kids to bring back meat if they agreed to do chores to pay off every dish I have to replace because of their defiance. My daughter happily accepted. My son was furious and started yelling and cursing at his sister. She got mad at him, so she tattled, telling me their dad was paying my son to ruin my dishes. I confiscated his phone, made him give me the password (threatened to turn off WiFi) and found the conversations. I sent myself screenshots of everything. I also found the money
... keep reading on reddit ➡I’ve been striving for almost a year now to achieve something, and finally I was able to stack 0.1BTC. I know it’s still small and I still have to grind more to reach 1BTC, but I feel so giddy realizing that I have this. I want to continue doing this so that I can buy a house and hopefully become financially stable as soon as I could.
It’s still a long way to go, but seeing the decimal place move as I keep on stacking makes me feel excited and motivated at the same time. Sometimes it really pays to be frugal.
I am in IT. I have a fairly niche title that everybody wants right now. I have 5 full time jobs, 4 of which are fortune 500 companies. If I manage all 5 for a year, I will make around 1.2 million in 2022. I made 16 dollars an hour in 2016. I'm still struggling grasping the sheer amount of money dumping into my bank account.
At the start of 2021 I got a new job. It paid around 70k (105k to ~170k) more than I was making at my previous job. I had the inside scoop from a previous coworker, so I was able to name drop and negotiate effectively. I was tempted to keep both jobs, since due to covid both were fully remote. My fiance is incredibly risk averse, so she talked me out of it. As I got situated in my new position, I became increasingly set on getting a second job. I played video games from 8-4, and sat in meetings barely paying attention. I've probably done around 15 hours of real work since I started in January of last year. In April I opened my resume to the world and by June I bagged job 2 (82 bucks an hour). Holy crap! Two jobs! I was giddy with the money, terrified of meetings overlapping, and horrified if they found out about each other. As I settled in to job 2, I found the meetings to be tedious. There were around 4 hours of meetings each day for job 2. I suffered through them, agreeing to job 3 (having never stopped interviewing. I just made my salary expectations higher and waited for something to fall in my lap). My thought process was that job 3 (90 an hour corp to corp) would likely replace job 2, as job 1 is a laughable cake walk. However, since I am now in the position of power, I decided to try to flex it a bit. I told my project manager that the meetings were a waste of my time. They got nothing done, and they didn't contribute to my work at all. I now participate in an average of 45 minutes of meetings each week for job 2. Job 3 is also a cake walk - around 1.5 hours a week of meetings, probably 5 hours a week worth of work.
I continue to field any job that will hear my salary expectations. I am now saying 95 an hour is my salary expectation. Another corp to corp gig comes around, and the hiring manager loves me. Once again being in the position of power, I am able to simply set my expectations with ZERO fear of the results - "Given the scope of the work, my salary expectation is 105 an hour". "The highest we can go is 100." "Nope." They gave me my request. They then tried to push back my start date a week. I told them "I had already
... keep reading on reddit ➡While I did press charges on my mother for stalking me and trying to frame me as a drug dealer, I didn't want to spend much time in court because that meant being near her. So the events I'm about to describe are half from me, and half from my dad. They probably aren't very accurate. It was five years ago. So please don't savage me if anything sounds off. It's something I've mostly tried to put behind me.
To start off with. My dad actually didn't know that my crazy mother had taken a flight to my state to stalk me. She claimed to him that she was just gonna take a small vacation away from everyone for her own mental health. And never said where she was going. And my poor dad didn't know what she was about to do, or he'd have warned me. My mother then spent several days secretly following me and my GF around with her smartphone. She used the spare key we kept hidden inside of a fake rock to get into the house we were living in at the time. She then photographed everything she could. Even more intimate things I'd rather not describe. Then after she returned home my dad said she looked really smug about something. He described it as the kind of look someone has when they think they've won. And she seemed unusually happy and giddy until police came and arrested her on Christmas. Dad said she was bawling her eyes out and saying she didn't do anything wrong as she was being carted out by the cops.
The evidence against her was clear. All of the photos were found on her phone and my dad quickly realized what she'd done. The call my mother made to claim I was selling drugs she even made from her own smart phone. The call was recorded, and was very much traced back to her phone quite easily. When my mother was confronted with the evidence, my dad said she just started crying and begging. And when she refused to get up from the table, the police had to move her. Dad said she just totally went limp and refused to cooperate. No one bailed her out of jail either. She had to use her own money to get herself out. Dad said she wanted to call me to beg. But I guess in a rare moment of clarity she figured out there was no way in hell I'd bail her out after what she did. So she spent a while locked up before finally using her own money to get out.
She didn't try to run. In fact she firmly believed herself to be justified in what she'd done, and felt like she could sway a judge to her point of view. Her lawyer advised she just plead guilty. So she fired him and said she'd r
... keep reading on reddit ➡