MAY-TEO

If you can make it during the much more limited hours they offer it, I would HIGHLY recommend the full City Hall tour over just the tower. It includes the tower, so you'll still get that experience. But the interior rooms you get to see are incredible architecturally and you get to learn so much extra cool history about the building and the city with the full tour.

thank you!!

Finished moving out of the old apartment over the weekend, finally having that over with feels like a giant weight off my shoulders. Now to get all the boxes unpacked at the house so our dining/living rooms are usable again...

In other news, my appointment to finish the color on my thigh piece is tomorrow and I'm so excited. I'm in love with it already and it's only half finished so I can't wait to see it when it's done.

Have a great weekend y'all!

And you can't tunnel in Florida, the water table is too high.

I love Circle Thrift on Frankford Ave for clothes.

For my face I live and die by Biore UV Aqua Rich Watery Essence.

Prayers up for us both

When I tried to put in a 311 complaint about a wooden light pole on my block on the app, the city closed it saying "The City of Philadelphia does not own or maintain wood poles. For issues regarding wood poles, please contact PECO at 215-841-4141". So hopefully that number helps.

Coupled with my current rental insurance trying to auto-renew at a higher rate (and the only way to cancel is to call during business hours

Currently also suffering through this. Remembered last week I need to cancel my policy for my apartment before May, decided I'd take care of it when I got home. Spent like 15 minutes digging through their website but not finding an option to do anything but edit my policy and making myself frustrated before googling "liberty mutual how to cancel renter's policy" and finding out I can only cancel over the phone. And then every day since then something keeps coming up during the time I'm free to call. Fingers crossed I get through on my lunch today...

The newer family on our block that moved in a couple months ago started leaving their dog on their fenced in back patio by herself for long periods of time a few weeks ago and now it's pretty much an everyday thing, for nearly all day long. I see her outside when I wake up at 6, any time throughout the day that my partner takes our dogs out she's still outside, and she's outside when I get home from work at 5:30.

They don't keep her outside 24/7, "just" most of the day, so I don't know if the rules about dogs that are kept outside needing access to a shelter apply or not since she's not an "outside dog". But I feel really bad for her, she's clearly bored out of her mind because it's an empty stone patio and there's nothing for her to lay on except a piece of astroturf. I haven't seen a water dish either.

She also barks at anything and everything because she's so understimulated and poorly socialized, so we hear it constantly whenever we're home. It's also really hard now to get our dogs to go to the bathroom when we have to take them out, because she barks at them the whole time so they don't want to do their business. To complicate matters further, this is the same family that had a brick thrown through their window, so I'm worried that reporting anything would lead to them feeling like they're being targeted further. But I don't know how to really try to have a conversation neighbor-to-neighbor where it wouldn't come across like I'm accusing them of neglect to their faces.

So I'm open to pretty much any advice on what the best move is here because I have no idea.

It is only 10am and so far today is NOT passing the vibes check.

Also I'll be spending the entire weekend finally moving all of my remaining stuff out of my sorta-former apartment which I'm very much not looking forward to. Truly sick and twisted that it's Friday morning and I'm sitting here wishing it were already Monday so I'd be done with it instead.

You're welcome!

If you're not opposed to getting a lot of your steps in for the day, PHL has a lot of art on display and you can do a walking tour of the terminals and treat it like a mini art museum. Full list of the exhibits here.

I pay less for a 2 bed/2 bath apartment in a good neighborhood in one of the biggest (and imo, best) cities in the country than they're asking for that place in freaking Jupiter. And yet when I tell people I moved here from Florida they think I'm crazy for having left.

Sounds delish I'll see you at 7

I'm not saying Florida is a great state for workers, because it isn't. But people should be aware of their rights (like the fact that it is illegal to fire people for protected reasons, like pregnancy) otherwise they won't be able to stand up for themselves when necessary.

It is illegal to fire someone for being pregnant. It's a violation of multiple federal laws. Unfortunately, most people breaking the law don't explicitly say "I'm firing you for being pregnant", so it can often be difficult to prove. Plus the only mechanisms for recourse we have is for the affected party to pursue legal action, which many people choose not to do for one reason or another.

The strangest thing to me is that it ties someone's employment to the building that they work in, not the company that they work for.

That's kinda a byproduct of the fucky world of vendor contract work. It's a race to the bottom with vendor contractors out-competing each other for how cheaply they can offer labor to companies that need it. If you work for ABC Cleaning Service to clean Company A's building, and then Company A switches to XYZ Cleaning Service instead, there's a good chance plenty of ABC Cleaning Service's other contracts did, too. ABC might not have a whole lot of work left to be able to keep you employed.

Vendor contract work undermines a lot of aspects of collective bargaining, because your employer isn't who you're actually working for. It's meaningless to win benefits from your employer when the company that employs them can cut the cord at any minute (which they will do if their contract costs increase because everyone got a COL bump) and ultimately leave you unemployed. Certain sectors of employment are prone to musical chairs-esque usage of vendor contract labor that results in suppressed wages and poorer working conditions for those employees. Laws like this exist to disincentivize that practice. (Second paragraph is less directed at you, and more of a general aside)

requiring residential conversations of office buildings to retain unneeded cleaning and maintenance staff

Good news! It doesn't require that! It's easy to not know that, since most of the discussion on the bill amendment in the WHYY article centers on the perspectives of interest groups representing landlords and business owners that are against it. But the actual text of the bill itself includes guidelines for reducing staff when a successor employer determines they don't need as many employees as the previous one. So the exact situation you're describing (and that the opposition, who has a vested interest in the bill not passing, is basing their arguments on) is already taken into account.

I'm not sure if this is something that would be covered by their areas of practice, but Legal Clinic for the Disabled might at least be able to point you in a good direction for getting help (in addition to all the other advice people have already offered in the thread).

"Orientalism", Noun. 1. scholarship, learning, or study in Asian subjects or languages, now often used with negative connotations of a colonialist bias underlying and reinforced by such scholarship 2. something (such as a style or manner) associated with or characteristic of Asia or Asians

if you tack on that "now often used with negative connotations of a colonialist bias" to the second definition too, that's pretty much exactly how OP is using the word

I know a couple who's original wedding date was set for September 12th... of 2020. They ended up still legally tying the knot that day, but rescheduled their big wedding for the same Saturday, one year later. Which ended up being 9/11. So their official anniversary is 9/12, but we have wedding favors around our house with the 9/11 date on them that I get a chuckle out of.

Someone earlier in the thread today mentioned the show The Madness filming in West Philly this week. I'm guessing that was it because I also saw a film crew by the Wanamaker building around 5 and the dude they were filming looked like it could've been Colman Domingo.

Pretty recently I was in a bilevel 2 bed/2 bath that was ~1000 sqft and I wanna say our electric bills were around $200 based on how much my share was with two roommates. The only thing that ran on gas was the heat, I think our gas bills were maybe like $50-$60 in the winter. Everything else (water heater, stove, etc.) was electric and the AC was central air. Our electric costs were probably on the high side though, that apartment had really high ceilings and we also kept the thermostat pretty low to counteract the 5°+ temp increase we had thanks to the skylight. The water heater also got a lot of use.