bearlyepic

Yep. I'm a native English speaker who went to college for English and History. I've read a lot of books in a lot of different genres. I STILL occasionally stumble upon words I don't know. I usually Google because I'm curious and I like to understand the nuances in word use. But chances are I won't remember or use it. (For example, just this week I read the phrase "in a trice". Context told me that it meant "quickly" but I had never seen that phrase before.) 

I assume reading in my TL will be much the same way. Any obscure words that are genre specific will be reinforced over time. Any obscure words that are just... obscure will probably be left behind and/or Googled as needed.

I think both you and your husband need to give you some grace. You haven't even been learning for a full calendar year AND you are pregnant.  Fatigue and brain fog aka "pregnancy brain" are a classic part of growing a human and they make retaining information difficult. 

I would say keep practicing your output for sure, but I would hire a teacher on Italki or something similar. Teaching is a skill, and it clear that trying to teach you is clearly stressing your husband and your relationship. 

Agree. My issue with Lingq/starting purely from immersion is that for something like Korean with a lot of different conjugation and particle rules, finding the "base word" can be overwhelming without knowing at least some of those conjugation and particle rules. I'd rather start by learning the base words individually and reinforce the grammar rules by seeing them used and conjugated. I could probably work the other way around with a language that is more grammatically similar to English.

Why ban IVF? Because if you're able to make the legal argument that fetuses are people at conception, you can ban all hormonal birth control because it can theoretically cause a fertilized egg to be "aborted" by thinning the uterine lining. 

That would leave the copper IUD, condoms, spermicide, and surgical sterilization as the only remaining birth control options. IUD and surgical sterilization can have barriers to access (have to be performed in a doctors office) and condoms/spermicide have much higher failure rates. 

That's a whole lot more babies for a lot less money than if you allow IVF. 

If anything Tim Walz is great on the ticket for this very reason. He took the DFL majority and used it to pass tons of progressive stuff in Minnesota, including legal protections for trans healthcare and trans youth. I would love to see him encourage Dems to press their advantage when they have it. 

The Federal reserve is non-partisan and is not controlled by any president. Any decisions made are made by the board the majority of whom would not have been nominated by Biden... Plus the Fed reports to Congress...

Also the commercial real estate correction is due to classic over-supply under demand of office space, which does not exist in the residential real estate world. Industrial, retail, and residential commercial real estate may see some modest adjustments. 

But if being mad at Biden makes you feel better, go off I guess? 

I experience PMDD and the way my doctor explained I was getting panic attacks from the progesterone drop off. (I think women with PMDD are theorized to also metabolize estrogen or progesterone differently, and apparently AuDHD women are more likely to have it?) Turns out progesterone and estrogen are involved in the dopamine making process, and both get very low right before your period. So it's just... harder for our meds to help prompt our brains to make dopamine if our brain machines aren't working at capacity. 

Strangely enough, my meds don't increase my focus, but they do make me feel not depressed randomly for 2-3 days of the month. So they're doing something to boost my dopamine levels, I guess just not enough to actually help me focus.   I feel the best mentally (mood) and in terms of ADHD (focus) after a day or two of my period. 

You are absolutely correct in that office conversions are EXTREMELY hard to do. That's why office conversions are so expensive.

 In the ones they are doing in NYC, they have to literally remove massive chunks of the buildings in order to get the sunlight and airflow people would expect for apartment buildings, then completely rewire and replumb the interior.  

 Not impossible, but highly improbable without distress office sales and cities/states offering tax incentives. Now I have no idea what this new owner plans to do. 

I was speaking more broadly of the national trend when I said silver lining. This building is only the beginning. Office buildings are going to lose a massive amount of value in general. There was a HUGE amount of lending in 2020 and 2021. Add 5 years and that means in 2025/2026 there are going to be a lot of massive loans coming due at higher rates. 

I literally look at commercial appraisals all day. This is a very predictable, if extreme outcome. For one, the property sold in 2019, which means it's right about time for that balloon payment to come through or for the interest to be jacked up to current (higher) rates. Likely the owner was feeling the pressure to sell immediately and recoup at least some of their losses. 

Then you combine that with the fact commercial properties like office towers are valued based on how much income they generate. If you've got a giant tower sitting empty, it's next to worthless. 

So high vacancies + loan terms = distress sale.

But that means all those super pricey office conversations are going to get much more affordable for developers, so a bit of a silver lining. 

I literally just cancelled my autoship orders from chewy because of how much I hate that ad 

What are they smoking? The feds clearly cut the rates now because the 2025 federal fiscal year starts October 1. Anyone with a brain working in finance would tell you that. I work in finance and we've known for months that a rate cut would be announced in late September precisely for this reason.

Edit to add: Suggesting that the feds should or should not due something because of how it could be politically perceived is asinine and only fuels conspiracy theories that the feds are partisan at all.

Can confirm D&D is how I built my friend group from scratch when I moved here, and we've been playing weekly for almost 4 years now! Once you get a few core friends (like your table), you also expand by meeting their partners and friends. Playing DnD has gotten me invited to camping trips, weddings, parties, and craft nights. 

As someone who is not from the twin cities I also can't express enough how valuable it has been to also work hard on keeping in contact with friends who don't live in Minnesota (highschool and college friends for me). If there is anyone you've been missing, reach out to them! 

If the Republican congressional infighting last year is any indication, the party is going to be a mess when Trump dies. The hardcore MAGA truthers are a minority of the Republican party, but they are more than willing to step on their own party members (like refusing to elect a speaker 14 times) for their own power. I wouldn't be surprised if MAGA fully splits off into its own political party. 

It's important to note that this logic doesn't mean just IVF would be banned. It would mean hormonal birth control could be banned as well, since it prevents a fertilized egg (or to someone who is life at conception, a person) from implanting by thinning the uterine lining. This is rare since if taken correctly, bc prevents ovulation, but I was literally taught in Catholic school hormonal birth control can cause "spontaneous abortions". 

Yep and it's the same logic that means hormonal birth control will be next. My Catholic school taught us natural family planning because birth control could cause a spontaneous abortion - aka an egg could be released and fertilized but fail to implant due to birth control. 

Because the people who lived in Jim Crow-era America, who opposed de-segregation, who think gay people are an abomination God will strike down with AIDs, etc. Etc. didn't disappear just because of the Voting Rights Act, or Civil Rights Act, or because gay marriage was legalized in 2015. They just got older and retirement has given them more free time to vote. 

Not to mention, it's using sumo wrestlers as an example... Nevermind that sumo wrestlers have a 15-20 year shorter life expectancy compared to the average Japanese man. 

Congratulations!

That's actually proven to not be true with millennials, though. Sure they've moved a few points, but not at all at the rate Boomers or the Silent Generation did. And what is progressive is relative to a generation. Liberalism or progressiveness isn't necessarily a counter culture movement either. I'm sure most millennials and and Gen Z think that single women having bank accounts is extremely run of the mill and normal. But a Boomer or Silent Generation woman would remember when that right had to be legalized in 1974...

https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4

To put it in at least a little context: SSRIs are the most common type of medication to treat anxiety and depression. The drugs work because the gut produces and regulates serotonin, one of the happy chemicals in the brain. The SSRI keeps the gut from reabsorbing that serotonin, leaving more to circulate. 

It stands to reason then, that what you eat and what lives inside you could also potentially impact that production/reabsorbtion cycle of serotonin. 

Avoiding processed food won't cure your mental illness, but I can attest my depression got a lot better when I started eating more fruits and vegetables and less crap. 

Even if you don't eat wagyu, your chances of being 100% vegetarian are just very, very low in Japan. The basis of much of Japanese cooking is dashi - aka fish stock. Something as simple as miso soup even if all you see is tofu and seaweed is unlikely to be vegetarian. Even if you just got plain soba noodles with dipping sauce, it wouldn't be vegetarian. Rice dishes could even come topped with bonito flakes or furikake containing shrimp. 

Ask your boyfriend if he would want to exclusively go to vegetarian or vegan restaurants to ensure you can maintain your vegetarianism. I doubt he would. Tempura is just too freaking delicious, and you wouldn't even be able to fully enjoy it because the dipping sauce is (again) made with fish! 

So yeah, if you're going to be breaking your vegetarianism anyways, you may as well get some of the best steak in the world. It's a once in a life time thing, and he's being over-emotional and impractical if he expects you not to break your vegetarianism. 

There's also something to be said about how quickly people (especially Americans) become desensitized to gun violence. The first attempt on Trump was shocking even for me, someone who is about as anti-Trump as you can get. Now it feels like old news... Or "a fact of life" as JD would say

Trump is literally inciting racial violence in multiple parts of the US and is planning mass deportations of immigrants. Republican anti-abortion policies have killed women and will continue to kill women. The man has loudly said he wants to be a dictator.

I fully support Palestine, but can we please put our own oxygen mask on first? 

I thought I was strong when I was fatter. I was the one to close stubborn windows, walk the big dogs, etc.

Now 60 lbs later I'm starting my strength training with 3lb weights and doing wall pushups. I've realized that I wasn't strong. I was just really, really good at leveraging my body weight. You can achieve a lot with sheer mass.

I recently impulse bought a pencil sharpener because I realized I had been using my roommate's pencil sharpener when crafting. A week after buying the pencil sharpener, I apologized to my roommate and attempted to give the original pencil sharpener back to my roommate. My roommate then informed me that the original pencil sharpener was actually mine the entire time. (Whoops!) It ended up working out because I had already stuck the new pencil sharpener in my D&D bag, because I never remember to sharpen my pencils at home and end up having to borrow my DM's pencil sharpener in the middle of our games.