Quitting/putting collecting on pause

[AceofKnaves]

"well, this would be very difficult to dust"

Ooooh a few months ago when my beloved cat nearly died from a mysterious and deadly infection, my dad said “well, maybe it was evil dust from your house”. Seriously. “Evil dust”.
That sparked quite the conversation.

 

[TheGillMan]

Gotta give the house a good sprinkling of Evil Dust every day!

 

[TheGillMan]

So cool that you've played Frank and Hedwig, @TheGillMan ! Those are 2 of my dream roles as well, though I get too anxious singing around other people, so I don't know if that'll ever happen. Nothing wrong with being the token straight guy in theater, either. Once chicks find out a guy doing theater is straight, he usually cleans house!

This is true! What's really weird is, the two roles that I played in drag I got more female attention than any of the others! I don't know why that is, but I certainly didn't complain!

I'm lucky in that my mother never discouraged me from doing anything I wanted to do outside of drugs or illegal things. A few weeks ago I took her to a restaurant out of town that she likes to go to and we stopped by Target afterwards. I was walking down the action figure aisle with her and she handed me $60 and told me to buy myself something. I was both embarrassed, as a 45 year old, and thrilled at the same time. She is the greatest.

So nice that you have that! My Mom is similar. I almost can't tell her the things I'm looking for anymore, because more often than not I'll either find that thing sitting on my doorstep one day, or mysteriously find the exact amount in my bank account. Bless her heart, she's always tried her best to understand my and my sister's nerdy loves, if not outright educate herself on them so she'll know what we're talking about.

Okay @Justice & @joshsquash729 I'm going to need one of your moms to adopt me!

Until I think about how racist and MAGA and transphobic she is, and recall back to specific instances where the signs were there that I ignored and I'm like "Oh, you were conditioning me to be just like you. Thank God THAT never stuck".

Oh, both my parents are transphobic, MAGA nuts as well! While my siblings are far more conservative than I am, they still think our parents are nuts for their worship of the Mango Messiah. They wonder why no one wants to go visit them...

And also how my wife pointed out my mother's narcissistic and vanity issues and how she would always insult me with "You're gaining too much weight, you've lost too much weight, that haircut looks stupid on you, stop making that ugly face, the way you cut your beard is atrocious"...ya know, all of the loving things a mother says to their child.

Oh, I could fill a book with all the awful crap my mom has said to me over the years. She definitely doesn't as much anymore, but some of the gems she's said over the years still rattle in my skull. My best friend has a crazy mom as well, and much of our early bonding was over the vile things our mothers had said. Until I met him, I don't think I'd ever met anyone who had been verbally torn down as much as my mother did me.

Electronics duster/canned air. Lifesaver.

Definitely essential. I give them a quick hit of that now and then, though I also try once a month to remove the contents of one shelf and give everything a thorough cleaning.