Lies and betrayal are very hard to get past.

Because it can be hard to break away from what you get latched onto.

Just like the octopus in this adorable video, some people are content to stick with trash they've somehow picked up along the way... passing up on something much better because they're waiting for something absolutely perfect to come along. Sometimes you're lucky, like this octopus, and perfect gets served up to you and you're able to leave your trash behind for greener pastures...

But what if perfect never arrives? Then you've just saddled yourself to garbage for the rest of your life.

I've worked very hard to let go of the things (and people) who have screwed me over, made my life worse, and had essentially became unhealthy trash I was stuck to. But throwing your trash in a garbage bin doesn't mean that you're entirely rid of it. You have to then take the trash out, which can be a messy task. So you might end up delaying and delaying and delaying, because you don't want to get messy. In which case it's still around, making you aware of it occasionally when the bad smell wafts your way.

Then hopefully one day when you've finally gotten tired of the smell, you take the trash out.

At which time you hope it stays wherever it gets hauls away to, all while secretly fearing it will come crawling back into your life one day.

Then the news comes that it got buried in a landfill a while back.

At which time you might be conflicted about your feelings. So you choose to drop the negative and focus on the positive. You try to be thankful for the happy times you once had. The times when you were blissfully unaware that you had become attached to trash that would eventually unleash an avalanche of garbage on your life.

What else can you do, really?

Clinging to bitterness and hatred turns you into the garbage you managed to escape from.

And do you really want to be the trash in somebody else's life?

I may have finally turned the heat on to make my cats happy, but never fear, I still have money left to blog... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Bread! Yesterday I baked a loaf of bread for a neighbor, but since my oven is broke I had to make it one of those flat loaves and bake it in my toaster over. It turns out pretty great, all things considered. But then all I could think of was freshly-baked bread, so I checked to see if my starter was good to go, and...

Bread for me today. Except I actually made rolls, because I figured it would be easier to make sliders or little sandwiches that way. =sigh= I sure hope that there's some really good deals on ovens for Black Friday... or, more likely, for President's Day. I want to be able to bake stuff again.

   
• Winner Winner! My favorite game show is Pyramid (which started as The $10,000 Pyramid). I remember watching it with my mom when I was a kid, though I think by then it was The $25,000 Pyramid

What's surprising to me is that even though you know all of these runs are winning runs, it's still stressful! There's some great players on here. Noticeably missing is Rachel Dratch, who is spooky-good at the game...

I kinda wish there was a way to play that game for everyday people. I mean, sure, they've made home versions over the years, but it's not the same experience as pairing up with a celebrity on a show stage with an audience and playing. Guess I'll just have to apply one day or something.

   
• And Speaking of Game Shows... There's loads of game shows out of the UK that I obsess over. The two most notable being Taskmaster and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Absolutely nobody does game shows like the Brits when they are celebrity competitions. Nobody. Since there's no real contestants and just famous people having a laugh, it gets absolutely bonkers, and is so much fun to watch. Take for example...

I don't know why we don't do more of this kind of thing on our side of the pond.

   
• Early Days! Somebody shared this video of gymnast Ian Gunther asking other gymnasts he's performing with to sign a photo for him... but it's not a current photo, it's a photo of them when they were young...

The reactions are priceless. I love stuff like this.

   
• Stranger Things! Doctor Strange: The Multiverse of Madness grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide and had a brilliant teaser for a sequel when Clea showed up in the post-credits scene. But the most exciting part? Somehow they got frickin' Charlize Theron to play Clea!

So where is Doctor Strange 3 on the development slate? We keep hearing about new Avengers movies, new Spider-Man movies and the like... but no sequel to a near-billion dollar film that people are dying to see? Is Kevin Feige still in charge at Marvel Studios? What's going on there?

   
• And speaking of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Doctor Strage... You can't put this much thought into super-hero movies...

Wanda was done pretty dirty. I mean, yeah, I get it... kinda compelling to have an innocent hero get corrupted in a way that makes them become a villain. And Wanda did turning to The Darkhold would only speed up that process. But come on! The Scarlet Witch has been abused to death in the MCU, and it's beyond bizarre that they don't seem to be interested in redemption for the character. I keep hoping that this will be rectified... maybe it will happen in the Vision Quest mini-series... but the longer they wait the more it seems like nobody cares.

   
• NEWS: A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms! So much blood on these asshole's hands, and yet NONE OF THEIR SUPPORTERS GIVE A SHIT! This country hates women. HATES them. Their only purpose is breeding stock to make more labor and more cult members. Other than that? Oh it's always "Oh well" and moving on to more death.

As I'm typing this, somebody on Facebook just commented "...if women die because of a problem with the baby, that's God's will." And I am like, if absolutely everything that happens is God's will and He's an all-powerful being Who can make anything a reality, then why didn't God just design it so that terminating a pregnancy for any reason results in immediate death? If He's God, then He could absolutely have designed it to work that way, right? — Then the conversation spiraled into "the devil" and "temptation" and "God's wrath" and every other bullshit thing you can think of from a person with no critical thinking skills who hasn't studied the Bible even a little bit. I am so fucking tired of this shit.

   
And now back to my toasty 72° homestead.

For the longest time, Halloween was my favorite holiday.

But then I got cats. And not just any cats, but cats who are terrified of other people. And noise. So a day where people are coming to the door screaming TRICK-OR-TREAT is pretty much their nightmare scenario. To Jake and Jenny, it's the scariest day of the year for realsies.

And it's no picnic for me, I gotta say.

My home has the living room in the back, kitchen and dining room at the front. So every time somebody comes to the door, I have to go running across my house to get there. I usually deep-clean my kitchen on Halloween because of this, but this year it wasn't in me after the rough day I had.

Fortunately, my home is covered by a full array of security cameras, so I just have the camera at my front door running on my televison so I can see people coming before they knock or ring.

But that doesn't save me from having to run to the door fifty times.

Though I should welcome the excersise given that I bought too much candy again this year and will have to eat it myself, darnit.

=sigh=

It's really telling when you get some bad news... but because of what you've been through in the past, you have no idea what your reaction should be. Or even if the bad news is, in fact, fake news.

I was so naïve for so long. Now I'm just numb.

After work yesterday I went to the grocery store to pick up... stuff.

I didn't know what I wanted. Nothing sounded good. I just knew that I was out of just about everything and I needed to go to the store. I guessed that I'd just figure out what I should be buying when I got there. Except that wasn't the case. I just kind of meandered down the aisles aimlessly.

And I wasn't alone.

There was a bird hopping around who looked equally confused as to what they should be buying...

It was tough to sleep wondering what happened to the bird.

What do stores do when a bird gets trapped in their shop?

Hopefully at least make a little effort to help it find its way back outside.

The last time the Aurora Borealis was a thing back in May, I dragged out my camera and tripod and was disappointed with the shots I got compared to what others were getting. So when I heard that she would be making a repeat performance last night, I thought I'd study up how to take better photos this time around. Then ultimately decided I didn't care enough to do that. I'll just look at other people's photos and stay inside where it's warm

But then I remembered that I have a new iPhone and decided to throw on a jacket to see what happens when I used it to snap some photos...

What people are not saying is that you don't just walk out your door and see this. It's barely visible until you pull out your phone or camera and make a long exposure. To actually walk outside and see this you need to go to Norway. Or Alaska (which is where I saw it for realsies). Or somewhere way north. Still... it's pretty to look at through my iPhone.

I kept looking through my bedroom window and waited to see if the pink/red got stronger before going outside, because at the start it was mostly green like last time. And yes, before you ask, I changed the photo style in iPhone Camera from my new go-to "Amber" undertone to the "Vivid" filter setting (which was my former happy place in the app before we got "Amber")...

Some interesting things to note...

First, all of the above photos were shot with the wide-angle lens. I was really hoping to get something cool out of the new 48MP ultra-wide lens, but the results were terrible. It's as if the shake reduction is not working and the "Vivid" setting wasn't doing anything to help. All I could get without a tripod were grim, blurry photos. So disappointing...

Second, I shot a couple videos to capture the shifting lights, but that turned out even worse. I think if I got my tripod that I could have gotten something worthwhile, but my cats were already pissed off enough that I had left them.

Third, when I looked through my photos more carefully this morning, I found that what I really liked was when the stars shined through the aurora. Now I really wish I had grabbed my tripod, because I would have liked to have gotten a crisper take of that. But still, the iPhone's shake reduction is darn good. Considering how small the stars are, I expected a lot more blur than what I got. This is a 100% pixel crop of how iPhone did with the wide-angle lens...

Fourth, I opened my laptop this morning and of course social media is overflowing with "tHIs iS nOt NORmal! ThIS IS The hEAVy metaLs ThAT thE GuberMINt aRE putTing InTO The air to CREaTE hURRICaNes!" Because of course. We can't have nice things any more because despite explanations by scientists and astronomers as to what's happening, everything has to fit into some nonsensical confirmation bias narrative. Everything. It must be fucking exhausting spending so much time trying to sus out what the latest conspiracies are and how they can sandwich into the demented fantasies that people are building to explain the world around them. Fantasies which don't rely on empirical evidence, rational thought, or all the evil lying scientists around the world who have been paid by NASA to deceive us from the truth. It's absolutely bonkers that we've regressed back to the Stone Age, and everything humanity has learned is being tossed out the window in favor of absolute bullshit. But that could just be my eight COVID boosters talking. I get vaccinated because I have respiratory issues and getting COVID could kill me, so I guess I'll just keep believing in science so I can survive even though it means that I am crazy-stupid for believing in science? Who the fuck knows any more.

And there you have it. A pretty nice display of this cool consequence of stronger-than-usual solar storms hitting earth's magnetic field and interacting with gasses in the upper atmosphere which is visible further south than usual.

Or it's Obama and the Deep State using unicorn blood as a sacrifice to satan for summing death and destruction upon the earth which our prayers to Jesus combated, thus creating pretty lights. Or what the fuck ever you want to believe. I give up.

   
Today I spent 20 minutes trying to explain that a photo was not real but AI-generated. FML.

It's Friday again, which would usually have me excited about having time off for the weekend. Except Summer ends on Sunday, so I've got a rapidly dwindling amount of time to get my home and yard ready for winter. My garage wood shop has been dismantled. My HVAC inspection has been made. I've replaced my air filter. I'm down to the home stretch.

Which largely involves taking out my Fall/Winter clothes, bedding, and such... then storing away my Spring/Summer stuff.

Which is to say that there's going to be a lot of washing and packing.

How can I look forward to that?

Long before the candle parties, makeup parties, sex toy parties, and home decor parties, were Tupperware parties. I remember them very well. Every other month or so one of the moms on the block would host a party where the neighborhood would gather to see all the latest wares from a goliath plastic food container company so they could order stuff to make their lives easier (and keep their foods fresher).

Personally I hated Tupperware because the containers would easily warp and stain... and the soft plastic would scratch with little effort, always making me wonder how much plastic was ending up in our food. My mom still had a bunch of the stuff when I cleaned out here cupboards... all of it warped, stained, and scratched.

With the exception of this thing, which I kept and still use from time to time...

Guaranteed delicious microplastics in every bite!

Today it was announced that Tupperware is bankrupt.

Which isn't too shocking. Who has time for food storage parties when you can just order cheap crap from Amazon and get on with your life? Or, if you're me, replace as much kitchen stuff as possible with glass and metal (well, except for stuff that sits out on the counter because I have cats).

Still... I do have some fond Tupperware memories too. It would be tough growing up in 1970's rural America and not have fond memories.

There were the Tupperware popcicle molds which you could fill with Kool-Aid (or Jell-O or Jell-O Pudding, if you were bougie). There was the Tupperware cereal keeper containers which made it so that your Fruit Loops didn't go stale as fast. There was that famous Tupperware cake taker that got pulled out when grandma was taking a cake somewhere and you got excited for a slice.

But then there was everything else, which usually meant you were getting gross leftovers instead of new deliciousness. That's the darker side of my childhood that most people don't want to discuss. Though, as an adult who has to actually pay for my own food, I'm thrilled to have modern food storage technology!

I'd just prefer that my food not be stored in plastic and cost a fortune, so I guess childhood memories are all the Tupperware I need.

Time to say good bye to Summer.

My air conditioning hasn't come on since I've gotten back from vacation. My outdoor plants are starting to keel over, turn brown, and die. And the mornings and evenings are noticeably cool now. Fall is totally going to be here any minute now (well, okay, it'll officially be here in three days), so I've been doing what I can to clean up the yard, get my wood shop torn down so I have a garage, and do all the other things that one does while the weather is still accommodating to it.

Like clean out my flower beds.

There's this tree-thing that grows back every year. I chop it down, it grows back almost immediately. I thought that having my flower beds completely gutted last year would finally kill it, but NOPE!

This year I actually just let it be. I never had time to replant the very front of my house, and it was green and tall and helped fill up space. But now that everything needs to be cleaned out, I chopped it down...

I posted about it on Facebook, and somebody told me... "Yeah, that's a Tree of Heaven, and they're almost impossible to get rid of." And so I had to research that. "Tree of Heaven" (AKA Ailanthus Altissima) is something that totally IS tough to get rid of because the root system is extensive and can survive almost anything. Regular poisons won't work (there goes my plan to drill into the cut edges and put herbicide on it), and may actually encourage it to spread further because it will try to escape the poison.

And so... next year I will probably hire a company who knows what to do to try and get rid of it for good.

I hope their solution isn't to light my yard and home on fire.