RustyRaven

ETA for afternoon tea: 15 mins. Iced fruit bun, highly anticipated yummyness.

Edit: yumminess aquired.

In this case I recommend you either give up Lent and/or religion.

Probably not, because at home I can break myself away to do something else when I realise I've been wallowing too much. At work I'm often stuck at my desk with not much happening and I can't do anything else much because I am "monitoring", but there's not enough to do to keep me fully occupied so I end up mindlessly scrolling reddit and things.

I don't get public holidays off, so it doesn't add anything for me to take leave then (and if I do I lose out on penalty rates, so would prefer to work anyway). I do get next year's sick leave credited mid April though, so I technically could get a much longer break by taking it then.

I have just worked out I have enough sick leave available to take all of March off. Tempting to book off due to existential angst, but it's probably a better idea to just cut down on the doomscrolling.

If you don't feel you can enjoy a street party without money that is an indictment on society, not you. These sorts of events should be a community celebration that everyone can be a part of, and in the past they were. Buying things used to be an extra option, not the core part of festivities, but our society has moved more and more towards making everything about just shopping in slightly different ways. As a society we seem to have lost any ability to have social connections without spending money - we meet in shops and restaurants, and more and more often we are expected to pay for "experiences", whereas once we would have met in people's homes and experiences were just things that happened to us, not something to buy.

A big stack of pancakes please, drizzled with syrup and topped with a big blog of cream.

15/50 and apparently that's worse than average. By which they presumably mean the average of all people doing the quiz, as its pretty standard for my own personal average.

But annoying customers often do get discounts for stupid reasons. Shops deal with a lot of volume and losing a bit of markup to get rid of a PITA can make sense, and they are often run by management with a "customer is always right" attitude. But for an individual the dynamic is very different, being a pain to deal with is more likely to get you blocked.

Some people are very out of touch with reality. Quite a few also don't seem to understand that they are dealing with individual people and that it works differently than buying from a store. It makes for some very odd interactions.

It certainly seems a bit better lately. I've sold a few things recently, and there seemed to be a lot less of the useless inquiries to wade through.

My most recent lot of bar soap was made from beef fat I skimmed from some overly fatty soup bones. It made great soap and definitely counts as cheap.