I've got it!

I somehow injured my wrist last August (not entirely sure how; I didn’t notice anything specific but over the course of a couple days, it increasingly hurt to use my wrist or twist my forearm). The pain was on the top of the ulna bone right before my hand starts, and would be worse when I twisted my forearm or moved my hand sideways and outward. My doctor looked at it for 30 seconds and said it was tendonitis. Since then I’ve had good days and bad days. Braces didn’t seem to help, even wearing them for weeks, day and night, multiple times. Last night I was taking the trash out to our canisters and I was holding a bag while trying to open the lid, requiring me to twist my wrist in a weird way and I felt a strong POP (I did not hear anything), and that was followed by a deep, searing pain in the trouble spot that lasted for a few minutes. I didn’t think about it the rest of the night. The next day I thought about it again and expected my wrist to be sore, but it wasn’t. Not only was it NOT sore, but all the pain I’d had for months was just gone. Time will tell, I guess, but it’s more than half way through the day now and it still feels fine. What in the world happened?

"Free love" was this amazing concept in the 60's but when we find out that some people become a little too "free", it causes a lot of harm. So now we're trying to figure out all of these rules about consent and when consent can be given and what constitutes a rape vs. what is sexual assault.

Seems like a lot of hysteria, and we're fast heading to a place where all of the "rules" are untenable to keep straight and it would be more beneficial to just admit that the old "wait until marriage, keep it in marriage" idea actually had a lot of merit and offers a lot of simplicity and stability.

My current job is not video production, editing, graphic design, or voice over work at all. But in a few above-and-beyond instances, I've made a few videos for staff education about various industry regulations on my personal editing software. Some have become the standard training videos on the various topics for our company.

Recently I got the idea and urge to start doing voiceover work as a side gig. One way to find work is to connect with a talent agency, but I don't want to contact them without some kind of demo.

With it being firmly established that the videos in question do NOT have any proprietary information in them, just the company name, would it be an okay move to include the videos as a demo?

Perhaps something you see as more harmful in the long-run than it is helpful in the short-term? Or perhaps something that you feel over-complicates a process that didn't need technology in the first place? Please share as many as you can think of and explain why.

As a gift, someone dear to me got me an Amazon Echo. I don't want this thing in my house, let alone plugged in and connected to the internet. Not only do I have a personal principle against technology that fixes problems that didn't need fixed (including voice-command computers like this, as well as GPS devices and back-up cameras on cars, just to name a few), I don't trust Amazon and I don't trust this AI they want to put in my house and do who knows what with anything it "hears."

But the person who got it for me is elderly and wouldn't understand this gripe. Also they visit fairly often and they'd ask where it was. Any help and ideas?

I've been on a particular intermittent fasting and gym schedule for 3 weeks.

I do intermittent fasting from 7 p.m. to 11 a.m.

I chose this window because, despite dinner being the easiest meal for me to skip, and breakfast being the hardest, I have a young family and it's important to me that we all sit down together for dinnertime each night.

But I hit the gym at 5 a.m., or 4:30 if I can swing it. My schedule does not allow for any other gym times--plus my gym is debilitatingly busy any time after 6 a.m. Since I finish, at the latest, by 5:45, it's still five hours and fifteen minutes until I eat again.

I've read things that suggest that this kind of schedule is working against me . . . or maybe those things only said I'm not getting the gains I could be getting? I'm not sure.

My goal is to lose fat, get stronger, and--let's be honest--toning up would be nice.

So if this schedule can take me there, despite taking longer than it could, I'm fine with that. After all this is all part of a lifestyle change, not a fast track for a photo shoot.

But if this schedule is actually setting me back, then I need to do some re-evaluations.

Thoughts? Comments from experience?

I was arrested over 20 years ago when I was a teenager in a small midwestern town, not my home state.

Don't worry, it was a massive, unfortunate misunderstanding and things were cleared up before it ever went to court.

But now there's probably a copy of my mug shot on record somewhere and I want it. Probably for a Facebook profile. For a while.

Simple google searches of the town's records, and public record searches, have yielded nothing so far. Any tips?

For as long as I can remember I've always been not only a harsh self-critic, but also very analytical about those criticisms. I spend a lot of time and effort figuring out why I do what I do and I most often blame myself first before I blame others (or at least come around to blaming myself fairly quickly).

So I'm not sure this is as common of a trait as I would want to think it is. Other people don't seem to do this like I do--or do they? I don't run around talking about it so maybe they don't either.

I have a family member that takes the concept of laziness to new, unprecedented levels. They re the kind of person you describe to someone and the other person says, "They can t be that bad," but they re actually worse.

This family member is morbidly obese because they refuse to move physically and now their legs won t work. They got a taxpayer funded mobility chair that they wreck and bang aroudn like crazy. They find it too frustrating to get up and down in the bathroom so they just go on themselves and refuse to bathe. Of course they don t keep their taxpayer funded apartment clean. They spend all their time playing video games and watching cable.

Recently this person fell out of their chair and passed out, and they were not found for more than 24 hours. They are now in intensive care with a litany of serious issues including dead skin and dead muscle from immobility and uncleanliness (and sitting all the time). My extended family is now expecting to have to pay for nursing home care for them but I want to speak up, finally, and demand that something be done about their mental state. I fully expect my family to push back on the mere suggestion of the existence of a mental illness here, so I want to have my research in place first. What kinds of conditions and areas of mental illness could I look into as starting places?

"Research shows that depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders can be tied to poor nutrition, and can be improved with a proper diet. So drink our juice!"

Seems a bit like a non sequitur but not quite. Any help?

Put a new hard drive in my computer last winter. Reinstalled my backup. Reinstalled my software, including iTunes. Went to route my audio files through iTunes and it froze EVERYTHING. I attempted multiple times to uninstall it and start over, but with each new re-install, it immediately picked up the process that froze the computer before (without being told to do so) and froze my computer. I gave up and used sub-par, 3rd party apps for syncing and ripping. Now 8 months later I tried to install iTunes again but it's still installing anew but picking up that 8-month old process and still freezing or freezing my computer. Any ideas what's going on or if I can fix this?

Will it matter?

Counting calories can be tricky for a homemade recipe. I think I've got it figured out (to at least give me a ballpark estimate), but when I did it tonight, the calories in what I ate seemed terribly low.

I took the individual ingredients' weights and looked up the calories for those amounts. Then I added up how much the whole dish should weigh based on what the ingredients weighed. Then, when I ate, I weighed how much my portion was. Then I figured out the calories per ounce for the whole dish and used that to determine the calories I ate.

I'm not expecting this to be right on the money, but I'd expect that I'd get reasonably close, and if anything over-estimate my intake, which is the preferable direction for error I say. Am I maybe doing something seriously wrong with my logic here? Just checking.

An example:

The dish I make has 4 ingredients:

Ingredient 1 weighs 1 pound and has 500 calories

Ingredient 2 weighs 2 pounds and has 800 calories

Ingredient 3 weighs 0.5 pounds and has 200 calories

Ingredient 4 weighs 1 pound and has 200 calories

The final, combined dish should weigh around 3.5 pounds and have 1700 calories in it. That's 30.4 calories per ounce, so if I have a half-pound serving, I've consumed around 243 calories.

Yes? No?

A guy called me wanting me to play his birthday party. It'll be about 20-30 adults in attendence. I'm a guitar instructor and not really a performer but he wanted something more "interactive." It's an idea better on paper than I think it'll be in reality, but I'm getting paid so I'll cope. My idea is to have 5-10 simple songs down pat and I want to see what people would suggest. I'm looking for rock songs--mostly well-known ones--that utilize a lot of chords and maybe have a solo or two, from the late 70's and into the 80's.

I got a free used charcoal grill to replace my 1-foot-tall Weber, and it's great to have room to actully have room to cook more than 2 things at once. The problem is that it has a bunch of holes around the base that let air in, and I can't close them. This makes me waste charcoal when I'm done cooking since I can't close it and seal off the air supply like I am able to with my tiny Weber, and thus save the remaining charcoal for future use.

I got the brilliant idea to seal off these holes, but I'm second-guessing my idea and I want to see if it's warranted. I got some of that hardening, sealant putty. The Steel-Stick or Quick-Steel stuff. The repair will be simple, but I'm concerned that using it may cause problems in a culinary sense.

So: using Quick-Steel Putty to close off needless holes in my used grill. Good idea? Bad idea? If bad, what other options do I have?

I just took my first freelance side-gig. Do I need a W9? My client says they ll pay me with or without one. I don t intend on dodging taxes, so I ll end up saving a percentage and then paying what I owe next April, but I m not sure if there s an advantage TO ME to do this through a W9 rather than just skip that part and report the earnings when I file?