I had not touched a cat in 15 years when an orange kitten wandered over to sit with me in the grass.
"I had not touched a cat in 15 years when an orange kitten wandered over to sit with me in the grass one day. I was left without adequate words to describe that experience. It reminded me that I am alive. It instilled in me a raw, unbridled happiness that I had never felt before, not even as a child.
I have spent many hours with those cats, and still I am amazed at how perfectly they reject everything it means to be in prison. They are playful and unselfconscious, curious and silly, soft and cuddly.
Sometimes it is even more interesting to watch my fellow prisoners interact with our cats. All those hard cases doing hard time melt like butter on a summer sidewalk when they visit the felines, feed them, watch them chase the birds and bees, and when they make toys to entice the cats to play with them.
I don’t think about the past when a cat hops in my lap. I don’t think of what I should or could have done. I don’t think about courts or life sentences or parole boards. What comes to mind is peace, and a sense that everything is going to be OK. What’s in the past needs to stay there if I want to have a future, if I want to be grateful for today and for the fact that I am no longer the person I once was.
The cats, of course, already know this. They are gracious enough to spend their time with us so that we might learn, and so that we can enjoy a few quiet moments of warmth, softness, non judgment, and freedom."
We are exhausted from the war and displacement we have endured. We desperately need your help for my children. We haven't received any donations in the past three months. I hope you can donate even $5 or $10 and save my children by providing them with food or medical treatment.😭😭🍉
I'm sorry but "reluctant slave owner" just shot to the top of my list of most ridiculously laughably racist shit I've ever heard. Reluctant slave owners. As if someone just... HAS to have slaves. Can always depend on a white Anne Rice fan to act like this
I'm SORRY I know I'm beating you and starving you and splitting your families apart and feeding your babies to alligators and maybe even sending dogs after any of you that try to escape such harrowing conditions it just HAUNTS MY SOUL the things I simply MUST DO to you!!! Don't you know that this causes me DEPRESSION?? Won't anyone think of my REGRETS??
if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills
where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*
this is exactly why I love talking about historical passive heating and cooling techniques
oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?
and we're still building them?
while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?
uh. okay then
(also public transit. the history of public transit in the US is infuriating, because we had it! and then we destroyed it!)
I can’t remember if I told you guys this but my grandpa paid a guy to put up a rock retaining wall in the backyard when my grandparents moved into their house in 1966. They live at the bottom of a mountain. The wall finally collapsed this year and my grandfather with dementia was PISSED OFFFFFF and he wanted so badly to call the guy who did it and chew him out for doing a bad job. My grandma is trying to explain that the wall lasted 60 years and the guy who did the work is probably dead and it TURNS OUT HE IS STILL ALIVE. Now we’re worried grandpa is going to get through to him (small town) and we’re going to see two 85 year old men come to blows over a rock wall that has been there since the mid-60s. My grandpa is a scrapper, he’s been to jail over a bar fight, the possibility that he WOULD fight this guy is high.
To top it off? The stone mason is the only person in town with one arm so grandpa would definitely recognize him if he saw him. If that is your grandpa, please protect him from my grandpa.
I don’t know. They could last indefinitely in perfect conditions on flat land. Like I said, they’re at the bottom of a mountain in Appalachia and this wall has held back 60 years of snow melt and ground shifting and it has survived countless major weather events. In my opinion it is very good work and I think 60 is a good run for a rock retaining wall. The problem is that grandpa feels like the wall was put up recently so he thinks it is shitty craftsmanship. He’s mad because he can’t quite grasp that this wall has done its job for 60 years. Dementia is a terrible disease but if you don’t laugh you’ll cry and grandpa’s righteous indignation at this man’s work is kinda hilarious.
izzy806
yousharknotpass
origamiaround
blakekathryn
gummygunk
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
dededos
stormborns
baratheonpilled
