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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • My mom mortgaged me when I bought my current house. I’m in BC, Canada so you’ll want to check on your local rules. Here, the process of buying a house is separate from the process of getting a mortgage so if you don’t need a bank mortgage no one is going to scrutinize where the funds are coming from.

    I got a realtor and went through the standard home buying process. As far as the seller and realtor were concerned, it was a cash sale and they didn’t care where the money was actually coming from, just that financing didn’t have to be a condition. They guided me through the offer process, told me when to get a lawyer to do the purchase paperwork, and the lawyer gave me details on how Mom should make the deposit and final payment. She could also have transferred the money to me and I could have done the payments myself but that was logistically difficult in this case since my credit union doesn’t have a branch where I live.

    Mom and I then contacted a notary to draw up a mortgage contract. In our case, she’s not charging interest since she’d have to pay capital gains tax on any income over the principle. On paper, I own the house. Mom is listed as a lender on the title, exactly the same way a bank would be. If I default on my mortgage, she has the right to foreclose and force a sale. Once the house is paid off, the loan goes off the title. We have a handshake agreement that if my parents die before it’s paid off, the remainder will come off my portion of inheritance to keep things fair for my sister.

    We could have set up the mortgage agreement first, but it made more sense for us to wait until we had the final numbers from the house sale.




  • I have the following at home:

    • My work laptop (2021 MacBook Pro)

    • My personal laptop (2018 MacBook Pro)

    • An old iPad Air

    • My phone

    • Living room PC (Linux, shared)

    • Bedroom PC (Linux, shared)

    My laptops live on my desk and I mostly have whichever one I’m using plugged into my external monitor and peripherals (mouse and mechanical keyboard). The portability of my personal and work machines is nice if I want to sit on the couch or travel.

    The living room PC is hooked up to the TV. My partner and I mostly use it for gaming and YouTube. It’s a few years old but it can handle most of what we throw at it.

    We only use the bedroom PC to watch TV in bed.

    The iPad is for knitting patterns. Previously, it spent several years sitting unused in a drawer.

    My phone is for doomscrolling and spam calls.



  • ratofkryll@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlsmoking
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    26 days ago

    I smoked for almost 20 years. I lost track of how many times I tried - and failed - to quit. Last December I just felt done. Put it down and haven’t gone back to it. I even had a few cigarettes while out with a friend in March and had no desire to go back to it after. I know a few other people who quit like that, but far more who have struggled with it for years and still smoke.

    I have no idea what changed for me. Every other attempt failed, even if I felt really ready to quit.


  • Whatever I want. Usually PJs. The three times a year I go into the office, it’ll be a tank top, jeans, and combat boots or high tops, generally all black or dark grey. I’ll also wear a plaid flannel over the tank top if it’s chilly in the office. I save my dressing up for the office Christmas party and shock the hell out of everyone.



  • ratofkryll@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldDaughters and Fathers
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    2 months ago

    Dad was born in the '50s into a family I can only describe as Victorian. Very rigid gender roles, happy and angry the only acceptable male emotions, and all the “fun” stuff that comes along with that kind of upbringing. I’m in my mid-30s now. He worked a job that sent him out of town for weeks or sometimes months at a time, but where he would often have several weeks off at a time as well so he was either never around or home all the time. Mom was a stay at home mom, but that’s about the extent of the gender roles enforced while I was growing up.

    Dad and I had a fairly close relationship until I got to about 14/15 but I did learn very early that he was not the person to go to for anything emotional. He never knew how to handle emotions and - like many people of his generation - he didn’t think about the long-term effects that his offhand comments and teasing might have. As an adult, I understand that it was his way of showing affection but it’s taken me a very long time to work through the body issues I picked up because of his (and Mom’s) teasing about “the family nose/thighs/shoulders/etc.”

    We drifted apart when I got to high school. The teenage girl hormones hit really hard. He didn’t know what to do with all the feelings I was having so he either ignored them or got angry with me if they inconvenienced him. I never felt like I could talk to either of my parents about what I was going through so I withdrew into myself. Honestly, I was a pretty shitty teenager and my parents were both pretty shitty parents of teenagers (though in my defense my sister was way worse from a much younger age and never really got much better - we still don’t get along.) As I got into my twenties and calmed down, Dad continued to treat me like that hyper emotional teenager. I resented that a lot and kept him at arm’s length.

    Dad’s and my relationship is good now but it took a long time to get here. It took me accepting that he is never going to change and meeting him on his level, while asserting my own boundaries. I’ve spent a lot of time unpacking the hangups and baggage I carried with me into adulthood, which has given me the ability to get past “Dad is an asshole”. Dad was raised in an environment with a lot of gendered pressure, came out of it with severe anxiety - which you can see runs in the family if you know what to look for - and his only coping mechanism is control. When he feels out of control, he explodes. However, being a “man of a certain age” (a.k.a. Boomer) there’s no way he’ll ever develop the emotional intelligence to understand and acknowledge that. He has no incentive to and has never learned the language. I learned that if I want a relationship with him, I have to be willing to work around that so I do the work on myself and focus on what he and I have in common - which is a lot! It’s been a slow process, but I’ve also seen him finally start to acknowledge and respect me as an independent adult over the last few years and that feels pretty good.

    On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, my partner has a fantastic relationship with his 7-year-old daughter (my stepdaughter). He’s very emotionally intelligent and self-aware and has no problem talking with his kid about feelings - hers or his own. He also rejects the idea of traditional gender roles and doesn’t feel at all weird about playing dress up with her, getting his nails painted, or any of the other “girly” things she likes to do with him. Neither of us had good parental relationships modeled for us growing up (mine were distant and affectionless with each other, his were volatile) so we do our best to show his kid what a loving, respectful adult relationship looks like. I’ve often thought that I wish my dad had been a parent to me like my partner is to his daughter.

    I think the most important thing about any parent-child relationship is that the child feels supported, respected, and confident to come to their parent about how they’re feeling. That’s going to look different in any relationship, but staying empathetic and not assuming you know better than your kid about what’s going on in their mind is always a good place to start. It also helps to be self-aware. Recognize where you might have hangups or emotional baggage and be proactive about addressing it. I have done more self-work in the last two years of being a stepparent than in the previous ten. That’s not to say I didn’t also do a lot in those ten years, but my partner and I both strongly believe that it’s our job as parents to do better than our own parents did, even if our parents had been stellar. But no pressure, right? XD

    It’s well after midnight and I’m rambling now so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.






  • I cancelled my Netflix account. I keep Disney Plus around for my stepkid, and Prime Video because it comes with Prime, although I’ll probably cancel that soon too. I’m keeping Funimation.

    Streaming is becoming worse than cable. At least if I got cable (which I won’t) I could PVR shit and skip the ads. The idea of paying a monthly fee to get advertised at anyway is nauseating.



  • 35, Canada, and manual is my preference although my current car is an automatic.

    I learned to drive on an automatic, but bought a manual for my first car and got my ex to teach me how to drive it. It was important to me that I be able to get into pretty much anything and drive it. After driving an automatic exclusively for the last year, I miss having that level of gearing control, especially on hills and corners.