The price of eggs in particular I haven’t noticed. I have been vegan for ten years, so I am over here trying to give people tips on how and where to replace eggs with other, cheaper stuff. I do anlot of baking and cooking, so I have tried all the swaps the internet recommended and have a pretty good idea which ones work.

However, the price of food as a whole is going up as well, and I don’t expect it to stop anytime soon. I am hoping to set up a ‘victory garden’ to try to help. If anyone else is looking into this, I recommend looking for an official victory garden guide that would have been issued for your particular area. I found one that was written by an agricultural professor at the University of Ithaca in NY, for example, and it goes over what crops and food preservation methods will work in my area. It will give you important information about temp tolerances, which is about to be more important than ever.

I am short with a somewhat femme figure, sparse but obvious facial hair, a flat chest, and a voice that sounds somewhere between a very gay man, a 13 year old boy, and an older woman. I am very visibly crossing many lines that people look for when trying to figure out how to address someone. Meaning, in a time when attacks on trans people and our rights are very quickly ramping up, I am in more danger of harassment and assault than I have been in the last few years.

As far as who is looking out for me: I am, that is part of my goal, but I also have a husband and a few friends who I can ask for help. However, I am in a slightly better position in life than most trans people in this country, since I live in a blue state that is (probably) unlikely to strip me of my rights. Hence my focus on helping others. There will probably be a lot of people coming here for medical treatment, and I want to make sure I help in any way I can.

As a visibly trans person: survive, and help as many other people survive as I can.

Having two dinners this year. My mother in law came over on Christmas Day, we had a Field Roast, garlic smashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, brandied cranberry sauce, and boozy nog, with plenty of cookies for dessert. It was a nice time, though a bit bittersweet as this is the first Christmas since my father in law passed.

This Sunday we are having friends over for another dinner, and I am making veggie pot pie, fondant potatoes, green beans in garlic butter, the rest of the cranberries, and ricotta cheesecake for dessert. It won’t be a huge crowd, just doing dinner and some board games, so looking forward to that.

My parents had kicked me out for unrelated reasons (I was a nerd and my mom was a believer in borderline Satanic Panic BS) and my extended family had welcomed me back because my parents were generally assholes to everyone and had been told they were no longer welcome at family get-togethers. When I rejoined that extended family, they told me all about how they couldn’t imagine kicking anyone out a kid simply for being honest about how they want to live their life.

So when I came out to them a few years later, they realized that they couldn’t really say anything about it because it would make them the same as my parents. Most of my aunts have come around, and even my grandad was happy to call me his grandson before he passed away. The main holdouts are my uncles and the one aunt who is a strict Catholic despite being divorced herself. But if I weren’t to be invited, it would be a big issue with enough family members that they always ask.

Thankfully I am not entirely alone, as my one cousin got gay married last year as well, so now we joke about being the rainbow sheep of the family lol.

The traditional way this was phrased was “bleeding heart liberal”. The implication being that they were so giving as to be gullible and not realistic.

Nowadays the preferred insults are “commie” or “woke”. I don’t hear it directed at me much, due to particular family circumstances that forced them to accept my gay-married trans ass, but boy do I hear it about Democrats every year.

(I know that Dems aren’t commie or even ‘woke’ most of the time, but to them it is a distinction without a difference. To them, those terms refer to anyone who thinks that people don’t deserve to die for the ‘crime’ of being homeless.)

I was in NYC for Pride the other year and got a sample of a cannabis drink made by a new-at-the-time company Cycling Frog. Flavor is good for a seltzer type drink, and the inebriation level is tailored to be about equal to 1-2 alcoholic beverages, which makes it easy to dose. Hubby and I loved it and bought a couple of cans on the spot. They are now available in dispensaries near us, and we still pick up a case every few months.

When I was about 12 and searching the local paper to learn local rent costs. I was looking with the plan that I would move out at 16 and take my sister with me so we could escape the abuse we were suffering from our mom.

Bonus points: if someone asks about it, say that the bark is worse than their bite!

Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.

If you like that and want more, I also recommend her book The Will to Change. It is about the same length, but goes into much greater detail about the ills that men, especially marginalized men, experience under patriarchy.

Avocados and peppers to make guacamole 😋