CentipedeFarrier

I’ve had saag paneer as well, also looks horrific but goes beautifully with coconut rice.

Palak paneer was spicier, but largely similar taste profile, yeah. I’m not super into really hot food all the time, I like it sometimes, but typically I’d like to get through more than a couple bites before I have to stop, and I’m a bit of a wuss unless I’m in the mood for it, so the paneers and stuff have been good. I’m also a fan of a good goat vindaloo, and really I’ll try just about anything.

I just learned the other day that masalas are spice blends that form the backbone of a dish’s flavor profile. I was under the impression that it was a preparation or something, what with it being in the name of so many dishes, but no. And there are many many many kinds of masala, grouped by region, sort of a family recipe sort of thing, which is really neat.

Hard agree there. I recently tried palak paneer for the first time, and while it looks truly horrific, it tasted lovely :)

What’s your fave?

I think you might have missed my last line there. :)

I’m not terribly familiar with those specific works, but there certainly are some that are actually worth the time investment. I just personally find most of it that I’ve tried not to be, for me and maybe OP up there, because they lack depth (being intended for younger audiences). I read through young adult stuff in elementary school and moved on to whopper 1,000+ page books around 5th grade (read sphere and the third pandemic that year), so admittedly I don’t have a lot of experience with more modern YA stuff, tho what I have explored has sometimes been far superior to what was available when I was young. And the shows made for younger people are also sometimes real gems, like adventure time.

You know, I’ve never actually bought one, so I don’t know yet. It’s in a location I usually only get to around noon (how I know about his going home), and I typically only eat in the late afternoon/evening, so it just hasn’t really lined up, but I should get one to have later one day. Maybe I’ll do that Wednesday since I have an appointment in the area. Could use more bulk spices and lychee candies anyway :)

I have an Indian grocery owner (as in nearly 100% of his stock is imported from India) here who does basically the same thing.

His number is on the door. If you come during business hours and it’s closed, it’s because he went home to hang out with his wife while she makes hot meals to sell at the store for lunch and dinner. They live just down the block. If you call he’ll be there in under 5 min.

It’s fine, if I owned a place that didn’t get a lot of traffic during the day, I’d probably do the same thing. He’s always around in the afternoon when people are actually likely to show up, and most of his customers are people from his community that he knows personally, so it seems to work for him.

Horizon zero dawn future coming sooner than anticipated.

Most of the fiction I’ve been exposed to (which is a lot, I enjoy it very much and always have) isn’t like that. They don’t just describe someone as strong or evil, they describe actions and events and emotions from a specific perspective and let you come to your own conclusions.

I guess if you like stuff made for kids, teens, and young adults, you’ll run into that problem a lot more, but it’s not actually an overall problem with fiction as far as I’ve noticed. I’ve never really liked young adult fiction though, because it’s lacking in depth, much like you describe (some exceptions do apply of course).

You have two options.

1. Resist. Plan stuff really far out and hope they forget about it, after “consulting your own schedule” on your phone.

2. Lean into it and respect them as capable of their own time management. Schedule things they don’t want with them, like doctors appointments, as well as the things they do want, like fast food rewards, and stick to the schedule. This gives them some adult skills like choosing when they want to do something to make it less scary, gives them some limited autonomy in their own lives, while still allowing you to mitigate the worst of it by still being the adult in the household with the master schedule. Really a win win, there. Especially if they drop it because being an adult who plans stuff is boring and lame and not nearly as much fun as they thought it would be.

Late, but a lot.

A lot of places around me have started passing on the fees for using a card to pay, so it costs less to pay with cash.

I strongly prefer that over cash subsidizing those card rewards programs, but it makes using the cards pretty pointless unless it’s for big purchases that tack on a flat fee rather than a percentage, since the rewards programs are usually so limited.

Stupid questions don’t bother me as much when I can be assured they who are asking them at least made an attempt to figure it out on their own first.

You know, I kinda low-key hate this. I get why it’s your thing because I’ve also worked various retail and service/hospitality jobs, but still. I usually go out of my way to avoid having to talk to employees, but sometimes I don’t have the time, or my pain flares up and I lack mental energy to do that. In especially the latter case, which is getting more frequent, I just ask someone rather than spending 45 minutes looking with pain-glazed eyes that pass right over what I’m looking for. Same thing if I go to huge places I don’t normally go to. It’s absolutely, no question, a gigantic waste of my time to even try to figure it out rather than just ask someone who works there to look up where it is and point for me, 3 minutes tops. They don’t know where it is either, what hope do I have to guess right?

This is one of those “you don’t really know what someone is dealing with/has experience with” things. And it sucks on both ends, but at least from my experience in those roles, it helps to remember that retailers of all types have a nasty habit of changing store layouts periodically with the specific goal of making regular/frequent customers wander around looking for things they used to be able to find, just so they can briefly make more money on impulse purchases. They’ve even done studies to see how often people are willing to tolerate these layout changes so they can maximize it further. Maybe retailers shouldn’t keep forcing customers to use their whole brain (remapping, which will take multiple trips at full brain power. The effort also fatigues a person, which reduces willpower to resist impulse buys) for what should be a minimal-brain activity (routine habits exist to decrease mental load), and you wouldn’t have people who don’t want to further engage their brain just to find the pie crusts that used to be right here, damnit. The frequency with which they do this encourages people to just ask rather than look because it happens so much they’ve learned it’s probably not worth the effort. A form of learned-helplessness.

I can feel the overwhelm set in whenever I walk into a store to discover a changed layout, sometimes months after it happened. Half the time I just leave because I’m not prepared for that much effort, and I have the luxury to do so because I’m the only one impacted. If I had kids to feed or something the entire equation shifts dramatically, and I’d be in there, zombied, asking annoying questions.

That was such a sad episode :(

I bought a high precision scale that does grams to three decimal places and can handle about a pound (because I don’t know that I won’t need that and if I’m getting something nice, might as well go all in), and switched all my baking to weight-based recipes for exactly this reason. It’s the only way I could get my bread maker to produce a halfway decent loaf without collapsing, but it makes a lot of other things more consistent as well.

Thankfully, I haven’t any offspring to use my failure to summon forth the end the world, but it did make decent croutons.

I have a non-chain fast food place near me, doesn’t even have indoor seating, just a small waiting space (holds maybe 10 people if you pack them in such that the personal space bubble is tiny) and some picnic tables, but no drive-through.

They’ve managed to keep prices pretty low; Big Mac or whopper equivalent is $4, for example and I think fries are some 2.50 for the large. While that does add up since everything is ordered individually, the quality is superior and it’s local-family-owned, so well worth it. And it’s very very popular even without the drive-through convenience. The local McDonald’s hardly gets any traffic by comparison.

Just goes to show it can totally be done, if not for outright greed.

The brain stops developing at age 23.

No it doesn’t. The brain continues to develop and change throughout the lifetime of the organism.

No worries, those services are pretty hit or miss for me as well.

Thanks for the link, I’ll watch this later today :)

Do you have a link to it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, so idk what to look for.

Wow you weren’t kidding about being disappointed, and I’m not even using a lot of programs…

I did find this to be chuckle-inducing, though, simply because it’s the only time I’ve found so far that doesn’t have an alternative and also isn’t left blank