Rudynate

Younger is better. I really enjoy being around bright, ambitious young guys.

Sounds like a pretty hot scene.

When I was in high school, I played with it a little - read a few books on winemaking. I saw a recipe in an old cook book for making dandelion wine and I tried it. The finished product was kind of cloudy, but tasty and the alcohol content was enough to produce a good buzz. I also tried making applejack, which was very successful - I got a brandy-type concoction that was very boozy. Years ago somebody gave a beermaking kit. I tried it but it wasn't very successful.

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I agree - many clients carry a victim bias that is easily triggered.

I was thinking about Synthol - I heard about this stuff many years ago and Ive been trying to remember what it is. It is a medium-chain tryglyceride like coconut oil blended with lidocaine to reduce the pain of injection. It's really bad news - could even kill you.

I had a hip replaced 3.5 years ago. I have to resist saying I regret it, because I had end-stage osteo in the hip and was in so much pain that I didn't see an alternative. I was expecting to have Duchal's experience- everyone I talked to said the same thing -"I was like new in just a few weeks." I had a long, difficult recovery that took over a year. I was still using a rollator more than a year after the surgery. I'm afraid I'm going to need the other one done within a year or so. I will do it if I have to, but I'm hoping that if I really dedicate myself to retaining mobility in that hip, I can avoid it until some of the new regenerative therapies come online that eliminate the need for joint replacement.

The athlete in the middle looks uncannily like the partner of my husband's sister. She grew up in the part of Germany that became the GDR. She remembered, when she was 4, running as fast as she could with her family to get the last train out of town before the Soviet Army swept in.

I don't know that I've ever seen anybody blown up with synthol. He looks Ok to me - like he could stand to lean out some, but otherwise fine. I don't understand all these enhancements- pec implants, calf implants, silicone, synthol. I certainly understand anyone wanting to look their best, but if you didn't work your ass off to look that way, you didn't earn it.

I'm of two minds. I'm 73 and have a list of semi-serious health concerns. I made it all the way through the pandemic without getting infected, but in December 2023, my husband and I came down with it at the very same time. We were both pretty ill. We were religious with covid shots and flu shots and still got sick. So, on the one hand I'm wondering if it was all for nought, and I'm also thinking that we're both high-risk and it would be dumb to skip the covid shot.

Who wants fake muscle, even if it were safe?

Idris Elba, Jonny Bailey, Miguel Silvestre

That's important too. I used to see a guy who wasn't great at soft skills (although he was a great kisser) but he was a complete sex machine. I used to think that he could be more touchy - feely, but then I would think, "who does what he does the way he does it?." Not many.

I think about the line from Auntie Mame - "When you're from Pittsburgh, you've got to do something." So, do something, anything that moves you in the right direction.

In middle school and high school, I was one of those weird, introverted kids that nobody likes. By the time I was about 14 I figured out that I was probably gay. I wasn't ashamed of it, but I knew I had to keep it a secret. I had decided I was going to try male-male sex as soon as I could, and I started looking for opportunities. I couldn't see how it would be harmful because I thought - if I don't like it, I don't have to keep doing it. I met guys in high school, who, in retrospect were gay - there was a small group of very edgy guys - very smart, got good grades, but weren't interested in girls and liked to party and live dangerously - I realize now that they were all gay. After high school, I joined the Army, partly because I didn't want to go to college right away and it was an easy way to get away from home, but I had also heard that the military services were full of gay guys. It turned out to be true that the military was full of gay guys, but of course we were all closeted. I had various jobs after the Army and went to college. I started being open and honest about my sexual orientation sometime during this period. I started challenging straight guys who didn't like gays to explain what it was that they hated about gay guys. It was interesting how often their animosity disappeared when they actually had to think about it and they realized there was no good reason for it. I guess I was in the closet until I met my husband. I had kept being gay from my family until I met him. I had to come clean in order to introduce him to them. Most of them think the world of him, but who knows what they say behind our backs? Here, in the San Francisco bay area, sexual orientation just isn't an issue - and that's the way it should be. You don't have to keep it secret but you also don't have to announce it or discuss it any more than straight people would feel called upon to explain themselves. I realize it isn't that way everywhere. though.

No, I don't think it is. He just needs to be a little leaner. Better lighting would help as well.

We've gone on quite a few road tips in remote areas of the southwestern US. You encounter that predicament a lot. We learned to plan for it.

I kind of forgot about him. I'm going to hire him for sure - he's really stunning.

A distant relative whom I have never met made a really odd post relating to Danny Thomas and daughter Marlo in a genealogy database. The post was about an ancestor we had in common, a great uncle and his wife, who lived in a small rural town in western New York. Supposedly, they had somehow formed a friendship with Danny Thomas and Marlo. He didn't say how the friendship came about, but it was apparently close enough so that Danny and Marlo traveled from NYC to pay occasional visits to the uncle and aunt. I don't know anything about the guy except that he lives in a region of the state where my mother's family came from. No idea whether the story is true or not, but when I read it, I just thought, "what the fuck?"

One of my aunts was an accountant and spent her entire career with Sears Roebuck. She had a pretty comfortable retirement.

Yep - that points system, after you got used to it, allowed you to go anywhere and eat anything and still lose weight - it was a forerunner of macros. After a couple weeks my points were burned into my brain and I realized that there was no end to the ways you could distribute your points through the day.

For me, looking a little drawn in the face isn't too much of a price to pay to stay lean.

Sometime in the 80's I had about 30# to take off, so I joined WW. Initially, I felt a little silly because it was mostly women, but I got used to it and started looking forward to the weekly meetings. I did buy a WW cookbook to give myself plenty of variety, but I didn't use any of the prepared foods. I found the whole thing very easy. Truthfully, it wasn't a lot of food and I often felt hungry, but I lost the weight rapidly - sometimes several pounds in a week. When I reached my goal weight, I continued meetings for the prescribed amount of time. It couldn't have worked better. I had a serious health crisis in 2003 and gained some weight from being inactive. I went back to WW and peeled the gain off in a matter of weeks. I have nothing but good things to say about WW. It doesn't work as well as it did for me with a lot of people. My sister and her partner are huge and have tried WW over and over and are still huge. I visited them a few years ago -my sister served fruit salad topped with whipped cream for dessert and I thought, "Well, no wonder it isn't working for you."

Of course those jobs have disappeared from the economy. But kids can be petsitters, dogwalkers, they can do data entry,etc. The cleverer ones can build websites and other internet-based side hustles. The GNC near where I live is staffed by young high-school age jocks.

My user profile on RM includes my photo, so nobody has to ask.