Charlie

A wonderful family photo for the Xmas card.

He may feel that being hired regularly by you at that asking price is more satisfactory to him than possibly seeing less of you at a higher price.

Speaking the local language is certainly a help for anyone living anywhere. I have lived in places where I wasn't fluent in the language (Czechoslovakia) or where my accent gave me away as a foreigner (England), but English is the lingua franca, so to speak, in most parts of the world now, and I never found becoming at least moderately communicative in the local language all that hard. Learning another language is easier to do, however, if one is young, and I wouldn't want to have to start learning a language that is completely foreign to me (e.g., Japanese, Finnish, Arabic) now that my brain is old and tired. Canada never seems as foreign--to me--as Louisiana or West Virginia.

As an historical footnote, when the typing machine was first invented, the term "typewriter" usually referred to the person using the machine.

Shouldn't it be "1 & 2 are correct?"

That is the point that anyone looking to retire anywhere should consider. He moved to a beautiful area that he had experienced before only as a tourist. Daily living is more than charming scenery, good restaurants, nice weather, and free healthcare.

I wouldn't kick Hadrian out of bed either.

He was in a somewhat rural area, and found it difficult to make friends of any kind, despite being a very intelligent person (retired school teacher) and a pleasant personality.

Unfortunately, I don't remember.

I just finished reading the article, and was surprised (and enlightened) to realize how little "queer" literature I have read, especially in recent years, when I seem to have lost interest in fiction and poetry of any kind. The article made me only mildly curious about most of the works the panel discussed. I am even older and more irrelevant than I realized.

Are there human proofreaders any longer? I certainly don't see much evidence of them in the newspapers I read. I took a course in proofreading once, because I enjoy correcting people's mistakes, but the teacher explained that it was a very poorly paid profession, and should be considered only as a sideline.

A number of years ago, an English friend of mine retired to Portugal because he thought he could live there more comfortably than he could in London on his modest pension. He would occasionally phone me practically crying, because he said the health care was great, but otherwise he found it a miserable place to live for an elderly gay man.

One thing she said I would agree with: I have been encountering hotel room bathrooms with toilets that are too low for normal-sized elderly adults to use comfortably.

You are correct about numbers 1 and 2. As for 3, a semi-colon rather than a comma should have been used before "however."

I have very tender feet😟

I would never just tuck a credit card or ID in my sock in a place where there are a lot of people down on their knees for a good reason.

He huffed, and he puffed, and he blew the house down!

Thank you for your noble efforts to help other clients!

It has always been hard to find the right date for the PS Weekend. When we started the event in 2005, we did it in February, because it happened to fit Lucky's and my schedule, and it included a group visit to the theater to see a show. Once Oliver offered to host the event and include a pool party, weather became more of a factor; I remember one year when it was so cold that we had to rent outdoor heaters to put around the pool. After that, Oliver moved the event to April, which also worked better for his schedule, but it's hard to find any weekend in March or April that doesn't conflict with some other public event in the Coachella Valley, because those happen to be the ideal months in the first half of the year to do anything here.

It was actually a rather daring thing for the teacher to do, if he was trying to signal that he was aware of @Rudynate's interest in him and was warning him of the possible consequences.

The late forum member whom I described stumbled upon the old Hooboy site while looking for sex, but joined the forum in hopes of finding gay men his own age who might understand his history, which I think is the OP's motivation as well.

I suspect that there are now so many AI-written papers about the so-called Great Books that giving such an assignment today would be a waste of time, unless it were a very specifically pointed question (e.g., "Why do you believe that Jane Austen decided to give her novel the title Pride and Prejudice instead of All's Well that Ends Well or A Sensible Marriage?").

BTW, when I lived in in the UK back in the 1970s, although I was only a resident alien and not a citizen, I was able to use the National Health for my medical service without charge. I don't know whether that is still true.

Just to clarify Unicorn's comments, the recently deceased member of this site that he is referencing, whom I also knew but not well, is not the same person I was describing in my post, who died fifteen years ago.

As I remember from my old list of ways that HIV is transmitted, fisting per se is not one of the ways that one gets AIDS. (I worked for a few years on an AIDS information hotline, and we got calls regularly from an hysterical man who was worried because he had put his finger in a female prostitute's ass, and he was afraid he might have been infected with HIV from that act. No matter how often we reassured him, he couldn't get over that fear.)