Posts made by silverfox

@ganymede

ALL the kitten pics! I can do that.

My favorite foster TikToker never has kids in her videos, and I have always respected her EXTRA because of that.

EDIT:

ALSO, my husband just got a new job after a 3 month hiring process. It's for a local county sheriff's office, so he had to go through the same background screenings they gave the officers, multiple psyche evaluations, lie detector, drug test, etc. It was a lot!

But now he has a start date and we're really excited for this opportunity for him to make a Colorado wage.

@ganymede

I keep getting started by being @atted in your post and then I go "Oh, that isn't about me, move on."

I'm not sharing this information with my IRL yet (except my older sister, because I trust her to be zipped up about it), but my husband and I just submitted all the paperwork to start the process to become foster parents.

It's all the PRE paperwork, like background check authorizations, financial disclosures, documents that we understand we need to not be discriminatory (seriously, the number of times we signed "Yes, we won't discriminate against LGBTQ children/youth" is a sad sad commentary on how common it is that these kids ARE discriminated against...) etc.

I'm really nervous about it, especially since hubs and I haven't ever had kids of our own.

I just wanted to tell someone so I told y'all.

Randomly surprised today. Fireworks are a hot button issue on Nextdoor. Every week someone posts complaining. Usually, I don't engage, but there has been a LOT and last night one went off at the same time as one of my fosters was having a hard time in the litter box. It made them and a sibling jump. The mess was bad enough I had to give this poor baby a bath.

So I posted that the fireworks were hard on my poor fosters. Someone posted a flippant reply. I waited a few hours and replied that I understood people want to celebrate but that I still felt empathy for my poor babies and that I felt their comment was heartless.

Thus the surprise!!!

They APOLOGIZED and wished my kittens well.

There is some small hope left guys.

So... I forgot to post that I brought home 5 more kittens!

They've been here long enough to have finished quarantine and joined Hansel and Gretel in the big kitten room.

So now we have one 7-kitten pile, with poor Tortie Gretel feeling so sad for being the only non black baby.

Names: James T. Kirk, Kathryn Janeway, Jean-Luc Picard, Christopher Pike, and Benjamin Sisko (Collectively the Captains)

The tortie is Gretel and her brother is also black, Hansel.

Bisexual =/= promiscuous or not monogamous!

You love and commit to whom you love and commit!

My foster fail Calypso is SUPER SAD about all the time I am spending with the kittens. She was meowing sadly outside the door. Thankfully the less favored human came to take care of her despite knowing he is the less favored. I've got the best husband.

@il-volpe

Grumpy one requests a manager!

Hansel (black) and Gretel (tortie) are four weeks old and healing from being super sick really nicely, even if I do have to force feed them at times because their anti-biotic can cause icky tummies and loss of appetite.

@devrex said in RL-Friendly Game Design:

@L-B-Heuschkel does a great job of GMing async and making it really fun and I'm not sure what his techniques are there or what he's doing differently that I'm not doing (or if he's just wired differently as a GM) but.

I think it's just that they HAVE TO DO IT or they'd never RP. You grow into whatever restraints you have to.

Honestly, I think it was defending someone who had never done anything bad to ~me~ but then they ended up being really abusive to others.

I try not to use, though I still fail and need called out, on the 'but not me' argument.

@faraday

To follow up @kk - It is perfectly OKAY to feel bad though. You are leaving something that you poured your soul into. It is okay to mourn the loss, even if it was a shitty situation.

@mietze said in The Work Thread:

It really sucks to have so many people at work say how great I do the job when in fact I know I'm well below my own standard.

I vibe with this statement so completely I can't even express it. This is why I left the classroom.

I'm glad you took this step for yourself. I'm sorry it had to come to this.

You guys' reaction had me going 'I am in the right here' and that was only confirmed when I checked with a few of the more level headed teachers at the school and their jaws hit the floor and all of them said something along the lines of "you've got to be kidding me."

@Ganymede has the right of it. This admin is incompetent in ways I can't express. He isn't a BAD GUY but damn if I would like him to go to a retreat this summer to learn how to do his fucking job better. It doesn't make me feel good that he makes almost double what I do right now.

I walked into another teacher's classroom yesterday and in the ~90~ seconds I was in there I witnessed three utterly unsafe behaviors from kids and another 3-4 behaviors that even a minimal amount of teacher presence would have fixed.

I'm not even sure that this teacher was AWARE I walked into her room, let alone what the children were doing.

So I wrote it down and handed it off to admin because MY JOB IS NOT TO POLICE OTHER TEACHERS but it IS to report when I see something unsafe.

My VP had the AUDACITY to come to me and say "are you sure you wouldn't be better to talk since you know the kids and are more experienced."

And the answer is absolutely not. I had a moral obligation to speak out, but I in no way have the ability to control what goes on in another person's classroom. THAT is the job of the admin. If they want me to do admin duties they'd better pay me for doing them because otherwise - nope nope nope.

@misadventure

Having seen husband chop tip of his thumb off and still lack feeling 10+ years later - can confirm.

It has been a week since our fosters went home and I swear my Calypos and my Kiva are depressed. Caly follows us everywhere now, and is trying to cuddle more with Kiva than she EVER has. And Kiva's ALLOWING it most of the time.

I'm so sad I can't bring new kittens in for them to play with.

I think a lot of the 'fuck this' from teachers comes from the fact that we feel under attack already. The fuss about CRT, indoctrination, banning books, etc has REALLY had an impact on teacher morale. We have 2 teachers of 15+ years experience getting out of education because of the environment. (Love kids, like the school, but it is everything ELSE getting to them.)

So to see incompetence displayed can absolutely feel like it is going to give even more power to those attempting to destroy public education.

@greenflashlight

To a point you aren't wrong though. I hated my position last year. HATED IT. But the thought of a first year teacher getting my kids almost made me stay, (thankfully the kinder teacher of decades wanted to move up) and if they hadn't figured out a better option when their veteran teacher went on Maternity leave, would have had me going back into that bad place.

No one at my job was doing it maliciously, but that doesn't mean others aren't.

Excuse me while I go rewatch The Good Place now.

@derp

It's more complicated in a service industry than just that fallacy though. While it's easier to tell our systems 'fuck you' it's not so easy to tell the victims, that might become even MORE victimized by our absence, to fuck off.

I'm not saying she shouldn't - just making sure she/they know that I'm 100% understanding of how one can stay in a sucky system for the people they serve.

It's been six years since I left my last hellhole of a school and I still wonder to this day if maybe I could have saved the kids coming up if I'd stayed.

(The worst systems use our empathy against us.)