This is real. In order to formally evict, it needs to go to court. Because eviction is a civil matter, most places don’t give access to a public defender. This means that the tenant must retain legal counsel or fill the paperwork out themselves. I’ve heard of at least one local case where the defendant was publicly berated by the judge for not applying the correct spacing to the document. Most people don’t have the time to be lawyers as well as working jobs and raising kids. It’s ludicrous but it’s the default status.

It sounds like she theoretically got fourteen days to respond, but wasn’t notified. In my state, it’s five. It should be a minimum of thirty, but half our state legislature is realtors and landowners. Evictions follow a person around, too, and make it harder for them to find new housing.

If you hate this news story, check out tenant right to counsel, which is a new movement to guarantee legal defense for evictees. Cities are slowly adopting it, and it needs to happen everywhere.

Oh awesome! I like Narcissist Cookbook but missed this one. Thank you.

This took me a very long time to learn: you don’t have to be immediately good at something if you enjoy doing it. I’m terrible at painting minis, but I have fun doing it. I was awful at BBQing when I started out, but I enjoyed experimenting with rubs and iterating on the best way to get the coals going. Sure we had a couple gnarly racks of ribs in the early days, but now my daughter demands them on the regular. I was a terrible coder at ten years old, but I kept at it because I loved being able to make the computer do things and I’m tolerably good at it now.

I can’t remember which Contrapoints video I got this from, but amateur derives from amatorem (lover in Latin.) The amateur pursues something for the love of it, not because they’re good at it or want to make money. Society wants us to grind, use all of our time for maximum profit, and only do things we’re already amazing at. Fuck that. Do something you’d love to do, even if you somehow remain fully mediocre at it. It’s good for you.

First of all, if a friend makes you feel bad about yourself for being yourself, they’re not a friend. If a friend expects a one-sided relationship (you always pick up the check, you always host, you’re always are the one making time), they’re not a friend. If a friend is always taking potshots at you and then tells you to lighten up when you tell them you’re uncomfortable, they’re not a friend.

I was a pariah in high school so I can’t give a lot of info there, but cool adults will understand and give you some breathing room if you say you’re autistic. So if you stim or get hung up on something a neurotypical thinks isn’t a big deal, decent people will give you the benefit of the doubt. Uncool people do not deserve friendship. Better to be a mysterious weirdo than some narcissist’s new plaything.

Weird AuDHD bragging rights: Picked one of these for the first time and ended up having to completely disassemble and reassemble it. I wasn’t ready for it and over-rotated the core, which dropped pins into the lock body and seized the whole thing up.

Not sure how I pulled it off, but the autism and the adhd really came through for me. I’d never taken a padlock apart and I didn’t have a plug follower of the right diameter to take the cylinder apart. So I improvised with a hollow pen tube. I ended up dropping all the key pins (variable-height pins that match up with the key blade) in a pile, and managed to get them all in the correct chambers after a few false starts.

I couldn’t fit a shim in, so I used an allen wrench + tweezers + the hollow pen to put the cylinder back together; it’s basically putting seven tiny metal pieces into spring-loaded chambers that really don’t want tiny metal pieces in them. The padlock itself has two ball bearings that have to fit into the left and right of the chamber and roll all over the place and onto the floor, but I found a way to hold the lock body that kept them both in place long enough to put the lock cylinder back in.

It was a chaotic mess throughout and I shudder to think what any decent locksmith would think of the attempt, but I got it back together again before the anxiety completely seized me up. Now I’m afraid to pick it again, although I also want to take it apart about 50 more times.

Go to his graduation. Be very kind to yourself in the days leading up to it: get plenty of downtime, do comforting things, get lots of rest. Bring earplugs or noise-cancelling stuff. If you’ve got a favorite object you can touch or fidget with, bring that too. Afterwards, go back home and take care of yourself some more. You did a big thing and need to recover.

I’m gonna be at closet alcoholic my whole life and there’s nothing I can do.

This next part is just a story from someone that felt like they were trapped by booze.

I had a massive problem with alcohol. I think it runs in the family. My great-grandpa owned a bar before my great-grandma found Jesus for him and dried that whole branch of the family out. There was a lot of stigma around alcohol when I was a kid, and a lot of dark mutterings about relatives.

I always drank a little too much, but things got bad when I switched jobs into a company with a heavy drinking culture. The pandemic compounded it. I drank every single night and sometimes during the day (long team lunches, remote work at the bar, beer fridge Fridays.) They knew me on a first-name basis at the liquor store. I knew the backstories of every bartender around my office. And there was a period in the pandemic where, since I never had to go anywhere, I’d just wake up and start drinking. In retrospect, I was poorly medicating autism and both flavors of ADHD.

I didn’t even realize how bad it had gotten until I broke a tooth and had to have oral surgery. I had two procedures spaced across a couple months and a heavy antibiotic load to clear things up before and after both procedures. That meant I couldn’t drink, and it was hell. In the middle of freaking out, I realized just how much of my life was devoted to drinking.

One night during my enforced dry period, I made myself a glass of soda water and shook a couple drops of bitters into it. It flipped the right switch in my brain and I realized that I didn’t need heavy alcohol every single day. I didn’t even need a second drink since there was so little alcohol in the first one. I didn’t have to maintain a level of drunkenness until I crashed for the night. My brain just needed a little reassurance.

I tapered off the bitters and soda and spent the next six months terrified of taking another drink. I never joined a group because the idea of sitting in a room with strangers was overwhelming and horrible. I relapsed a couple times, but I realized that beating myself up about it just made me want to drink more; it was better to just analyze what had gone wrong. On days that I didn’t drink, I didn’t wake up with all-consuming anxiety and dread. I slept better, too, and started dreaming again.

Today, I have a glass or two of wine every few weeks. If I go out, I get one or two drinks and cut myself off. Every once in a great while I go a little further; wife and I are both on the spectrum and we spend all of December 26 at home with a charcuterie plate and a bottle of nice port to recover from the mandatory holiday socializing. I’ve flipped alcohol from a mundane thing to a novelty. It’s an occasional treat, not a reward for getting through the day.

Physically, I feel better. A lot of my digestive problems cleared up when I stopped drinking heavily. While social situations are harder for me to navigate because I’m not on easy mode, it gave me the ammo to pursue an autism diagnosis. A lot of the stuff I’d chalked up to alcohol craving were actually my body being overwhelmed in social situations and telling me to go get some space. I’m in a much better place than I was five years ago, and I have a hard time recognizing me from a decade ago.

Again, this is just a story from someone that felt hopeless. It doesn’t seem like it in the moment, but life can be better.

Downstairs toilet is leaking. It has, over the past week, slowly driven me insane. Finally went to the store and got a replacement fill unit and flapper valve.

Tried to turn the water off and the supply valve is stuck in the on position. So I can’t actually turn the water off. Neat. Tied the float in the up position so I can at least keep the tank dry.

Replaced the flapper valve and it still leaks. Realized the overflow pipe is probably responsible. Grabbed it to check for leaks and it broke off in my hand.

Went back to the store for a can of WD-40 and a replacement overflow valve. Store doesn’t sell them. I’d have to buy a whole new assembly, and installing it means pulling the tank off. Which I can’t do because I can’t shut off the water.

Fast forward to now. I’m regularly hosing down the supply valve with WD-40 in case it magically starts working. I’ve marine cemented the overflow tube back in place. It’s curing right now. The float is still tied up like some kind of plumbing David Carradine.

I’ll know whether the fix worked this evening. I still need to replace the supply valve and it would be nice to actually have a new fill unit.

I hate this toilet so much.

I’m AuDHD, so I have a set of hobbies I rotate through to keep from burning out. Lockpicking is my most recent.

I started this summer and it’s a puzzle and a fidget toy rolled into one. It’s helped with dexterity and fine motor control, too. I’m not fantastic at it, but it holds my interest and it’s fun exploring new locks and techniques.

The best hobby is something interesting and fun for you. You don’t have to be immediately good at it, you just have to get some dopamine from it. Every brain is different, and there’s no standard autism hobby. Just think about what you’d enjoy learning and get after it.

Hell of a day already. Phone buzzed at midnight and woke me all the way up and I spent the rest of the night listening to the 20+ mile/hour winds howling outside. Got very little sleep, woke up tense, and went to my daughter’s school christmas program. The chairs sucked; between them and the muscle tension I was in agony by the end of it.

Everyone around me was filming the stage, which was ok, but about half of them didn’t think they needed to turn their camera flashes off and the rest of them talked at normal volume during the songs. And then the 4th grade class came out with recorders and jesus herman christ it was like listening to someone play jingle bells on a room-sized Aztec Death Whistle.

And we’re supposed to get a massive dump of snow in about 45 minutes. Hoping to get some downtime before the big day next week, but holy cow today sucks.

Whoa! A glass, amber-colored, chicken-shaped sugar bowl. I haven’t seen one of those in ages. That’s awesome.

She caught a shot of a lady reaching between my legs to get a bag of chips today, and I’m ultra skeeved. Ruined my whole fucking day. 🫩

Turn around, make eye contact. “Before I move, anything else you need while I’m here? No? Just wanted to make sure.” It doesn’t just have to be awkward for you.

That’s why I always flip my keys off and call them a motherfucker when I put them down somewhere.

Ok, not really. But the real story is negative enough that it probably qualifies. I locked myself out of my college apartment and had to wake the building manager up to get a spare key. She was super pissed and I really didn’t want to go back there to drop the key off. Later that morning I ran into her husband in my statics class and just handed him the key. “Hey, you’re already going back there so you should just take it now.”

He gave me the dirtiest look and a couple days later I saw him moving some boxes out of the apartment. I didn’t really process it until two weeks later, when I was out mountain biking with my Russian buddy and caught husband and another girl making out on the trail.

Yeah. Apparently she’d caught him cheating and I accidentally made him go back to her apartment and probably get screamed at more. I mean he deserved it, but I felt so awkward and weird about the while situation. So yeah, that was emotionally charged enough that I force myself to always know where my keys are.

I mostly lurk in here, but I got my official diagnosis this week. Autism + both flavors of ADHD. It explains a lot. Dunno if I feel any differently, but I’ve got a therapist now.

I fired my last one because every time we’d get close to a breakthrough he’d say something like “so you don’t need to be stressed” or “tell your inner monologue to fuck off” and I’d just stare at him. Gee, that’s easy. Why didn’t I think of that? Don’t be so stressed? Tell the voice in my head to fuck off? You’re well worth the small fortune I’m shelling out every month.

The new therapist has largely been explaining how the autism makes me want routine and the ADHD wants to blow up all routine and be chaotic and I end up stressing myself before I do anything productive. Then plans change and my tightly-wound chaos arc fails and I crash hard. So right away, 100% better than talk therapy guy.

I’m still processing it. The ADHD is a surprise. We’ll see if i can develop some good coping strategies instead of the many bad ones I’ve picked up over the years.