Gorgeous!
I think our daffodils will open tomorrow.
Here are a pansy and some crocuses that came up this week.
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How terrible. I am sorry that happened.
Thanks. Itâs not the first time, but itâs the first time in a long time. And the second time on a bus! Maybe I should walk more. 
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Wow, so very sorry this happened to you. Did you see any reaction from others around you after you said that and to her and your husband arguing about what she had said? Her turning it back on you sounds very familiar as well. 
As for her conversation being none of your business? Nope - the minute she chooses to have a full out-loud conversation on an enclosed bus, she made that conversation EVERYONEâS business.
I recently spoke up at my local magazine shop when a xenophobe was lashing out at the shop owner, a immigrant woman roughly my age.
It wasnât anti-Semitism. He was racist as hell. He was also someone who had shoplifted from this woman and her husband previously.
Sometimes people need to be schooled.
And by speaking up, that sort of forged the friendship with the shopkeeper. I was already a regular, but now weâre friends.
I left a large FB group about 3 months before I quit FB because some Mods were lax about some comments that I found to be anti-Semitic. Some people really suck.
We sadly have had some really terrible stuff happening in Toronto lately.
Last weekend, during Passover ( obv you know, small h, mentioning it for context for others), a fellow shot at a Azerbaijani resto owned by a Jewish woman in an affluent part of Toronto. It was anti-Semitic, and he has been arrested. I have several friends who live 2 or 3 blocks from the resto. What has been nice is to see both the neigbourhood and Jewish community come together to host a fundraiser for the resto owner. The first night sold out so a second fundraiser has been set up.
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I made this point myself. You have no expectation of privacy if you carry on a loud conversation in a public - enclosed! - space. You also donât get to police the people who call you out, just because freeze peach, 'cause I also get to speech freely.
Nope. Thatâs to be expected. No one wants to get involved in this stuff. If I were one of the bystanders, I probably wouldâve kept my head down as well.
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Oof, thatâs awful. I donât know how Toronto feels, generally, but NYC is starting to get a little tinder-keggy, I fear.
It also feels tinder-keggy in Toronto, right now, unfortunately.
So sorry you went through that vile experience.
It is really disgusting how some ignorant racists can blame a whole race for the acts of a few authoritarian monsters.
Hating and wishing harm to all Jews for the acts of an Israeli war criminal is the same as hating all Americans( especially one of color) for the acts of an unhinged lunatic in charge, and his sycophants that enable him.
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Thank you. I didnât get the impression this was anti-Zionist. Just anti-Jews in general, and throwing out the usual stereotypes. I will add that this person held up as an example of our perfidy that the Jews were âtaking over Mt. Sinai Hospitalâ and I canât even.
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Those are stunning! 
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Well, well.
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In years past I would accuse you of inventing such a perfect illustration of just how fucking dumb these types of people can be.
Current reality has led me to believe you without a shred of doubt.
They let these people out in public. 
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Iâm creative, but not that creative.
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Tax filing software. Wife and I are used to having to pay more because ours is more complex.
But this year Turbotax wanted to charge two of our kids the $80 âDeluxeâ to save them about the same amount, just because it required filing one additional schedule with it.
Eff that, it 's easy to paper file.
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Especially when the IRS website has âfill-ableâ .pdf files.
Type it in - easy-peasy!!
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Caught up with a friend back home yesterday who reminded me of an absolute gem of a term while discussing a mutual acquaintance: âAdabei,â which is Bavarian dialect for âalso there.â
Itâs a term for people who have the desperate need to be part of everything all the time.
We both agreed it sounded terribly exhausting, but weâre old 
The older I get, the more I donât want to be part of anything and just âbeâ. I treasure pulling into my garage after work and shutting out the world.
Iâll socialize here and there IRL (much less than most people, Iâ presume), and I âsocializeâ here on HO and on FB, but not being online constantly helps my mind rest and avoid the âclatterâ.
Kids and those who have had nothing but an online presence since they were growing up are missing out on the world around them. Doesnât bode well. All I can think of is the humans in WALL-E, mesmerized by their hover screens as they sit and move around in their hoverchairs, completely oblivious to the outside world, feeding off of the consumerism that the spaceship/megacorporation gives them.
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Kids these days!! #SMDH 
I remember going out every. single. night. in my late teens / early twenties, a clear case of FOMO â even if we didnât have a fancy acronym for it back then. You just never knew if something fantastic was going to happen* AND YOU WERE GOING TO MISS IT!!! 
The person in question is actually around our age. We think theyâre just absolutely desperate for human interaction, regardless of how meaningful or meaningless, and hey â at least itâs still human interaction.
Whereas my circle of ladies is almost 100% convinced that one of our most frequent participants in our gatherings (a bit of an odd duck & def the youngest in our crew), and whoâs admitted to using ChatGPT for her most pressing questions that itâs made her break off all contact with every single person in our group. Weâre all still kinda stunned by the whole thing, but itâs the only explanation we have bc there wasnât a single incident that would have prompted her completely cutting us out. Itâs one of the strangest things ever 
I am online FAR too much, but Iâve been making a concerted effort to focus on writing, reading, and creating offline⌠with varying levels of success 
*It rarely ever did, of course.
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OK, my jaw dropped at that. So her only interaction is with an AI bot? 
