u/cazort2

Some time ago there was a special at an Indian grocery store that I was visiting to buy bean and millet flours, and I picked up a kilo of loose Wagh Bakri tea, a strong black tea blend from India, for $10, which I thought was a good deal. I rarely drink it hot, but when the hot weather hit I busted it out to make iced tea.

I brew it concentrated, using about 3 teaspoons and steeping it for about 12 minutes in a large mug in a basket infuser. Then I remove the leaves and pour the tea into a heat-safe jar and leave it in the basement to cool to room temperature, and then retrieve it and fill it with cold water to chill in the fridge and that makes about 4 servings of iced tea.

I've been doing this for weeks and I still enjoy every cup. Whenever I brew it I keep asking my wife: are you tired of Wagh Bakri? And she's like no, it's great. So I keep making it.

Every time I pour the steeped tea into the jar, there's a rich aroma of the tea and that is one of my favorite parts. Normally with iced tea, because it's cold you don't get to enjoy the aroma in the same way as slowly sipping a cup of hot tea in cold weather. But this way, I get that nice little moment.

And then drinking it is still enjoyable.

I also appreciate the fact that it's inexpensive. At the rate at which I'm drinking it I'm probably gonna get about 100-150 batches of iced tea out of it which means they cost less than 2.5 cents per cup.

I also take the spent leaves and put them directly on the garden as mulch, so I'm getting extra value out of those leaves.

I took our toddler on a walk yesterday and we came across a patch of Carolina horsenettle, Solanum carolinense, in a neighbor's yard. The plant seemed to be growing as a weed in the flower beds and had pretty much taken over the one bed. Now a lot of people consider this plant, which looks a bit like an eggplant plant with thorns, to be a weed and pull it out, but it has these pretty white flowers with yellow centers, which often hang downward. And the flowers reliably attract bumblebees.

The whole patch was in bloom and was teeming with bumblebees, and as we got close and stood quietly, you could hear the buzzing from their wings. Our toddler, who is just learning to talk, pointed at them and said "B...", not quite able to form the whole word. We sat for a while and watched as the bees buzzed around, visiting one flower after the next.

If there is one thing I want people to take away in sharing this, it's that sometimes something that someone might consider unwanted can bring joy to someone else. I don't know if the neighbor knows that anyone else appreciates their horsenettle but I hope to some day meet them and let them know that I do.

FF8 is by far my favorite of the FF games. When I played it, I had played all games from 1-7, including translations of the Japanese-only ones (which at the time were only available through ROM hacks) but FF8 drew me in unlike all the others. I found everything compelling from the story to the characters to the unique gameplay and the card game and the way the card game integrated with the gameplay and story elements. And the past segments with Laguna were so enthralling.

When I finally played through the whole game though, the end of the game left me feeling slightly disappointed. It didn't end as dramatically as it had drawn me in and I kept feeling like something could have been improved.

If I were to change the game here's what I'd do:

• Either ditch the NORG subplot (with the follow-up optional visit to his hometown), or find a better way to weave it into the main story. It felt too disjointed and why he did what he did never felt fully explained in-game. Having it relate to the main plot would make it so good.
• Make the optional areas like the Deep Sea Research Center and Centra Ruins have more integration into the story, even if they're still optional. I loved both of those areas but was disappointed that I didn't get much story or character development in them.
• Show what happens to Galbadia garden after the battle.
• Have Balamb garden play some role in the plot after Fisherman's Horizon instead of it just becoming irrelevant. I just loved Balamb Garden and its places and characters, including some like Cid who don't come with you on the team, and it was sad to see them totally abandoned late game.
• More character development for Ultimecia. What are her motivations? How did she become the way she was? It makes sense, story-wise that you don't know much about her initially but I wish the late game revealed more of that.
• Make Seifer a tougher battle when you actually fight him. For how strong he is thematically in the story, it doesn't make sense that it's that easy to beat him. Also, more late-game character development. Seifer is such a rich character early game but when he becomes controlled by Ultimecia you don't really see much more character development and that disappointed me. There could have been some development after you defeat him too. There are a lot of options.
• Better balance the late-game fight scenes in the dream sequences. In the first dream sequence they are about level with the rest of the game but, excepting the one dragon fight, all the later ones are trivial.
• Better character development for Laguna late game. I loved the early game development but disks 3-4 fell off and especially meeting Laguna in person felt anticlimactic. I think his storyline tried to do too much without depicting it, like his journalism career felt rushed and under-developed, and how he became president felt under-explained. I wish Kiros and Ward were developed more too.
• More Trabia garden. A low-effort way to do this would be to like...have one or two cutscenes from Trabia garden before it is destroyed...even if you never get to visit it. This might make it "hit harder" emotionally when you visit and find it destroyed. As it stands, it was a bit of a random oddity and visiting it felt pretty disconnected from the rest of the game.
• Two major cinematic sequences, Rinoa in Space, and the endgame scene with Rinoa and Squall, felt really slow and boring. I want more "fast" scenes and more character development in them.
• Game balance...I think the late game was a bit too easy, especially if you get some of the optional GF's you just start to be OP'ed. I would have liked more challenge in the late game.

That said I still really love the game. I just felt like...it had so much potential, like it could have been one of the best games ever made and it started out like it was going to be, I still think it's the best FF game but most people don't seem to agree with me and I wonder if it could have been more universally liked if some of the shortcomings could have been addressed. It felt like the game was so amazing on disk 1 and then disk 2 was almost as good and then the end didn't stay as strong.

My wife and I are considering moving to Rochester, probably in a couple years. I've visited once and loved it. It seems to be a small metro area that is easy to traverse, and I love the way the neighborhoods are structured. But I've learned the hard way from living in quite a few places that what my life is like depends not just on the physical layout of a region, but on how people relate to it. Rochester does seem to have some exurbs and lots of towns in the surrounding countryside, which got me wondering whether people in those think of themselves as "in Rochester" or "outside of Rochester" and live their lives accordingly.

So while I look at the metro area and think "wow, I can get anywhere in 20 minutes and if I lived centrally it would be more like 10" this is based on how I operate, not necessarily how others do. I don't have a good sense of like...if I go there, am I constantly going to be meeting people who are coming into the city from farther away? Will people keep inviting me to far-away events? I have these problems where I live and it drives me batty. I can't go to any event without 3/4 of the people living 30+ minutes away and I just don't want to be driving that much in my daily life. People say they live "in" my town when they are 20 minutes from the city limits. Most online groups for my town are filled with people who live that far or farther from it, and in all directions so it makes it hard to actually connect with people locally. There's not much of a local neighborhood "soul" to where I live and people just sort of mingle broadly over a vast area in a way that makes it so if you want to be tied into the social fabric you need to be spending hours in the car. I'm honestly sort of looking to escape this so I'm very wary of like, looking at a new city and engaging in wishful thinking and fooling myself.

So I'm trying to assess what the "culture of distance" is like in Rochester, so I wanted to throw out a few questions:

1. If someone says they "live in Rochester" but they actually live in one of the suburbs or nearby towns, at what point would you think "yeah you do", at what point would think to yourself "Eh, that's stretching it, you really live outside of Rochester"? And at what point would you think: "Lol...wut? You are nowhere near Rochester."

2. How far away can something be, before you start thinking about whether or not it's too far to drive to? Whether a store, event, etc.? Like if you go out to eat, or people are suggesting a meeting place for an event, what distances are so short that you wouldn't think about it at all...vs. at what point do you start doing the calculation in my head of "okay, I'd have to drive X minutes...is this worth it?"

3. Do people walk much as a way of getting places (not just for fun/exercise)? We are planning on keeping our cars but I really like walking to get places. The neighborhoods both in Rochester and some of its inner suburbs looked super walkable (and were--we walked around a lot when we were there!) but just because I do this doesn't mean the people who live there do. The town I live in is like this, there are whole neighborhoods full of people who live in the walkable town center and drive everywhere and it makes me so sad.

So yeah, these are the questions I wanted to throw out!