u/foreverand2025

By real friend I mean someone you see at least somewhat consistently in person and could trust to watch your kids/pet/house sit for you (or something equivocal to that). Do not include blood relatives or romantic partners. Include your gender in your reply please.

Guys I really need a break from all this bougie “it’s the spot!” for breakfast places. I need a certain type of diner. Where the same old timers meet on Tuesdays and the waitress smokes cigarettes outside and everything is delicious and greasy. Who knows, maybe even cash only. Anyone know a spot?

If you’re sick and likely need to be admitted, but assume you can get to any hospital safely, which one would you go to? Which would you avoid at all costs? And why?

I can appreciate Claude’s positivity. I use it primarily to build excel sheets for work and some other busy work. Occasionally for mundane non-work things as well.

Occasionally after completing a big project, Claude tells me to take a break. Or that I earned something. I’m not sure it understands work in a particular chat was spread over a week or not either.

Anyway, I’ve used it for some smoothie recipes. I ran out of bananas so I sent it what I had because I’m too lazy to google smoothie recipes. I did this once before and got a gross recipe but this time Claude was sure so I went for it.

And the smoothie came out halfway decent. I told Claude it was okay.

I recognized the same banter from my work project chats when Claude told me afterwards:

“Enjoy it — you earned this one.”

Thanks Claude. I sure did.

Is anyone interested in doing some volunteer wo.rk together? Not trash pickup (too hot, but Ty those who do this) but volunteering for some established cause as a small group or just a couple of us?

I posted a while ago about what opportunities are out there so I could draw from that (or google) for some potential ideas. Anything would be fine really. Let me know if anyone is interested. For me personally, weekends or evenings (or weekend evenings) is the easiest time to do so.

Male, 30s, on/off the apps for a while. Thought I would share my "success story" to give other guys hope out there. 

I had been talking to a girl a few years older than me over the course of a week. Twice she mentioned how she hates being flaked on if we meet up. I told her I felt the same way and not to worry because I'm not a flaky person. I don't like dinner dates in case the vibe is off so we agree to meet for coffee at an outside patio. She also let me know she doesn't like people being late. Okay, the girl is cute and seems nice just sort of OCD about this one thing, I figured maybe she's been ghosted and just has a low tolerance for BS. Fair enough.

Get there five minutes early, text, no reply. At the meeting time I text again and she is running a couple minutes late. Okay, no big deal, I grab a coffee and sit outside. Across from me is another guy on his phone at a table. 

The girl shows up and I recognize her and she gives this "oh shit" expression. I turn and look at the other guy. Turns out, she had arranged a date with BOTH of us (unbeknownst to us). She later claimed she got times mixed up but honestly I'm not sure I believe her. As you can imagine, me and bro are in this awkward situation, we kind of do a look exchange like what's gonna happen here.

I tell him to go for it, I really was over it at this point, the audacity of the situation shattered whatever attraction I had going for this girl, and she was not even as cute irl anyway (not to sound shallow, just keeping it real here). The guy looks at her and back at me and tells me nah, go ahead man, I'm not feeling this either. At this point the girl is just sitting there dumbfounded, I guess waiting to see if we were gonna fight to the death to buy her a coffee or some shit?

So next me and the guy both get up to leave. We both tell her we are no longer interested in the coffee date. I live in a fairly large city and the coffee place is just outside of downtown and the other guy and I both got street parking about two blocks over. So inevitably we wind up walking a couple blocks together. Turns out we're both into Warhammer and we both are actually watching the same old TV series which we'd never seen before (Fargo, though I was a season ahead). We exchanged numbers and wound up hanging out a few times and since have become pretty decent friends.

So don't give up, fellow single men. You too could wind up as lucky as me one day.

I will be thoroughly honest here but won’t reply any facts that would dox myself or my ex. As a teenage adult I fell in love with a woman about a decade older than me. We were together just over 20 years. Went from codependent to being a victim of extreme coercive control. I don’t like the word victim but I use it here because it’s the most accurate way to describe things. After much counseling and divorce I now consider myself healthy and in a good place. AMA.

I’m a bigger guy and not sure if that has anything to do with it, but I find climbing out of the saddle much easier and much more enjoyable. I can hit a pretty good resistance and cadence up to 80s out of the saddle, when I sit, my cadence sharply falls to 50-60 and feels harder.

I’ve been looking for climb rides but most remain in the saddle way over half the time. HIIT and hills have more out of the saddle time but I’d really like a more consistent climb.

Any thoughts?

I’ve hit the main stores (Michael’s, target and Walmart) and we’ve done the boxed kits. Jewelry making, legos, draw a spiral, cut out masks. I need to avoid clay/dough/slime, paint, and messy things. My kids don’t like puzzles. We’ve tried some little kid board games with mixed results.

What have you guys had success with and if you remember, where can you get it? My budget is generous as long as I’m getting a fair value for my money.

I won’t go into too much detail but want to know if anyone has dealt with this before. I have a good lawyer and am doing everything possible on my end to see my kids as much as possible. We have a GAL as well. My ex filed a VPO in bad faith after being served divorced papers. The way this works is until the VPO case is heard (which I anticipate it being dismissed), it stands. Then my ex finds ever possible way to delay the hearing (firing their lawyer and getting a new one last minute, delaying appointments, etc).

The end result is my time is extremely limited with my kids because each delay sets us back several months in court given how busy the court system is where I live (major city). I’m going through all the legal channels to see my kids more but the system is so slow. This is an obvious strategy my ex is doing but the court so far doesn’t seem to care - in fact any chance to delay things seems to make the judge thrilled (not just in my cases but all cases - the first thing the judge does is try to delay every case as much as he can).

It’s such a kafkaesque system. I could’ve done the same strategy had I filed a bad faith VPO though I’d never do such a thing. I’m worried the net end result is me barely seeing my kids for so long will mean the final ruling will favor my ex because of status quo (that is, my ex has had the kids so long because of this VPO and delay strategy, they’ll be able to argue it’ll be disruptive to let the kids split time between parents after so many months). This strategy seems obvious to my lawyer and me but yet we seem powerless to do anything. And yes my lawyer is doing everything possible to help me and I don’t believe any of this is on account of them not being proactive as we continue to file extra motions etc.

A drive and a fee are perfectly fine. I know we have a couple spots like this but anyone ever do them and can comment on which ones are worth going? Mainly don’t want my young kids digging all day and coming home empty handed lol.

I am getting back into Judaism after a long “break.” I attend temple, most Shabbat services. I’m in my 30s. I would say people 40 or younger make up less than ten percent of our temple and the young folk bring their kids and spouse whereas I’m a single parent.

I met with someone at our small Jewish federation. They have stuff for kids (summer camps, some family days) but that was about it.

Finally I reached out to my local Chabad “chapter” three times and once a rabbi emailed me for my cell phone (which I sent back twice) but never heard back.

I do enjoy temple and I’m reading “Here All Along” and planning on practicing Shabbat with my kids in the near futures (got the candles and holders so yay!).

However I feel totally disconnected from the community. I feel like I’ve hit the main resources - and I am in a smaller city overall as well - and just am not meeting anyone to actually spend time with outside temple.

Advice? Thoughts? Commiseration? TIA.