Good Ideas yet Bad Ideas [NOT 7/9/21]

7/9/21 brightersideoflife 45

Hi, friends!

What’s something you would want to buy/do/etc but know would be a bad idea? Bonus points if for some random reason.

Assume price isn’t the reason to hold you back.

For me? I love the super old homes. I would love to own a really old home but I think it would be horrible because of ghosts.

I don’t believe in ghosts. I consider myself an atheist. But like… it would be my luck to get a really amazing old house and be able to deal with the structural, electrical, etc issues but then have it be haunted AF and not only would I be like OH SHIT I’M WRONG GHOSTS EXIST and also then I’d have to sell my old house to some people who want to live with a bunch of ghosts.

Just for the record – the reason I don’t want to believe in ghosts is if I don’t believe in an afterlife or really even the concept of a soul, someone being trapped after dying and stuck around here is just so unbearably cruel to me.

I do hope Nessie exists though.

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45 Comments

  1. i want a sea worthy boat house…houseboat?
    i figure ill either get me waterworld floating shanty towns…. or everyone will think im crazy…which they mostly do anyway…so really win win
    ill have to build my own to get there tho
    i mostly could too…..if i could afford the materials

    • I was just reading about Amsterdam’s ambitious rebuilding program of the canal supports (so that everything doesn’t slide into the canals) and the number of Amsterdammers who live on houseboats and will have to move. Are those seaworthy, or no? 

    • This is yet another one of those things where if you’re rich, it’s your fancy yacht you live on, but if you’re not rich, ew gross why would you live on a boat in the ocean. 

      I don’t think I want to consider the combination of houseboat and ocean waves because wow terrifying. 

  2. I live in a 100 year old home and have never encountered a ghost. I’ve never heard of anyone in the neighborhood who has. But there are all kinds of weird wrinkles in terms of roofs, wiring, plaster and more.
     
    Still, they’re pretty awesome if you can accept quantifiable physical elements.
     
    I love ghost stories and while I don’t believe in ghosts (I don’t, I don’t, I don’t) I think almost always they turn out to be benign, more like Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost.

  3. We live in an 1840s farm house.  All the ghosts seem friendly.  It’s really nice here, but renovating it all fancy like the houses on that HGTV network is never gonna happen.  There are gonna be flies getting in during the summer and groundhogs digging under the sides of the house.  It’s not like living in the city at all.  We did manage to insulate it pretty well and installed good heat exchangers so when it gets hot or cold we can make do.
    We had to dig out the septic tank earlier this summer, and it took the guys a real long time to find it.  When they finally did, they found a bunch of shotgun shells and bullet casings about a foot below the surface.  I don’t know what that’s all about except I’m hoping it was just some shooting sports enthusiast living here years ago.  We have also found Minie balls in the pastures, but I assume there was just some civil war dudes passing through.  Maybe they looked at our house and thought, “this looks like a nice place to live”.  That’s as far as I’m prepared to speculate.  

  4. Here’s one: I want to scrap the preschool idea and have Lil just stay home forever. Ok, not really, but I won’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind today. It was his first day and it. Fucking. Sucked. Ass.
     
    Ugh. First, we were late, because he decided to park it on the potty for like a half hour when it was time to leave. I got him off after a while but once we got to the car he was like noooo I need the potty. So we rushed back in and he did use it, so he wasn’t lying. I think he just had a nervous stomach, poor guy. But it was maddening.
     
    So we ended up 15 min late (because I had built in a buffer which ended up being totally insufficient) and were rushing to hand him off and he absolutely lost it. Screaming and crying for me, wailing and banging on the door. My heart was broken. And the teacher had disappeared with the other 6 kids so he was just alone in the hallway crying. I was kinda pissed at the teacher.
     
    At pickup, she said he recovered quickly, but then she gave me super judgy vibes and told me we do too much for him and need to let him be more independent. Because he needed help with his shoes, and with his hand sanitizer. He’s fucking 4 and this is his first time being with anyone other than family in charge.
     
    I’m a great big ball of stress tonight. I’ve cried a bunch and I don’t know how well I’ll sleep. And that’s after getting a shitty night’s sleep last night too.
     
    Tomorrow will be better. It has to be. 

    • A quick recovery is a good sign. Tomorrow may, unfortunately, still have some hassles but odds are they’ll drop away bit by bit and by next Monday a lot of them will just be speed bumps.

    • For fuck’s sake! As if you needed a parenting comment from teacher on day one. You are a fantastic parent who nurtures your kid’s interests (all things Space, right?), kept them alive throughout the pandemic, and has the patience of a saint when it comes to potty shenanigans. Cheers to you and your little one’s first drop off! They can learn to put on shoes and hand sanitizer at their own pace. I’m more concerned with how the teacher left them alone to cry it out.

        • I’m not worried, haha. We honestly talked when I was pregnant about going the super hippie route and raising him gender neutral in his infancy. I had a friend who did it until her son was like 5, which is slightly crazy. We didn’t do it though. 

      • Right? To be fair (kind of), it didn’t seem like she was planning on saying much of anything to me at pickup, but I lingered to talk to her about how it went. I don’t know if it was just my stressed out mood making me read judgment and snarkiness in her comments when maybe she just intended them to be helpful? I don’t know, but it was super not helpful.
         
        And yes, Lil is obsessed with space! It’s been an enduring obsession and it’s still very cute. He’ll still sometimes bust out facts that I’m like “yeah? I mean, I trust you.” 

    • @BigDamnHeroes, hugs. I doubt it is much comfort, but all parents feel this way/have stuff like this happen. My son’s partner gets very upset as she navigates the autism education nightmare, because of the judging. Velcro closure sneakers, hand sanitizer at home as a game, it comes in kid oriented types…you can game the teacher’s system and continue to nurture you precious small human, your way. Again, hugs to you.

      • Ah, autism education is tough. I don’t have personal experience, but I have friends that are or have navigated that. My husband might be on the spectrum slightly and we’ve wondered if Lil has some elements, so that certainly compounds our anxiety with him entering school. He’s extremely routine and rule driven, so once he adapts he should be golden, but change is really hard for him. 

        • We have amazing friends from Germany that have 2 autistic children on the extremes of the spectrum.  They finally moved back to Germany when the kids became adults because unlike America, Germany deals with adults with special needs too.  Second day of college & my daughter changed her major to special education.  I don’t know that she will end up there but it works for now.

          • Yeah, the US education system really shafts kids that are different. That’s great about your daughter. Whether she stays in that major or not, I think the desire speaks to her character. 

    • I mean I was great in preschool because I listened to adults really well. But that was because I was “daddy’s little beer helper” and also drank beer with him. So yeah, you’re a great parent and it will get better.

       

      • Did you ever watch “Mad Men”? Another one of my favorite soap operas. In the first season they went really heavy establishing how different 1960 was from the present day. The Drapers have another couple over. Sally is enlisted to be the bartender and makes and serves the cocktails, because it’s “cute.” She must be about 8 I would guess.

    • From the OTHER side of (a part of!) pre-K land, I PROMISE this will get better, @BigDamnHeroes!💞💓💗💖💝
       
      Tbh, for MOST kiddos who’ve never been in child care before, the first few days (sometimes a MONTH, for the kids i work with!), is completely normal & expected.💗
       
      The teacher sounds pretty out of line, too, tbh!!
       
      Especially since this was his first day… hopefully she was just stressed, but that’s SO not anything to ever say on a first day (maaaaaybe a couple months in, if a kiddo has totally bamboozled their parents, into thinking “the little one just can’t ____”😉😆🤣 But SO *NOT* a “first day” conversation to have!)…
       
      Trust me–in Autism-land, I have literally had to carry some children (sobbing!) down the hall, away from parents!💖
       
      And I’ve even had one handed off to me from the hip of another staffer, who gave me the warning, “DO NOT PUT HIM DOWN, he WILL flail & accidentally hit his head on whatever is closest as he crashes!”
      (And he DID, for *days* when I finally had to set him down!😖😱)
       
      We had others who just cried, until they sobbed themselves out…
      One would fall asleep under the table for the rest of the day… and mom & dad debated HARD about keeping him in our program! (He stayed, and eventually did FINE!😁)
       
      Thing is? 
       
      ALL OF THEM settled in, within a week or two, a month at the VERY outside!**
       
      I wouldn’t worry about him at ALL yet!!
      This week will be hard, and YES, there will be tears!! 
       
      That’s totally normal!
       
      He’ll start to make some friends over the next few days, and pretty soon, this will probably just be a blip in your rear view mirror!💖💞💓
       
      and I’ve VERY much had *this exact conversation* with the parents of MANY of my kiddos who had those hard “first few days”💝💝💝💝
       
      that little dude who got handed off mid-air with the warning to not put him down?  His dad & I had quite a few conversations those first few weeks😉💖  Dad was worried at first, but when I was able to assure him that the little dude only cried until we got *into* the classroom & started to play, he visibly relaxed. I reassured him that it’s pretty much ALWAYS harder on the parents (because it IS!💓), annnnnd that a quick leave-taking, with only *one* turn to check, rather than something like walking backwards & waving the whole way is ALSO the better way to go (Parent confidence–even the *illusion* of confidence!!–makes the kids more confident!). 
       
      That little guy took *almost* a month.  But once he understood the routine of; “Emmer will say, ‘Hi!’ when she walks in, go to the classroom, then come back out & get me. That’s when she takes my hand, we both wave & say, ‘Bye!’ to Dad, then Dad goes put, while we walk to class & go play,” it was SMOOTH, and we never had problems with that transition again.😉💖
       
      But in the beginning?
      YES, it was tough on him–because I WAS a stranger to him, and *school* (even Pre-K!) was a completely new situation for him💝–it made *perfect* sense that he was upset, and it just took a little time for him to process & adjust💖
      **that tiny handful of month-long kiddos  are typically the little ones with zero functional language skills–expressive *or* receptive (in English!), when they started programming.
       
      So part of the issue is often a literal language barrier, and once kids *get* the rhythm of the day down, they do really, really well💞
       
      AND, if you can, imagine how *we* would feel if every day we were driven to a place with a bunch of strangers, where we were expected to interact for hours, with people whose language we don’t speak!!!
       
      You or i would 100% stress too, until we understood what was going on!😉💖
       

      • I think your whole comment has really driven down into the biggest source of anxiety that I’m having at the moment – the teacher really didn’t help the transition. She just ghosted. And it’s our first time dropping him off – we don’t know the procedure beyond what she’s told us previously that on school days, the parents drop the kids at the door and don’t come in. So he starts saying no no no as he goes in without us and I’m standing there like… What now? She should have fucking stepped in. I don’t know. It was the first day, she had 6 other kids, and no other teachers. It just felt like a fuck up. And it degraded my confidence. And when I picked him up and I was like I’m sure you’re busy right now (some of the kids were still there to stay later), can we have a call later to talk about what happened today? She looked uncomfortable and was like let’s just talk tomorrow morning at drop off. Or I guess right now what’s up. She had zero impulse to reassure me. Just none at all. So how does she react to him when he needs reassuring?
         
        Maybe I should have said above, but it’s a montessori school, so independence is a big deal in the program. I’m just now having serious doubts about how they go about it. 

    • *hugs* It’ll all turn out ok. Honestly, I always wanted to keep my guys home with me, too. However, the 2 times I tried homeschool (3rd grade for KidSmacks2, and 5th grade for BabySmacks) I realized that a) I’m not a very good teacher and b) that I relish a few hours of relative peace. 

  5. I live in a 24 year old house and I have a ghost story… sort of.
    It was during the time of cokehead narcissist.  She went off to her dealer(?) work, I don’t know.  I just come off a miserable shift on nights and went to bed.  I woke up at around noon hearing something in the basement.  I knew the narcissist hadn’t returned home because she would have been screaming about something (coworkers, her dealer, the quality of her blow, etc).  The hair on the back of my head went straight up as I grabbed the baseball bat.
    I don’t know who or what it was and then I went into the fetid ruins that was my basement at the time as I heard more rustling from the laundry room.  I entered the room when I saw a pair of gold eyes staring at me from behind the furnace.
    I was about to start screaming/yelling (I would hope yelling) and maybe wet myself when it took me a moment to realize it was her damn dog who had escaped from the crate (which cokehead damaged during a day long coke bender.)
    I picked up the dog and put her back in the crate and tried to go back to bed.
     

  6. For me it would be buying a mint condition 1969 Dodge Charger.  It would be a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons, including but not limited to:  I am not a mechanic so would never be able to work on it myself, Mrs. Butcher would never ride in it, and I would very likely kill myself driving it like I’m fucking Steve McQueen.

    • My neighbor up the way’s son just got out of the army and bought a ’73 Barracuda.  I see him bombing up and down the road to town going way over the limit through some twisty and turny areas that are frequented by deer.  He’s a good boy, but I worry about him.  But he’s a grown man now I guess.  There’s a lot of old Mopar down this way.
       

  7. I’ve always wanted to get a tattoo. My self-imposed rule is that I must settle on a design and placement and if I still desire it five years later, then I can get it done. So glad I didn’t go through with the last one I liked.
    bob

  8. ooohhh….
    I am MADE of bad ideas…
    It’s a good thing I live in a studio apartment, so I can’t really start making a shop and gathering tools and trying to build some of them…
    so… limited due to lack of shop, and it’s too warm to wear jackets here, but I’ve put serious thought into those instructibles about making spot welders out of old microwave transformers, and using that to make welded chain mail (butted is crap), to make an armored jacket  out of.  Other bad issues with this idea, I rarely close a jacket when I am wearing it, so it would be like an inverse breastplate, and not much use as armor.  also, getting shot through chainmail is worse than getting shot, since the projectile tends to break the chain mail rings and throw a bunch of them into the wound, so it’s like getting shot with a small shotgun in addition to whatever you were shot with.  So, then I’d need to back the chain mail with kevlar or similar.  And, at that point, I should just skip the chain mail and make a jacket out of kevlar, but I’d need an industrial sewing machine to handle something like 7 or 12 layers of kevlar, and they make stuff like that anyways. 
    Anyways…
    Or going to one of those Pacific WWII old air bases on a tiny island, and boat in enough supplies to set up a solar-powered still, a small garden, and some chickens, and just hang out and fish and swim and be way the fuck away from people.  Except, I don’t think you are even allowed to visit a lot of those islands without permission, and certainly aren’t allowed to camp on them, let alone build a weird homestead on them.  Also, the first tropical storm/hurricane/typhoon to come through would probably dismember me.  And I’d probably get sunburned way too much…
     
    I’ve got more…

  9. I always wanted to open a brewery & got pretty close at one point but after the pandemic, I’m very relieved I held off.  Now I think I won’t ever do it & will do something equally stupid like buy a boat.

  10. Our current house is about 120 years old (1902 or ’04, depending on what source you’re looking at!!) and I’m pretty sure there’s no ghosts… but I’m also pretty sure we have Borrowers. It’s astonishing how much little stuff just vanishes here. 
     
    I have lots of bright ideas. Things like, “Let’s buy a restaurant!” or “Let’s move to Alaska!” Fortunately, I’ve always been too broke to do most of the more grandiose ones. For awhile (when we only had one kid, it’s worth mentioning), I wanted to live in a motor home and do the Renaissance Faire circuit. There’s about 87 reasons that would never have worked, but it was a fun idea!

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