Congratulations. There's a tax break for the new status!
I personally have enjoyed either getting/making exactly whatever carryin or dish I want. Getting to agreement with the kid or gf seems a lot smoother on days when I share meals in.
Pleasing the kids with dinner remains difficult (Sally's a vegetarian again, and Newt still doesn't eat pasta, which limits their areas of overlap). And of course Buck's been moved out for ages, so this doesn't change meal planning.
My name just changed, though, which feels weird. No longer hyphenated! Not that I can do all the bureaucratic crap until I have a copy of the judgment, which will take a week or two yet, probably.
My name just changed, though, which feels weird. No longer hyphenated!
I hadn't thought about that. It seems like a good decision, but that would take a while to get used to.
Anyway, congratulations on an unpleasant experience, conducted efficiently.
Mine also avoids meat.
I found a reliable source of fresh dill; fava beans, lots of fresh dill, tumeric, and good feta is a recent discovery. I am a convert to soaked dry beans.
Creamy squash soups with crunchy topping are another reasonably quick veggie addition to my limited quickie repertoire, prep is over 2 nights though.
Wow, that's a lot of change in 11 months. I'm at not quite double that and still not to resolution, but time helps. I hope you and the kids have a good weekend as an official smaller family unit.
9: Not really up for discussion on a public blog my ex has the option of reading.
Or I can't count. One or the other.
Or I can't count. One or the other.
You just need to use an elaborate code involving puppies, wolves, etc. . . He'll have no idea what you're saying.
13: And most of us won't either, so you'll be able to maintain your privacy.
Peep, speaking of privacy, email me if want to meet up in about a month. This is actually probably a creepy thread to put that in, but oh well. It's in keeping with our accidental date at least.
I was lucky and managed to pull it off in under 6 months. Had the pleasure of appearing before a judge and watching my ex confess to infidelity. The judge barely looked up from her crossword puzzle.
Congratulations on being unhyphenated!
Many years ago it took me something like four months. Didn't involve any kind of personal appearance before a judge or anything like that. Just paperwork and a notarization, I think.
Congrats on the transition, LB, and good luck with the next thing.
Glad it's over. That was pretty quickly done.
Reno was slower but had nice scenery.
Best of luck, LB, with whatever comes next.
Congratulations, LB. I admire the way you've navigated this. As I'm sure do your kids. If they need a reminder of resilience and grace later in life, they have one.
Congratulations. Those 11 months went quickly. Are you feeling relieved? I could image having mixed emotions along with relief with the divorce being finalized. Regardless, I hope you can do something(s) you enjoy this weekend.
Wait hold on. Let's back up to the real bombshell here.
Newt doesn't eat pasta?!
Congratulations LB! Now just to get those weird picky kids out of the house.
Congratulations Ms. B!
My first one took just a few months, enough time for the paperwork to be filed and processed. The second one, the one that damn near killed me and took years to recover from dragged out over a couple of years.
Well survived! Your kids are teens; picky is not weird. If pasta is a problem, try risotto? Also, if you're serving pasta, you can always give Newt some bread with his sauce.
Congrats, LB! MN normally takes 6 months, but we were in two different states while the kids finished out the school year in California (I had moved back to start a contract gig) , so we had to wait until she and the girls were back here. So from date of deciding to divorce til receiving notice that it was final was a bit over 11 months.
I've started dating a woman whose child-having schedule is exactly the opposite of mine. We've been making it work with babysitters, day dates (she's a counsellor and has appointment gaps, I'm still unemployed) and her coming over after the girls are asleep. It's functional, but the reality is I have to ask my ex to switch weeks if it's going to be an ongoing thing. That's not a conversation I'm looking forward to.
Congratulations LB!
Mine actually only finalized a month ago, but there were jurisdictional reasons to delay filing until after 12 months, so it took much longer
Thanks for all the congratulations (and right back at you, soup and Chopper and anyone else who's done it recently.)
It feels very odd. I was married for a very, very long time.
36:
Odd but mostly good is how I described it feeling recently, which I guess is not a bad place to be at this point.
I was just listening to a concert on youtube with the following bit of stage banter:
"This is a song about divorce"
[Audience member: WOOOO!]
"I love the one guy who says 'woo.' Because, you may or may not ever feel anything as sincere as the guy who says "Woo!" for divorce. You might sit there in your private conversations with your god saying 'may I someday feel the woo of the guy who wooed divorce.'"
Best wishes to all newly single and on pita dinner with teenagers issue, if you have access to decent corn tortillas then tacos are your friends.
If you like Lois McMaster Bujold at all, the fourth of her Penric novellas just dropped and they are a lovely treat.
Missed opportunity: the headline should have been "No More Matrimony".
By dint of hardly being around last year, I missed this development at the time but sussed it out somewhere along the way. Congrats on closure achieved and good luck going forward.
I am less certain if you have a new job. I may be confusing you with someone else on that one.
You know who else lives in New York, got divorced, and got a new job this year.
So from date of deciding to divorce til receiving notice that it was final was a bit over 11 months.
This is crazy fast. In VA, it is almost always at least 12 months.
42 is fantastic. I have what I hope will be my last coparenting therapy session today, except I'm sure we'll have to check in again after Lee meets with the therapist too. Lee is unwililng to sit down in a room with me at this point because I'm too childish. At this point, I wish I had been documenting all the nonsense here rather than trying to keep it off the blog because OMG YOU GUYS. Someday it will be over.
43: Yep -- still in the same larger organization, but I moved from defense of various necessary but dull bits of state government to the Bureau of Tree Hugging And Snuggling Small Woodland Creatures (in a legal representation kind of way).
44: Actually, I don't.
45: Huh. It could have been faster, really -- if the mediatior and his affiliated lawyer hadn't been kind of lacksidaisical about drafting, we could have gotten filed in late June, which would have meant plausibly done by October or so.
(And risotto and tacos are two of our basic meals. There just aren't that many other basic meals. Stir fry, with either cashews or tofu taking the protein role. If I'm feeling energetic enough to do the whole frying thing, falafel.)
Maybe I should have sent that to Standpipe's blog.
I think Moby is trying to say that your country needs you.
Aren't they old enough to cook for themselves?
It never occurred to me that falafel would be something you cook at home. There are places that will cook it for you.
Snuggling Small Woodland Creatures
Shoulda gone to law school.
I momentarily forgot New York is a state and was like how much representation do squirrels really need?
I've never mastered the art of falafel cooking. I end up with a crumbly mess. Fortunately, there's a good gyro/falafel place just down the street.
I make better pita bread than we can buy conveniently, and likewise with all the accompaniments. But it is a hassle.
56: This recipe hasn't gone badly for me yet: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/my-favorite-falafel-231755
There's a great felafel place down the street from me too. All vegetarian, hummus, moutabbel, etc.
I've also had much better luck buying bread than making it.
(Argh. It's going to be weeks yet, probably, before I can get my hands on a copy of the judgment, which means I can't get started with all the bureaucratic nonsense with the name-changing. Feh. At least Facebook will just take my word for it.)
If you're going to be legally changing your name, aren't you the least bit tempted to go big? I recommend Zoltan The Invincible.
I am already committed to changing it back from the hyphenated last name to my birth name. Which is common enough, that combined with my hypercommon first name, that I will become ungooglable.
Immediately before I changed my name back in the nineties, I had a summer associate job: no Google yet, but they were showing us how searching for information on various databases could turn up a surprising amount of information about anyone. Everyone else in the meeting got creeped out by how successfully, starting from just a name and an age, searches turned up past addresses and jobs. Me? They got a ridiculous number of hits, and almost none of them were actually me.
63: join the club; due to having far more illustrious namesakes who wrote a lot more stuff, performed a lot more plays and stormed a lot more machine gun nests than I have, I remain pretty well ungoogleable.
There just aren't that many other basic meals.
I had an easy lentil salad that was in my standard rotation for a while*
Brown (pardina) lentils
* toss in some cubed carrots and possibly other vegetables a few minutes before the lentils are done, so that they are lightly cooked but still crunchy
[Too taste]
generous amounts of olive oil
mild vinegar (I use champagne vinegar)
salt
pepper
cubed pickles (1/3 or 1/2 inch cubes) (I like both the flavor and texture of the pickles, but you could probably use diced olives if you preferred)
It really is that simple; the lentils are flavorful enough that it doesn't need that much. I adapted it from the Smitten Kitchen lentil and potato salad by removing the potatoes and I never missed them.
For a while I was making it almost once a week and didn't get tired of it.
* I stopped making it because of a stupid example of the sunk cost fallacy. I have a bottle of pickles that's now two years old. I suspect the pickles have lost some of their crunchiness, which makes them less appealing for this salad. But I don't want to buy another jar until I finish it.
64: I have the added lack-of-distinction of having no middle name, which helps as well.
I also don't have a middle name! TWINSIES.
I have a middle name but it is unpronounceable by air-breathing life forms.
I had an uncle with no middle name and when he went to America, immigration wrote him down as Norman NMI (No Middle Initial) Young. Which he remained in official correspondence for the duration of his time there.
Every so often you put on scuba gear and go commune with a school of herring just for the satisfaction of being properly called by name for once? Makes sense.
I am the second most famous person with my name in history (it's not a very illustrious name). The first-most famous person with my name is still alive, so I think I can overtake him if I murder him in a sufficiently gruesome fashion.
It'd backfire and just be reported as a suicide.
70: that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
There's a musical theater actress whose name is close enough to my SO's that the actress used to push her off of the front page entirely. Now it's the opposite, so either SO has become much more famous or the actress much less.
In Virginia, there is a 12 month waiting period if you have kids under 18 bc they want to make sure you have really thought about it before you finalize a divorce. Plus, they want to stop divorce from being so darn easy.
There are dozens of mes across the country. Annoyingly, a bunch of them are in fields of professional interest to me, or are otherwise highly successful, good people.
Probably mentioned it before, but the only one that worried me was the one, from Orlando, who tried to Facebook friend me. All dozen or so of his friend shared our name. I can only assume he was a very focused serial killer.
I had a PI who for a variety of reasons was probably the single worst human I've ever known personally, but he had a very common first + surname combo and refused to use his middle initial on publications just because it gave him pleasure to think of what a pain in the ass it was for anyone, including his trainees, to search his (extensive) publication record. There was even another one of him in his own field, and about a million more in science generally. It made a PubMed search for his name totally useless.
As I said, a variety of reasons.
Dammit Swope you ruined my timing.
I guess I vaguely assumed I would be the only person with my name, but there's at least one or two others on Facebook.
All the top google hits are me, though.
I am sure 77.2 is a Sherlock Holmes story.
re: 82
Sort of an inverse Dave Gorman thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Dave_Gorman%3F
I had a PI who for a variety of reasons was probably the single worst human I've ever known personally . . .
When I started that sentence I was sure that it was about a Private Investigator. . .
I'm the only me I know of, but my son shares a name with a woodcarver in Boston who is the adopted son of a much more famous guy who shared a name with my uncle.
Yep -- still in the same larger organization, but I moved from defense of various necessary but dull bits of state government to the Bureau of Tree Hugging And Snuggling Small Woodland Creatures (in a legal representation kind of way).
I missed this. Congrats!
I mean, it's not all bunny rabbits. Today is brownfield cleanup and volatile organic chemicals. I did just get free pizza and a pep talk from my elected boss (Eric S, the AG), though, which was nice.
In a certain sense, I think bunny rabbits count as volatile and organic. Everything is chemicals.
Everything is chemicals.
And star stuff.
87: That is so true! Did you know that without chemicals, life itself is impossible?
Congratulations, all you newly single or soon-to-be-single people.
62: I have two regrets about how we named Atossa. One: it's too long. She's going to hate us when she gets old enough to write it out. She'll probably change it as soon as she turns 18, I wouldn't be surprised if she asks to do it earlier, and I'll have no hard feelings if my half of the last name is the one she drops. Two: we didn't give her the middle name Danger.
As for Googleability, this comes up often here I think. I'm the first hit for my name and most plausible combinations. It's kinda sorta scary how much you can find out about people online, but I think the signal-to-noise ratio is getting lower. Eight years ago, the top 10 links about me were Facebook and nine things I had written. Now there's Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (and I've never tweeted, just followed other people), my two-year-old baby registry, two different Google+ hits even though I don't use it for anything, two directories or geneology Web sites I've never heard of before, one blog comment, and one clickbait infographic.
This would depend on the person, of course, and my career change is a big part of it. I haven't written anything for publication under my own name in the past eight years, unless posting on blogs counts. But I have the sense that there's more to it than just that.
90.2: The schools here at least have been pretty cool about kids going by whatever name they want to. Nia would like to drop her hyphenation to just my name and that might happen. It's really hard to name kids and to second-guess naming them.
It's really hard to name kids if you're concerned about making the kids happy in the long term. It's pretty easy if you're trying to keep yourself happy in the short term.
AIMHMHB, there are two people in the US with my name, and the other one married into the name. We're FB friends, and I'm the only one with a web presence.
88: Oddly enough, that's my new gig. It's truly bizarre and amazing how versatile a law degree can be if you find yourself in the right place at the right time.
My name is only just on the shady side of John Smith or Mohammed Ahmed, but Mrs y's name is quite certainly unique both in the world at present and in history. This does affect whose name we choose to do various things under.
I just checked and I do show up on the first page in a search for my name spelled as I do (I have a weirdly shortened version of an alternate spelling of a common first name, and my last name is among the most common in the United States). However, the two pages that show up for me are Google Plus posts. Since I'm logged in to my Google account, I question whether the same search would turn me up sans login.
There are 5-7 of us who use the weird short version of our names professionally on LinkedIn. There are few enough of us that when I got an e-mail from the Illinois DMV about a car registration (having locked down one but not all iterations of my name on gmail), I was able to track down the likely intended recipient on LinkedIn and forward the e-mail to him.
I have this sweet potato chili recipe that is easy to make and delicious. It's also easily vegan and/or vegetarian.
These are the general amounts, but any and all ratios are adjustable to taste:
1 can pinto beans
1 can black beans
1 large sweet potato
2 bell peppers (I use red, yellow, or orange)
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
2 cans diced tomatoes
1 TB cocoa powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp chipotle pepper
1/2 tsp cinnamon
extra cayenne to taste
2-4 cups broth (I normally just chuck in 2 bouillon cubes with some water)
Cook the onions and garlic in olive oil, add the sweet potatoes and spices, then add everything else, cook for as long as you have (min 30 mins). Serve with sour cream & chopped green onion.
Also, LB--maybe throw fried rice/rice and beans into the mix for meals?
I have an uncommon but not unusual first name, and an uncommon but not unusual last name, spelled weirdly. Together they make my name extremely uncommon. Weirdly, there's another scholar of women in China with my middle name and the more common spelling of my last name. I feel like at some point if I want to stay in academia I'll have to murder her and take her place.
My boyfriend's first name is I think the most common man's name in Italy and his last name is top 5 or 10. He's the equivalent of John Smith over there, but in the US he gets to be exotic.
Once a month I have to prepare a vegan meal for a friend. Last time I made him that chili, and this time I made him an eggplant and olive pasta dish. I just realized that pasta is out, but I think it would be pretty tasty eaten with with pita or a baguette. I used 5 fresh tomatoes, a large handful of pitted and chopped kalmata olives, 1 eggplant, two cloves of garlic. First I salted & pressed eggplant cubes and cooked them in olive oil. Then I sauteed garlic with olive oil and added the blanched and diced tomatoes. I let that cook for awhile (15-20 mins) then added the eggplant cubes and olives. I let that cook for awhile longer, then served it with shredded fresh basil. It was really delicious.
96
I get emails meant for other people with my same last name on a regular basis. It's kind of terrifying because some of them are quite important, like job interview scheduling and mortgage paperwork.
99
I should clarify uncommon but not unusual for my ethnic group, which narrows it down quite a bit.
As an experiment, I just deleted my Google+ account. Because really. Anyway, a refreshed (non-cached) search on my name still shows two Google+ posts, but each leads to a 404. So I guess Google's index of its own network doesn't refresh in real time.
The most amazing number of third parties use my gmail address to sign up for things. I finally wrote to Spotify to ask them to block it ("I'll use a different email address if I want to sign up for your service"). I don't know if this is normal for a firstname.lastname gmail address from the dawn of time.
I once got a lease agreement for an oceanside property in New Zealand to sign. Tempting.
Don't fall for it. New Zealand is a landlocked island.
82: I first heard of this book from my very good friend, David Gorman. I still haven't read it, but David the author did fly over to visit David my friend.
New Zealand is a landlocked island.
Technically, on a spherical planet, isn't every island landlocked?
Off topic, but if anyone remembers the "Kony 2012" video and was wondering "hey, what are the guys who produced that up to now?" the answer is apparently "the founder had a nervous breakdown, and now they're getting funding from a Texas hedge fund to run a high-frequency radio net in Uganda to give early warning and targeting information to the Ugandan army, in alliance with the guy that DiCaprio played in 'Blood Diamond'."
My wife is trying to get me to apply for one of those tech jobs in New Zealand, although I am hesitant because it would interfere with my plans to lay in the sun on my dock and not work very hard. Maybe if I tell her its landlocked, she'll get off my case.
I suppose that in the degenerate case where there is only one island on the entire globe, that island is not landlocked.
Yeah, but if its full of degenerates, you still wouldn't want to live there.
I presume that there is a drag artist called Ellen DeGenerate.
I'd forgotten George Michael had died, and when I saw the Guardian's story on the results of his inquest, I felt the pang of his death all over again. Really NMM to George Michael.
Actually, the guy Arnold Vosloo played in "Blood Diamond". Except he survived and made out like a bandit instead of getting shot by a whiny American with a fake accent.
I get a lot of e-mail intended for one of two other Swopes FM, one in the north of England somewhere, and the other a college student in the western US who is always getting stern reminders about late paperwork from some admin office (it can take a minute to work out that these aren't for me). The first guy, I swear, has got to be misremembering his own address b/c I've gotten things from so many people over such a long period of time, including rather personal notes from his mother, his lawyer, and a loan officer at his bank. Each time I write to politely say "not the Swope you were after" but then a few months later I get another.
Now one of the two is looking for a job, b/c I've just recently been flooded with daily updates from half a dozen job hunting services. Who persistently fails to remember their own e-mail address?
Someone unable to hold down a job, secure a loan, or stay out of jail.
The other Doug Merrill used to be CIO at Google, so I'm well buried on that score. Cheeky bastard took the obvious gmail address, too.
Or maybe not. At least under the short form of the name. Apparently blogging for a long time cranks up the search engine rank.
Congratulations on this weird milestone! I found the most affecting parts of the process weren't the most facially dramatic, like I was excited signing the pleadings because I got to be the plaintiff (coin toss) so it felt like I was winning something (well I guess I did win the coin toss), but I cried switching my insurance. I dunno! Divorce feelings are the strangest feelings.
"You know who else lives in New York, got divorced, [has no middle name] and got a new job this year." Just me SWFing around nbd.
anyway aegis provoked me into proposing to him so stick around and i'll let you know if divorce feelings are strange on round two.
Congratulations on the engagement! There is so much potential for a really interesting wedding dress within the Mean Old Dance Teacher aesthetic.
signing the pleadings because I got to be the plaintiff
You know, our mediator never even asked -- just drew up the papers with me as the plaintiff. I kind of wondered if there was some vestige of chivalry in making the woman as the plaintiff by default or something going on there.
Maybe your mediator didn't have spare change around?
I justified it as like spiritually, I was for sure not the plaintiff so this way we both got a turn at plaintiffhood.
It's times like this you really need the "shabby" back.
I keep reading aegis (Aegisthus) as aegis (Gorgon-headed golden-tasseled dragon-roaring weapons system of bright-eyed Athene), which is confusing, but appropriate for Clytie, Mean Dance Teacher of Sharp Objects.
OT: When did Tito's vodka jump from airplane magazines to actual bars?
"The drink of the peripheral Jacksons"
The University of Nebraska extension has a cow with a porthole into her stomach. They drive it around to primary schools. They used to just teach agriculture but to keep relevant to the times, they're traveling around teaching the kids about horror and the futility of the quest for security.
I don't know why that isn't one of selections you can direct your alumni contribution toward. Scholarships for poor kids got nothing on horror cow.
||
Late to this but NMM to TCM's Robert Osborne.
What a charming, classy gentleman and true scholar and lover of classic movies. And I loved and will miss his voice.
|>
"In late capitalism, when we start to make Soylent Green, we'll find a way to make it more terrifying than just the cannibalism."
I wonder if anybody had tried to scale-up feeding cattle directly into the stomach bypassing the wasteful chew-swallow-urk-chew-swallow cycle?
Anyway, probably enough science for one day.
No Yuengling in this bar. I just checked.
The horror-cow channel changed to basketball. I don't understand network programming people.
They're playing 80s county music. It's very romantic, because of the old Georgia pine.
The waitress asked if Yuengling was a vodka.
Congrats, Clytie!
OT: I'll be in Cambridge (the one in England) March 10-15, and then in Oslo March 15-18. My main priority in Cambridge is spending time with friends who are doing poorly w/r/t cancer treatments, but I know I'll have at least some time to wander around/meet-up with locals if any are interested and available.
I'm kind of ridiculously excited to wear robes to High Table and do that kind of thing. I am a nerd.
Congrats, LB. On the recipe front, most of the things that work with pasta also go with couscous, quinoa, etc. How does Newt feel about those?
It would be delightful to meet you [a local writes] drop me a line at seatrout at Gee! Mail! dot com
I feel the way that
Every child should
Eat their quinoa
Eat their quinoa
SHAREEF DON'T LIKE IT
EAT YOUR QUINOA
EAT YOUR QUINOA
Bright and early for
The daily races
Fueled by quinoa
Fueled by quinoa
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
But people eating quinoa
It's a very very
Mad world
Mad world
I EAT QUINOA
THEN I THROW UP AGAIN
THERE AIN'T NOTHING GONNA KEEP IT DOWN
||
Good news on the job hunt front. Another of the several ducks that have to line up just did so. A few more to go and it will be several weeks before the next one comes into view.
|>
I won't wish you luck until you make a quinoa joke.
Quinoa body meet a body
Comin' through the rye
161 is a wrap, I think.
Good luck with the duck shoot, Barry.
Good luck, Barry!
Congrats, Clytie!
When a man loves quinoa
Can't keep his mind on nothin' else
161 is great.
Congratulations Clytie!
And thanks everyone!
Reno was slower but had nice scenery.
Not to mention the gradual realization that you're a lesbian and a rough-and-tumble younger woman is just who you need in your buttoned-up academic life, if only you can get her to come back to New York City with you.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter fanfic.