What a coincidence! My sisters and I just gave blood this morning.
To be fair, the individual places don’t make the rules and when you’re talking about something that is going to be given to another person, you don’t want to take any chances. I agree that it’s frustrating to be excluded for what seems like a silly reason, but at the same time, I get why they’re overly cautious.
Nope, just sent her away.
I stopped giving blood after the phlebotomist blew out my vein the last time I did, causing a hematoma. I’m A+, meaning my blood type isn’t in super demand, anyway.
Last time I went, I gave plasma. They told me it would take half an hour. I was there for 90 minutes. And I had to squeeze a little bulb regularly the whole time. I know plasma is needed, but that’s too much for me.
I’m O- so they’re particularly keen on me. Being O- is great because you can give blood to anyone but you can only get it from other O-s. I hope I never bleed out!
I do understand why they need to be cautious. There’s just a curious tension between “people will die if you don’t give blood TODAY” and “there’s a 0.0004% chance that you’ve been secretly harboring mad cow for 30 years, so we don’t want yours.”
Another interesting fact: I joined the Bone Marrow Registry and got matched to a kid and they took my goop for him (blood stem cells, which are collected by apheresis) and they didn’t care that I can’t even donate regular blood. But the kid was in Europe so maybe that’s why.
I get that but don’t feel guilty! You should only donate blood if you have some to spare and apparently you do not 
Yeah, back in the day when it was called Non-Type-A/Non-Type-B Hepatitis…they couldn’t detect for it and it wouldn’t show up for years.
All the McDonalds in my area have stopped carrying Diet Dr Pepper. It’s a small thing, but McDonalds has been built into my routine because they don’t overcharge for a large soda, and they don’t force me to drink Diet Coke. (It’s the only diet soda that still tastes like diet soda, even though I’m used to diet soda.)
Diet Dr. Pepper is my favorite diet soda (I’m drinking it right now). It is annoyingly hard to find.
Coke Zero is OK… better than Diet Coke, and anything is better than Diet Pepsi with its nasty aftertaste.
I’m just now settling down to breakfast and first coffee; I’ve been awake 4+ hours already.
Why? Because with multiple food allergies and health conditions in the house, grocery shopping any given weekend involves 3-7 stores and crossing state borders. It also involves getting up at daybreak to be there when the places open.
Uuugghh. Good news, though; I don’t have to go out for the rest of the day!
Trying again to bring down this double-leaner of a tree…
Texted my friend around 9:30am this morning and didn’t get a response. I leave work early around 12 to pick up lunch to take home and he finally texted me back saying he’ll be over shortly. Over an hour later he shows up with 2 chainsaws, 2 cans of 2 cycle oil but no gas… Left to get gas an hour ago and still isn’t back yet! How F’n long does it take to get a can of gas?!
All I want is these 2 trees downed but it’s like hoping for a miracle to make it happen 
Burn it down! Kill it with fire! Do it!
No real gripe. Apparently my services were not needed for a sixth day at the job today, so I can put my feet up for the second day in a row and perhaps I shan’t be hobbling like a gimp tomorrow.
S’all good, man! Do the twice-monthly shaving of the beard, probably have a shower.
Not doing laundry. That would just cause me to gripe again.
I see a vision…of…epsom salts in an aqeous solution…my battered feet being soaked…and damned the giant mess it will make!
I’m a reckess rambler that way!
They’re always after me because I have a rare type. But at this point I don’t think I should be guilt-tripped further given that I donated more or less uninterrupted for three full decades. With all the meds I take for my various late-middle-aged issues, the donation process just knocks me out now. I really don’t have the stamina. They should chase down some younger, sturdier folks for their AB+ at this point. Oh, and given the amount of money that “Non-Profit” swims in, maybe they should offer those young people something more than yet another tacky t-shirt or a ten-dollar gift card. 
At any rate, I don’t want to chew off a volunteer’s ear, so when they call I just sigh and say, “Sorry. I’m still not feeling well. Call back later.”
He got tied up at the gas station and then thought he forgot one chainsaw so he went home searching for it… He had already brought it over before he left for gas
Anyway, he finally came back and got them both dropped. I dragged the branches and logs to the front of my yard for the city to come around with their grappler claw truck, scoop it all up and haul it away.
Mission accomplished 
Well if you really want to hear them–
Let’s start with Google. What once felt like a kind of magic has become so weighed down by SEO crap that it has me pining for the days of Yahoo Directory. Also a factor is Google’s attempt to become a kind of Everything Site, which is focused towards finding a random person’s exact thing, above its old use for seeing what’s out there.
I regularly search the web to find things to post about to our gaming blog Set Side B, but it’s become very difficult to find new interesting things that way. Alternate search engines have now become much better for this, like Wiby and Marginalia.
The Twitter “What’s Happening?” sidebar is worse than useless. There are two kinds of things that can appear there, things its magical aLgOrItHm thinks are relevant, which is way too easy to game by Certain Bad Actors who are low in number but extremely loud and tweet a lot, and news articles that Twitter staffers place there themselves, which are frequently idiotic.
Algorithms trying to show me what I want to see, or what they think is important, are my bane on the internet. YouTube’s is particularly awful. It seems only able to show me things very much like what I’ve already seen. If I watch a video game walkthrough, it suddenly thinks video game walkthroughs are all I’m about. I put in a long-playing video for a cat I was sitting to keep it stimulated while I was away, and nearly had it convinced that I was a cat. There are videos that I do want to see, but its algorithm is entirely incapable of predicting what those are, which is both completely understandable, but also, not what these content finding algorithms were promising? Maybe they’re this way because those Bad Actors I mentioned before were using them to [color]pill people (a stupid term regardless), which is also awful. This whole field of AI research feels like an utter dead-end right now.
Yes, I have a bunch of devices wasting my time by trying to assist me in doing things that I do not wish to do.
My favorite thing is that when you search for an item that might be a purchasable product – socks, sour cream, a Maserati – you’ll see ads for that product for weeks, EVEN IF YOU ALREADY BOUGHT IT. Once I had to replace a toilet so I did a little Googling, bought and installed the new toilet, and got nothing but toilet ads for like a month. Hello, I am not a mad toilet collector! I just needed the one! Argh
I just clicked ONE add to look at a shirt I thought was super cute, and now ALL my ads are a zillion cute shirts. I can’t buy ANY of them right now! 
Now imagine you’re a writer! 
I’ve googled everything from the best route from Niagra Falls to Rochester, to how stabiliser systems on cruise ships work, to how to make a nuclear bomb. Never mind different weapons, poisons, and how to treat a myriad of injuries.
Oh yeah. I’m on a list.
I frequently have the opposite problem with Le Tube. It’s constantly bombarding me with the literal opposite of what I just watched.
Me: “Oh, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ translated into Yiddish! My email buddy was right! I love it!” [clicks “Like”]
2 minutes later:
YouTube: “Hey here’s 20 copies of Ted Nugent’s Greatest Hits for you! Enjoy!”