First thing that comes to mind are my glasses I’m wearing right now. Might as well start with the thing on my already awkwardly roastable face.
- Legal documentation up to date. Hated paying the fees and having to visit lawyer’s office. Easier to manage.
- Nice stainless steel water bottle with a wide mouth. Easier to wash.
- Pilates bar. When I have no time to go to in person classes, this bar has been super useful and I can store it easily. Easier to workout.
Corrective eye surgery
For me this meant PRK not LASIK.
I hope this is my experience as well. I’m slated for ICL surgery on Tuesday. Doc said that I qualify for the laser, but that she can get me significantly better results for my condition with the ICLs.
Kinda nervous, but excited too!
My eyes were bad. Like couldn’t see something three feet from my face bad. I’m 6 feet tall, so walking without glasses was out of the question. The first night I got up to pee and didn’t have to hunt for my glasses was magical.
I’m 6 feet tall, so walking without glasses was out of the question.
Please explain.
He can’t see past 3 feet. Hes 6 feet. So when he looks down he only sees down to his waist then nothing.
Ahh, I see, so the solution is that he needs to cut bone mass off his legs until he’s 3 feet tall. Maybe eye surgery was the better option after all.
Huh. It seems obvious now you explain it, but I never thought about it that way (as a short sighted, average height woman). Thanks for clarifying.
My roomba changed my life. Having one of those is essential now with 2 dogs.
Oh hell yes.
I work from home, in the basement. Getting a roomba meant I didn’t have to vacuum, but I did have to pick stuff up off the floor.
So now one 15 minute break is tidying and starting the vacuum. The next is cleaning the vacuum out and organizing dishes, while a third is doing the dishes and sometimes minor dinner prep.
My wife gets to come home to a clean house and I get to do it all on the clock so it’s done when I’m done with work. Total life changer.
TRUTH. It still gets you off your ass to make sure the floor is tidy and ready and puts me in the mood to do other general cleaning.
Am I the only one who doesn’t mind vacuuming? I’m in a 1 bdrm apartment so maybe thats why, but it’s by far my “favourite” chore.
Some people surely do like it. I personally can’t stand it. I’d rather do dishes or laundry
Yes! You’ll see that other parts of the house look dirty and just dust a little, put a few things away, organize…
It’s surprisingly effective to have a little robot buddy!
My wife really likes the beach, but I hate the sand and I find laying flat in a towel very uncomfortable.
This thing fits in my backpack and folds out to a very comfy air filled bed. It does lose some air over time, I expect to re-fill it every 2 hours or so, but filling it is just a matter of catching some air by moving the Lamzac around. It only takes a couple of seconds and doesn’t require a pump or anything.
Got a dishwasher after I bought my house and it is incredible.
Also got one of those fancy self-scooping litter boxes which is great.
Got my yard fenced in too after I broke my ankle/leg walking my dog and had to have surgery. Now I can just let the dogs out whenever and not have to worry about them running off or me breaking my bones.
Which litterbox did you get? A brand would be appreciated.
I got the PetSafe Scoop Free litter box. It’s expensive, as is the refill litter, but it’s so good.
I looked into litter box robots and decided to try a low-tech solution first. I got an Arm & Hammer sifting litter box for under $20.
Basically, you dump the whole litter box into an equal sized sifter, then lift the sifter and give it a little shake, then dump the waste.
I can completely clean each litter box in 10-15 seconds. It’s not fully automatic, but I have no need for a robot anymore.
Not my comment, but we have a Litter Robot 3 and we love it. Cats like it as the box is always clean, filter does a good job of keeping the smells down… And its easy to repair…
Next up, doggy door.
I’m hesitant with those because I have a gang of crafty raccoons hanging around. The 3 little shits cause so many problems and I don’t wanna wake up to raccoons in my house.
Locking dog doors are available that are opened by a tag on the collar or by your dogs microchip if your dog is chipped. Racoons won’t get in unless they steal your dogs’ collar.
Fair enough.
Money, makes life easier (as in surplus to your immeadete needs)
I was always frugal and started investing small amounts in the stock market when I was 19 , started reading the financial news when i was 18 and never stopped doing both. Still invest my surplus income now (still live a frugal life) and still read.
Quit work at 35, been mortgage free for decades and am 58 now. Allows me to live where I want, which is a quiet small rural town well away from everyone.
A roomba. (Long time ago though. Not sure I’d get one of the new models.)
Linux.
standing ovation
My god you people are annoying.
Every single goddamn thread
Linux got me a job later on in life. Made my life a breeze honestly.
I know most people will talk about how Linux/Windows/Mac but one of the not often talked about benefits to learning an OS really well is that it can lead into a high paying job. And Linux allows you to see under the hood as deep as you want…so more likely.
Maybe not Linux per se, but certainly learning how to write scripts and other technical stuff, to automate boring tasks or alert me of things, or writing applications to do things I need, has been a massive time saver - but also a time waster as I enjoy it, and probably spend longer on these things than the amount of time they’ve saved.
And as footnote, it’s always easier to do this stuff on Linux than Windows… plus you can stick things on a Pi so it’s cheap and quiet.
Scripting is the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in real life. Wave your hand over the script and poof, a job is done.
I automated so much at my last job I usually never “worked” more than a half hour a day. I am not a programmer, but I slowly learned enough Excel functions and VBA, then simple batch files and some AutoHotkey. Since it was only stuff for my job I needed to learn to program for, it took much less time than learning to program for any situation. Also much of your work is going to be relatively the same as many others’ work, so there is a lot of code out there you can lift from and tweak until you learn to build it from scratch.
🙄
😆
(I wasn’t really sure if I was going to be upvoted for that answer… Really, though. The whole culture and philosophy also influenced me. And gave me a lot over the years. I think it’s alright fulfilling the stereotype every now and then.)
Solitude.
I appear to have had extraordinarily bad luck in my life, as nearly every significant friend or lover or family I’ve ever had is consistently some.combination of abusive, exploitative, duplicitous, violent, criminal, hypocrite, never willing to hear my side of any story.
Been by myself with a new phone number in a new state for some months now and I’ve never been less stressed out, never felt less burdened, never felt more free.
Took me 35 years to figure out… wait, what if I did what I wanted to do, enjoyed things because I enjoyed them instead of pretending to like some other thing because someone else does, what if I stopped bending over backwards to solve everyone else’s problems when they usually just go out of their way to cause more problems for me, and never give anything meaningful back, and in fact usually blame me for things I have no control over, and then spread unfounded rumors about me due to their own massive neuroticism and guilt complexes?
I am quite happy now. I’ve never needed much to be happy, and nearly no one who has ever claimed to care about me has ever once been able to handle my honest opinions about what they have put me through.
Its been astounding to realize that actually, I make friends quite easily and get along with most people I meet great, whilst everyone I used to know has spent decades convincing me I am an unlikeable asshole who is merely to be tolerated.
I am going through setting strict boundaries and getting those people out of my life right now, so glad you managed the same!
Well, the final straw was when a number of them made me homeless, and the rest were either too busy or too emotionally burdened to help right now.
So after losing all my possessions, losing my job, being homeless for nearly a year, getting the shit kicked out of me regularly by fentanyl addicts uh… well, I should not have survived.
But despite nearly being killed more times than I can count, being held hostage by madman (who the police held for 30 days and then let loose), and witnessing a number of people I’d met along the way die…
It was not exactly easy.
But, by basically dumb luck, I survived.
And, being alive, having not only hit rock bottom, but having been dragged and kicked along its jagged ground… well, now I am free.
It is only after you lose everything, that you are free to do anything.
And for me, that means not having to deal with anyone while I do a whole lot of PT on disability.
Also, I now have a great deal of self confidence, as I am 100% certain any of those dumbfucks would have died going through a tenth of what I went through, yet I persist.
What is pt?
Also, amazing story and glad that you’re doing better
PT stands for “physical therapy.” They’re trying to improve or regain mobility, likely lost due to injury.
Physical Therapy.
Whole lot of my tendons and muscles got torn, shifted into the wrong places and misused as I had to keep moving with the muscles that were not completely fucked, bones broken, etc.
I still can’t really walk for long periods of time without massive pain, but it is slowly getting better.
Thanks for the well wishes =)
Finally setup up my smart home. Lights coming on at dusk across my whole house with varying levels of brightness, from nightlight to lighting up the living room. Shutting down everything in my house and arming my security system all with one phrase. Temp automatically adjusting throughout the day/night for better energy savings. It really just made life a little easier in multiple ways. Especially once you realize there are smart IR blasters.
Using smart lights as an alarm clock is a game changer. Fades on 10 minutes before my alarm, and lets me wake up slowly and drift in and out of sleep during that interim period. Only occasionally do I go all the way until my audio alarm, and this way is way more pleasant to wake up to.
My Hue system is probably one of the best things I ever bought.
I live alone, in a suburb north of Stockholm, so during winters it get really damned depressing to leave the office after sunset, and then get home and open the front door to a dark hole.
Being able to turn some lights on before I open the door has made wonders for my mental health, it makes it feel as if there is someone at home taking care of it and waiting for you to come home.
Then in the mornings, using the lights in my bedroom as an alarmclock in combination with my phone makes me get up far quicker.
And when I have guests over I can set the mood and make my apartment look cool.
Did - Lived abroad. Cheap, fun, good healthcare/dental, great new foods
Acquired - electric toothbrush, immediate halt of dental decay
Roomba.
20lb blanket. Better sleep means better everything!
The ones I’ve tried are always too warm. Anybody have advice for cooler ones?
I just run my AC.
This and a proper height pillow for your sleep position
I sleep on my side and needed a thicker pillow to better align my neck for example
Yeah my pillows are too thick.
Two* empty cardboard boxes. One is roughly the width and length of my desktop tower; another is ~1/3 of the size of the first.
My desk used to have two drawers, right below the surface top. I was always hitting those bloody drawers with my thigh. Eventually I had enough, unscrewed them, and threw them away.
…ok, but what about the stuff that I stored there? Inside the big box, that is now over my desktop tower. The smaller one and its lid became divisions for the bigger one. It’s organised, within the reach of my hands, and far from my thigh.
*actually three. One of my cats saw it on my chair, as I was organising the stuff here, and went into “if it sits, I fits, I call dibs” mode. It’s in my living room now.