Hard to make any real conclusions or make any specific helpful recommendations/observations without making a lot of assumptions. If I were going to, though, I would say that it sounds like you’ve taken on too much and you’re burned/burning out. And it might be worth a little introspection to try and prioritize what’s important to you, then trim expenses and activities if there are any that can be cut.

When I see myself headed towards burn out, that’s what’s worked for me. Granted, this is still a lot of work and can take a bit of time and effort to get to a better place in life.

Sometimes there are low hanging fruit you can tackle. For example, some nights we just have cereal for dinner. Not the most nutritious thing, but easy to fix, easy to clean up (relatively speaking). Maybe it only amounts to 15 less minutes of work that night, but 15 less minutes of work goes a long way when you’re exhausted. Also, the kids are taught to help out with basic stuff like putting away toys, making beds, and even feeding the pets.

Another low hanging fruit is simply learning to say no (to yourself and others). If you’re the type that’s overwhelmed because you can’t help but take on more or you just can’t find yourself being content and enjoying the moment, then you’ve gotta put the work in there, realize you can’t keep it going or that it’s simply not worth it. Easy to say, I know.

A bit of an anecdote: A buddy of mine ended up having a health scare and basically cut back at work to the point where he qualified for various forms of government assistance. I know he wasn’t exactly proud of it, but it kept food on the table and a roof over his and the kids’ heads, and gave him the time and space to focus on his health and be more present for the kids.

I did that once and woke up in Gaffney, South Carolina with a house wren stuck under my coat.

Lemmy is such a negative place and I guess you’re part of that so yay you.

I first joined and started using Lemmy probably a couple months before you.

Back then, when anyone was being uncivil, needlessly hostile, rude, or aggressive, there was a very high likelihood that other users would call it out quickly. Many, many wonderful folks did it on my behalf multiple times and that’s one of the big reasons I stuck around, because that’s cool as hell if you ask me. I’m here to enjoy myself and have a little fun, not to be verbally abused because some problematic person lacks reading comprehension or prefers to make wild assumptions based on very limited information.

I won’t say there’s been a recent uptick in hostility, unless your definition of lately is a lot more lenient than my own. However, I will say that with each new outrage from Reddit comes an influx of new users and with each new influx, it’s only a short period of time before I notice things are suddenly a bit less nice, friendly, and casual.

Sadly, things are at the point now where I rarely bother to read any responses, replies, or messages in my inbox. I usually just go in there to click “mark as read” to clear the notifications without reading them and move on. There’s just too much negativity directed my way, often super randomly to the most innocuous stuff, or random users I can’t recall ever interacting with who somehow seem to have a chip on their shoulder. It’s actually kind of bizarre at times. Regardless, for my style of participation, which is mostly parodying old people facebook and sharing random anecdotes, feeling like I need to ignore replies is still okay, I guess.

Anyway, glad I’m not the only one who has noticed the shift. Wish there were an easy button to get things back to the welcoming place Lemmy used to be.

If the story is to be believed, Jesus was conceived via parthenogenesis (aka immaculate conception aka unfertilized egg). This means Jesus had only X chromosomes and yet presented as male. Jesus was definitely somewhere on the line of intersex, transgender, non-binary, et. al.

My experience has been starkly different from Sterile_Techniques and I’m also living in what might be termed as “the middle of Ya’ll Quaeda” USA. So, it’s interesting to hear that there’s such a big difference in opinion / understanding on this topic.

For sure, 20 - 25 years ago it seemed like almost nobody had heard of it, and whenever someone said they were allergic to meat because of a tick bite, there was a lot of skepticism and denial.

However, these days, pretty much everybody knows someone who has this allergy, and that’s no exaggeration. Even the most backwoods, anti-science, do my own thing, fuck your feelings kind of people are telling others to check themselves for ticks and/or taking steps to keep ticks off them because they’re aware of all the risks from tick bites. Now, they might be claiming that it’s government bio-warfare, related to 5G and/or covid, or some other unnecessarily contrarian bullshit, but they do take it seriously from what I’ve experienced.

Also, the good news is (or bad news I guess depending on your perspective) is that a lot of people seem to experience improvement of symptoms in time, so it’s not necessarily a permanent thing for everybody. I don’t know if it’s just that some people continue to test the limits and end up inadvertently putting themselves through exposure therapy or if the immune response itself just naturally wanes over time, but several people I know who’ve had this for 5 - 10+ years say they can usually get away with a small amount of mammal meat, like maybe a hotdog now and then at a minimum, even though a small bite would have caused them a lot of trouble when they first developed the allergy.

The single, simple answer is the one that you don’t want to hear: There is no clean split. Bats are a large and diverse group of flying mammals just like birds are a large and diverse group of flying dinosaurs.

The simplest answer I can come up with (because it’s actually a very complicated and convoluted topic that I wouldn’t truly do just anyway) is: Most birds can fly because they are an offshoot of one group of dinosaurs (avian dinosaurs) that survived the last great extinction when their non-flying non-avian dinosaur relatives did not. Basically the ones that couldn’t fly mostly went extinct. And mammals mostly don’t fly, which is possibly because several groups of vertebrates beat them to it and essentially filled all the niches that would have been available to flying animals, kind of blocking that path for them.

Obviously that’s nowhere near the full story. There are lots of other factors at play, like some of the peculiarities of mammalian and dinosaur physiology that made one group better suited to flight than the other, ramifications of the great extinction that killed non-avian dinosaurs as well as most large animals in general and whole swaths of other species, and so on.