10x is right. We didn’t have pet insurance. My dog got hit by a car in September. Everything is good now, but the incident broke his leg and popped his eye out of socket. Between emergency surgery for his eye and orthopedic surgery to put a plate in his leg (the other two options were amputation or putting him down) we ended up spending just shy of $9,000 for all the procedures and follow ups. I also feel very similarly about having a responsibility to my pets health. We’re lucky we could afford the procedures, because it would have been very hard to put him down.
I just lost my 17 year old kid brother this year. He was the passenger in a car that got hit by a charter bus. He died on impact. I never got to say goodbye. I’ve lost grandparents and friends before, but I have never felt pain this intense before.
This is also the most alone I have ever felt. Even surrounded by my huge family I felt alone in my pain. I consider myself extremely lucky, I have an incredible wife and loving families from both of us, and yet the grief has left me feeling isolated.
One thing I have thought about a lot is an analogy someone shared with me. They said that when we lose a loved one, we are given a box. In that box, is a ball and a button. Every time that ball touches the button, we feel pain. When the loss happens, the ball fills the box and is constantly pressing the button. The pain seems inescapable. Over time, the ball gets slightly smaller. It still will press on the button, but maybe not as often. The pain doesn’t change and it is always there waiting to be triggered, but as time goes on it may happen less.
We carry that box for the rest of our lives I guess. I still don’t know if there will ever be a day I don’t miss my amazing brother so much it hurts.
I guess I don’t really have much advice for how to deal with the pain. But it has been helpful for me to read your and other's posts on here. Thank you.
I lost my grandpa the last year during the lockdown and the corona. I could not meet him, I could not be there just to say farewell. That analogy you described might be the best way as to how we bear the loss of our loved ones, the pain is always there, we just get used to it and feel less often.
But grief also teaches us to be kind and look after each other's. It is also helps a lot to connect with your lost one's friends and acquaintances! Our memories are scattered across the ones we know.
One of the Feb 29 bugs I saw this year was that when I logged on to Skype for Business Monday March 2nd, everyone in my company that had logged off their computers on Friday Feb 28th, had a message about being offline for anywhere between 20-40 days. It just didn't know how to handle that day.
He is working for Sky as a commentator at races. Doing the occasional TV commentary is a lot less time consuming, is a lot less stressful, and allows a lot more family time, than driving for the #1 F1 team, against arguably the best F1 driver off all time in Lewis Hamilton
I think there is something to it but I think being a driver, especially as Hamilton's teammate, is all-consuming and super stressful. I think now he can do what he wants when he wants without much pressure. He seems to enjoy the spotlight so that's what he does.
Kohl's also reprices many of their products on a daily basis. I used to be a repricer. I would walk through every night for hours changing the price labels on all the stands. That's why they have updated so many of their price labels to be electronic.
In many respects I agreed with the original comment you replied to, but something didn't quite sit right. I read the comment and thought that the commenter was obviously much more qualified to speak to the subject than I was, but I just felt that while he wasn't wrong, he wasn't completely right. You hit it right on the head.
Working in a Fortune 500 company it is amazing the kind of information we have available for "Powerful People". I also feel like more and more of that information is available to everyone, the difference is that "Powerful People" have the money and resources to pay teams to sift through, organize, and present the information in an actionable way. Companies, Powerful People, and Governments spend tons of resources on trying to understand the information. Data is cheap, understanding the data is extremely expensive.
Information is out there for the taking, but it is useless in the raw state it starts in.
I read an interesting story a few weeks ago about how the CIA has entire teams of cartographers whose job is to show data on information on maps in a way that tells a story. That is their full time job to work with researchers and analysts to create "pretty" representations of data that are informative and easy to digest.
I think data is only interesting because of the stories it tells. But picking a story out data can be time consuming and expensive and prone to errors. If WikiTribune enables experts and laypeople to collaborate in a productive way then I think it will be an amazing service.
I have lots of thoughts on all of this and am very very very interested to see where it goes. I really hope this is as great as it has the potential to be.
