on losing and finding

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sonnetsandswingouts https://sonnetsandswingouts.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “lost and found” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/628262219683135488/lost-and-found

Ugh, I remember that awful adrenaline hit of “wait…where’s my wallet?” and ever since that first time I’ve kept a slip of paper with my parents’ number and “in case of emergency” written on it tucked in with my license. Glad you got it back!

The last time I lost my wallet, or it got stolen, I’m not entirely sure how it left my possession, within ten minutes my bank card had been used at a liquor store and then declined at three convenience stores, and I never got any of the wallet back and that’s why I no longer have a passport card or any of the giftcards I’d had in there. We searched every trash can in the area and never found it. Filed a police report, the police got the guy’s face from the security camera on the liquor store, told me his name and approximate address, made me come back down into the city after I’d gone to bed that night hours later so I could file a statement that no, I did not know this person whose name they told me, so that they could go arrest him.

That was like two years ago, I never heard from them again and assume they never bothered arresting the guy.

Also the cops had me fill out a form so I could get my license replaced with the fee waived, but then they filled out their part of it incorrectly, so that it was not valid to get my license replaced. When they handed it to me, I looked at it and said “the checkmark’s in the wrong place, it says it was confiscated instead of stolen but it was stolen,” and the cop looked and said “ehh, it’s fine”. It wasn’t fine; the form was useless and I had to pay the fee and might as well never have filed a police report, but the DMV was 300 miles away from those cops and I knew they wouldn’t fix the form even if I did drive back there and ask them to, so.

So like, fuck cops, but also, I don’t have a lot of faith that putting a note in my wallet is going to get it returned to me any more surely than having my license with my address on it in there would.

The cop acted like I should be really upset that my personal information was so not-hard to come by but like this is 2020, it’s really easy to get doxxed. [added: also, you used to be able to just look in the phone book, it’s not like we haven’t always had directories??] I’m not super worried because if you just Google my wallet name, there are a shitload of other people with it who are either famous or historical. (Yesterday Mom told me how she’d just re-filed my probate file at the historical society, apparently I died with a contested will in 1890. There’s also a hip-hop producer and a scandalous politician. If I ever get a Wikipedia page it’ll have to have a disambiguation, which is hilarious. If you add in my middle name you get a TV character.) If you want to find me you’ve got to fill in my address or some other bit of information, and like, if you have that, you could probably find me regardless, so. I’m not that freaked-out and in this case it worked. It’s fine. If some terrible person wants to use this information to find me and do something horrible, that’s really on them because they’re a terrible person and me being harder to find isn’t going to stop them from being a terrible person. Like… at some point that’s really not about me at all, is it?

Of course I would feel differently if I were famous or notorious for some reason, but I will cross that bridge if I come to it.

baby lambert

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s-leary https://s-leary.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “chapter update” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/628325861531254784/chapter-update

Baby! Lambert! omg.

He has very large eyes, and very sharp teeth. And Geralt, who is about 23, has all of a sudden discovered that he’s got this super-fierce Dad Instinct, which is going to basically rule him for the rest of his life, so.

tidy-tidings: missouri-nationalist: Marriage is good and weddings are great but I hate modern...

weddings in fic, i fucking hate the concept of weddings, i am such a bitter crone, i should crawl back in my hole now

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tidy-tidings https://tidy-tidings.tumblr.com/post/183480969565/marriage-is-good-and-weddings-are-great-but-i-hate :

missouri-nationalist http://missouri-nationalist.tumblr.com/post/182624445984:

Marriage is good and weddings are great but I hate modern wedding culture. You don’t need to bankrupt yourself to have a nice wedding. Stop supporting the wedding industry, stop buying outrageously priced engagement rings, stop spending 10k on a dress you’ll only ever wear once.

Coming from a professional event planner - weddings are egregiously expensive because companies openly raise prices at the word “wedding.”

Pro Tip - Never drop the word wedding while planning if you don’t need to. Most things can be for “an event you’re planning.” This obviously doesn’t include things like the venue, DJ (who needs specific wedding songs), and the wedding dress company if you’re going that route versus just buying a dress.

For my wedding I got “discounted” cupcakes, flowers, decor, bridesmaids dresses, groomsman attire, and invitations. I did this by either searching for things that aren’t marketed for weddings or not telling the companies I was working with it was for a wedding. Because honestly, most of the time they don’t need to know why you’re ordering.

These companies target people planning their weddings and markup everything the second “wedding” is said. And it’s said often because people assume the services change exponentially for weddings. They absolutely do not.

The best example are the cupcakes I had for my wedding. I used a designer cupcake store in town instead of spending $1000 on a wedding cake. If you place a large order of cupcakes with a cake tree for display - it costs about $150 for 100 (which is what I did). When you order their “wedding” package - the price raised to a $700 base for 100 cupcakes. The only other perk includes a “tasting.” Forget that. Our tasting was buying a few cupcakes in flavors we thought we’d like and picked three. It cost maybe $20.

What these companies do is scummy and targets people who don’t have information about the event industry.

I will yell it from the rooftops until people realize there’s a better way.

just be aware, the reason places raise their rates for weddings

is because of all the cultural hype around weddings

and how people are now conditioned to be fucking insane about weddings

I work with photographers, I’ve shot weddings as a photographer, it is one hundred thousand times worse and higher-stress than any single other kind of event you can photograph, and believe me people are always shitty to photographers but weddings? fucking bonkers

I also do flowers. Mostly I do boring cheap-n-cheerful posies and bouquets to sell at the farmer’s market but we’ve done some weddings and oh my god no. That is so high-stress*.* Never even had a bad experience at one of those but we now only do DIY buckets– make yr own flower arrangements, here’s some buckets full of flowers and a handout of tips on how to make it nice, have at it and return our buckets if you remember to, thanks, bye. Not getting any closer than that!

If you are not telling the service that you’re having a wedding, then don’t act like it’s a wedding, don’t make four fucktillion custom substitutions, don’t demand all kinds of extra shit (it can’t be BLUE it has to be CERULEAN! I don’t want CRAB it has to be LOBSTER. The tablecloths have to be IRONED. I need ROSES not CARNATIONS), don’t be a fucking bridezilla. (Worse, don’t be a momzilla-of-the-bride, or whatever horrible relative who needs to impose their expectations and their vision on an event that’s not about them in any fucking way. Oh my god.)

So yeah, if you can be chill, have a chill wedding.

If you can’t be chill then those places have that markup for a fucking reason and they have earned every goddamned penny of it. If the words MY SPECIAL DAYYYYYY ever come out of your fucking mouth then you had BETTER be paying that fucking wedding surcharge.

Don’t be like this. My sister had a “family reunion” in a white dress and got very reasonable rates from the catering place, and acted perfectly normal to them, and it worked out fine.

Don’t order the standard package and then freak out when it doesn’t look like what you saw on a TV show once.

Am I a bitter old hag whose withered hand nobody’s ever taken in marriage? Sure. I’m also not in fucking debt over a party.