“Why I Hate Straight Men,” A Thread By Me. Congrats, You Assholes. You Just Scared Me To Fucking

Cologne Cathedral, Germany. Construction began in 1248, was halted around 1560,  restarted in 1814 and was completed to its original medieval plan in 1880. The builders in the 14th century created a pastel light effect that remained unique among medieval churches. It is preserved in the cathedral choir to this day. The oldest window dates back to the 13th century, the most recent window was created in 2007 by Gerhard Richter. Source

Click here to support Rebuild-TX with Jim Mcingvale organized by Jim Mcingvale

Jim "Mattress Mack" Mcingvale has established Rebuild-TX, a grassroots effort that offers assistance to Texans who have been affected by flooding and other damages to their homes related to Hurricane Harvey. Rebuild-TX provides volunteers who will assist affected Texans in rebuilding their homes...

This guy is a living saint. Without being asked, he turned his furniture stores into shelters for people who were flooded out of their homes by Hurricane Harvey. His employees used his delivery trucks to drive through flooding neighborhoods, rescue people, and take them to the stores. He set up showers, gave people clothing, and allowed them to rest on his showroom furniture–and it’s not cheap stuff, either. He’s also been feeding them three meals a day. On his own dime!

When the city of Houston and the Red Cross finally organized enough to open up some official shelters, some of the people sheltering in Gallery Furniture stores moved there and Mack was able to bring even more hurricane evacuees into his stores to shelter. He’s also sheltering members of the National Guard who have arrived to help.

Now he’s collecting donations–cash, cleaning supplies, and volunteered time–to help people clean out their homes.

A petition is going around on change.org to make August 26 Mattress Mack Day in Houston. Frankly, I think they should name a street after him. This isn’t the first time Mack has stepped up to support his community–and even people outside his community. He sheltered Katrina victims in 2005. Almost every year he buys animals at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which provides college scholarships to high school students. He gives and gives and gives, and has done so for the 35 years that he’s been doing business in Houston. Now he’s asking the community to dig deep and help him give a little more.

If you’ve been thinking about supporting the people in the Houston area, this would be an excellent place to give your time or money. I will definitely be making a donation to Mattress Mack, and I’ll probably stop by Gallery Furniture on my next trip back to Texas.

I totally understand if you can’t afford to donate, or if you just don’t wish to do so, but please reblog and share! I’d like to see him reach his goal.

Stay down, or I’ll kill you.  

Something to make you smile

mom, do you have any favourite recipes?

Hello, dear! 💛🍯I’m gonna recite one of my favorite kinds of cookie recipes to make!They’re creamy, delicious, fluffy, chocolatey cookies! 🍪

💛 Ingredients 💛~ – ~🍪 2 cups flour 🍪 ½ tablespoon of baking soda🍪 ½ teaspoon of salt 🍪 ¾ cup of melted butter🍪 1 cup of brown sugar 🍪 ½ cup of honey *my special ingredient*!🍪 ½ cup white sugar🍪 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract 🍪 1 egg🍪 1 egg yolk 🍪 2 cups of chocolate chips *or more if you like!*~ – ~

💛 Directions 💛~ – ~🍪 Preheat oven to 325° F, grease cookie sheets🍪 In a separate bowl, sift the flour, baking soda, and salt together, and set it aside 🍪 In another bowl, cream the melted butter, brown sugar, and white sugar 🍪 Beat/whisk in vanilla, egg, and egg yolk into the same bowl until mixture is light and creamy🍪 Then, mix in the sifted ingredients until it is well blended🍪 Stir in chocolate chips using a spoon🍪 Drop cookie dough ¼ cup at a time onto prepared cookie sheets. Cookies should be about 3 inches apart🍪 Bake 15-17 minutes in the preheated oven, cool on baking trays for a few minutes before transferring the cookies elsewhere to further cool!!🍪 Finally, eat up!! Lots of yummy cookies for your tummy!! ~ – ~If you make these, please show me how they turn out!! I would love to see, dear! I’m probably going to make some soon, too!! 💛🍪💛

Last night my husband showed me a local Beaumont news story about a woman died in my hometown as she tried to stay afloat in the floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey. The little girl was rescued alive, but the mother was unresponsive. I shook my head. The next morning, I saw a post in the Facebook group for my high school senior class about the tragedy. Photos appeared in the comments and that’s when I fell apart: police had identified the woman who died as my friend Collette.

Articles about her death were published all over the country. The LA Times called her death “a true testament to a mother’s will.” The NY Times headlined her as “Drowning Mama.” I don’t mention these descriptions because they’re wrong, they’re all true, but because it felt strange to read about someone I knew described as a near-anonymous victim.

Many people in my senior class had trouble remembering her. They dug up old yearbook photos and confirmed she did indeed graduate with us at West Brook Senior High School. That’s understandable, you can’t know everyone you went to high school with. But I knew her, and I’d like to write down what I remember about her before she becomes another Facebook profile memorial.

I don’t remember how I met Collette. It must have been soon after I moved back to Texas, and we were friends from middle school until we graduated from high school. We ate lunch together when we had matching lunch periods, went to the movies, showed up at each other’s parties, had sleepovers and hung out at the mall. I can see her sitting on my couch, or my bedroom floor, chatting the night away about nothing in particular. One night, just for fun, I recorded our voices and played it back.

“Turn it off,” she said. “That conversation was boring the first time.”

One day I took a plastic frog to school and pretended to pick it up from the ground. I told her I’d caught a real frog and when I tried to show it to her, she backed away. I tossed it at her and she squealed and ran off. When she came back I admitted it was plastic and she gave me that smile and rolled her eyes. At lunch, I left the frog on my soda can while we went to the food line and when we came back, a group of kids were circling it. Thinking they were crushing a real frog, they smacked the can and spilled soda all over Collette’s food. She was very forgiving.

She was late for every movie. All of them. Not “missed the previews” late, not even “thirty minutes in” late. She would show up a full hour into every show. I usually let her pick the film and she’s the reason I saw Curly Sue and Threesome in the theater. Threesome was so bad, I leaned over near the end and whispered, “This is awful, let’s just go.”

She folded her arms and clenched her teeth. “I paid to see this movie,” she said, “and I’m gonna’ watch it.”

I didn’t argue with her, she’d paid full price to see half a movie. I sat back and watched Stephen Baldwin have an awkward sex scene because fair was fair.

People gave her a hard time about her weight. “You have such a pretty face, they tell me,” she said once. “You would be so pretty if you lost weight. That just, uch…” She didn’t need to put into words how vicious and useless it was to say things like that. Collette was tougher than the people who tried to define her by her body.

Collette and her mother were close. One year her mother rented a hotel room for her daughter’s birthday and invited a group of us to stay. We watched Single White Female and scared ourselves to death. There was cake and a sparkly chandelier from Party City and we stayed up too late and it was one of the best nights of my life. Collette loved parties.

Dooney and Burke handbags were a must-have among affluent girls at my high school. We weren’t affluent girls, but Collette’s mom gave her the money to buy one anyway. There was only one store that sold them at Parkdale Mall and they had a reputation for using saleswomen to intimidate teens into leaving the store. I didn’t want to shop in a store like that but she wanted me to go along so I went with her for support. She marched right up to the counter and picked out a purse without paying any attention to how the saleswomen were looking at her. Collette was fearless.

I tried to find pictures, but I haven’t yet. Pictures were physical back then. I did find the note she wrote me in our senior yearbook. It read:

Hi Georgia,

Well, it’s four years later and soon we’ll be off to college. I can’t believe we’re SENIORS. We’ve had a lot of fun over the years but it seems like we’re always busy. Good luck in college and the future. Have fun and remember you only live once.

Love,

Collette Sulcer

Ps. Stay in touch.

We didn’t. Every graduate in 1994 knew how hard it would be to stay in touch in a world that had stopped writing letters but hadn’t yet discovered cellphones, Facebook and e-mail. I went out of state and she went to Lamar. She became the kind of medical technician her co-workers can’t stop raving about. An entire hospital of medical professionals in Port Arthur, Texas is grieving her tonight.

When Facebook took off, we found each other again and I followed her life from a distance. She had a baby and I thought, “We’re both mothers now, look at us.” On August 27, I was working late and I saw a Facebook notification pop up that read, “Collette Sulcer has marked herself safe from Hurricane Harvey.”

“That’s nice,” I thought. She was in Beaumont, not Corpus or Houston. She was safe.

Except a few hours later, she wasn’t.

I’d been thinking about Collette a lot lately because I’ve been writing about her. I’ve often written about her, under different names and characters. She exemplified how to be a friend, and I admired her honesty, her positivity, her support and her compassion. Collette was someone I wished I could be more like.

I hope Jordyn reads this someday, when she’s older. I’d like her to know what her mother was like when she was young, that she was a hero who loved her more than her own life, but that she was also a person worth knowing who uplifted everybody who knew her. They deserved more time together.

DRAGONSTONE Artwork by Allen Douglas

The First Men and then the Andals both settled the rocky isles of Blackwater Bay, making themselves lords and living by piracy and fishing. The largest of these islands, dominated by the volcanic Dragonmont, would come to be known as Dragonstone.

Two hundred years before the Doom, the Freehold of Valyria sent an expedition to seize Dragonstone and make it the westernmost outpost of its vast empire. The citadel that they raised there to guard their new possession was shaped by Valyrian magic into an imposing structure impossible to create by any other means—with towers shaped like dragons, doorways that gaped like the mouths of dragons, and hundreds of gargoyles adorning the wall, forming a menagerie of fanciful beasts that bristled from the stone.

Twelve years prior to the Doom, Aenar Targaryen moved his kin, treasures, and dragons to Dragonstone after his maiden daughter, Daenys the Dreamer, foretold the destruction of Valyria. The Targaryens thus became the only dragonlords to survive both the Doom and the war-torn years called the Century of Blood that followed. Over that century, the Targaryens looked more to the east than to the west, however, busy with the various machinations and wars between the Free Cities in the aftermath of the Doom.

Buenas noches.

US SUICIDE PREVENTION HOTLINE IS CHANGING ITS NUMBER

Taking effect July 2022, the US Suicide Prevention Hotline will change from 800-273-8255 to the three digit code of 988. Especially with families and communities reeling from back to back tragedies, it is super important to share this information!

Repeat: Starting July 2022, the US Suicide Prevention Hotline will be 988

Need!!

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