The nor'wester just blew one of my potplants out of its pot, how's the weather at your place?

I disobeyed the "no cameras in changing room" signs to get this photo of my shoulder after swimming 40 laps of mostly backstroke, which is less than I could. The other side gets a mild mark like you expect from tight clothing but not like this. And of course it can't fully heal between weekly swim sessions so gets worse each time. This shoulder is wonky so could be technique involved but that won't change soon, so what can I do with the togs? Add 1cm or 1inch ease at top of shoulder? Tighten at top of shoulder? (That seems opposite of helpful but fit can be counterintuitive sometimes...) Line with something soft like flanelette? Wear another layer underneath? (A bandaid just means the abrasion shifts to a slightly different spot.) Buy a different style and if so what? (Would prefer not as most togs are black or neon blah but would also prefer not to be sandpapered to death.) Give up swimming forever? (Wouldn't be devastated tbh but it is good for my back and shoulder muscles so I guess I shouldn't use this as an excuse.) #swimming #sewing

Sometimes real-time news is the worst. You get an article in the afternoon where (let's say hypothetically) a school principal says that the govt's school lunch programme gave them mouldy lunches. Then that evening you get an article where a politician blames the principal. Then next day you get an article where the principal says that's kind of rude. Then in the afternoon you get an article where the food safety folk say actually the school screwed up. Then in the evening you get an article where the principal says wtf mate you watched the footage with us that shows we didn't do that. Just drip-feeding the revelations which means anyone who isn't chronically refreshing the news (... 👀 ) gets a single point of view in the whole sordid saga. Can the journalists not just take a pause before basically liveblogging every individual new "he says" and "she says", and instead talk to everyone involved, maybe even (can you imagine) take a look at that footage themselves, and compile the full story all in one go? (Sigh. I know they can't, because capitalism.)

RNZ asks "Why do we all earn close to the minimum wage?" but they only asked economists so they didn't get to the obvious answer that billionaires are hoarding all the money. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/580462/why-are-we-all-paid-close-to-minimum-wage

Some years ago I bought a "butterfly in a jar" toy. It's two thin plastic butterfly wings(*) taped to a near-invisible wire attached to a battery pack which has electronics coded so whenever they detect sound/vibration they put electricity through the wire and the butterfly flutters in the jar. 🦋 The idea is cute except for the butterfly fluttering against the sides of the glass jar sounds absolutely frantic and then when it stops, it lies at the bottom of the jar, giving a last couple of slow dejected flaps of its wings before giving up in despair. 🥹 Also it reacts to *every* little sound, oh my goodness it just never stops. So at some point I turned it off, thinking it'd be cool to learn how to do enough electronics to convert it into solar-powered instead, so it'd flutter in the sunlight but you could put a cover over it when you wanted to shut it up. 😅 I never learned enough electronics. (Electronics are fiddly!) Over the years the butterfly faded, the jar fogged up, and the batteries corroded. It sat in a corner for years. Today, still feeling very ambivalent about "Cute! But anthropomorphically horrifying!" I was just resigning myself to throwing it out when I realised the fogging was just a film of dust inside the jar easily wiped off, and a bit of vinegar dealt with enough corrosion in the battery leads to make it work again, and the faded wings could be replaced with the ones from a paper butterfly I got as a souvenir from a restaurant we had a family dinner at. So now I have an as-new Terrified Butterfly Endlessly Seeking Freedom toy. Thumbs-up emoji???