My cousin tried to make divinity, the Southern candy, for Christmas. She had a problem, so she called my aunt. "It said to cook to the soft ball stage and I did but--" *thunk* goes the pan on the counter "--now I can't get it out?"

She'd cooked the entire thing until it made one soft ball.

That's almost exactly what we do for Christmas eve too, except we usually have deli meat & rolls to make little sandwiches for an entree!

Turkey dinner for Christmas though...

I think most people can taste aspartame but a lot of the other ones, apparently not? Or so I'm told.

They must have mistyped their emails bc Google deliberately ignores the periods & wouldn't have let them make that account!

You can also do yourusername+Bluesky & Google will ignore everything after the plus & send it to you anyway. Can be a fun way to figure out who's selling their contact list...

I can taste all the sweeteners--stevia, monkfruit, Splenda, etc--and apparently that's just a supertaster thing? But I can also see particular sensitivities to one or another

SO AWFUL

They're also responsible for one of the best emails I've ever received, when the college office sent out a plea for sightings of Professor Biscuit while conveniently forgetting to mention that he was a cat...(I won't comment on how often a similar email might have gone out about human Professors...)

😱

(Will you have any ability to buy a set of needles where you're going?)

You say that, but I bought some narrow stripe twin sheets where somehow the stripe goes ACROSS the bed....

...about healing from the trauma that somehow also was my niche OTP in that fandom, even though, again, I was anon and they had no way to know it (the fic I wrote, IIRC, did not even have one half of the OTP in it).

I've got blanket permissions on my profile for a reason :)

Glad I could share the news!!

If you have a local craft fair, you can probably find local artists selling things in this style too! Or if you know the website of a local craft fair, they might link out to the artists' own shops.

The necklace style is a pendant (one item on a chain). This particular pendant looks like a single piece of polished (but not cut like a diamond) stone, often called a "cabochon". An Etsy search for "cabochon pendant" should turn up good options, with the usual caveats about resellers on Etsy.