Tag: qotd

Photo Talk Thursday: The 90s Farm Legends (Tabby & DJ)

Andy Young5 Comments

Welcome to the very first Photo Talk Thursday, where I dig into the archives of my Google Photos to unearth real memories, questionable decisions, and the companion animals who ruled my life before the digital camera was even a thing. Indeed, Photo Talk Thursday is all about showcasing these treasured moments and memories.

Today, we go back to the 1990s on the farm with the original two family legends. Both lived to the grand old age of 17, and both possessed zero respect for rules, as many stories from Thursday’s Photo Talk series reveal.

1. Tabby: The Farm Queen (and Budgie Serial Killer)

Tabby was our cat from Peterborough, and our first real family pet. Looking back, memories like these stand out for every Photo Talk Thursday post.

She had thousands of fields to roam across the farm, living the ultimate feline dream. She’d spend all day patrolling her territory, but no matter how far she wandered, she always trekked back every single night to sleep on the end of my bed.

She was an absolute ruler, though she did leave my parents with a cold-blooded crime scene to clean up when she managed to eliminate the neighbour’s budgies. (Given that I am currently held hostage in my own flat by two feathered overlords named Blobette and Mojo, I appreciate the historical irony).

Tabby died peacefully of natural causes out in the garden after 17 glorious years. Tabby was awesome, just like many tales told on Photo Thursday Talk adventures.

2. DJ: The Beach-Eating, Farm-Hopping Sheepdog

DJ was our sheepdog—a big, short-haired, black-and-white force of nature. We got him as a puppy from the folks who owned the farm before my parents. You’ll see stories like this one often on Thursday Photo Talk features.

DJ had two primary hobbies in life:

  1. Visiting his mates: We’d regularly lose track of him, only to find him a mile down the road at the neighbouring farm, sitting inside the pen hanging out with their farm dogs like he was popping to the pub.
  2. Eating the beach: When we took him to Colwyn bay beach, he would merrily consume mass quantities of sand and jellyfish. The next morning, we’d walk downstairs to find half the Welsh coastline deposited across the kitchen floor.

He was a good, loyal dog who lived for farm freedom. I managed to find this photo from late 2004 of me giving him water on the farm—a great memory of a truly legendary dog. In summary, these kinds of stories are at the heart of every Photo Talk Thursday post I share.

Question for the Comments:

Did you grow up with a farm pet or a childhood companion who had an absolutely absurd habit? Drop their name and their weirdest trick in the comments to join the Photo Talk Thursday conversation!

Question of the Day: Why Can Nobody Give a Straight Answer Anymore?

Andy Young5 Comments

Is there anything more head-bangingly frustrating than trying to extract a simple, straight answer out of someone, only to get a bucket of absolute riddle-rubbish in return?

You ask a basic “yes or no” or “what is actually going on?”, and instead you get slurred mumbling, vague waffle, or a ten-minute run around that leaves you knowing significantly less than before you asked. It’s like people actively train to avoid making sense.

What really pisses me off is when someone rambles in total circles, hands you half a sentence, and then acts like you’re the thick one for asking what the hell they’re talking about.

So, today’s question for the comments:

When it comes to useless communication, what really angers you off the most?

Is it the cryptic puzzle-masters, the mumblers, or the people who speak for five minutes straight without actually saying anything at all? Drop your rants below.

Question of the Day: The 1% Battery

Andy Young9 Comments
close up shot of black and yellow batteries

It’s Friday. The week is done, the battery is flashing red, and the coffee has officially stopped working.

We all have that one highly specific coping mechanism we fall back on when the brain refuses to process anything more complex than a loading screen. Mine usually involves surrendering to gravity on the sofa, shutting out the world, and watching strangers play video games on YouTube so I don’t have a seizure.

So, what is yours? When your battery hits 1%, what is your ultimate, zero-effort survival tactic?

Drop it in the comments. I need to know I’m not the only one.

QotD: Black Ops

Andy Young4 Comments
rustic padlocked door with weathered texture

What is a completely mundane, everyday task that you approach with the tactical intensity of a military black-ops mission?

Here is mine: During the daylight hours, I am a perfectly reasonable member of society. The windows are open, the air flows, and I exist in a state of relative, breezy normalcy. But the absolute second the sun starts to dip below the horizon? My brain flips a switch, the triggers fire up, and securing this flat becomes a high-stakes tactical mission. PTSD and FND attacks occur almost nightly unless I secure the flat.

To be fair, the area I live in isn’t exactly a gated utopia—as anyone who read the saga of the crackhead porch pirates will remember. So, when dusk hits, the perimeter gets sealed. We are talking vibration sensors on the windows, blackout blinds drawn tight across the front, front door sensors armed, and triple locks fully engaged. I’m currently plotting to add an exterior motion sensor or a Ring doorbell just to get early-warning perimeter breach alerts. And if anyone actually makes it past the electronics, they still have to face the ultimate deterrent: two highly trained attack Rottweilers cleverly disguised as pet budgies.

The only people officially cleared to breach the airlock after dark are the care staff. Fortunately, they have the code to the key safe outside and gracefully humor my intense evening weirdness as they let themselves in. They understand that once the sun goes down, this isn’t just a flat in a residential block anymore; it’s a heavily monitored fortress.

Drop your highly unnecessary tactical routines in the comments below, so we can compare notes and figure out who is best equipped to survive a zombie apocalypse, or at least a rogue Amazon delivery driver.

The Ghost of Presents Past and Unconscious Cinema

Andy Young9 Comments
Sleep me!

I have learned two very important lessons over the last 24 hours. One of those lessons came from reflecting on the Ghost of Presents Past.

First, talking about world leaders and ballistic missile shields is a fantastic way to watch your follower count immediately drop. Apparently, my geopolitical musings aren’t for everyone. Note to self: stick to complaining about supermarket shrinkflation and my increasingly demanding pet birds. On a lighter note, thinking about the Past Ghost of Presents still makes me chuckle.

Second, ‘Past Me’ is an absolute legend. On a whim today, feeling a bit restless, I checked an old hiding spot and miraculously found a forgotten emergency reserve of exactly what I needed to completely check out for a bit. It was as if the spirit of the Ghost related to Presents Past had set it there for me. I’ll leave the exact details a mystery, but sometimes the universe just throws you a bone.

The sleep was much needed, largely because I was up until 2 AM last night actively avoiding it. My brain had decided to serve up some absolutely horrendous nightmares the night before, so I was treating my own bed like a trap. It made me realize how utterly flawed the human sleep system is. We just close our eyes, cross our fingers, and hope our subconscious doesn’t decide to direct a psychological horror movie while we are paralyzed in the dark. By the way, nightmares could easily be the work of some Ghost from Presents Past haunting our minds.

Which leads me to today’s question. Taking inspiration from the idea of visiting dreams, much like a Ghost of Presents Past would revisit memories, what genre would you choose?

Question of the Day: If you could select the genre of your dreams every night, just like picking a movie on Netflix, what genre are you watching? Give me your ideal sleep-cinema categories in the comments.

Comedy. I want to wake up laughing for a change! Who knows, maybe laughter was a gift from my own Ghost of Past Presents.

QOTD: What’s a minor inconvenience that completely ruins your mood?

Andy Young6 Comments
crack head

Porch pirates. Specifically, the local crackheads who treat the front of my building like a free, collection point.

If a parcel gets left outside the main entrance for even ten seconds, they materialize out of nowhere like scruffy, opportunistic rats, grab the box, and scurry straight back to whatever den they crawled out of. I’ve lost more parcels over the last few years than I care to count.

The real kicker isn’t just the thieves, though—it’s the endless cycle with Amazon. You leave explicit instructions: Do NOT leave parcels in plain view on the street. But because they swap delivery drivers every single day, you are forever trapped in a groundhog-day battle of re-explaining basic geography to a fresh driver who thinks a communal doorstep counts as “a secure location.”

It turns a simple delivery into a high-stakes, time-sensitive covert operation. If you aren’t standing at the door the microsecond the van pulls up, you’re just funding someone else’s habits.

QOTD My Unique Morning Routine: Managing Life Post-Strokes

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Tell us about your morning routine.

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When people ask about a morning routine, they usually expect a speech about productivity, 5 AM alarms, and commuting. If I leave out the details, it sounds like I’m just living a life of leisure—which isn’t quite the reality.

Thanks to a past stroke and a few persistent neurological complications, standard work isn’t on the cards for me. My days involve a team of carers calling in four times a day to keep the gears turning. So, my “routine” isn’t built around a 9-to-5 hustle; it’s built around managing energy, pacing myself, and structuring my day into four-hour chunks between medication calls.

Here is what a realistic morning actually looks like:

  1. The Wake-Up: I wake up at 7:00 AM every day. It takes me a while to get going and make my way to the kitchen.
  2. The Drink Run: I get the coffee machine going, and while that’s brewing, I make a cup of tea. Because I use a walking stick in one hand, I take them through to the lounge one at a time.
  3. The Morning Chat: By the time the drinks are through, the birds have noticed I’m awake, so we have a quick chat before I officially open up the lounge for business.
  4. The Four-Hour Timer: I move to the sofa and fire up a background stream (usually someone trying not to die in Project Zomboid). Shortly after, the first carer arrives for morning medication—and as soon as they leave, my four-hour timer starts until the next call.

It’s a bit nyeh but it works.

QotD Moments That Make You Feel Truly Alive

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What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

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A moment in my life that made me feel alive would have to be the birth of my kids. Nothing can prepare you for the moment you come face to face with your freshly born child. It is such a natural, primal moment to happen. I say moment but I spent the first few years in sheer wonder that this child had seemingly just appeared and I was now partially responsible for.

I can still remember the first night back, the three of us just hugging and existing. Well, in my mind that was a moment when I felt truly alive.

Prior to that, when I was 13-14 years old I went to st Lucia with my parents. They were doing some consultancy work over there and brought me and my brother along. It was a brutal 12 hour flight in first class. When we got there, the person my parents were carrying out some work for took us to a small beach bar called Spinnakers. It was pitch black. I had never been in such a place with such little light pollution.

I remember standing on the beach and just looking up for the first time since we arrived. I was speechless. Well. I emitted an ‘oh’ sound. You could see everything. The sky was just filled full of stars, you could see the milky way, it was crazy. At that moment you felt alive but also so, so small in comparison to what you were viewing. Somehow I felt connected to everything. Its a hard one to explain, probably because I don’t have anything else more significant but to me it was.

They also made amazing banana milkshakes with freshly grown bananas from the plantations near by. We went a few times over the years, staying in various town houses not hotels and mixing with the locals.

So, what thing or event has made you feel alive?

A sleeping newborn baby wrapped in a white blanket, wearing a light blue polka dot outfit and a white hat.
A man resting on a sofa while holding a sleeping baby, both appear relaxed in a cozy indoor setting.
Scenic view of Cap Estate in St. Lucia, featuring lush green hills, a sandy beach, and clear blue waters, with flowering plants in the foreground.

QotD Do better. Be better.

Andy Young2 Comments
Bad people

What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

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Empathy and medication.

One thing I wish I had started doing earlier in life would have to be learning empathy. I was a terrible person until i started to get older and realised that the world didn’t revolve around me. I was a pure narcissist, enjoying playing people against each other, telling tales of grandeur, and various other things that bad people do.

It took me a long time and I really struggled to have empathy towards other people. Whether that is a result of the child abuse or my yet to be diagnosed personality disorders I don’t know. I’m not making excuses. In 2011, after a dramatic event, I was medicated quite heavily which really helped even me out. I still feel so guilty for the people I have hurt in my life. If I had learned the art of empathy earlier then I think things would have turned out differently.

Its weird. I fantasize about going back in time and doing everything again, just with that little better understanding and the medication, then I get upset when I can’t. I even dream about it and wake up in a panic. I’m aware that this is a heavy post but I’m being honest. I genuinely feel remorse for the ick head I was and can only strive, which I do daily, to be a better person.

Bad people doing good things.

QotD Karma Police

Andy Young3 Comments
Karma meme

Do you believe in karma?

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Karma meme

I wholeheartedly believe in karma. What comes around goes around I believe the saying is. But. Big but. There are rules. You can’t be nice to just gain karma, that would be greedy and exploiting the karma system. So no “Oh I’ll be nice so I can get good karma”. It needs to be recognised in hindsight. “Oh I won the lottery, I must of done something good”.

I have a lot of weird superstitions. I can’t stand on certain drains, I do the “If I beat this game then x will happen”. I have no idea why I do that but it can be annoying sometimes!

I used to do it all the time as a kid. Especially playing pool. If I were to pot a certain ball then I would win whatever football match I was playing. Oddly enough by pure coincidence, it worked every now and again.

Do you have any weird rules for karma? or is it just me. Being weird. As usual.