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Cake day: September 5th, 2023

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  • Gonna have to go earlier than that; or at least very early gen-Xers. Wife and I (born 80 and 77, respectively) were paycheck to paycheck until we were in our late 30s. Consider until like '98 or 2000, I was making 4.35 an hour (in San Diego, no less) . We are good now, but only because I am in the tech field and we live in a sorta low cost-of-life area. But even now, saving for retirement and my kids college funds doesn’t leave a whole hell of a lot sitting around. Mind that we budget like mad. Know what every bill will be a year out and have buckets for those.

    Point of that cool story is that there have been many generations of people living check-to-check. Boomers are probably the closest thing to maybe working a service job, but still having enough to pay mortgage on a little ranch-style house or at least covering rent and other bills.












  • It’s pretty tasty, to me at least. But I like mushrooms so YMMV. That said, it’s not overly earthy or eating a bag of shrooms. If you ever, as a kid, saw a tin that said Hersheys on it in the cupboard and grabbed a spoon; well, it’s like that, but a little better. The cocoa in it is what gives you the caffeine bump IIRC. Assuming the ingredients are legit, then there is good stuff in it, but I think this is really geared toward another group of people than anyone trying to curb coffee. If it was cheaper, I’d drink it every day.

    To answer the question, sorta, you could grind a batch of lions mane and chaga and have at it. This has other stuff in it to for palatability, but like you said, you could make your own variety if you want. Again, assuming the ingredients are accurate, it would be good for you, as long as you can manage to choke it down.



  • That’s a good question but hard to nail down. In terms of nutrition, I was in decent shape as an omnivore in my late teens, early twenties, but nutrition was miles away from any thoughts I had on my diet. And even then, back in the late 90s/turn of the millinea, most substitutes and otherwise interesting plant-based foods didn’t exist, had limited availability or were pretty rough (cheeses, burgers etc…). Best we had was Morningstar corn dogs, boca and tofutti slices.

    I think Soy Curls were hitting the market up in Portland around that time (2k-ish), and that would have been mega when I was younger. But I was in Sac/San Diego at that time and distribution wasnt as widespread, or at least I hadn’t seen them. Though, now that I think of it, you could get big tvp chunks in 16oz bags at Trader Joe’s in that timeframe, so I guess that’s my primary answer.

    That said, I suppose I would have loved to discover Sunflower Cafe in Fair Oaks (Sacramento CA area) earlier on before going vegan. The super nut-burgers are amazing and that might have driven me to joining the dark side a lot sooner.







  • Absolutely. If you haven’t seen Washington Crossing the Deleware in person, you simply haven’t experienced it properly. You don’t get the sense of scale on the internet. Same with the Louvre, d’Orsay or any other world-class museum. Even local museums like the Columbia Maritime Museum in Astoria OR has exhibits and stories that really require that intimate exposure to be engrossed in the information. It transforms your reception to the exhibits and cannot be replicated virtually.