OMG, that baby picture is hilarious.

I kept watching AHS on Sunday afternoons and mentioning it to my family and immediately saying "I AM NOT SAYING YOU SHOULD WATCH IT!!!" Oh, especially the last season, because of Catholic stuff.

I just realized after I got home from yoga that my shirt is on inside out. And beforehand I had dropped half of my breakfast on the floor. So it's been that kind of day so far.

You guys, I just met a guy who really wants to buy the empty house across the street. Social studies teacher at City (high school just across from the Y.) It's his second visit, he brought the parents. Told me to scare off anyone else looking at it. YAY! Nice guy, came to talk to the filthy sweaty woman doing yardwork.

Was he cute?

Nice, sarameg! Also, nice photos of your morning walk.

My dad was incurable about the n-word, and also coon and jig and jigaboo, "jew him down" and "gyp" and every other imaginable racial or ethnic slur. The ultimate stereotypical cracker. He was a wonderful, compassionate man, but he was a product of his environment and essentially uneducable about social issues. His was an unenviable hardscrabble life, and racism was the one way he felt he could elevate his status. It brought me to tears more than once, and it was difficult to love him around this, but I learned to pay attention to what he did more than what came out of his mouth. He never changed, and I never stopped wishing he could, or would.

Mom was careless and indifferent about slurs, but she was concerned enough with peer pressure and appearances that, until senility robbed her of her judgement, she made the effort not to use them.

Growing up was halcyon, till I look back on all those sunny days and see them shot through with darkness and casual, callous thoughtlessness, and sometimes actual evil intent.

I was about to say that no one in my family used that word (we are all from the north, new England, and Canada), but my grandma called Brazil Nuts N**** toes.

My family called them that when I was growing up. But I haven't heard anyone but my dad (see below) use it since the 1970s.

My dad was incurable about the n-word, and also coon and jig and jigaboo,

My dad, too. He still uses those words. It's appalling. He's more or less okay in public, although "spook" and "jigaboo" come out once in a while. But at home, with just us kids, "nigger" rolls off his tongue like it's no big deal. (I smack him down HARD when he does that, so he hasn't said it in front of me in years, but apparently he still uses it with my brother all the time.)

He lets fly with the misogyny pretty freely, though, in public. Awesome. (I had lunch with my mom this week, and mentioned how much I straight-up LOATHE the way my dad uses "female" as a noun, and she said, "Oh my god, 14 years of marriage and I could NEVER get him to stop that! I HATED it!")

My parents were born in the 1920s and were adamantly against racial slurs such as the n-word. Their parents weren't. After a visit from one grandparent, Mom heard six-year old me use the n-word and made it very clear it wasn't acceptable. And the grandparents never used that language around me again. It turned out my parents told both sets of grandparents that if they ever talked like that around my sister and me again, that would be the last time they ever saw us. And it worked.

My parents and grandparents were both from Michigan. The difference may have been partially generational, but I think it was also partially due to the fact that my parents traveled a lot more than their parents and interacted with a wider variety of people.

My grandparents (b.1912/1913) were making donations to the United Negro College Fund in 1945 (it was founded in 1944). And in the 1950s my grandmother used to routinely call and give the Cincinnati Police department pressure about integrating their patrols. (Of course, she also had a running letter war with the New York Times about their tendency to hyphenate words in strange places - not all of my grandmother's fights were fraught with justice.) So, yeah, racial slurs were not an issue in my 67 year old father's upbringing.

Ok, "not all of my grandmother's fights were fraught with justice" just won the Trudy's Phrase of the Day Award (which I just invented).

Had my grandmother been born 60 years later, she would have embodied xkcd 386.

I was trying to remember what we called Brazil nuts when I was a kid, but I don't think I ever even saw one until after college. I don't like them much.