When I was a mile and a half away from a decent supermarket, I bought a sad amount of food at CVS. I am so used to being able to run out for stuff, having to plan ahead feels like a hardship! Now I walk by the supermarket, CVS, hardware store, etc., on my way home from work, and stop to pick up something more days than not.

We have a convenience store, and a liquor store that advertises that it carries milk so it probably has some other groceries that is closer than the grocery store, but those are both expensive and don't have, like, produce. There is an Asian grocery store over by the liquor store that has produce. I haven't been there because it's not on an of my regular routes anywhere - I would pretty much have to be going there to go by there. But I should see what they carry.

I just ran into the second computer this year that has had our software's data hit by ransomware. Nasty stuff.

I slept in until 6:30 and then skipped going to the kids' school and volunteering to work on stuff around the house, and I feel so much better about life. Also, the cat only woke me up at 3 and 5am, not every hour all night. And the dryer is nice and new and fancy! It tells you how long it plans to spend drying your clothes and goes "ding!"

I live within a five-minute drive of two grocery stores, and one of them is less than a mile away if I needed to walk to it. From the apartment complex next door, several people do. Where I grew up, the closest grocery was 10-15 minutes away, and I never want to do that again. Rural life is wonderful until you run out of something, or until you can't stop the bleeding.

Rural life is wonderful until you run out of something, or until you can't stop the bleeding.

I grew up ten miles from the nearest stores etc. It was quiet and peaceful and beautiful and I'd go nuts if I had to do that again. I need the sounds of people around me.

It was pretty quiet in our farm house. We could barely hear cars go by on the highway in front of our house. In the winter we'd hear snowmobiles along the highway, and occasionally copulating cats or cows giving birth.

We lived about a three-minute drive to the grocery store in town. But we had to drive 45 miles to see a movie.

We do live about a 7-minute drive from a Kroger, but it's too far for residents of the neighborhood to walk (though some do), and navigating it by bus is oddly difficult. The planned co-op will be right in the middle of the neighborhood, so much easier to walk to for virtually everyone, with a bus stop on the corner.

It is definitely a luxury to be able to choose to drive 15 minutes to go to the grocery store we like (or even a little further to stock up at Trader Joes), and we're well aware it's a luxury not everyone has.

We both bought owner shares in the co-op so we can both vote for the board and such, and we'll probably shift the bulk of our shopping there when it opens.

Can You Solve the Math Problem That Has Torn Singapore Apart?

A question on a quiz for teenage mathletes proved so tricky for Singapore newscaster Kenneth Kong that he posted it to Facebook to find a definitive answer. Now the problem has driven the entire country mad, and it's spreading to the rest of the world.

It's gone viral enough that even the New York Times compared it to The Dress , the asinine social media argument-starter by which all asinine social media argument-starters are now measured.

I solved it.

I was kind of horrified to realize that I'm living a fairly standard middle-class lifestyle at the moment. My standard of living is actually improving. I'm not obsessively checking the bank balance right before payday, I can contemplate the death of the washing machine with equanimity.