Redhead Ranting™

@Goldenfoxx @NikkiRocky50413 Same.

@NikkiRocky50413 @redheadranting Wish I had been more mature at the time to appreciate the freedom college prep boarding schools afforded, honestly. Ten periods is a school day, and I didn't want to be anywhere near school by that age.

Did your high school have a smoking section for students?

@mplsgordon2 @MikeBales This morning he pulled a guy out of a burning plane. Threw him over his shoulder and brought him to safety.

@redheadranting @MikeBales My favorite scene: Cannon runs up to his 4-door massive sedan. Some miscreant is trying to pick the lock on the passenger side. Cannon ignores him, circles to the driver's door and opens the unlocked door, gets in and drives away.

After 55, you don’t “wake up early” — you join the elite 3:30 AM secret society and spend the morning silently judging everyone still in bed like the smug old bastard you are. 😖

@RexUmberleigh These are the stories I love. I feel bad for the kids today who don't do any of this stuff or have these experiences.

@redheadranting We were way, way in the sticks. Kids either snuck behind shop to "wop a dip" of snuff they stole from their dads or went into the cedars behind school

@MikeBales I have two ex husbands because of it.

I never touch the stuff. Then again, I’m happily loyal to the same woman who still puts up with me.

@the1BigK Did you utilize it?

@redheadranting Yes

@Goldenfoxx I meant a dedicated area where it was ok for students to smoke, not a place where they hid to do it.

@redheadranting In Alabama, in the '80s and '90s? I couldn't even wear my hair the way I wanted. The only thing I can say is that at Indian Springs in the 9th grade, that was a college prep school with too much free time and a billion places you could go no one could find you.

@Bufford214614 We had a "smoker's alley" at one of my high schools, but if Sister Phyllis busted us we'd have to call our mom's. At my other high school there was a dedicated area on the side of the building. No detention or getting in trouble.

@redheadranting 90's we had a "smoker's alley" 😎

@shycollie Living your best life!!!

@redheadranting 90s outside, 71 inside, 89 in the pool, 104 in the hot tub, that’s the proper range

Would you rather have temps in the 20°Fs or in the 90°Fs?

@Tonyrudh Kelly is a tool.

Proof that you can be a doctor or a member of Congress and still possess zero critical thinking skills. Kelly is either extremely ignorant, or is purposely trying to mislead and scare you. Next time Kelly lectures us about ‘science’, remember this: This is not unprecedented, and it’s not your fault. Minnesota’s most extreme heat wave occurred in 1936. The worst forest fire in Minnesota history (by far, in terms of human impact and overall devastation) was the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire of October 1918. Your risk of dying from climate-related disasters has dropped 99% since 1920. Believing the climate is in ‘crisis’ is delusional, dangerous, and untrue. Legislation won’t change the weather. Minnesota’s Carbon Free Energy Standard will do absolutely nothing to decrease average temperatures or severe weather anywhere in the world (even MN). Minnesota’s climate continues to become milder - fewer temperature extremes, fewer hot days and heat waves, fewer multi-year droughts, no long-term increase in severe weather, longer growing season. Boreal forests in the Boundary Waters region naturally experience fires. This will happen with or without humans.

@the_zealot Is that good or bad?

@redheadranting I'm on my "For You" feed and saw this at 11:40 which was at least 3 hours after you dropped the post.

I'm putting the final edits on Bad Dates: A Cautionary Tale! So in the meantime be sure to pick up my other two books. I know, am awful at self promotion. I was going to rewrite this because of the algo change, but apparently I wrote this one for the last algo change so let's see if this one goes a little farther. Or is it further? Anyway, click through and buy my books. Thank you, you guys are the ones who make this possible.

@OldHollowTree We're all tired.

I’ll never forget about a decade ago I was teaching “The Yellow Wallpaper” to an American Literature class and told them about rest cures. “Why’d we get rid of that? Sounds nice. Can I get one? Lock me in a room for a month with needlepoint. I am ready.” The youth are tired.

@EastTNMama Ooh, it's so pretty!!

Watch that water run with the lid open. That’s the faucet. It won’t actually fill with lid up, but you can run water in it and mix your soap up if you want. Another thing I like is it spins your clothes around both ways a few times before filling and during the initial water run.

@MikeBales We've all been there.

Good afternoon, my friends! Let me save you some grief — learn from my mistakes and never, ever shape your hamburger patties like hot dogs just to ‘try something new.’

@MplsBarry @theseawalls @spencerpratt You'd think not pardoning rapists would go a long way too.

@redheadranting @theseawalls @spencerpratt I just question how effective an in-your-face strategy would be for (e.g.) CD3, an area that on paper should be GOP friendly. I think the "no guys in girls sports" is her very best campaign issue to pull these suburban voters back from the DFL.

Listen I am all in for Michelle Tafoya, but saying "Washington needs some Minnesota common sense" is a losing strategy. Minnesota no longer has common sense.

@Haifa62019 You've posted an image without any context. No attributions as to who said the quote or in what context.

@Haifa62019 Grow up, this is the kind of defensive argument fools made back in 2019 when they couldn't support their positions. It is absolutely your responsibility to make your point clear. Something you have not done.

How about we just don't speak ill of the dead regardless of which side of the aisle they come from?

@PeteCatMN @grok There's always that one guy.

@redheadranting @grok is it further or farther?

@thecurioustales How cool!!

Most people look at an opal and see a pretty stone. What they're actually looking at is a frozen accident of time so improbable it borders on impossible. Five million years for one centimeter. Read that again slowly. The opal sitting in a ring on someone's finger represents a span of geological patience that predates the entire human species. Modern humans have existed for roughly 300,000 years. The little gem catching light on a jeweler's velvet cushion has been quietly assembling itself for sixteen times longer than we've walked upright. To understand why opals are so strange, you have to understand what they are at the molecular level, because they break a fundamental rule of what we call a "gemstone." Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires. Every classic gem you can name is a crystal. Its atoms lock into a rigid, repeating lattice, the same geometric pattern extending in every direction. That ordered structure is exactly what gives crystals their hardness, their cleavage planes, their fire. Opal refuses all of that. It has no crystal lattice. It's classified as a mineraloid, an amorphous solid, the same structural category as glass. At the microscopic level it's built from countless tiny spheres of silica, each one impossibly small, stacked together like cosmic billiard balls. And the magic, the entire reason opal does the thing it does, comes from how perfectly those spheres arrange themselves. When the silica spheres are uniform in size and pack into an orderly three dimensional grid, light entering the stone gets diffracted. The gaps between the spheres act like a natural grating, splitting white light into its component colors and bouncing them back at the eye. The size of the spheres determines which colors appear. Smaller spheres throw blues and violets. Larger ones release the rare reds and oranges that make certain opals worth more than diamonds by weight. This means the color in an opal is not pigment. There is no red dye, no green mineral, no blue compound. The stone is essentially colorless silica and water. Every flash of fire you see is pure structure, pure geometry, light itself being sorted by architecture too small to see. You are watching physics, not chemistry. The opal is a lens disguised as a jewel. Now layer the water back into the picture. That 6 to 10% water content is doing something almost no other gemstone does. It means opal is partly liquid history. The water trapped inside is ancient groundwater, sealed in during formation millions of years ago, fluid that touched a prehistoric world. And because that water is structurally part of the stone, opals can literally die. Take an opal from a humid environment to an extremely dry one and the water can escape over time. The stone crazes, cracks into a web of fractures, and the play of color fades forever. A diamond is functionally immortal. An opal can dehydrate and pass away like something that was once alive. There is a poetry buried in the formation process that most people never consider. Opals form when silica rich water seeps into cracks, voids, and cavities in rock, then slowly evaporates and deposits its silica load, layer by microscopic layer, over those incomprehensible timescales. Which means an opal is a fossil of empty space. It's the cast of an absence, water patiently filling a wound in the earth and turning the scar into the most colorful substance the planet produces. Some of the most spectacular opals on Earth take this even further. In parts of Australia, opal has replaced the bones of dinosaurs and the shells of ancient sea creatures, molecule by molecule, preserving the exact shape of a creature dead for a hundred million years but rendering it in rainbow fire. There exist opalized seashells, opalized teeth, opalized pinecones. Death and deep time and light, fused into a single object you could hold in your palm. When you grasp all of this, the casual phrase "it's just a gemstone" collapses entirely. Each opal is a five million year exposure of liquid that touched a vanished world, an amorphous structure that bends light through pure architecture, a partially living thing that can crack and die if you treat it carelessly, and sometimes a tombstone for an animal that breathed before the first primate existed. We mine these from the ground, polish them, and sell them in shops next to mass produced trinkets, rarely pausing to register that we're trading in compressed eternity. The planet spent five million years per centimeter making something beautiful with no audience in mind. We just got lucky enough to dig it up and notice.

@remodelnerd I mean me too. I need more coffee.

@remodelnerd Me either!