Arizona Sue, I need your sign, I do know how to cook but it's just so much easier to nuke my frozen meals. I do make homemade chicken soup and chili quite a few times throughout the year and freeze each into small portions and because I live in the midwest, I do need to have my casseroles so maybe once a month I'll make one up and freeze meal size portions of it but on the whole I eat store bought frozen meals.

Hi NQ and Homely.   I'm not the cook in our household.  I'm lucky to have a husband who enjoys cooking.  It's just the two of us.  I'm a Lean Cuisine or anything microwaved.  I have a small sign in our kitchen.  "I know how to cook.  I just don't ". ;-)

Homely, I'm game but just so you know, my cooking consists of warming things up in the microwave or air fryer and because it's only me, I plan my meals around what I have in the freezer and am hungry for at the moment :)

Glad you're back now, NQ - and Sue, I'm glad your husband turned out not to be an axe murderer ;-) If anyone is looking to return to the type of community discussions that got squeezed out, I'm totally up for sharing recipes and meal planning inspiration!

Arizona Sue I know of quite a few people who met their future mate in chat but I also knew one guy who seemed to be a nice enough of a guy in chat, who had quite a few woman fawning over him(not me) who we found out wasn't so nice, actually horrifying, he killed his x-wife and 3 year old son on christmas eve and then hid out at the house of one of the women he met online. That incident pretty much made me decide it's better to keep those online friendships online !

But it's great that you met somebody online who I assume isn't an axe murderer :)
Two of my nieces also met their husbands in chat and neither of their husbands are axe muderers either(grin)

Hi NQ:   Referring to chatrooms -- I met my husband in 1998 in an AOL chat called Newsroom.   We married in 2003.  Turned out he was not an axe murderer!   Celebrating our 20th in August.  I agree with you about bullying.  

Homely I'm happy to know I'm not the only one who felt that way over their treatment of Susan. When I first got into groups and came across somebody bullying another person I tried to reason with them and found that there just wasn't anything that I could say that would change their behaviour so I just got to the point where I did walk away, it's easy to find other chat communities. I found one in explore.org but the chat there centers almost completely around the animal cams. I'm into the brown bears of Brook Falls, it's amazing how each bear has a different personality and I'm also into the Cat Rescue, nothing more calming then watching cats and kittens playing. I also found a few facebook groups about things I'm interested in that are private and don't allow bullying. So walking away was good for me but I'm back now :)

NQ - I'm glad you said that out load. I was alarmed by the Susan Dennis issue as well as the bullying of Kyle and some ohter things, but the OT community was important to me so I lurked with the occasional comment. I'm glad to see you back. And if by chance MD does come back and engage in that behavior, I won't hold my tongue. I've been invloved in bulletin boards, chats and the like since the 1990s and it's very easy for these communities to fall apart because it is easier to vote with your feet than to step in and insist on civility.

Hi Homely, thanks for the link to the webcam for inchydoney Lodge.. think I prefer the other one though, you can see a bit more of the beach on it. NQ, didn't know that Trix and MD had been bad mouthing Susan Dennis. Not nice.. 

Hi Arizona Sue, no I didn't know about MD but then a lot of people I knew from online died in the last few years from covid so there's a chance that she also succumed to it which is sad.

I left Opentopia because of her and Trix's cyberbullying of Susan Dennis on her cam. I've been in groups/forums/chat rooms since the early 2000's and over the years I found that for my own mental health that I rather steer clear of those kinds of chatter. It's too bad, I actually considered MD a nice person till she started bad mouthing Susan.

Hi N Q.  I'm glad to see you're still here.  Your job is locating Christmas trees?   Did you hear anything about MD?  She's MIA since November 2022.  

Homely I like the view better on the cam you posted.

Phoenix they probably blocked their cam from being viewed on Opentopia because it was using too much bandwidth or costing them too much in bandwidth. With it now only being viewable on their website, they probably only get occasional viewers.

It's still in action, Phoenix, here: https://www.inchydoneyisland.com/beach-cam.html

And it still looks lovely! I miss these sorts of convos on OT - thank you for bringing it up!

Wonder why they don't fix it? Would be in their best interest because it draws people to the hotel. 

This one's been down for a while.. 

Beautiful calm sea this evening .. ☺️

No MD, we cannot... Irish mist maybe??  LOL!! Just a puddle jump from Scotland really..  :-)

But we can't call it Scotch mist.  LOL

Very misty this evening.. 

Irish coasts are always quite nice, if a bit gray and dull. Surprised it isnt lashing rain!