Zonetrooper

Depends on the kind of home and how "handy" you feel yourself to be. There are a lot of minor things around the home which can save you boatloads of money (and be faster to deal with) if you do them yourself.

Tools:

• A multi-bit ratcheting screwdriver. It's my #1 go-to for assorted small fixes. Wirecutter recently recommended the Megapro 211R2C36RD, for what that's worth.
• Multi-tool. Another good "it's not the best at anything, but I use it for everything".
• Adjustable wrench and/or pliers. Good for tightening nuts, holding things tight, bending, and other small tasks.
• Sponge mop. One of the ones with a little handle to help squeeze it out. Great for cleaning floors without killing your back.
• Speaking of which, a good-quality hard plastic bucket. Look for something in the 10-15 liter range. Dirty water, clean water, road salt, supplies, anything which is easy to carry.
• If you are comfortable with power tools, a good quality cordless drill can be a huge help as well.
• If you're comfortable doing your own minor electrical repairs, one of those little outlet checker tools. Saves a ton of time.
• Good quality measuring tools, like a measuring tape and/or bubble level. These needn't kill the budget, but are handy to have.

Comfort:

• I am a firm believer in ceiling fans as a great room cooler. Put one up and be amazed as the room feels comfortable at a range of temperatures.
• Similarly, a small room air circulator or pedestal fan can really help, especially if you're doing some heavy work.
• If you don't have good chairs for the table, I'm a personal fan of Ikea's Bergmund.

Convenience:

• "Lazy susan" cabinet organizers. Game-changer for kitchen cabinets.
• Mr Clean abrasive cleaning pads. You can scrape off a lot of grime with these.

Lastly, for furniture and other things, unless you're in a really small area, check various community marketplace kinds of sites. You can find a lot of critical stuff for less than MSRP, and non-critical stuff at a point that won't break your budget.

A lot. Some of them were genuinely great. Some were way less so.

• To Kill a Mockingbird: Earns every bit of reputation it has. Should be shown twice.

• Teacher's Pet: They showed this as a reward. I despised it. Seriously, it sticks in my head

• The outsiders: "Okay, I guess." I remember feeling it was a decent bit of storytelling, but I was too detached from the themes and era to care. Honestly, it was probably too old for kids to identify with.

• When the Levees Broke: In retrospect, one of Lee's weaker works. Nonetheless, it made a hell of an impact on us. We'd mostly seen helicopter's-eye views of New Orleans. Getting down in with the people was a whole different view.

• Tuesdays with Morrie: Apparently it's popular, but we all hated it. Felt it was sentimental slop.

• Brighton Beach Memoirs: Honestly don't remember much. We mostly cared that, at the end, they actually showed the nude photo the lead character received. As kids, that was mind-blowing.

This is a little surprising to me because I read it on a daily basis and haven't seen sign of the paywall yet. I don't know if Ublock Origin is simply squashing that as well, or I'm somehow lucky.

If anything, Tahini - a separate spread common to the Middle East, made from sesame seeds - is vaguely closer to peanut butter.

You're already asking good questions, which means you're doing a lot better than many of the people who adopt without thinking. You're also looking for an adult cat, which means you aren't going to have to deal with a kitten's destructive exploratory phase (although, fair warning, adult cats can still be destructive if you don't prepare properly).

One thing I would say is that you should consider two versus one cats. Some cats don't handle being alone for a long time well and can become unhappy, while others prefer not having feline company and would be just fine alone for ~48 hours. A good shelter or adoption agency may be able to tell you whether a cat prefers company or solitary.

Like some other commenters, I would strongly suggest going to local shelters and discussing with them. They should entirely understand if you aren't able to adopt immediately and be able to discuss particulars with you.

I mean, you can argue some semantics about "peaceful".

What it is undeniable is that it prevented global powers from going directly to total war, resulting in a much diminished number of casualties (both soldiers and civilians) compared to the World Wars. Nothing since then, even if we summed up all the wars going on around the world at any given moment, rival the unthinkable numbers of dead who piled up those conflicts, nor - if I can speculate a bit - would they have rivaled another worldwide industrialized conflict.

But.

Does that actually mean the world is "more peaceful"?

One can argue that the undeniable reality that you are much less likely to be killed in a war between nations today means "Yes." One can also argue that peace should not be measured by cold mathematics: That the continued existence of smaller-scale conflicts around the world, internal conflicts within countries, or deaths from non-national conflicts such as the ongoing gun violence epidemic in the US or deaths caused by polluting megacorporations mean it has not gotten "more peaceful"; the risks have just changed.

I suppose it depends on how you are analyzing all of this, in the end.

Disclaimer, I am not a physicist, just a guy with interest in sci-fi, science, and too much free time.

is their any theory centered around our frame of reference having a past but not a future?

So, the answer is, yes, this is actually kind of a common theory on how time actually works. Maybe.

This has to do with physics, and the fact that no two observers have the same perfect frame of reference. For most of us humans, our frames of reference are close enough to be identical on a day-to-day basis. It's even close enough for (most) science. But it's not true on a perfect level. For instance, special relativity says that time passes differently for objects in motion; GPS satellites have to correct for the fact that their onboard clocks are experience "slower" time than us observers on Earth. Even astronauts "lose" about ~1/100th of a second for every year spent on the ISS.

What's this got to do with the future not existing, though?

So we know no two observers have a perfectly identical frame of reference - there is no objective "truth" of when something occurred. Cool. Now what? Well, what we can talk about is historic light cones. Because the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, we can determine how far from you a photon departing your actions would travel. Places that photon would reach at any given point in time following your action are said to be within your historic light cone, and in common parlance, the past. The boundary of how far that photon is reaching at any given moment is, from your frame of reference, "the present". But since nothing can exceed the speed of light, it is impossible for an observer to view beyond the present, into the future.

The catch, of course, is reference frames. You used a plural - "our frame of reference", "we're blazing a trail forward" - but the reality is that each of us has a minutely different reference frame and is blazing a minutely different trail. Again, for almost any day-to-day purposes this is irrelevant... but there are certain scientific experiments which exploit or even rely on this absence of reference frame.

Cool, what about time travel again?

In my first comment above, I mentioned something called closed timelike curves. Those are an actual thing: By severely bending spacetime, you can theoretically cause a photon to "curve" around and end up at the same point in time it was produced, now in its subjective past, while mathematically not violating quantum physics.

This is where things get kind of freaky and headachy; if a photon can be sent into its subjective past, doesn't that imply a future now existing, in which that photon will be generated? The answer is, not in the frame of reference of that particular photon. A historic light cone of that photon being generated, now in that photon's future, still exists; but that photon is now generating a new, detached lightcone...

Like I said, headachy. I also have to emphasize that while the math holds up, there's ample reason to believe CTCs don't exist, chief among them that our mathematical understanding of quantum physics may still be imperfect.

tl;dr: Yes, absence of reference frames means that each distinct observer is blazing their own trail, which spreads into the "past" at the speed of light. The future, exceeding the speed of light, is unobservable. This framework does provide a mathematical concept of how you could send something into your subjective past, but such a means is still theoretical at best.

This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox ("You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?"). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.

Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn't even all of them:

• The closed loop theory: To maintain the loop, you will in the future build a time machine which will allow you to activate the machine in the past, maintaining the loop. Past you may even be unaware it was activated from the future.
• The Parallel Universe theory: When future-you sent information into the past, they did not send it into their own past but rather into a universe in which you do not send the information back in the first place.
• The Timelike Curve theory: Because there is no common reference frame for "time", each quanta of "you" is experiencing a different reference frame. The historic light cone of your future self sending the information back exists, and if you could follow those photons backwards you would find him doing this. But future you, in your frame of reference, will never see the machine activate.
• The Emergent Time theory: Time is not a linear path, but a function of entropy. By inverting entropy, you have caused a reconfiguration of the universe into a version in which the machine is inactive.

Haha, holy shit. Somehow I had never connected that Piratesoftware was Maldavius. Yeah, that explains so, so very much of this entire SKG debacle.

Like, what kind of dictator are we talking here? Is this a Lord Vetinari benevolent dictator, or your typical generic slimeball autocrat?

Personally, I'd like to think that if they did become the latter, they'd be so far different from the person I love that I would break from them. Thoughtfulness, intelligence, and consideration aren't usually things I see associated with dictators, you know? But people have an incredible capacity to isolate and put on different masks between their personal and professional lives...

It really is an interesting question, yes! Fires started by frictional heating are pretty uncommon in nature, but early humans could pretty readily see that objects placed near a fire would begin to smolder and burn just from radiant heat.

It really depends on when we were able to take intellectual leap of realizing that all heat is equivalent, and fire is not a prerequisite of making new fire.

We don't know. Hell, we can't even narrow it down to a specific place with certainty. There is strong evidence in human settlements for use of fire anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 1 million years ago. When, exactly, is hard to ascertain; for instance, some sites which are claimed to hold the oldest evidence have been criticized as resembling the aftermath of wildfires.

It is also depends on what you mean by "discovered": Early proto-hominids were almost certainly aware of fire and the concept of burning, so are we counting from when they realized "hey, I can take a burning thing and put it where I want it, and it will spread burning there?" Or are we only counting from when fire began to be used as a tool (e.g., for clearing brush or cooking)? Or when humans discovered how to start fires in the absence of a natural source?