RedPandaAlex

I'm planning now for some fall direct seed plantings. I think I'll do a few stands of different species in different areas of my yard after ripping out some ivy. What I'm not sure about is marking where I put which seed to keep better track of the plan and know what to pull and what to leave in the spring. Do you use stake markers? Hoops of rope? Edging? Just make a map you can refer to later? In the past (with a seed mix), I had a hard time distinguishing wanted and unwanted plants and ran into a weed problem when I didn't want to rip out plants I didn't know were unwanted until they were pretty entrenched.

I'm considering opening a HELOC through Alliant Credit Union, not for a specific large renovation but for some home maintenance sanity and cushion, and I wanted some feedback on my thought process here.

Three years ago, we bought a house for 550k that Zillow says is worth close to 700k now, and we still have 445k on the mortgage. It's a 100+ year old house with some deferred maintenance from the previous owner, and there are a lot of things that are health and safety concerns, that I have a hard time judging how much time I have before they become a big problem, or may be costing extra money now. These are all issues that have persisted since we bought the house.

A partial list:

• No rail

I bought a house two years ago at 6.85% and I'm seeing refinance options around 6.375% (with no points). It looks like I could save roughly 200/month with this, which might give me a break even point of about a year. I was hoping rates would drop faster than this, but with so much economic uncertainty, I'm really not sure when to pull the trigger. I'm more concerned with giving my monthly budget some more breathing room than optimizing my equity in the near/mid term because I have a kid in daycare, and because the plan is to stay in this house for the foreseeable future. Those in a similar situation, how are you thinking about timing a refinance?

I also might have some significant repairs/u

We have a 2.5-year-old. As far as we can tell, he's convinced that he saw Paul McCartney's face on the wall in his bedroom the night after seeing the thumbnail for this Hey Jude video while we were just listening to the audio. That was a week and a half ago--many times a day we have to reassure him that there's no face in his room and there's no music playing in his room. That's fine and getting better over time. The problem now is that he won't stay asleep in his room. We've always stayed with him until he falls asleep at bedtime, but since the nightmare if he rouses at all overnight and we're not there he'll start crying. I sometimes try a cou

I want a big table that lists every skill on one axis, DCs in increments of 5 from 5 to 30 on the other, and in every cell in the middle a few examples of skill checks for that skill at that DC.

It feels like the game designers are using features like skill proficiency, expertise, tool proficiency, reliable talent etc to balance martials against casters for out-of-combat utility. That's fine in theory, but in practice skill checks are very squishy whereas spell effects are explicitly defined in the spell description. When you try to do something non-magical, DMs can say you succeed without a roll, say you fail without a roll, arbitrarily set a DC 15 or just pull another number out of their

We moved into a 130-year-old house recently, and it has lead service lines. We had the city test for lead in our kitchen tap before we moved in and initially got 18 ppb, which is above federal action levels. On a subsequent test after we moved in, it was down to 6 ppb which is below federal action levels, but I know any amount of lead is still bad. (We believe the initial higher value was because the water had been sitting in the pipes for a several days at that point, not just the 8 hours required for the test.) But I'm having a hard time figuring out a sustainable solution that doesn't involve a 30000 dollar service line replacement that the city might do for free in a few years anyways. I

We recently moved from a condo to a new house. In order to beat out other offers, we didn't put in a sales contingency for our condo, which meant we bought the new house before selling the condo and wound up only putting 5% down because that's what we could afford. We knew our lender allowed us to recast our mortgage after we sold--putting in a big one-time payment to lower our monthly payment without changing our interest rate or other terms. That was the plan, but now that we're at that point, I'm not 100% sure it's the right thing to do.

Some numbers:

Mortgage interest rate: 6.875%

Take home pay: 9,596

Mortgage: 4,646 childcare: 1,100 groceries and essentials: 1,000 phone and utilitie

My family has been through it the last couple months. We usually like to make home-cooked, varied, and well planned dinners. But we've had bout after bout of illness, we moved into a new house, and things keep coming up. We've had to fall back on takeout too many times and the cost is adding up.

What's your go-to when you just need to get something to the table quickly? What are you making when you're sick, or you get home from a day trip late, or you're trying to cook and baby wrangle solo?

We have an almost-two-year-old who isn't a super picky eater.

I know I can withdraw my contributions to a Roth IRA account without taxes or penalty. Is there anywhere I can find that number in my account so I know how much I can withdraw without penalty? I have an idea what it is, but I want to confirm.

Another complication here is that this was rolled over from an account I had originally opened at TIAA, so I'm not sure if that cost basis info came over to my new account when I transferred it.

I'm not sure if I'm actually looking for advice here or just ranting, but I have a 10-month-old and feel totally unprepared for the reality of cold weather for the next three months.

My LO is super active, already standing up on his own and cruising on furniture (or just the wall) from one side of the room to the other, and very rarely content anymore to just sit in one place and play with his toys or have a book read to him. The more time he stays in his play space, the less his toys hold his attention and the more he gets restless and explores--finding holes in our babyproofing, like a velociraptor looking for weak spots in the fences. So I have to constantly hover while making a mental l

Mislead had some combat utility, but it has a lot more non-combat utility, especially for evil NPCs. It allows the caster to create an illusory duplicate of themselves that they can see, hear, and speak from for an hour. This allows your BBEG to:

• Get his evil monologue in without the players trying to kill him as soon as they see him
• Follow the PCs as they make their way through the dungeon, taunting them as they fall into his traps
• Scout the capabilities and plans of the party, allowing you to play to the party's weaknesses without metagaming

This all gives you a chance to build some animosity for the bad guy instead of the final showdown breaking out the first time they meet him.