vaguely tired and perpetually cold

BOOK BIRTHDAY! BOOK! BIRTHDAY! I'm so excited to get SECOND HELPINGS out into the world. It's a warm, cozy and funny second-chance romance filled with found family, a chaotic deli dog named Pastrami, and all the comfort food you could ever want. I loved writing it, and I hope you'll love reading it 💜🥪

👨‍💻 Sam Adelson has spent more than ten years pouring his heart into Silverman's Deli, the beloved Cleveland institution his family has run for seventy-five years. So when a bad review tanks his business, Sam develops some strong feelings about the critic responsible. Fantasies involving expired clam juice may be involved.

❤️‍🩹 Then Jake Thompson walks through the door—Sam's first love, the one who got away. Reconnecting after over a decade feels like coming home, and having Jake around makes even the chaos of saving the deli feel manageable. But Sam’s fought to move on from the disaster that tore them apart, and now pretending it never happened is becoming more impossible every day.

🧑‍🍳 As Sam falls harder than he ever meant to, Jake's past begins to catch up with both of them. Some recipes are worth perfecting, even when the first attempt was a disaster—Sam just hopes this one doesn't blow up in his face...

📌 Perfect for fans of Casey McQuiston and TJ Klune. Second Helpings is a male x male contemporary romance, featuring:

• Second-chance romance

• Surprise neighbors (again)

• Slow burn, mild spice

• Cozy vibes

• Grumpy Steady x Chaotic Anxious

• Forced proximity

• Food as a love language

• Found family

• He's fine (he's not fine)

I love the third person POV from one character, we don’t get bogged down in what I’m sure is the swamp of trauma in Jake’s mind and that helps keep what could be a really heavy book feeling fairly light. Although I will admit my kid saw me reading and asked why I looked so sad. I absolutely cried twice.

Sam’s got plenty of his own shit to sort out, and I love the cast of characters around him who are there to help, or needle him, or challenge him as needed. Every single one was unique and fully formed and instantly likable or dislikable as needed.

Blocked, flambéed and unfollowed.

that being said, @homunculus-argument :

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

I work in an obstetrician and gynaecologist’s office. we have to tell patients on a regular basis that they are binge drinking weekly when they think they are simply consuming a normal amount of alcohol on the weekends.

having more than 3 drinks in a single sitting if you have an estrogen based endocrine system is a binge that is medically significant.

having more than 5 in a sitting is a medically significant binge for someone with a testosterone based endocrine system.

every time you do this, it significantly impacts your risk of getting breast cancer, and damages your liver. it takes time to recover from that liver damage. if you’re having a 3-5 or more drink binge on a weekly basis, you are an alcoholic, medically speaking, and your liver is not recovering.

again: the bar for what binge drinking is, medically, is so much lower than what you think it is.

alcohol is a really toxic substance and not something you should fuck around with.

again: if you have an estrogenized hormone system (common for most women), then 3 drinks is a binge. if you have a testosteronized hormone system (common for most men), then 5 drinks is a binge.

anything above that number, consumed as frequently as weekly or more, and you’re medically a binge drinking alcoholic.

also, if you’re drinking any quantity of alcohol 6 days a week or more, that’s another threshold at which, medically speaking, you meet the definition of alcoholism. your liver needs more days without alcohol in your system than just one a week to recover and be healthy.

I don’t say any of this to shame anyone—to me, alcoholism or substance use disorders aren’t a sign of weakness or moral failing. and most of us genuinely don’t know this stuff.

information is key. you don’t have to stop drinking, but the utter lack of education on alcohol + the normalization of binge drinking in current society leads to many people drinking without any idea of what it’s doing to their bodies.

Because a vodka shot is not the same as (idk, some low alcohol percentage alcohol.)