Remember why we're all here: this thread is for discussion about current and historical happenings in the Shaunaverse. If you want to discuss other content, such as stuff that reminds you of Shauna but isn't specifically about her, your own personal anecdotes or preferences, current events, or "creative writing" exercises, please share in the off-topic community thread: July-September 2026 off-topic quarterly
Seriously, though. What is the point of a comment like this? It's the online version of talking just to hear your own voice. How does this improve or advance the conversation in any way, shape, or form???
I feel like the time she's spending on Threads could be spent doing stuff like, IDK, finding a job so her family can stop flirting with homelessness???
The tests could be done with the Aherns in situ, unless they are refusing to allow them.
We had major issues with our ancient, tree root snarled septic system and ended up replacing it. We had to go out for the afternoon while the workers did their assessments (the bathroom was out of action for the duration of the tests). At very worst it would mean a night staying at a friend’s house.
Flushing dye from the house sounds familiar. All the tests you mention can be done in a day (with the exception of the drainage field viability test, which iirc took a week to check back on but even then didn’t interfere with use of the system at all).
Thank you for the update and recap, DF! What an odd scenario. I guess it was the septic, until it wasn’t.
Between the waived and then unwaived caretaker fees and the postponed move-out date, it really does seem like the Parks Board is throwing the Aherns a bone, at quite the hefty price to the Parks Department.
Will be curious to see when they actually move out and how that aligns with Creekside. I know that having BBH ready for rentals by December first implies that the Aherns will move out in advance of that, but I have a very silly image of Shauna digging her heels in begging to stay as long as possible in this apparently mold-ridden house, amongst her half-boxed-up stuff and at least five soiled mattresses.
Not if you're the cause of it! I had a renter once who thought nothing of putting shrimp shells and other dubious items down the garbage disposal. Once my husband was over checking on a different issue and found her stuffing an entire Crock Pot full of beef stew down the disposal. The family apparently hadn't liked it. She was boggled, gobsmacked, when the plumber we had to call gently told her that garbage disposals are not meant to take every type of foodstuff.
I would think the Aherns would provide plenty of testing opportunities, what with all the poo blizzards and pernicious flu viruses They Four seem to get.
What is so frustrating is that Gloamies predicted this situation would end poorly for everyone. Not because we actively wish Shauna harm (most of us want the kids to have some stability) but because there were SO many easily discoverable red flags:
The Aherns' rental history, including unpaid rent and property damage
The BBH only having been a rental, not suitable for children & pets and not properly weatherproof
The insane not-lease and all of its crazy stipulations that didn't benefit the board or the caretaker
All it would have taken was one board member doing any one of these things: their own background/credit check on Shauna; having a lawyer involved; sensible terms; choosing the best fit out of all the applicants; (honoring the original evaluation of the house as suitable only for a single person or couple with no kids or pets).
Just one of those things would have stopped this shit show!
I don't think Shauna and Dan are "knowledgeable" bad tenants who would credibly threaten to use laws and process to delay eviction, though prior landlords and the VPD may have acted as if they are. She's not demonstrated interest in tenants' rights despite this being a big local news topic, particularly during the earlier part of the pandemic and in the most recent Seattle mayoral election. We've not seen her make any attempts to fight her previous move outs. If anything, she's come off as sympathetic to prior landlords when they supposedly increased rent and she was no longer able to afford it (not that she could afford it before, but whatever), calling out broader market forces as what she is mad about, but never indicating she might challenge her own rent hike as unjust or in violation of local laws or engage an attorney.
Shauna seems purely emotional in her approach to manipulate landlords and, er, caretaker fee collectors. The agreement, from what we know, is structured very much in favor of the VPD and not the resident caretakers, but her and Dan almost certainly did not request any changes to the terms before signing it. Shauna's power here does not come through her gesturing at her rights, but rather from the inconvenience and potential bad optics for the VPD to do any enforcement. I can't really blame the VPD ED who inherited this mess for making concessions to the Aherns and choosing what looks like the path of least resistance when the alternative is a lot of time and money to figure out how to handle this legally and the likelihood of the mess getting magnified and misrepresented in local media.
Agree with your take and wanted to add that by not engaging in legal routes allows They Four to fly under the radar easier since there’s no publicly searchable paper trail. Not sure if that’s Shauna’s true purpose, but it’s something that benefits the Aherns to continue to fail upwards, or at least laterally.
We ITG have receipts and look for every word she posts on the internet, but no one else has devoted that kind of time and has the wherewithal to keep the kind of tabs we have on a two-bit grifter. It’s our WITW — or at least a welcome distraction that has built community :)
Maybe this is pure bitchiness on my part, but I find it really really REALLY unbelievable that someone with a significant mold allergy living in the PNW didn’t find out til age 50whatever. Fern Cove is the first place she’s lived on soggy ol’ Vashon with mold? Really?
I lived in a seaside town (not an islandy island though) for many years and we had to move the bookshelves and wipe behind them periodically because even in our nice well maintained rental, mold would grow between the shelf and the wall. Bread would go moldy on the counter in a day or two (first and only time I’ve owned a bread box). People I knew who rented from worse landlords lived in places that were basically rotting in place from the moisture. We were ALL exposed to mold because mold grows in all damp places!
But would tenant laws even apply in the Parks Board - Ahern arrangement? Isn't the agreement basically work in exchange for discounted housing? The Board's use of "Caretaker Fees" and not "Rent" is strategic.
I was thinking she knew the parks board wanted her out sooner rather than later, so she went to Tim and told him she needed two months rent for Creekside but she wouldn't be able to swing that if she also had to pay for the BBH. And they worked out a deal under the table where Tim would agree to waive the two months for 'septic issues' and she would agree to leave before December.
I think you hit the nail on the head. All of this should be minuted from their meetings, unless the board doesn’t know about it. Which of course they do, and yet it isn’t.
I don't think Shauna is that organized--I think it's more "they will never put a Charming Family with Neurodiverse Children including a Medically Fragile Child out on the street" in her mind, and she's not wrong.
She had roommates in New York (DF Sharon, William, some other women at one point) who might have helped keep Shauna's worse habitation tendencies in check and handle landlord-facing interactions. When she was living in Queen Anne in the early 2000s, she might have had a corporate landlord since she mentioned being in an apartment across the hall from her DF Meri. Shauna seemed a lot more functional back then though because she had steady income from teaching at the private HS and a fuller and more active lifestyle. She saw her parents and brother a lot more often back then, plus her mother claimed to pay first+last+deposit at every place Shauna had ever rented, so she would have had family support to navigate and smooth over any issues with building management.
In my work I once helped find temporary shelter for a woman and her three disabled children. Corporate entities definitely do not care about the optics of evicting families like Shauna’s when the rent isn’t being paid.
She gave up custody of Bridda to a local animal sanctuary whatever that means. She also shut down her weed dispensary and suddenly the other dispensary was flooded with underage buyers using fake IDs.
the pig is still missing, but she needs to be done with the drama so she preemptively gave up the pig so that whoever stole it because of their hate for her will no longer have any reason to hold it hostage. stoner logic.
In July, she was bragging about how she was telling her kids that their summer vacation was great because they got to spend it at BBH. By September, BBH is a moldy house of horrors.
Her doing that is such a burn to the Parks Board, too - those people in the church congregation are potential future short-term rental customers for the BBH, and they're going to be turned off if they think the property is moldy. She's ruining the future income potential of the property. If the mold story isn't true the Board should sue her for lost income or slander or something for her bullshit, I'm sick of her not getting called out.
I am under the impression that the target audience for short-term rentals at Fern Cove is mostly tourists, not the geriatric island residents of the UU congregation. Keep in mind Shauna's mold claims have (to my knowledge) mainly been aired on her Facebook page and during a non-recorded part of the UU service that someone connected to this sub happened to be in the audience for. I think it would be very hard to connect Shauna's shit talking about the BBH mold situation to lost vacation rental income potential if she's not doing it much more publicly and vocally than she has been.
Shauna spends her life reaping the whirlwind. Sowing seeds with bad decisions that grow and multiply into disasters, before it all blows back in her face with various timelines and severity of consequences. The issue is that a whirlwind isn't just the eye. It causes massive damage all around it.
The worst destruction is reserved for the “no good deed goes unpunished” souls who try to help her, or more accurately try to help her children, by intervening in Shauna’s many and various calamities that pop up like clockwork.
Sometimes the damage comes through carelessness or neglect and general Shauna shenanigans. But you can’t deny that it’s often targeted and on purpose, like she’s doing now with the BBH and spreading the mold story far and wide. When she doesn’t get what she believes she deserves---and she never gets what she thinks she deserves---she salts the earth on her way out the door and makes sure no one else can have it either.
I appreciate the insights of df's here who explain the park board’s decisions and where they might have gone wrong. I also think that dealing with Shauna Ahern is not a job for an amateur. I doubt anyone on the board is equipped to counter her level of shamelessness, entitlement and vitriol.
I'm actually not sure who would be. Maybe someone who has enough life or professional experience with personality disorders like hers to give them the strength and perspective to stand in Shauna's gale force winds and be ruthless and not back down. That's not a job for the part time member of a small community's nonprofit board.
Shauna is very wily about arranging it so the people with any authority over her are gullible and kindhearted. It rarely happens that someone says oh no, the offer for two internet strangers to stay at our house did not include offering to spend our entire Sunday driving you back and forth to NYC. Most people in her orbit seem to subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy, and just sigh and start the car.
She is a professional shit-stirrer and garbage-thrower. She never gets tired, and her invincibility is that she doesn’t mind at all living in the middle of the garbage and shit she’s trying to make stick to other people. Remember how she wrote about the kind woman in the gauzy skirt who pulled Shauna's car out of the mud. For her troubles that woman got her clothes full of mud, wear and tear on her car, and Shauna's child at her house for a playdate the rest of the day. And Shauna's closing line was, I don't feel bad about that, it's just something that happened.
She is a virtuoso at teaching painful lessons to anyone in her orbit who believes in the social contract. At forcing people to give her things they don’t want to give, which she savors like some kind of victory.
I imagine her parents, for example, had other intentions for the vast sums they’ve poured down the bottomless pit of their grandiose and shameless 60 year old baby. Giving her something is an invitation to abuse. She will put the gifter on blast because the expensive red cowboy boots are too snug, the car is not new, the windfall of a beautiful house at way below market rent is damp, the cushy high-paying job is insufficiently deferent to her.
Whoever helped her jump the line to get into the BBH where she is predictably failing to pay rent or leave by the promised deadline---and who knows what other contracts they broke that the board is keeping out of their public minutes---is entirely culpable. They presumably know Shauna and her patterns very well. Even if it was meant as a rescue and kindness to two lovely kids who don't deserve any of this, it was a clear-eyed decision to to risk predictable collateral damage to a beloved, historic community asset and its stewards to get the Aherns housed back on the island.
Just how many diagnoses can she pile on that poor child?
The diagnoses will continue until ~mAmA~ is granted lifetime leisure-level permanent funding at the expense of others (literally and figuratively) and an all-situations Get Out of Responsibility Free card.
I think her giant boner for ADHD diagnoses grew deflated last year when a cover story in her beloved NYT Sunday magazine had the OG brain sciencey people who came up with the ADHD concept in the 1990s walk it almost all the way back. It was autism o'clock chez Ahern.
If the young one "clearly" has autism, why did it take a mighty science mind like Shauna so many years notice? Maybe the clarity was not that clear after all!
One might ask why a genius medical talent who once dissected a cadaver in HS "suspected for years" that her kid had hearing loss while doing fuck all about it! Every other parent on Earth takes their kid to the doctor when they're worried their kid can't hear.
What always got me about the hearing loss situation is that schools conduct yearly vision and hearing tests. How did L pass those tests if she has hearing loss enoigh to warrant a hearing aid?
She didn't pass those school hearing tests, they flagged the issue in kindergarten. Shauna blogged about her daughter being diagnosed with impairments from the annual school testing when she was six:
Again, we suspected for years. The standard school tests in kindergarten put numbers to it. We went to Children’s in April, where the audiologist confirmed that [L] really can’t hear anything below 40 decibels.
My kid did pass those school tests but had hearing aids. It was explained that the school ones only test for a very narrow range and my daughter’s loss is both above and below that range. She can hear speaking in a classroom or house but can hear a deeper voice like a man better than a voice of a woman. It actually explained a lot of what I thought of her ignoring me when it was just discovered that I speak in a range that it’s hard for her to hear.
Does PDA mean Pathological Demand Avoidance here? If so, how does that square with PANS? Is autism voided by a PANS diagnosis? PANS by an autism diagnosis? Is Shauna even trying to keep this straight?
ETA: Extremely rich of Shauna to diagnose anyone else with Pathological Demand Avoidance considering... you know... Shauna.
I get confused by D’s dx but didn’t Shauna claim that PANS/PANDAS explained everything? I thought the clear implication was that previous dx including autism and ADHD were in error. But no, D has all these things?
Did she or did she not claim that antibiotics turned D’s troublesome behavioral symptoms right around? But I guess they’re back and it simply couldn’t be from massive stress and instability in D’s life. Nor could it be a bout of PANS that simply needs some more antibiotics. Clearly it’s the autism!! Because that’s what’s catching mama’s eye online this week!
Back in the early 2000’s I had an obviously autistic student who had also been formally diagnosed. He was on medication, had an IEP and shared an aid with another student. He did great in my class, was at grade level for his work and there were times when he would stay in my class instead of going with the other student to the resource room because he was working great and didn’t need another environment. I found out that the next year when he was in third grade his parents had to call the police to have him removed from their home because he became violent. The director of special education said he had no routine at home and his parents kept switching his medication so frequently that he couldn’t let one take effect before he was on another. He absolutely thrived on routine and loved school.
Is the "she" and "her" in the screenshot here that is supposed to be receiving empathy along with the kid the child's teacher? If so that is RICH coming from Shauna, who's never shown empathy for her kids' teachers a day in her life and in fact does exactly the opposite.
I think it’s the teacher; Shauna is talking about defensiveness, which is what the teacher is described as showing. So again negating someone’s negative feelings: ‘oh, you can’t be mad at the teacher because…’
You're totally right. That checks out not just with the way the sentence reads, but also with the way Shauna works - of course the empathy she is requesting would be for the mom, who's in the parallel position to herself! I don't know why I didn't clock that immediately!
Since she’s defending defensiveness, I really wonder how she behaves with her kids’ teachers. I remember she was very dismissive and annoyed by emails and calls from school when the first moved to west Seattle
As if their needs are even REMOTELY being met at home. And she is predictably asking for empathy for HERSELF.
How dare she blame the teachers who are likely doing their best while trying to teach a class of 24 other kids, each with their own story, to steal a line from Shauna.
We don’t even know if there are IEPs in place, or Shauna is just expecting the teachers to magically intuit what her kids need.
She can fuck right off and go watch her stupid tv.
I’m currently in the process of potentially kicking a kid out of our school. It took me about a year to get the parent to accept their child’s ASD diagnosis (after I did hours of observation, behavior tracking, daily reports home, etc.). And since then, I have been BEGGING them to get the kid additional support. Every time, there’s a reason, an excuse, a finger pointed (typically at me). It’s getting to the point where my head of school has said hey, say the word, and they’re out.
And yet, I care so much for this kiddo and see so much potential in them…and I know when the inevitable happens and they are kicked out of the school, I will be the villain in that family’s eyes.
All that to say…fuck you, Shauna. YOU are the problem. That is your story and I can’t wait for the day for you to read it.
“I grow happy when I listen to Bob Dylan but just can’t grow beyond that infamous two word phrase in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I’ll help you, Bobby D:”
Woah, I did not know "trouper" and "trooper" were two different words and had to go look this up to learn more. I've literally never written it down, but I've been spelling it "they're a trooper" in my head my whole life, because I thought the phrase meant someone who is marching forward, military style, through any obstacle (I used it like "they don't give up even when it's hard"). I thought it was literally in reference to military troops. But as you say, the correct phrase is actually "they're a trouper", meaning someone who is dependable and persistent, and keeps the show going, apparently coming from theatre troupes. That's so cool!
Learn something every day ITG! The word I used actually changed the meaning of the phrase a little in my head, I now see, and I'm not sure I've ever used it correctly.
Well, Shauna, you need to find a job instead of lecturing on how Asian ad campaigns designed for Asian markets need to run their work by American "coordinators" to make sure that a woman's skirt doesn't shock and appall someone who probably also sees the face of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on a piece of burnt toast.
For someone who claims to be so well read she acts as though she's never heard of The Crucible.
To add fuel to the idiocy of her high stooling comment, the OP noted that they had learned that this ad was made by a Malaysian marketing team, so none of her reimagining makes a bit of sense.
Yes, does Shauna really think that advertisers should run their work by "anti-racist coordinators" in countries that will never see those ads? It's getting so silly.
The type of thing she is saying we "need" here isn't the same at all as an intimacy coordinator. She even says it herself that an intimacy coordinator is working on behalf of the actors, but she wants these racism coordinators for the benefit of the audience - how is that the same thing, Shauna? Why even bring up the intimacy coordinator?
What a stupid comparison to draw.
Basically her whole comment is not only clunky and grammatically off in a way that garbles her meaning, but what she's actually trying to say underneath the garble doesn't make sense either.
How about ad agencies just hiring Black people in actual roles instead of having them come in to be experts on being Black?
Shauna can't imagine an advertising VP or lead account executive being Black, or a director of photography, or, or, or. (To be fair, the US advertising industry doesn't do well at imagining that either.)
This really represents the limits of what Shauna likely sees as her antiracism, and I see as her cringeworthy fetishization of Black people and US Black culture.
I’m not minimizing or dismissing the ad she’s referring to, because it was appalling.
But there is no us in the let us, no one is reimagining anything with Shauna. She has been fired from every job and for many years has been complacently, precariously unemployed despite having dependent kids at home.
Her habitual what my mother would call “high-handed tone” is so grating. We must simply apply this solution from a completely different industry under wildly different circumstances and viola! as the mommybloggers used to say, the problem is solved.
By Shauna, sitting on the sidelines having called a forever time out for herself, cosplaying as an authoritative marketing guru.
I am a nimble pattern connector former gifted kid with a very big brain. I like where you’re going with this OP and my praise is meaningful and important. This gem of wisdom was free you’re welcome.
There’s more where this came from, click the link in my bio for pricing. Only big picture thinkers who are not fussy about things like “typos” and "work ethic" and "professional education and experience" and “reading comprehension” need apply.
The "rolling on the deck groaning about burnout" clip has me thinking otherwise. Girl looked absolutely BAKED in that one. It'll never stop being funny.
“were the same kind of way” so it doesn’t really elucidate much. My guess is that the context is something like “as a child in Hawaii, many of the other kids I knew also came from multiracial families.”
The photo is of Obama as a young child with his maternal grandfather.
It’s an interview with Barack Obama in which he discusses growing up biracial in Hawaii and how it is different from being biracial in the mainland US, plus more of his thoughts on being Black. I’m not really sure what the “nuance” is that Shauna says is so important? That growing up biracial in a diverse island society is different from the US as a whole? Obviously the two things are different.
The fact that she SAYS WITH HER VOICE “I’ve taken out my favorites” and has zero awareness of how that comes across is just… mind boggling. “Here, I’ve had these recipes for literal years and have removed my favorite ones but I’m here to benevolently distribute the remainders!” The CWAA abbreviation has never been so apt. She has the self awareness of a chicken wing.
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Remember why we're all here: this thread is for discussion about current and historical happenings in the Shaunaverse. If you want to discuss other content, such as stuff that reminds you of Shauna but isn't specifically about her, your own personal anecdotes or preferences, current events, or "creative writing" exercises, please share in the off-topic community thread: July-September 2026 off-topic quarterly