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#he's so fucking right about right to repair

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When you have both Lae’zel and Shadowheart in your party

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Night Witches

And Sabaton's brilliance lies in realizing that nothing is more metal than actual history.

#music #Youtube

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A quick lesson in "reading" pasture, and the power of ruminants.

#farming #ecology

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Valhalla Calling (Metal Version)

If you're a gamer and you don't know Miracle of Sound yet, you should fix that. This is one of their Assassin's Creed songs, and they're consistently great.

#music #Youtube

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#dungeon meshi #chilchuck tims

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So there's a classic joke, repurposed for innumerable jobs and hobbies. It runs along these lines:

"Question: What does a blacksmith/farmer/glassworker do with a million dollars? Answer: Work 'til the money runs out."

And basically--uh. That's what we've done. When we moved here, we used equity from the old house, and withdrew an older 401K of my spouse's for downpayment and property improvement. And as we try to pull this place together and learn how to deal with it all and eventually make it financially stable, we've spent that down. And uhhhhhh it's gone. And we haven't reached any point of stability.

We don't yet have the sheep to a point where we can recoup feed and fencing costs through sales of wool/fleeces/lambs. We don't yet have the garden to a point where it reduces grocery costs. (Indeed, it still costs a great deal because it still requires substantial outside input.) The various trees will be years before they provide us any value. The chickens probably cost more than their eggs would, though their eggs are definitely better than we'd buy at the store. We don't produce any salable crops or added value products yet. The metal shop generally subsists on money the spouse makes with metal shop sales, which is a fantastic achievement I'm very proud of. On the other hand, the metal shop is essentially a second job for him, and he spends a huge amount of time and energy on it. My glass does not support itself, because I haven't put in enough effort, though it's clear that it could.

We also don't have most of those property improvements the 401K was supposedly for. Still have no permanent fencing. No equipment shed. No barn. No water points in the fields. No fucking dishwasher. At least we do have the tractor and a mower more or less adequate to the several acres of lawn we haven't ripped up yet.

The idea was certainly never to get rich off these things. It was to enjoy these things at a lower cost because we put in effort in place of money. But uh. We done run out of money and making up the difference is going to be a whole lot of effort.

So anyway I guess the moral is that being a first generation farmer is insanely fucking difficult and the economic reality is that even having a well-paying outside job can be insufficient to get started. We're gonna do it somehow anyway. But goddamn.

#this is ridiculous #this isn't like...a plea for sympathy or anything #it's more of a 'piece of our shared economic reality'

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Enough things have happened. No more things for a while. Thank you.

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“By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reëlection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.””

— Joe Biden’s Last Campaign

#biden #us politics #lotta good points here but also #can I just say I'd love us to adopt #queer trans disabled monsterfucker website #more universally

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I've been rolling something around in my head.

If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?

Just let that marinate for a moment.

Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.

#I have complex feelings about UBI #and have not sorted through and researched and formed an actual opinion #but the points of second poster are so moving #imagine a world where all the young people interested in farming #could like #actually afford it

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Still Counting

Rockabilly metal.

"Counting all the assholes in the room/well I'm definitely not alone"

#for a while when he was five #this was the boys favorite song #but he knew he shouldn't say assholes #so he'd ask for the 'counting song' #parenting win? #Youtube

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Incredibly, I did in fact get fencing around all of the fruit trees yesterday. Makes me wish I'd done it last week--but if you've been paying attention, you'll know I wasn't exactly sitting idle during that time anyway. I am still getting used to this health functionality--and of course, I don't trust it, but that's another post.

So, yeah, got some laundry done, fenced the fruit trees that are planted (which isn't all of them), watered and fertilized the vegetables and the strawberries. That part is a way more significant task than it should be, because my watering system--well. There is no system. I have watering cans, which are the only thing capable of reaching the far garden and the orchard, and I have a busted sprayer attached to a horrible hose for the kitchen garden. Only the front of the house has a functional hose. And I can't get the busted sprayer off the horrible hose. But the Boy helped for a good while with the tree fencing, and I really love his developing sense of himself as a helper and his sense of ownership over the tasks here.

ANYWAY. Scrubbed the chicken waterer and duck tub and refilled them, cleaned the chicks' feeder and waterer and refilled them three times, because the chicks are massive and messy and have seriously outgrown the brooder. They neeeed to go out to the grower coop, but we haven't moved it, and I can't do that on my own.

Very notably, very much did not do any dishes. So now we're in the "need a fork? wash a fork" stage of needing to do dishes. Ahhh, spring. The housework always goes straight to shit.

So TODAY, let's see--urgently need to move aforementioned grower coop, put the chicks out, plant the rest of the Solomon's Seal, plant the sunchoke tubers. Haul water to the sheep, shift their fencing to give them new grass. Get two blueberry bushes and three aronia bushes in the ground. Uh. Create menu, create grocery list. Optimally, go grocery shopping, but I don't think that's happening. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I dread ya, tomorrow. What else? Oh. Do the fuckign dishes. mmmmmm. Probably still water the strawberries and myoga and Solomon's Seal while they're getting established. Water and fertilize the poor abused fruit trees.

I'll uh, I'll just stop there, since obviously even with help I can't actually do all of that today.

#this is ridiculous #farming

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Awaken

Dethklok--not the first band to prove that any sufficiently accurate parody of metal is also good metal, but definitely a good one.

#music #why not we're gonna continue the metal streak #Youtube

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Parenting is this thing you do where you're laying on your bed naked, moisturizing and relaxing after your shower, and your thirteen year old busts in and immediately starts telling you about the stupid-ass premise of a B-list DC villain.

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Grey Warden Cullen

#dragon age

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Do schools in other parts of the world try to raise additional money for their programs by dragooning children into pyramid schemes selling sub-par and overpriced candy bars or is that just an American thing

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remember when you used to be able to play snake with the… hold on what’s it called

hmm. don’t think i’ll be calling it that. anyways i was gonna say remember when you could play snake with the buffering circle on youtube but. now i have other concerns