Thor's Day Thing: 10/13/22

It's a slow news day until the nukes start flying.

Thor faces an indifferent wolf.

Ahoy.

I’m going to be very busy for the rest of the week, so I’m getting this Thing done in the wee hours. I will still bang out a thread every day, and the two essays I’ve been hacking on will show up eventually.

Stuff from Mouth World:

• Brothermouth, in his mid 40s, took and failed his road test for the first time in his life today. Living in NYC, he never saw the point in learning to drive and didn’t own a car besides his (now) ex-wife’s. Since moving here, I’ve been teaching him to drive, and he’s been flying solo for many months now. No issues, the dude can drive; he failed immediately on parallel parking, something I’ve never understood being a mandatory skill on a driving test. Anyway, Fathermouth and I will park the two pickups in inviting positions along the edge of the property and I’ll drill sergeant him for a couple weeks and try again. He was disappointed.

• In a gesture that probably cheered him, Brothermouth learned that I had never seen The Hangover or any of its culture-defining sequela that truly form a flying buttress of the Western literary canon, so I saw it for the first time tonight. In a result that will probably shatter no one’s illusions about my impeccable taste, I generally laughed hard enough to pee myself.

• Husbandmouth is again out of a job, having quit his recently-obtained position doing regional delivery for a major logistics brand that shall remain nameless. He was enjoying the work for the first week, where he was paired with a seasoned driver while awaiting the training that would have occurred later this month to make him a full driver able to do his own routes; however, a few days after Husbandmouth started riding with him, he went on two weeks’ vacation, and apparently the company had absolutely no scheduling plan for Husbandmouth for this contingency. He then proceeded to be paired with a daily rotating cast of other trainees, who also had no training or authorization for various aspects of paperwork or protocol, and all of whom, he quickly learned, were very likely illegal aliens working unlawfully, as each one spoke no or virtually no English and would not handle interactions with clients. He was completely unable to communicate even a little bit with them, they were additionally as untrained as he was, and as such, his 6-hour delivery route became a 15 or 16 hour work day three days in a row. For those of you not aware of Federal law around truck drivers, it’s illegal to drive more than a certain number of hours in a 48-hour period (or to schedule employees to do so); when he discovered he was going to be paired another day with someone in the roster who was simply labeled “trainee,” he informed them he should not be driving again in this time period, was told tough nuggets, and quit.

  • He is reverting back to searching for cybersecurity jobs, and apparently is finding no shortage of openings; his first callback was incredibly impressed with his qualifications but COULD NOT HIRE HIM FOR A 100% REMOTE JOB BECAUSE HE IS UNVACCINATED. The hiring manager didn’t seem super enthusiastic about enforcing this policy and has told him she’ll continue to work around for a way of fitting him in. Yep. It’s almost 2023, and we’re still doing this.

  • I was not at all happy with the way this shook out; I wouldn’t have quit before finding a new job, and money was invested for him to go to trucking school, so I’m disappointed in him giving up so soon. But I do understand his reasons, and seeing him stumble out the door three days in a row on four hours’ sleep to drive a truck for 15 hours definitely gave me concerns for his safety, so I’m not saying his judgement was bad. It’s just a shitty situation to go back to losing an earner in the household.

• My torn ACL is continuing to give increasingly more trouble; even on the majority of days where I don’t have a twisting incident that puts me on the ground screaming (thankfully still very rare), normal, reasonably careful activity (I was not discouraged from continuing normal non-strenuous movement) still builds up to pain and swelling that puts me in a seat for the rest of the day. I have a pre-surgical consult next week which will be my ‘point of no return’ for deciding to go ahead with the surgery, scheduled for early next month; I’m currently inclined to go ahead with great enthusiasm and wish I could have scheduled it for sooner because every weird pop or rattle makes me worry about the permanent damage of bones rubbing together.

• The cattle have gotten some successful test runs going out into the new, much larger pasture that still has an enormous amount of wild forage and corn overgrowth. It presently only has a 5-line electric fence but not an outer mesh fence yet, so they have so far only gone out under continuous supervision. Hanging the outer fence has been stalled for various reasons and I’ve gotten cranky and despondent about it, like people who buy a car they’re going to restore and it sits in your garage for literally decades while life buries you and you eventually get this heart-sinking feeling that it’s just never going to be finished. It is very frustrating being so limited currently and trying not to project anger on Brothermouth and Husbandmouth for not putting a lot of time into banging it out.

• It looks like we will have one steer and one full-sized hog to slaughter at the end of the year; we’re doing pregnancy tests on the cow and heifer, and if neither of them are pregnant, we’re slaughtering the bull, too. Just about the only thing that is consistently doing well is the poultry flock: we’re now one generation into breeding the Jersey Giant and Plymouth Rock roosters with Rhode Island/Plymouth hens and that first gen is old enough that many have started laying. We’re rapidly approaching a dozen X-large or Jumbo brown eggs a day and if the astonishingly large males are any indication, the meat hens will be pretty fantastic. In a few more generations I may have a very distinctive dual-purpose flock consistently doing far better than “good enough” on both meat and egg production.

• Fathermouth announced today that he learned that “Russia ‘turned off’ Nordstream 1 and 2.” So that was a fun conversation.

• I don’t talk about it often on here because I don’t like airing a lot of my sensitive private business- poop and cows are usually the level I’m comfortable with. I’m infertile, and it’s been a great source of shame, frustration, and despair over the years, and Husbandmouth and I had begun an adoption journey while still living in NY and got screwed over by the agency when we moved and decided to pick up again to stop making delays and excuses before we’re too old for it to be a wise decision. We’re going to go with surrogacy using a donor embryo, as it allows us to bypass a lot of the really soul-draining bullshit around newborn adoption as well as giving us more say in the matter, but we’re finding it an equally fraught journey with lots of scamming and shadiness. It’s also looking to cost an enormous shitload of money, probably about on a par with what newborn adoption was going to run start-to-finish anyway. We’re finding the information search frustrating, but Husbandmouth has really stepped up in being supportive this time, sensing that this is probably the last time we’ll be relatively young and stable enough to make the hard push for however long it ends up taking. All I feel is dread so far.

• Wow, midterms came up on us REALLY fast, didn’t they? I’m not going to tell my fellow Americans how to vote, and I’m not going to ask anyone how they plan to vote (though you are, of course, welcome to share). If you’re a Gutterball, though, we are all aligned on some very important dimensions, so I expect we all have similar goals in mind this November- assuming anything like real elections are actually what happen.

  • In light of the aforementioned, I encourage everyone to check out https://standforhealthfreedom.com/vhf/ and review the voter’s guide there, which relates specifically to health freedom. SFHF offers a voting guide for the general elections in every state with the roster of candidates who have either A) explicitly pledged to SFHF that they will oppose mask/vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and pursue rollbacks of emergency powers in their states or B) SFHF believes they will do so with enough confidence that they are being recommended above other alternatives. In the absence of other truly compelling tiebreaker issues- none of which currently leap to mind- everyone in House Mouth will probably be voting entirely from this list. I hope it’s helpful information for some of you.

• I’ll be very tied up the rest of the week doing speech/presentation writing for the management consulting firm and catching up on the last of consultations that were pushed back by clients affected by the recent hurricane, and in the afternoons will be attending the State Grange conference here in PA where, among other things, everyone on Mouth Farms will be taking the 6th Degree membership in the Grange, apparently accompanied by some very cool rituals relating to Ceres and Pomona that are not at all heathen in origin we swear. We’ll be touring a farm co-op entirely staffed by developmentally disabled adults and something with the Dairymen’s Association where we will probably be handed milkshakes every 5 minutes. I understand that this is all substantially similar to what Masons do but with more cow shit.

• Boy, it sure seems like nuclear war is back on the table again after being declared passé for a few decades, doesn’t it? Why do you think I’m in such a big rush to have a kid after putting it off so long? Babies keep you really busy in the bunker. Let’s spend a few more billion in Ukraine before turning some of it to a cinder. It’s not like we don’t have the best U.S. economy in modern history, especially after Trump nearly drove us into a new Great Depression and eating our own shoe leather and stuff, the big dumb dummy. I fucking hate cheap gas and our strategic enemies not laughing at us.

Have a Thursday, everyone- you don’t have a choice!