Thor's Day Thing, 2/9/23

Various and Sundry

It is really, really hard to find images of this guy anymore that aren’t from Marvel. Thanks so much.

Just a roundup of worldly and personal bits with a more focused piece later.

• Mouth Farms: The winter has finally broken around here. Since Thanksgiving it’s been more or less nothing but rain, followed by freeze, followed by freezing rain, with the occasional shitty dusting of snow. The entire area has been swamped for nearly two months straight, making chores a miserable undertaking and any projects on the grounds impossible. It’s been so bad I’ve actually been able to get Husbandmouth and Brothermouth to use the overboots we’ve had since last year because they’re sick of losing their own footwear in the morass.

  • But for most of this week, it’s been light jacket or nothing weather, the animals are overjoyed and romping around the acres, and all the first flowers are coming out. We can walk across the ground without sinking and having to completely change clothing. Leaving our house in general has become less miserable, which has been a much-needed lift to my spirits.

  • Now that projects can resume, there are plenty: our gutters were knocked down over the winter; the hogs destroyed one of their feeders and are well on their way to destroying the other one, so we’re moving to an anchored trough system instead; now that Fathermouth is moved into the adjoining property, we can finish putting pasture fencing around the property to include the field that runs behind his house, which means the cattle will now have shade trees available in their ranging area. This round of fencing is the longest yet, but we’ve learned a tremendous amount from the saga I regaled you all with in the fall, so I expect it to go faster and cheaper (by the foot).

  • We did not breed any meat rabbits over the winter as I had hoped we would have by now; after doing a bit of research I believe we’ve been overfeeding them, as apparently obesity more or less shuts down their reproductive cycle and can terminate pregnancies if they’re already bred. No fatties please?

  • The chickens have been a rousing success and you’d barely know they had overwintered with the volume of eggs and slaughters we did this season. They are presently averaging 10 eggs a day, more than half of which are browns in the large to jumbo category (which I have been exclusively incubating since Monday for another round of breeding). The Jersey Giants seem to be what is predominantly breeding now, followed by the Barred Rocks. The eggs are phenomenal quality. All our respective parents are handed dozen cartons every time they visit, and we’re still considering rolling out some small-scale cash sales to neighbors. I want to keep growing production so we can be confident about the volume, but for our own purposes, we’re in abundance.

  • The meat from the new slaughters this year has been markedly improved from last year’s slaughter, which was a bull we shared with the farmer that got my herd started. Our steer was much younger and less lean and it has so far showed in the meat. We got much less pork than last year’s slaughter, which was a nice big sow that filled a freezer by herself; this boar’s cuts are much smaller but no leaner, and he had an excellent diet so it’s been very flavorful. We were able to retain a lot more bones than last year so I’ve had a lot more opportunity to make bone broths and jellies, stretching the food a lot farther. My goal for this year is to be in a position to slaughter two of each animal at year’s end before I’m comfortable that we have surplus to sell off; that will be nice manageable growth. That means getting both cows and hogs breeding more smoothly, which is going to take some work and research. I dunno, maybe I can hang some glowsticks in the barn and leave some X in the stalls.

    We also very much want to try to have a dedicated dairy cow again.

  • Honey production starts this year as local hives finally have nucs to sell (last year was a population crash). We’ll have two hives which should not only be excellent for our honey production but start boosting the local population around here which were awful this year for all species.

• Husbandmouth and the Raiders of the Lost Job: Husbandmouth did not get the big job we had pinned hopes on (he was one of two candidates for a cybersecurity job in a state university). It has now been enough months unemployed that I am starting to lose count. We fight frequently when I feel he isn’t putting in enough effort to search and the subject makes us both miserable. Money has been stretched as thin as it can be before we start actively losing things or I have to start selling my personal protected investments at penalties. That this worries me and not him sick to distraction on a daily basis pisses me off and makes me assume bad faith in his job searching, which leads to more fighting. The agency I work for has been transitioning me into more accounts since the beginning of the year as I’ve become more experienced, but it is a very slow ramping up of new work and as such a very slow increase in income. I would not be a realistic sole breadwinner for quite some time, even if this were an acceptable arrangement for me, which it isn’t.

• A few weeks ago I became horrified at how much weight I had gained over the past year, a gain that seemed to accelerate after my activity further plummeted following the ACL surgery. It’s such an embarrassing number that I don’t even want to repeat it, but suffice to say, my goal is to lose a total of 40 pounds, which would put me at what I considered my physical peak in my early 30s when I was on the women’s kendo team for my former state’s confederation.

  • So, I quit vaping, all alcohol except for a dietary glass of red wine daily, and went full keto, which has been going for about 2 weeks. I increased my exercise regimen somewhat, but I’ve honestly been too busy to be incredibly aggressive about that, and weight is much more about diet. I mainly want to get my cardio back to acceptable levels of stamina and rebuild my upper body strength in preparation to return to Viking fight club in May, which is when I will (presumably) get clearance to return to sports. I have thus far lost roughly 5 pounds, but my weight is still bouncing a little and our only bathroom scale in the house died a few days ago (no, I didn’t crush it with a fat ass or anything), so I haven’t had data recently. It is hard and sometimes unpleasant but not impossible. It helps a lot that I love cooking and have a wide repertoire. I honestly miss smoking more than the carbs or the drinking. I really, really, really like smoking.

• Something very unsettling and unpleasant happened this weekend that I’m still half-attempting to get to the bottom of: on Saturday I had a kind of explosive mood swing resembling manic-depression, followed by being kept up the entire night with heart-racing palpitations and jitters like a meth high (I wrote the post “A Real Bad One” at the beginning of this swing when it was clear I wasn’t going to sleep), followed by crashing so hard I slept the entire day and woke up feeling like I had a hangover. We checked that I hadn’t accidentally swallowed someone’s prescriptions in the house, I didn’t eat anything weird, I wasn’t feeling ill. If anything similar happens again in the near future I’m running straight out for blood work.

• My phone seems to think that when I text people “see you tomorrow” what I really want to say is “see you gonorrhea.” And, really, isn’t that we all want?

World events:

• I did not watch the state of the union. I had much, much better things to do when it was live, and discovered I barely cared about its content when I did have time. I knew from the tiresome, butt-numbingly repetitive tweets from the hand up the ass of Brandon’s Twitter feed what the topics were going to be and could more or less guess what he was going to say: I created all the jobs, best economy ever, everything is amazing, Ukraine, Russia, immigrants. Everything you think you know is wrong and I’ll occasionally shout belligerently at you as I remind you. Did I basically get it right? If my curiosity overwhelms me, I’ll read Simulation Commander’s synopsis.

• How about that Chinese weather sex spy balloon? Nothing says “I am unable and disinterested in defending our borders and the contents of the nation from this specific nation” like allowing surveillance devices to stroll, at a lazy, leisured pace across the length of the nation and taking long breaks above strategic locations, and telling Americans to shut up about it and to not take matters into their own hands because Winnie the Pooh would be really angry if we damaged his property. We have no fucking dignity left at all. Anyone who still supports this wandering hemorrhoid is beyond my comprehension. Also, this sort of very graphic, public display of defenselessness combined with submissive foreign policy to the perpetrator has some historic precedents for what happens next. Start learning Mandarin or discuss your Valhalla plan with your families.

• We all watched as, directly in front of us, global war criminal Anthony Fauci changed jerseys directly in front of us in a creepy-old-man strip tease act- with constant eye contact and probably a few painfully slow strokes of himself- where he announced that vaccines for rapidly evolving respiratory viruses are futile, the COVID injection doesn’t work, and have never really worked.

  You remember the vaccines he’s talking about. The ones about which he said, “the time has come [for Americans] to do what you’re told.” The ones he defended in congressional hearings as totally effective. The ones that solidified his position as The Science, and that anyone dissenting from this was attacking said Science. The ones that formed the backbone of the bureaucratic infrastructure atop which he stood as Americans were fired, harassed, brutalized by police, forever split from their friends and families, and socially ruined. The interventions that caused suicide, drug addiction, developmental delays, and despair that will take a lifetime or more to wash out.

  We just watched this fucker calmly put out a paper reversing everything and be called to no account whatsoever for his actions to date, which is a pretty good indicator that he never will be. This is probably something we need to start internalizing at this point in terms of our goals and hopes for what the post-biofascist era will look like.

  Fauci’s judgment will have to come from outside the system. It will have to come from outside the law. It’s very clear neither of them represent anything like justice for regular humans anymore. I hope the assassin’s bullet or lightning bolt from Thor or random bus or pack of hungry wolves leave him alive long enough for us to enjoy watching it on national television, courtesy of footage provided by the horde of masked mindless zombies who will stand at the scene pointing phones forward with outstretched arms and dead eyes. I won’t endanger myself by suggesting online that I intend to participate in such a thing, given the opportunity. But I hope it comes.

  Just as a reminder, I do intend, if this community still exists at the time of this event, to organize a group in all seriousness to visit and piss on Fauci’s grave after his interment and have a celebratory feast afterwards. If this stack still exists when the blessed day occurs, I’ll announce and organize the gathering and send out invites.

  I’m willing to eat whatever criminal penalties such an act might earn me. I plan to eat a lot of asparagus and drink a lot of Natty Lite beforehand.

• Did you know the CIA has had a venture capital company for 25 years now? Yeah! It’s so cool. They invest your money in tech startups in fields that they’re really interested in for advancing their missions, like surveillance, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Gosh, I wonder how exciting it must be to be a daring young startup bankrolled by the CIA. I wonder what the terms are? I wonder if you’re allowed to say no? I wonder what happens if you do? I wonder how the board of your startup is chosen for the rest of its existence and how their nonprofit spending is guided? Anyway, it seems really neat, you guys. We should come up with a word for government steering of corporations: I’m thinking Fasctastic. You know, fashionable and fantastic!

Finally, if you had no insight into my almost impossible-to-perceive tastes, it might surprise you to learn that two of my very favorite musical genres are rockabilly and surf rock. In another life I firmly believe that I dated and was possibly engaged to a greaser, wore skinny jeans and a bandanna on my head, worked on his hot rod and called him “daddy-o.”

For your listening pleasure, let me introduce you to the Surfrajettes: