Having trouble sleeping tonight. I think I’m stressed because I have an appointment to donate blood today. I’m not going to back out, but still…
In the Yoo Kay, the farmers are already running appeals for workers; most of the pickers here have been from Eastern Europe, so there’s really gonna be a huge shortage for lots of crops.
I’m actually hoping this will be a bit of a trigger to get people to give it a shot and hopefully get us on a more sensible path- I really hate the fact that we’ve been dividing jobs into ‘stuff British people do’ and ‘stuff we get furriners to do for cheap’. I don’t think that’s a sustainable way to run an industry, let alone a country. Plus I think it helps drive racist attitudes.
And before you ask, yes I have picked fruit myself before, and I do plan to sign up for agricultural work over summer once my degree’s finished.
Anyway, I plan to finish working on my [del]triffids[/del] project data collection today, then I’m just finishing write up for everything.
Everyone have a good day and stay safe!
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffeinatin’. YAWN ‘Tis 66 Amurrkin out and cloudy/foggy with a predicted high of 88 and mostly N.O.S. for the day. Not a lot on the agenda today. I shall get out for a bit to go to the dollah sto’ in search of vitamins. The supply is a little low and I’ve always had good luck at the dollah sto’ so hope today will be the same. Other than that, no biggie plans. Sup shall be grilled salmon steaks, wild rice, rolls and some kind of vegetative matter.
I had an adventure of sorts yestiddy. We discovered a leak under the kitchen sink. So, emptied it out and sure ‘nuff, leaky pipe. Fortunately I do know what is needed pipewise to fix the situation, so a trip to Lowe’s was made. Long story short, I replaced the leaky pipe. Go Me! What? It was not a major plumbin’ chore. I was able to do it in about an hour with minimal cussage. Anywho, pipe replaced and with the help of a biiiiiiiig fan, we got it dried out. Today we shall put back all the stuff that got took out.
Hippie welcome! Glad boss in jammies listened to you. I am amongst the retired and highly recommend it as a lifestyle. I say the sooner you can swing it the better. Seriously, been almost three years now and I still wake up every mornin’ happy to be a retired, unproductive drain on society. 
{{{Nellie}}} OUCHIE! Hope you’re not all sore and stove up today. Medicinal whisky is always a good idea.
{{{Nettie}}} hope today is better. I say go to the mailbox in jammies and slippers. If it’s good enough for :eek:Wally*World:eek: it’s good enough to go fetch the mail I say.
Now I need more caffeine and to feed rumbly tummy. Then, alas, bother, and woe, I suppose I should purtify and don appropriate bein’ about the public attire if I am to go out and about. Life is just so difficult!
Happy Firday Y’all!
Good job on the pipe repair, O Ursine One. 
My so-called sleep pattern is seriously randomizing lately. At least I have another 9 days (counting the weekend) before next planned irk day, so hopefully can sort that out by then. Actually getting decent quality of sleep would help. Think it’s going to be a Nyquil “night” for me.
Thanks Sunny It was destiny and a botched oil change
I had noticed the two girls that had rented an apartment across the street from me for a few days. I came home from work one day and the pretty one was sitting in her running car crying. Blue smoke was pouring out from under it. I reached in and shut the car off and asked her what had happened. She said that she wanted to take care of her car on her own and she knew that the oil should be attended to. She called her father and asked him how much oil. He told her four quarts, five if the filter was to be changed. She did not know how to change the filter, so she just added the five quarts into the engine and started the car.
I told her it would be ok and went for some tools. I drained out the oil, went for more oil and a filter and finished up the job. After her car was all done I asked her if she was hungry. We went to Taco Johns for a quick bite to eat. That was May 19, 1972. In six weeks, we will have been together for 48 years and married for 45.
I am more and more ready as time goes on. Sunflower has been retired for almost two years and she assures me that “It doesn’t suck!”
SIL’s brother works on base at the child care center, and he’s also on admin leave. So the two of them, under FCD’s supervision, will build Roxy’s swingset. I may also get the 2 of them to help with the attic clearage. I gotta say, with my poor sweetie unable to do much of anything because of his back, it’s nice to have 2 young, strong, and tall guys to lend a hand. Plus, free labor! 
In a similar vein, it terrifies me that so much of our manufacturing is now done overseas because of cheap labor. What happens if something - whether plague or earthquake or some other disaster - stops the flow of clothing or fabrics or steel or any number of other items? What if China suddenly says “Screw you guys - we’ll sell our stuff elsewhere!!” You can’t just throw together a textile mill or a steel mill or an electronics plant overnight, and there isn’t a pool of trained workers standing about waiting to start building consumer products. I’m not an isolationist, but I still think a country needs its own source of vital items.
It’s like now with people - those who don’t know how to cook are suddenly scrambling with the shutdown of restaurants. Even if you have the ingredients, you aren’t suddenly capable of turning them into edible meals if you’ve never turned on your stove!
Sorry, I’ll kick this soapbox back into the corner.
Happy Firday, all!!!
Definitely doesn’t suck when the time is right! Turns out, I wasn’t ready the first time I retired, but 8 years later after a series of assorted jobs, I skipped out the door with no regrets! It helps that I’ve got the world’s most amazing toddler to, um, entertain me. yeah, Entertain, that’s the word.
It’s funny, tho. When we were both young and healthy, my sweetie and I decided that our retirement would be spent aboard a sailboat, exploring at will. But right before my first retirement, we sold our boat and honestly haven’t missed it hardly at all. Them things are a lot of work!! Plus little things like when you’re used to a king size bed, crawling into a V-berth is less of an adventure and more of a not-adventure.
Our boating of choice now (in non-plague times) is taking cruises. Decent size beds + lots of other people doing all the work = good.
FCM
I love to cook. My kitchen is my happy place. I have two grown daughters, neither of which have any interest in learning how. My older daughter lives a few blocks away. Her go to dish to cook is boxed macaroni and cheese with cut up hot dogs. My younger daughter lives in the apartment in my basement and is happy to eat almost anything I cook. When she ventures beyond sticking a frozen pizza in the oven her go to dish is scrambled eggs with shredded cheese.
it’s a mystery
FCM
I am slowly coming out of lurkerhood but I have been here a long time. I remember reading your posts about your boat with envy. I live about as far from the ocean as you can get and I am sure you do not envy my view of cornfields stretching from horizon to horizon
I was in Omaha once, around 2000, I think. It rained while I was there, but that’s no substitute for real water! I was visiting a friend who was retired USAF from Offutt. He took me to the air museum there and I got a close-up look at the Blackbird. That was very cool!
My daughter can cook OK, but she doesn’t like to. Her husband likes to cook, but he’s a messy cook and he does weird stuff like putting sugar in the breading for chicken nuggets. So I do most of the cooking for us. Which reminds me - I need to figure out what tonight’s supper will be. And I’ll need to run to the store a little later today - we’re almost out of bananas, and Roxy won’t stand for that!
Welcome to the madhouse, hippie! You and Sunflower are so lucky to have found each other, I look forward to more stories of your life together
Over my side of the pond, life is very quiet. I’ve been working from home all week but I haven’t had much to do so there has been quite a bit of slacking off! This afternoon, I fear I will have to brave the supermarket as we’re running low on fresh fruit and veg. I’ll take 'im indoors with me so he can be 'im outdoors for a while and get some fresh air while we stand in a queue out in the carpark.
I feel the same as you, nuts, I’m sure there are plenty of British people who could do the agricultural jobs but they simply don’t want to. I suspect a lot of that is down to laziness because it’s not a comfortable office job, but also it’s traditionally been a bottom-of-the-pile job that they look down on, and yes we have imported lots of furriners to do it in the past. However, brexit and the national hissyfit over being part of the EU means we can’t have access to those lovely furriners any longer, thus if the Brits want to eat all the stuff we can grow, they’re going to have to pick some of it.
Lunch beckons…I’m kinda bored with chicken sammies, but I have chicken to use up and the cat likes to share.
I’ve never harvested, beyond what little I’ve grown myself, but I expect it’s tiring and probably back-aching. Honestly, I don’t know if someone could pay me enough to do the job. What we need is some enterprising personality to create a veggie-picking fitness program and I expect we’d have more than enough folks to do it - especially if it “required” some fancy fitness gear.
Harvest yoga, anyone?
Last night, Mrs. L.A. noticed I’d cleaned the bathroom (Wednesday). She said, ‘I’ll make a housewife of you yet!’ (After I’d made escargots for dinner at her request. 
)
Morning all.
Don’t want to get into the politics of picking crops (for nothing divides friends like politics), but jobs like that have always been the low-end of the pay scale and as people ‘move up’ the ladder, they leave those jobs behind, until the mindset is ‘those jobs are below me’. Which leaves room for the ‘seasonal worker’, who may be in the position of taking anything they can get. Been that way through many cultures and countries through history. Might even say America came to be as it is because of the importation of cheap labor…
And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject, like I said, I’m not tripping over the third rail in the MMP…
It’s cloudy but no rain forecast and highs in the mid-80’s, so may get out and continue the Great Garage Reorganization. Also need to frame and hang some more pictures and make myself presentable and go to the bank.
hippie, that’s a wonderful love story. And swampy’s right; retirement is all that it’s cracked up to be–if your ready to retire, as FCM illustrates.
swampy, congrats on the plumbing fix. I would be calling (and paying) an plumber for that, I have limited skill in that area.
Butters, hope you get some rest.
Sunny, may your head (and Yoshi) feel better.
Now to break fast and finish up the first Sudoku of the day.
Happy Firday!
It’s a nice day outside, a sunshiny 52 going up to 66 day.
The dogs had a playdate this morning, Lily came over to visit.
Lily is a little less bold than their other friend Jax, so she was very nervous, until I let my two out back. Instant joy. The pups had a great time visiting. It’s not as nice as the dog park where there is a lot more room to run, but they still have fun together.
Echo cried when they left. I think she would love for everybody to move in.
Many years ago I worked with woman from Russia.
She would tell us the stories of living in Russia, one of which was how during the harvest the government would load up a bunch of college students onto the trains and send them out into the country to harvest the food. This is how they paid for their ‘free’ college. So you take a bunch of city kids (who basically lived on potatoes and vodka), put them out in the middle of a field, hand them a bunch of bushel baskets, and tell them they can’t go home until they have picked x amount of produce. So for two weeks they picked produce, only nobody told them how to pick produce, so they picked everything. Didn’t matter if it was big, small, unripe, ripe, rotted, half eaten; if it was on the bush, vine, or tree, it got thrown into a basket. Didn’t matter if it got battered, bruised, or splatted when it hit the basket, the goal was to fill the baskets as quickly as possible so they could go back to the city. She said it was no wonder there were food shortages, because nobody wanted to pick the food and nobody cared how it was picked, especially since they were forced to do it and not getting paid for it.
Of course they were getting paid for it because they were getting ‘free’ living expenses and ‘free’ college.
However, they were better off then the ones who were forced into prostitution to pay for their ‘free’ living expenses and ‘free’ college.
I think ‘harvest yoga’ would be a great idea. We should get the French to work on the marketing. Should be easy enough for a culture that managed to turn snails and goose liver in gourmet food.
Irking on the agenda for today. I got the new blind today to replace the broken one, my son can hang that later. I need him to put on the new shower head too, although I may be able to do that myself.
I took out chicken for dinner, but it’s the store brand so I’ll see if it makes my mouth itch.
I think it may be the black pepper, not the chicken, because yesterday the pork roast I ate made my mouth itch, and I had been a bit too heavy handed with the pepper.
My neighbor saw me outside yesterday, told me he had something for me and brought me out a piece of homemade pie. Unfortunately it was peanut butter pie, and I am allergic to peanuts. It looked really good too. My son ate it and said it was good.
I told my neighbor that once all this mess clears up I’ll take him to lunch.
Just got Roxy down to sleep. SIL is starting to assemble the swingset, but he’s waiting for his brother to come over. I’m having the last of the leftover sloppy joes. The house is quiet. Life is good!
Mom, harvest yoga, indeed. I’d do that (:))
Struggling a bit, today. Slept badly.
Mid-daughter and DIL took the children to walk a nature walk. Unfortunately it is in a state park and the govenor closed it.
Later…
Around here people are taking the kids on bear hunts.
They are asking people to put stuffed bears in their windows for the kids to spot.
No stuffed bears here, just a stuffed pig and a huge stuffed red dog.
I heard Mrs. L.A. getting ready to have a toaster pastry. Instead, I took some leftover corned beef and a potato and made a hash out of it (with two fried eggs each on top).