Sunday check-in and a question

 Got a busy week, but wanted to stop by here and download a couple of thoughts. It's been that kind of day.

The good news is that the Bride's job is reduced only 0.1FTE. We can live with that. I'll have to pick up some more contract work here and there, but we keep ALL the medical coverage, and that's what would hurt the most.

The bad news is that the goddamn IRS refuses to believe that I don't have a quarter million stashed in the Maldives.

Long story, but the bottom line is that my mother's IRA didn't get correctly divided into two inherited IRAs - one each for my sister and me - and instead went 1) into her's and then 2) into mine. There it is; it didn;t get turned into hookers and blow, or whatever the fucking IRA thinks it did. 

But the paper trail is complicated, and I'm not sure how to get the sonsofbitches to see how it worked and that I'm not hiding the money. I've got a FTF appointment this coming Friday and I hope to try and lay out what I have and see if I can convince the guy to see reason.

And fucking Trump has never been dinged so much as a nickel for all his tax chiseling? What a fucking fuckstory.

One thing I've been following with increasing incredulity has been the whole "transpanic" thing.

Fortunately Oregon is fairly insulated from this sort of wingnut freakout. It's not that our wingnuts are less freaky - they are, believe me; nobody who's stupid and twitchy enough to think that it's a great notion to move the less-paved parts of the state into Idaho is anything less than a gibbering loon - but that they're much fewer and much less in-our-faces, living as they do out in the hinterlands far from the decadence of civilization.

But as I understand it the whole idea is that these nuts are utterly unhinged on the subject of transgender people who, as I understand it, are people who are born with one set of genital plumbing but don't think and feel in harmony with that.

I joke about "Sharing the bathroom with a Cambodian ladyboy in a cocktail frock" but apparently this is a thing and a thing that utterly drives some people out of their tree; someone who goes to the ladies room and pisses standing up in the stall.

Now WHY this freaks these folks out I have no idea.

I dunno know about them, but I go to the can to do my business and I could care less about what the other people there are doing or how they do it. More than that - I don't want to know. Those excretory and urinary functions?

NOT my kink.

But apparently the whole thing - and I can't believe that it's all purely electoral cynicism; some people HAVE to be genuinely freaky about this for it to gain traction - really DOES freak people out, to which my response is complete and utter bafflement.

Seriously?

WTF, folks?

Why?

Why do you give a shit?

If someone with a cock wants to be called Shirley? If someone with a uterus wants to grow a beard and hang out at the bar with the bros? If they want to be called "them" or whatever?

Why on Earth is it your business to even care, much less "do something"?

No, really.

I totally don't get it.

There's so many things to worry about. So many fucked up problems; global warming, MILF Manor, nonalcoholic beer, exploding freight trains, Dick Cheney, the collected works of Sonny Bono. It's almost impossible to list them all, much less worry and "do something" about.

And you want to fuck around with this?

Like I said; I don't get it.

Anyone help a brother out? No kidding; what's the deal? Not with the cynical GQP scum using it for "culture war" ammo, but the CHUDs out there they're driving with it. What's THEIR problem? Why are these gomers so arsed about this?

Whisper of the axe

 

Well, the news was bad.

My Bride's position will be cut. We just don't know how hard.

Mind you, she was just one of the three out of ten people who got the axe today. She described it as "Body after body goes into the principal's office, shuts the door, comes out sad."

It's worth noting that the heaviest cuts fell on the most junior, lowly-paid staff. Which is pretty infuriating when you think that the body of one Assistant Deputy Superintendant For Paperclip Procurement would probably keep four of those people at work in the trenches where they will be doing some good.

But that's the way outfits like public schools work, and the deal we made.

The real problem now is that we don't know how hard this will hit us.

If she gets knocked back to 0.8 or 0.6FTE? It'll be hard but we can probably make it for another five years until my Social Security kicks in.

But if it's 0.2FTE? Fuck, we're hosed.

So the bottom line is that I may have had the world's shortest retirement.

That sucks. But what can you do? We can't bargain or appeal; the District will do what it will do, and we wil have to suffer what we must.

UPDATE 2/3/22: Well...the bad news is...less bad than we feared.

The Bride's position is being reduced to 0.5FTE. That lets her keep our major medical - which means losing vision and dental; a shoutout to the "best health care system in the world", what, eyes and teeth aren't "heahtcare" you sorry fucks? - and she might have another 0.1-0.25FTE as a "float".

That's bad. But it's not "the worst", it's not the 0.2FTE that would sink us.

So while it's bad we all have the Plague...at least we won't have the Plague AND be living out of our cars.

In passing

I've been working all week (You: but...but you're retired, right? WTF? Me: Ummm. Hang on, I'll get there...) and I've been getting up at 4am to get there, so I'm gonna do the old retired guy thing and take a fucking nap.

But first, I wanted to drop in here and throw out some passing thoughts.

So...retired.

Yeah, well. I didn't want to just drop into the rocking chair and find myself dead of some sort of aneurysm six months from now like every other retired dude. I asked around among some friends still in the biz to give me a call if they needed a hand with anything. One did, so I'm dirt-nannying a job up outside the tiny no-longer-a-real-town of Goble up in Columbia County.

It's irritating, like all this dirt-nanny work, but, hey...it helps pay the bills, and it's only for a month or two.

But that wasn't what reminded me of "working". 

It was an e-mail from my last chief engineer, from where I just retired out of.

He said he wanted to talk; specifically about my last annual "bonus" from the outfit we work(ed) for.

I assume if you've worked for any sort of big business you know what I'm talking about. At the end of the calendar year corporate masters hand out an envelope with some extra jack in it.

Or not; if business has been bad there may be nothing. My first workplace, David Newton Associates, tended to have fat years and lean years and the year-end kick tended to vary depending on how fat or how lean. 

One of the lean years our "bonus" was a fucking frozen turkey.

But this last outfit has a peculiar addition to that tradition; your immediate boss is supposed to "tell you about" your bonus - hence the e-mail from the former CE needing to have a FTF with me about this bonus.

What it reminded me was how I hated that little talk with the heat of a million suns.

What it always did was remind me how much my corporate masters seemed to think what a huge fucking favor they were doing me by handing me this cash bolus which my work earned for them in the first place.

It was a sort of 21st Century largesse, the coins tossed into the crowd of grubby proles by the noble on horseback, and the little talk that came with it irked me more every year I heard it.

Didn't matter if the speaker was someone I liked or, as this guy, was someone I wasn't particularly fond of.

It got to the point where I had to bite my tongue to respond with something biting. One thing I did early on was stop thanking the person. 

Why? Why thank them? How in any way was this a gift? I worked, and worked well, for it. I earned it, it wasn't largesse, it was a measure of my value.

But the corporate requirement to present it as a gift, to "talk" about it as such, made the company's rep come off like they were handing it down as a favor that they should be thanked for, and this time - he finally caught me on the phone - was no different.

I didn't thank him; I agreed it was a nice kick, we talked a bit about work, and he buggered off. 

That was my last one of those little talks - I'm no longer a salaried employee, and I'm no longer eligible for the thing.

Good. We may be in the Second Gilded Age. But I don't need an annual reminder that the coal barons still want to shove us back into company towns, thanks.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the continued Twitter tsuris.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle has a long post about his thoughts - which, as usual, are fairly well-reasoned and to the point - about this flaming trainwreck, but my own perspective on the issue is a peculiar one.

I read a lot of politics and a lot of political blogs, so I hear a lot about the nonsense. And I can see how it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that a high-function autistic, obscenely rich white boy marinated in the toxic shitbrew of apartheid South Africa could, indeed, be an unhinged shitposting MAGA nutball who is turning a social media platform into a fairly accurate resemblance to his own freakish internal headspace.

But the thing is...I don't get my news off the platform. 

I don't use it to communicate with others. 

I pretty much just read; read the content generated by people who write about soccer, or art, or history. I do read some lefty political accounts, like Roy Edroso, but I don't engage with anyone there other than that.

Some, or all, of the people I follow may be taking incoming MAGAt fire...but I'm not in the beaten zone, so I have no idea what the hell that looks like or is.

So...what's kind of weird is that while I know about this shit, I don't really...know it. 

It's like I'm sitting quietly while a knockdown brawl is going on in the next apartment. I hear the thumping and screaming through the walls, raise a brow, cock my head, mutter "Hmmm...", and carry on.

So while Twitter may be just another part of this country overrun with wannabee Blackshirts, looney anti-vaxx 14th Century cosplayers, and Donald Fucking Trump...I'm luckily enough to be in another part of the country.

And I'm fine with that.

Okay. Got to go finish up the paperwork from today's nannying.

But I'll be back in a bit. I've got some more stuff on my mind.

See ya then.

Away from home...

 ...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.

The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.

The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.

I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans. 

Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.

So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.

Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.

Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star. 

And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.

The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.

But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!

Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.

Home for the Holidays

The contract work I was doing crashed last week, so I've had a genuinely "retired" sort of holiday all last week.

It's been nice.

I've continued to wake early because, well, I like waking early. I make a pot of coffee and hang out at the dinner table, reading the news or just reading, sipping the good brew and watching the day slowly begin.

This week the leaves finally began to fall.

That's not a good thing.

The neighbor's yard features a ginormous bigleaf maple. She gets most of the fallout, but we get enough to make the backyard a mess of sopping maple leaves. The Boy - who has no job outside his gaming - got roped into the collection of these damn things. Since he's nineteen and has never really had to work to standard his leaf-raking is...sketchy. So Drachma Kitty and I had to come out and pitch in.

We've done this twice now. The rains that came in last night look like they've finally knocked the last of the leaves down. So there's another day of this ahead of us.

That's not exactly a thrill to look forward to.

But the alternative is a yard full of bottomless mud.

Oh, there was one "work" sort of thing last week, but it was really just sad.

A project that I'd worked on before I retired went to fieldwork. The PM had wanted me to drill the thing, and without me to sit the rig he'd gotten a cherry staff person from one of the Puget Sound offices. He did get me to review her logs and they were...not great.

Should I come in and look at the soil samples? I asked. I might be able to work out some sort of actual stratigraphy; I know the site and the soils. Sure, he replied, so Tuesday morning early I went into my old lab and looked for them.

Nothing.

I asked around; turns out the staff person had never been in the Portland shop. Maybe the samples were in the Salem office? So off I went in one of the company trucks, down I-5 to the little rental office in downtown Salem where this PM holes up. Went in, looked around.

Nothing.

An hour after I got back to Portland the PM send me an e-mail. Oh, I just got this, he says. 

It was a forwarded copy of a message from the staff person saying that she had reviewed the samples and logs and wanted lab assignments. I guess she took the samples back to Tacoma, said the PM.

Yeah, the empty spaces in Portland and Salem kinda clued me in about an hour ago, I replied.

You bet your ass I charged that job every second of my wasted morning.

But that's a big reason I retired when I did. This guy is the chief engineer of the Portland office, and it's perfectly in his "management" style that he had no fucking idea where the samples of the drilling for this sensitive and potentially-hazardous investigation even were and wasted four hours of project time for something he should have never authorized.

Oh, well. His circus, his monkeys now.

Got up Thursday and watched the Macy's Parade. I didn't have the marching mariachi band on my bingo card, but they were pretty goddamn awesome.

And at least the CBS broadcast showed the actual parade. Fuck you, NBC, you worthless gits.

This year I did an actual turkey, as opposed to a breast-only. The Girl has finally developed a liking for the actual tasty parts of the critter (the dark meat...) so I got the smallest one of these monsters I could find and cooked it the way my mother taught me; sealing in the juices with a hot oven and then basting like a madman.

It turned out good as turkey can get.

That, in turn, meant the return of a long-dormant Lawes family tradition; the boiling of the carcass.

My mother, child of the Depression and the Big War that she was, refused to waste a scrap of food go to waste, would use the turkey carcass to make broth and from that some sort of soup, usually a turkey-vegetable-barley sort of thing.

My sister and I, children of the plump Sixties that we were, made merciless mockery of this housewifery. We called the broth and the resulting soup "turkey bone gruel", gruel being the word we thought best symbolized the penny-pinching poverty and misery that the gruel represented

Mind you, it was good soup. Kids, they're just little fuckers sometimes.

Speaking of which...

I went into the Boy's room last night to shut down the gaming and asked about his application to the Portland police cadet program. He replied that he was no longer pursuing that program, but intended to go to college.

......

I'll believe it when I see it. He needs to do the work to find out how much he needs to do, how much it'll cost, and where he needs to go. Will he? I have no fucking idea.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving Day was bright and calm, and I went out into the yard to enjoy the temporarily-leafless vistas.

I sat in the old rope swing, idle since my progeny got too old to swing in it, and just took in the sunny afternoon, quiet and at peace. But also at a place I'd never been before in that familiar backyard.

What lies ahead for me? For us?

I don't know. Perhaps the most fraught part of this whole "retirement" thing is that I don't know how it goes.

I've been a wage slave for thirty years, ever since I left the Army.

I don't know any other life.

But now I'm going to find out.

Nice try, slick...

 

One of the people I worked with at my last job ("last" as in a week or so ago, mind...) apparently just went to the HR department and - according to my ex-chief-engineer - "threatened" to quit.

Now. This person may well be the single most appalling individual I've ever had the misfortune to work with. He's surely the worst I've ever had work for me.

He's a toxic combination of 1) illiteracy (his daily reports are unreadable, and the thing with these is they're nearly 95% pure boilerplate - you just copy what the go-by says and change the location and date - and he'd been given the go-bys within a week of his hire and shown how to use them. Didn't help; his stuff read like it was written by someone whose English was their third language), 2) obliviousness (which is deadly in his job, which is to be the engineers' eyes and ears on the jobsite, so he is supposed to see, hear, and record everything that happens...), and 3) a bizarre creepy/nasty personality (one of his other coworkers used to refer to him as "school shooter" and remark that if anyone shot up a Safeway or elementary school in his home town we'd know exactly who was responsible...)

He had the annoying habit of disappearing; he lives more than an hour from the central Willamette Valley where his job takes place so it's not like you could drive around and knock on his door. When he'd ghost on e-mails and phone calls and texts? He was unreachable.

You can imagine how well that worked with scheduling.

When the chief engineer told me about this "threat", I replied:

"How could (name of dirtbag) "threaten" to quit? You can "threaten" to quit if you're a critical employee who has skills your employer will find difficult or impossible to replace. If you're a tech and in grossly incompetent one, at that? The only reasonable response to your "threatening" to quit would be a sincere goodbye and wish for success at your next career at Jiffy Lube."

Apparently HR responded just so, and the gomer handed in his two weeks' notice. Good riddance.

I tend to be unsympathetic to the chorus of job-creators whining about how nobody wants to work anymore. No, they want to work just fine. Just not at your shitty job for shitty pay under shitty conditions.

But.

I gotta admit, I've been seeing some pretty goofy hires lately.

Maybe it's my old outfit; I'm not sure their hiring-fu is strong. But I wonder...this guy. The dude who quit before him who wasn't creepy and incompetent but just dumber than a bag of hammers. The other dude whose literacy was even more precarious than this goofball and who quit just ahead of getting canned...

Meanwhile the great people this outfit brings in leave, largely because the work is grim; endless brain-destroyingly dull development construction work, spending hours a day watching dirt move and arguing with people who tell you to believe them and not your lying eyes.

But this guy...wow. That's really special.

I think I'll make sure I go to Oil Can Henry's next time instead.

The engineer will see you now.

 I sent this to my corporate today:

"Here’s my thoughts at the moment.

My point in retiring is to step away from the need to punch the clock every week; I’m ready to start doing geology/engineering geology on projects that I enjoy and challenge me rather than worrying about getting in X hours a week and fretting about not making my billable target.

AND I’d like to be able to schedule out my work/life balance (as corporate likes to call it!) further out that day-to-day and even week-to-week, so I’m not getting a call Tuesday that I have to be on a drill rig in K Falls on Wednesday when I’ve got a romantic getaway planned for that day, or some volunteer work for Habitat or DOGAMI.

So what I’d like to do is help out with things that you can use my actual value for – tough stuff, local/regional knowledge, experience – more like a consultant than an employee. You have a big proposal and want research on local geology? Call me, and I’ll get on it. You have a big project next month? Let’s get that scheduled!

Now…I understand if that’s too big an ask. It’s kind of a weird setup. But that’s why I’m putting it out as an option, the option that I’m excited about."

My immediate boss - the chief engineer in Portland - said nothing. I think he may have thrown a plate of spaghetti against the wall, tho; he's that kinda guy.

His superior - the West regional chief engineer - agreed to my terms.

So. 

Now, after thirty years, I'm going through the door into the next part of my life.

Waiting room

Just wanted to check in briefly - and I do mean briefly; it's before 6am Thursday 10/20 and I need to be behind the drill rig up north of Battleground before 7:30.

I meant to post a bit more this month, but on my birthday I made the decision to retire. Or, at least, to begin the retiring process. I'm going "on-call" at my current job at the end of the month. From there it'll be a slow wind-down until I finally hang 'em up completely in five years.

That, in turn, has led to a sort of barely-controlled chaos. What does "on-call" mean? Which of my administrative duties (lab manager, radiation safety officer) do I retain? Do I pass off, and to who? Do I keep a physical space there, or work entirely from home?

So I'm sort of bustling about the anteroom until the moment I step across the doorway into my future.

At THAT point I'll have quite a bit more time, and leisure, and will certainly be here more often.

Until then, though...

I will say this.

I've been a geowageslave for thirty years; almost half my life. Doing geology for cash has been a huge part of who and what I am far longer now than I was ever a paratroop sergeant or fire direction chief. Yet this very blog, and a big part of my own self-image, remains trapped in the amber of the Army of my twenties and thirties.

Yet that wasn't who I was, and isn't who I am, nearly as much as the doing of earth science, everything from monkey-stupid construction work from dirt nanny to overseeing slopes and walls to genuinely challenging slope stability work. Too little of the latter, I'm afraid, but still...when I look at the sort of things that made up my days, the rock and slopes and soils were a lot bigger part than the cannon.

So it'll be interesting to see who and what I become as that daily dirt nanny work recedes. Will the skies change but not myself?

That's in life's next room, beyond the door from this waiting room.

I'm both excited, and more than a bit scared, to open that door.

Belonging Task Force

 

 This morning I got a corporate-wide e-mail.

Now my guess is that this is intended to be some sort of "diversity/equity/inclusion" group, and that's fine. Frankly, entirely too many of us geologic/engineering types are straight white dudes.

But the branding?!? "Belonging Task Force"? Seriously? Am I the only one old enough to immediately channel Tom Lehrer's "Folk Song Army"?

"Oh we are the Folk Song Army
Guitars are the weapons we bring!
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice;
Ready! Aim! Sing!"

But that wasn't my immediate thought; instead it was "Why is this a thing when the first question that comes to my mind when I think about my corporate culture is "What the fuck is your malfunction?"

Stuff like this makes me wonder if the people in the C-suites really have any clue what's happening out on the shop floor.

Getting on with things

Today is four weeks post-op for Knee #2 (nearly two months for #1). The aftermarket parts are...settling in; still stiff and creaky (the right obviously a LOT more than the left) and requiring lots more work to approach anything like normal walking.

But I can walk. It's not fast and it's not graceful - I'm still pretty stiff and tottery, particularly on the stairs - but it's doable with just a cane or even without, if I go slowly enough.

Sleep is still a huge issue which is why I'm typing this at 3am on a Friday morning. I've gotten into a weird sort of routine where I turn in about 11ish and then spend the next four to five hours just lying around. Occasionally I can sort of drift off into a doze, but seldom for more than a quarter-hour or so.

Until about 4:00 to 5:00am; then I drop into a light sleep. It's not a great sleep, it's like when you're so exhausted that you don't so much "go to sleep" as "fail to stay awake". When I wake - usually around 8:00 to 9:00 - I feel mazy and disassociated, wanting to get back to sleep but unable, but still not very "awake". As you can imagine, this shit is getting very old, and I sure wish I could do something about it.

I'm slowly beginning to re-engage with my job, with the intention to return to indoor work at the end of October. This past week I was yanked back in abruptly by a minor crisis and not happily.

I am the "Radiation Safety Officer" for my office. We have several machines - "nuclear density gauges" or "nuclear densometers" - that are used to test soil (or asphalt) density and, as the name implies, use radioactive isotopes for the measurement. Needless to say, they're expensive and have to be handled with great care; the isotopes (Cesium and Americium) are quite radioactive for the small size of the sources.

That's me in 2009 with one of them - it's the orange thing just behind me. The long black rod sticking up is the "probe"; it's all the way retracted so the source is enclosed in a little lead box with a sliding lead "shutter" on the bottom. When you use it you push the rod down into a pre-driven hole in the soil - the shutter slides out of the way - take your test, and then pull the rod back up to shield the source again.

Well...I got a call from one of our senior engineers who had been dragged out to the field because we're short-staffed. He described a litany of problems with the machine, the worst of which being that the sliding shutter that is supposed to close when the radioactive sources are in the "safe" position was jammed open.

This shutter thing is kind of a kludge. It needs to be decently clean to function, but it's used in all sorts of filthy soil materials which, unsurprisingly, will build up inside the shutter well and cake the thing and make it stick.

The solution is to remove the cover plate and remove and clean the shutter and then put everything back together again. It's a pain, but it's fairly safe (you face the bottom of the machine away from you and reach around to clean the shutter well...) if you know how to do it right.

Well...in the seven or eight weeks I've been out our two staff-level people have thoroughly trashed two of the three gauges, the worst problem being that the shutters were both jammed open with crud.

I spent a frustrating evening trying to solve the problem before deciding that standing a foot in front of an unshielded radioactive source was a fool's business. I shoved the things back in their carry boxes and sent them off to Seattle for our depot maintenance person to fix.

But I can see I need a little wall-to-wall counseling with the staff people involved. That sort of negligence - hell, they could have called me at any time and I'd have come in, knees and all, to try and clean and repair the things - is truly culpable. These aren't $1.49 gadgets from Radio Shack, but because of the staff guys' laziness now $8,000 worth of density gauges are both useless and dangerous.

How freaking hard is it to clean up your damn equipment..?

Rrrrrr.

Oh, and the other excitement is that Little Cat has started scratching herself again.

 

She was doing that when we adopted her; clawing out bits of fur and injuring herself for no reason we could see. It wasn't fleas, and we went to a vet allergist for several months, spent a shit-ton of money including this horrible "rabbot-and-pea" food that Little One hated, and got nowhere.

Well, she's at it again, so this time we went to a little kitty-cat ER and got some corticosteroids and a special flea treatment and she seems to be better. Still a goof, and very sweet and affectionate - she's our lap-kitty now that Drachma is too proud to let himself be mauled by hairless monkeys.

One last note; for some reason I got interested in a bit of history I'd pawed over and kind of tossed aside; the 1071 Battle of Manzikert; Seljuk Turks versus Byzantines for control of the Anatolian heartland. So that should be coming along here not too long.

I'll probably be back before then, though, with something.

But not I have gotta try and sleep.

G'night.

Pathways - taken, untaken, known and unknown.

 So it took the Boy about month - no, really, closer to three weeks - to discover what pretty much every young person getting out of high school over the past twenty years or so has learned; that low-skill, low-responsibility, entry-level commercial/retail wage work sucks ass.

Long hours (usually bad hours - he's got the 2-to-10 shift almost every workday so far...), poor pay, and the work itself is both mind-numbingly boring and irritatingly un-slide-throughable - you can't sort of glide along with it, you have to pay attention, but what you're paying attention to only requires about 10% of your intellectual capacity, leaving a ton of headspace for being irked and bored.

It's not that it's a "bad job". It's that it's a bog-standard "low-skill, entry-level" job that requires the entry-level person to be willing to spend a considerable time doing the drudge work before moving up to, say, produce, and he's the lowest of the low new hires.

Plan B, now?

Begin taking "fire science" classes at the local community college with the eventual goal of full-time professional employment with one of the big municipal departments.

I'm...very cautious about this.

First and foremost because almost every smoke-eater I'm run across has been a pretty serious jock. It's a job that requires a fairly insane level of both strength and aerobic fitness - the level that requires a jock-attitude towards working out.

This is a kid that, love him as I do, could make a sloth look perky. As far as I know the only muscle groups he's regularly exercised are the thumbs-and-forefingers of his gaming controller hands.

It's not that he couldn't change; anyone can do that if they want to hard enough. It's the magnitude of the change. He'd need to re-orient himself completely...to the point of almost being a different person. I'm not sure that he can do that - discipline and rigor have never been huge friends of his - and I'm very sure he has no idea how to even begin.

The second concern of mine is that I'm unsure...no, be honest - I've very sure he has no idea what this career entails. I'm betting he's done little or no diligence to find out what the best pathway towards this goal is, or even what the goal is. It's like he's ten years old and wants to be an astronaut.

I desperately want to sit down with him. I desperately want to map out a fitness plan and begin pushing him along it. I desperately want to find out what he knows about this and point him in the ways he can learn more.

I pretty much want to do the "Learn the pathway to your goal you must, young padawan, but the goal itself you must first find" thing with him.

But...

He's never been a kid who could be either led or driven. He's the king of Flat Affect, the ultimate in "listens with blank stare and then goes and does what he wants" kind of kiddo. I'm not sure whether I really want to spend a half hour I'll never get back trying to get some kind of response out of him that I'll never be sure is truly genuine.

He's eighteen. I get that this is the time for trying, for experimentation. 

My concern is that he doesn't seem to be "experimenting" very hard. I'm okay with him trying this or that...I'd just like to think he's learning more about this or that before he tries. But I'm utterly unsure that I can help him...not learn, but learn how to learn.

In the immortal words of Donald J. Trump; who knew that this parenting stuff would be so hard?

Techbros

My iPhone does this thing where if I respond immediately to an email it refuses to copy the earlier emails in the thread into the reply. 

 

I have to open the email, close, reopen, then wait a bit and then it’ll copy. 

 

My boss gets fussy every time it fails to do this, like today.

My Boss: Why don’t you copy all the earlier emails when you reply? It makes it hard to follow the conversation.

Me: (explains about the iPhone thing)...so when I’m doing four things at once, like today (hint) and don’t have time to be patient and wait, you don’t get the other stuff.’

MB: Well, it’s very distracting.

Me: Why? How hard is it to remember what you read two minutes earlier?

MB: Why doesn’t it just do it automatically?

Me: Because I am it’s bitch and every so often it has to prove it to me.

MB:

Me:

MB: Just do the thing that makes it copy, okay?

Me: What fun is that? Okay, fine. You useta be a lot more fun when you were just project level.

 

What happens when life intervenes

 What happens is that you're shanghai'ed into a panic-level dam reconstruction project...

(True fact; you can actually build a 40-foot high mine tailing impoundment dam and nobody will notice. Until comes the day when the MSHA inspector retires and the new kid comes in and happens to glance over, as he's walking past the processing plant, at the ginormous fucking un-permitted, un-engineered earth dam which - as it just so happens - is piping and shedding materials off the insanely-oversteepened sideslopes.

Needless to say, one he'd stopped hyperventilating and screaming the MSHA dude called the subagency of FEMA that inspects and certifies dams, and, something that will unsurprise all of you, that organization shut down the operation most quick smart.

Now the owners are buttressing the thing in hopes of reopening their mine pit.)

...and you end up slammed and working 14- to 16-hour days.

Brutal.

I'll try and post something here before the end of the week; this thing wraps Wednesday, and not a moment too soon.

 

Instead of grim politics, how about yardwork and some cats?

I had a post all set with dark ruminations about the State of our Nation on it's 244th birthday.

But, y'know what? You've heard it all before. We're fucked, the Plague is running wild, 40% of the American public is fucking batshit crazy. Welcome to 2020, yeah, well, shit.

Instead, I went out front to work on a project we've been thinking about for years.

Our little house was built on spec in 1922. It was built cheap, and it shows; as my Bride says, "Our house has ugly bones." Everything in and around it was built to turn a quick buck, which means spending as little a possible on any- and everything.

That includes the concrete pavement.

The original plan included a walkway from the curb to the front steps, from there around the east side of the house and out into the back yard to where the original garage stood.

Well, the garage has long-since burned, the only remnants fragments of glass and charcoal we turn up in the back garden from time to time. A tiny portion of the path around the side of the house remains, out by the back door, but the bulk is gone, demolished when we had the east side deck built.

The front walk, though?

Still there.

Broken, overgrown, ugly, crude...like I said - this was cheap, gimcrack Twenties concrete flatwork.

Well, we're cowering under the barrage of COVID-19, and what better time for some home improvement projects?

So we went out front, cleared the grass turf that had overgrown the concrete fragments and pried them up...

..and stacked them in a pile with the object of breaking them into smaller fragments to make a 4- to 6-inch recycled rock, what in the soils biz we call "stabilization rock", the bulk material you through over soft soil to make a dense base on which to build.

And that's when the Little Cat showed up.

This critter's name is "Nine", because she lived in the #9 storage unit in some trailer park or something where she got sick and was generally neglected until the nice people at a Cat Rescue organization took her in. She's desperately shaky on her feet, is a fragile little thing, and is very sweet and affectionate. She also looooves to be outside, and we don't let her roam nearly enough for her liking, so when she can get out she frolics around like a nut.

And this was pure joy for the little nut; outdoors, with these awesome piles of soft dirt to roll and dig in. And so she did...

...until even more fun ambled along, in the form of the Big Cat, Drachma, the senior housecat; black, comfortable, lazy, and plump. He's a solidly outdoors-cat, possessing enough physical eptitude that the Small One lacks that makes us confident he can take care of himself outside.

Full of the wildness she draws from her outdoor adventures, the Small One hunkered down in defilade of the dirt mount and waited for her victim to wander into the kill zone.

He did...and she went Over the Top:

Baruk Catzâd! Catzâd ai-mênu! The startled Drachma responded with a satisfying tail-bottle and crouch, and Little One was a Force of Nature...

...until he realized that it was just the annoying little spaz he shared his house with. Upon which he studiously ignored her, and she found something else intensely interesting in the manner of embarrassed cats since Ancient Egypt.

With the cat skirmish concluded, we could go back to work.

Okay, well, after that we got back to work.

Got the first lift of stab rock in place and the alignment cleared in order to begin digging out towards the street.

So, as you can tell, even yardwork is More Fun With Cats.