eveiya replied to your post“Chicken proces

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eveiya replied to your post“Chicken processing today, which went very smoothly. It was cold and…”

One of the scariest experiences I can remember was awakening early in my tiny 2-person tent in Glen Etive, where I was wild camping alone, tens of miles away from all human habitation, and hearing the footsteps of a stranger who’d turned up the evening before to spend the night in a nearby bothy and whose offer of sex I’d rejected, going around and around my tent in the grass. I silently opened up my Swiss army knife and then just lay frozen in my sleeping bag until I

heard his steps move away, and for a good while after. Maybe he just wanted to talk to me, but I didn’t hear him speak at all, not even a whisper. When I finally emerged from my tent, much later, he was, as I’d hoped, long gone from the bothy.

*screams forever* OMG. seriously he just– did laps of your tent? WTF.

NGL that’s the sort of thing I’m most afraid of out here. Animal intruders, I’m not that scared of– bobcats are local but shy (closest den is about a mile and a half away), mountain lions not locally known at all, coyotes shy– something rabid might try something, but it’s highly, highly unlikely; the yurt being elevated, it’s not an attractive hiding spot for something distressed or ill. And, being round, there are no corners for something seeking shelter. 

 But, for better or worse, I’m *not* in the middle of nowhere. I’m maybe a tenth of a mile from the house, and maybe another tenth of a mile from the apprentices’ cabin. When the leaves aren’t on the trees, if I go out my door and look straight, I can see across the field, across the creek, and across the highway, and it just happens the house whose porch lights I can always see belongs to the aunt of my best friend from high school. Now, she’d not be likely to come to my aid– she’s disabled and not likely to hear me– but there’s a whole neighborhood around, really. If I screamed, someone would likely hear me. 

Also, I sleep with a baseball bat right next to the bed, and last time I was here, my dad gave me a hatchet, so I keep that on a shelf handy to the door. I was offered a shotgun, but turned it down. I’d be so hesitant to use it, it’d be worse than useless. But I know I wouldn’t hesitate to beat the shit out of someone with a baseball bat, because I know if it turned out to be a horrible misunderstanding, I wouldn’t have done lasting damage yet. And I do have some practical training in mélee weapons. My training in firearms is much more theoretical and closed-course-target-based. (Most of my firearms training has been emphasizing *not* pointing it at a human, you know??)

And if a confused and rabid fox or something climbed into the yurt, I’d have much better luck prodding it with a bat than brandishing some sort of firearm.

I don’t know what i’d do if I really heard a person, though. One thing about the many humans on this farm: they’re not prone to nighttime wandering. Farming doesn’t tend to leave one with much spare energy for that sort of nonsense.

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ok this post just came out of my queue, it’s an

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ok this post just came out of my queue, it’s an adorable series of sketch animations of Jyn Erso powerlifting the entire Rogue One squad except she can’t pick Baze up, and I thought it was cute, but in the tags I mentioned that I now headcanoned Jyn as Totally A Crossfit Chick and at the time it was a throwaway line but now I can’t stop thinking about it.

I say this with love. I did derby for eight years, and Crossfit became popular in the last couple of those years, and many of my former leaguemates have gone on to be Those Crossfit Chicks. 

I know Jyn is a smol, but here’s a secret, that many of you might not know. I learned this in roller derby. There is really no one body type of woman who is Strong. While yes, it’s true, if I did hitting drills with my 4′7″, 102-pound teammate, she couldn’t knock me over, she absolutely was capable of using her body and leverage to redirect me. Yes, there are inarguable forces of momentum, but– I’m 5′7″, and was at the time about 215 pounds, and she couldn’t stop me but she could sure keep me from getting where I wanted to be.

 I even played a bit of co-ed, and let me tell you something, I’m bigger than most dudes. Our bench manager was a man, a hockey player, and he skated with us at practices, and I was his exact height and had 20 pounds on him, and he sometimes could out-leverage me, but if I could get my hip on him he wasn’t getting past me. And he wasn’t any faster than me. (Later we had another male bench manager, who went on to have a great roller derby career with a men’s league in Toronto, and as a bonus, he was our captain’s little brother, and she had twenty-five years’ experience at beating the shit out of him, and let me tell you, we beat the shit out of him.)

We have this idea, in culture, that men are So Big. I keep making jokes like it myself, about people like Riz Ahmed and Oscar Isaac, who are five eight or so, calling them tiny and pocket-sized and so on. But that’s. That’s my height, and I’m actually pretty huge for a woman. I know many men shorter than myself, and there are occasional jokes now and then but honestly, it’s not at all unusual, even for middle-class well-fed white dudes of whatever northern European lineage we like to headcanon as being giant. It’s just not true. Sure, I know a ton of guys who are huge– my dude is six three, my brother-in-law is six-two; my other brother-in-law is only five-ten but he’s got shoulders like a snowplow, he’s just a giant dude.

I personally know and could probably link you to the Instagrams of at least a dozen women under five-three who could destroy you. And they don’t really look like it, mostly. 

In the modern AU, Jyn Erso is absolutely a Crossfit Chick and never shuts up about it but also if you need to change your car tire without a jack, she will powerlift that bitch.