Whiskey cat gets a recharge in the yurt blanket fort. No fool...

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Whiskey cat gets a recharge in the yurt blanket fort. No fool she: I bundled up the bed corner and got a 12-degree temperature differential with my tiny heater. From 47 to 59 is a pretty important difference; we were cozy and don’t want to get up.

"When I brush my daughter’s hair and elabor

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“

When I brush my daughter’s hair and elaborately braid it round the side of her scalp, I am doing the thing that is expected of me. When my husband brushes out tangles before bedtime, he needs his efforts noticed and congratulated—saying aloud in front of both me and her that it took him a whole 15 minutes. There are many small examples of where the work I normally do must be lauded when transferred to my husband. It seems like a small annoyance, but its significance looms larger.

My son will boast of his clean room and any other jobs he has done; my daughter will quietly put her clothes in the hamper and get dressed each day without being asked. They are six and four respectively. Unless I engage in this conversation on emotional labor and actively change the roles we inhabit, our children will do the same. They are already following in our footsteps; we are leading them toward the same imbalance.

”
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Stop Calling Women Nags — How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

This article really makes me not miss my ex. Or …. just about every male coworker I’d had.

(via jadegordon)

This whole article is gold. The day I broke up with my first boyfriend…we’d been together 5 years and we were engaged, I was working and a full time student, he was essentially unemployed and spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft. In February I asked him to take the car’s oil to be changed. It was now mid-April. Upset over numerous issues in our relationship somehow all of it came out as, “why haven’t you taken the car to the shop?” And he replied, “if you’d made the appointment I’d have done it.” I’d never heard any of this emotional labor talk and was used to seeing competent women take care of semicompetent men but I remember thinking…this is going to be my whole life. I will have to do all these tasks and nag and push - while dealing with a man who had once told me that when I nagged and reminded him of tasks I *decreased* the likelihood that he’d complete them because he didn’t want to be nagged. Nothing got done if I nagged. Nothing got done if I didn’t nag. Unless I did it myself, when I was already working so hard. Breaking up with him remains one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. God forbid we’d actually gotten married, started a family…so anyway yeah this article really resonated with me.

(via unforth-ninawaters)

When I was a small child, my mother pulled my hair badly every day while combing it, and I would cry and struggle and whine. The same was true for my sisters. Mom would try, but there were snarls, and there wasn’t time, it had to get done. It was a daily battle for her to get the four of us groomed and out the door every day, hair styled well enough not to have CPS called.

Once a week, if that, and really only in the winter, my father would comb out our hair after our bath, of an evening, with careful picks and loving strokes and the hairdryer so our wet hair wouldn’t chill us as we slept, taking ages and getting it just right, starting at the ends so as not to pull. We all clamored for our father to comb out our hair, because it was so lovely, and he was so gentle, and so loving. We’d hold still for him, sure, and he’d send us off to get our PJs on, all warm and rosy and silky and lovely.

Very recently (I am 38) I finally apologized to my mother for the intervening years in which I’ve waxed so rhapsodic about my dad’s prowess at hairstyling. Because my father was *never* up against a time constraint. He was already gone for work when my mom was getting our tiny ungrateful asses out the door; he chose the time of the combing and if he didn’t have time, didn’t do it. She did not have time to sit and croon and pick and lovingly dry our hair, she had to get us out the goddamn door. What she did was much harder, and what’s more, much more often. 

Of course I’m grateful for those wonderful memories with my father and the hairdryer and his big callused hands being so gentle. Of course. We were lucky; anyone with truly loving parents is lucky. I still have him and I’m still grateful for him.

But it had never before really occurred to me to be grateful for the fact that every single goddamn morning, I went out that door with my sisters looking like a reasonable enough human being that the courts didn’t have to get involved, because my mother was a fucking hero. Could she have been nicer? I don’t know, because I can’t even imagine dealing with four children. I can handle one, sometimes, as a loaner, and that’s it. 

Chick update: managed to miss all the ones that flew, but some...

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A post shared by Bridget Kelly (@bomberqueen17) on Oct 12, 2017 at 7:10am PDT

Chick update: managed to miss all the ones that flew, but some of them manage impressive distances even without feathers to speak of. (at Laughing Earth)

Piglet update too! I saw a tweet about how mother pigs sing when...

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A post shared by Bridget Kelly (@bomberqueen17) on Oct 12, 2017 at 7:32am PDT

Piglet update too! I saw a tweet about how mother pigs sing when nursing, so this is a video of that. Bonus sow interaction; Cookies and Rocky are mother and daughter, so the standing sow is mother to some of the babies, and aunt to others. Even the pigs themselves aren’t sure which dam is really theirs. It doesn’t matter, and they farrowed the same day. (The boar is unrelated to either of them.)

nkrockz23 replied to your video “Oh my phone

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replied to your video “Oh my phone crashed and lost this, I thought, but here it is back…”

HOW ARE THERE SO MANY

They’re destined to be a production flock for my sister’s commercial pastured-eggs outfit that sells at a largeish regional farmer’s market. So there have to be a lot! (They’re going to be organic certified! Very exciting.)

There are so many though. So many. 

I really think there’s one particular one who always sits on my knee. She looks just like nine of the others, but somebody pooped on her back so there’s a mark, and she was definitely the same one coming back over and over to peck my watch and jump up onto my knee and check out my camera. And her friend, a particular stripey one, started investigating my vest buttons.

This is Watch-Pecker, and the stripey one next to her is, I think, Button-Pecker. 

Want to Know How the Cops Actually Trace a Gun?

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lookninjas:

criticalrolequotesandstuff:

Oh. My. God.

Did you know that when a gun is used in a crime and cops want to trace it, people have to look through microfilm to find the owner, because it’s illegal to have a searchable database of that information?

Seriously. The NRA managed to get a law passed that makes it illegal. These people have to search by hand. 1,200 traces a day. By hand.

Cops assume they just type it into a search engine, because, like, obviously? We have all this technology that puts information at our finger tips. But not who owns the gun that killed that little girl. That you have to search through microfilm or boxes of files for.

I feel sick.

If you’re American and could ever possibly one day vote, please take the time to read this and understand how absurd it it. I cannot for a moment believe this is what reasonable Americans would choose if they understood what it actually is.

And, whoever you are, please share this, so it gets in front of more eyeballs.

As someone who works at a store that sells firearms, I want to make something really clear here:  It isn’t just that they’re looking through microfilm.  It’s that the microfilm is being made from something called an acquisition/disposition log, which is the store’s record of all guns arriving at the store and where all of those guns go.  Depending on the store and who owns it, whether they’re corporate or independent, those A/D logs may be immaculate – entered into a computer, all information typed in with care, every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed.  They may be messy, hand-written, hodge-podged affairs.  They may be somewhere in between.  All guns are supposed to be logged in and logged out promptly, but I can say from experience that not every store does it every time.  If a manager isn’t sure how to do it and/or doesn’t feel like going to the hassle (and it’s a fucking hassle, let me tell you), a gun might exist in legal limbo for a few days, still technically ours but already in someone else’s hands.

And the ATF only gets their hands on our A/D logs when we go out of business.  Until then, all gun traces for guns sold at my store are relying on me and my wall of three-ring binders.  If something happened to my store – State of Michigan requires handgun registration, but every shotgun, every rifle, even the AK-styles and the AR-styles with the big fuckoff banana clips that shoot 30 rounds of .308, all of those records would be gone like that.

And all the record-keeping I do?  It’s not for shit if the buyer then proceeds to sell their gun to a friend.  Or their new best friend from Craigslist.  Or the sketchy dude in the Big Boy parking lot.  All of which is still legal.  No background checks.  Nada.  The gun is now out of the system.

Did I mention that we’re assuming a store that is trying to follow the law?  And not a store run by someone who is (and plenty are) still bitter about this whole 4473 form thing, and this whole background check thing, and government can’t tell me how to run my store?

Do you know how many times I’ve seen an ATF audit in the ten years that I’ve worked for my company?  That they’ve come and actually checked on my books to make sure I’m doing shit right?

0.

I’ve never seen it.  I mean, we do everything we can to keep our forms 100% spot-on, but for all ATF knows, I’m wiping my ass with them, because they don’t have the manpower to come check.

We need better gun laws.  I say this not as a representative of the store that I work for (which I will not name for obvious reasons) but for myself as a human being and as a human being who periodically does find herself selling firearms (and/or refusing to sell firearms, which is a whole other ballgame but that’s another story).  We especially need better gun laws as pertains to the keeping of firearm records.  We literally have the most inconvenient method possible that does not involve engraving on a stone slab.

I have a wall of binders.  Sometimes, that’s enough.  But don’t you still think there should be more than that, for the times that it’s not?