So we’ve finally finished buying all the tickets

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So we’ve finally finished buying all the tickets and making all the arrangements for our vacation. Next month! (yikes)

I should say, dude has finished. I haven’t done much of anything. Except buy and make and organize stuff, and I’m not done yet, but I do think we own just about everything we ought to by now.

(I do have to figure out my hiking boots. I have a pair, I just haven’t put them on in a while, and they’re likely full of spiders and need new insoles.)

Buying tickets to the opening ceremonies of the Nomad Games was an odyssey. You have to either buy them in person at the post office in Bishkek, or through an app that they didn’t release at all for iPhone and that only sometimes works on the Android platform, and it’s exclusively in Russian and, like, crashes if the phone screen rotates. But Dude persevered and figured it out, so good for him.

We still ought to get typhoid vaccinations, though they’re only lightly suggested for Central Asia. Still. Time’s running out, on those. 

Oh my gosh where did this entire spring go.

Ughh I’m trying to stave off being nervous about traveling. And just now, Dude is like, “oh I think I want a camera” like bro… I’ve been working at this camera store for a decade and suddenly, now… well, OK, I’ll find something. 
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like the brightest of stars

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emilyenrose:

When I tell the story of Achilles, I tell it like this:

Once there was a wedding, goddess to mortal man. She wasn’t very happy about it. Who knows what he thought. When orders come down from Zeus, what idiot says no? But they were married, and there was a child, and that child was almost something more than human.

I say almost because he was still human in the way that mattered most: he was mortal, doomed. Imagine being Thetis, his mother, pale and ocean-eyed, looking down at this tiny scrap of life and knowing you would have to watch it die. I don’t think any mother could stand it. She did what she could to protect him: bathed her baby in the Styx, the river of death, and he had little to fear from ordinary weapons after that. But a mortal is a mortal. Achilles was born to die.

There were two deaths woven for him by the Fates. Achilles could have had a long and happy life, beloved and honoured, surrounded by kin, living in peace and good fortune, dying at the last mourned by children and grandchildren who would honour his memory as long as they lived; and when the last of them was gone, Achilles’ memory would pass away from the world as well, the final embers of a long-banked fire going dim.

That was one death.

The other was simpler: to die young and be remembered forever. A brief bonfire blaze of life and then eternal glory.

How do you choose?

Maybe for you it would be easy. But remember Achilles was young, he was proud, he was beautiful and swift and strong almost beyond what is human, and he lived in a world of brief lives and brilliant deaths, a world of hero-songs and clashing bronze. For him it was not easy.

Keep reading
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B-I-L has been migrating the farm’s accounting

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B-I-L has been migrating the farm’s accounting books to different software, with the help of real professionals. 

He mentioned to me that he thinks we should update the website to allow online sales, though of course, he said, we won’t be able to ship anything, we could offer things for pickup on the farm or at the farmer’s market. 

And I was like… why couldn’t we ship things? I mean, maybe not meat– maybe work up to that, I do know it’s possible– but a lot of things could be shipped. 

Anyway. I’d been considering figuring out how to ship dried floral arrangements, and of course the holiday decor– wreaths, kissing balls, swags, and such– and the potpourri would be easy enough to ship that it’s dumb not to. But now I’m trying to think of other things.

I’m also starting to see Halloween Aesthetics on Tumblr already, so I’m considering making some little dried arrangements to sell as Halloween decor. I wonder if I could make the arrangements with fresh flowers and set them to dry now, and then they’d be ready for September?

That’s what I’m thinking about, anyway, to distract myself from the thought that summer is running away and I’m about to spend yet another fucking holiday season trapped at this fucking camera store.
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ok i’m going to hack my dysfunction and make

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ok i’m going to hack my dysfunction and make myself work on this original novel by just– dropping fanfic characters I’m still obsessed with into the original novel, so.

the story Hero’s mom is getting shoved aside and replaced with a dislocated Kes Dameron and we’re going from there. I think I’ll still keep her, I’m just going to make her be someone else. 
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awed-frog: Forbes took the article down, saying something about...

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awed-frog:

Forbes took the article down, saying something about the writer being outside his expertise, but if that ain’t illustrative of a lot of our American problems, I don’t know what is.

It did remind me, though, to go online and apply for a library card. My family all are signed up for electronic library cards and use apps on their phones and ipads to read ebooks and listen to audiobooks. My dad is now an avid smartphone user because he can have every book in the world on his phone at once, and Farmkid has improved her reading solely so she can use the search function herself to search for more audiobooks to check out– she can read most of the buttons, though she can’t spell well enough to really find what she’s looking for without help. (She’s four, and part of the reason she can’t find what she’s looking for is that she’s sure there should be audiobooks about a particular stuffed toy of hers, who isn’t a commercial character. But she’s really adept at checking out Magic Treehouse mysteries, as it happens.)

Anyway, it took me less than a minute to submit my online application, five minutes to get a reply asking for ID, and another minute or so to take a photo of my driver’s license (which has the required residency info on it) and reply to their email with it. Then they mail me a library card, which I can use to check out electronic things and reserve physical things; to pick up physical things, I just have to go into the library and upgrade myself to a regular library card, and then I can pick up the things I’m having held there.

So– Google “your metro area” plus “library card” and I bet you’ll find something similarly easy, US folks. 
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unicornduke: bomberqueen17: B-I-L has been migrating the

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unicornduke:

bomberqueen17:

B-I-L has been migrating the farm’s accounting books to different software, with the help of real professionals. 

He mentioned to me that he thinks we should update the website to allow online sales, though of course, he said, we won’t be able to ship anything, we could offer things for pickup on the farm or at the farmer’s market. 

And I was like… why couldn’t we ship things? I mean, maybe not meat– maybe work up to that, I do know it’s possible– but a lot of things could be shipped. 

Anyway. I’d been considering figuring out how to ship dried floral arrangements, and of course the holiday decor– wreaths, kissing balls, swags, and such– and the potpourri would be easy enough to ship that it’s dumb not to. But now I’m trying to think of other things.

I’m also starting to see Halloween Aesthetics on Tumblr already, so I’m considering making some little dried arrangements to sell as Halloween decor. I wonder if I could make the arrangements with fresh flowers and set them to dry now, and then they’d be ready for September?

That’s what I’m thinking about, anyway, to distract myself from the thought that summer is running away and I’m about to spend yet another fucking holiday season trapped at this fucking camera store.

I had to reblog because my comment was too long. 

dried gourds are a Big Thing in certain markets for decorating. They’d probably ship well, but getting them dried and cleaned is a pain. Wheat weaving is also a thing. Small patches of wheat could probably be grown easily although you’d have to get some special boxes to ship them in. I just pulled those from my gigantic farm ideas page that I have. Most everything else requires a kitchen or something like that. although with the on farm processing you might be able to get something set up. that would be a giant pain in the butt I suspect. 

Tiny dried arrangements would be neat. Maybe not worth the time, but like something hand sized would be super cute and nice. Plus they’d be easy to ship in small boxes.

We do a lot with like… pint-mason-jar-sized dried arrangements in winter, but we assemble those out of the big bundles we dry all summer, and it’s freezing and dark up there in the winter and Sister was just reminiscing about being up there in three pairs of socks and long underwear and jeans under her Carhartt coveralls and not being able to feel her hands while she worked. And I was like… I could just do them in the barn on like, a Thursday morning, and hang them up there and just take them down a few weeks later when they were dry, and package them to sell later. 

Gourds! Good thinking on gourds. I dunno if we’re growing any this year but it’s something to consider.

We have in the past saved armloads of wheat to make wreaths etc., but it’s never amounted to much. I haven’t heard of wheat weaving but I’ll look at it now. I don’t know if there’s any cover crop wheat out there anymore, but I’ll look. One of the farmstands up the road does wheat wreaths, and corn tassel wreaths, and we do have a big wreath table so it’s easy to do, but dried flower wreaths haven’t sold all that well up to now. 

We did have a lady contact us to request specific dried herbs and flowers because she makes “smudge bundles” to sell on Etsy. (Specifically, ammobium.) 

I really want to do some stuff that involves a commercial kitchen but that’s like. The ten-year plan. At this point I can’t even process enough stuff for farm use, let alone extra to sell, but sometime in the future I would like to be making, say, broth and pickles and such. 
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