Hey friends! Time for a weekly good things post.
Share something good in your world, I’ll start.
My Christmas decorations are up! I love the bright colors and shiny things, it really helps my mood during winter.
I have a second round interview this week, fingers crossed I get the job.
I ate some vegetables today, so that’s an improvement over the last few days.
Today I was finally able to confirm that we have a family of four otters in the lake. They spend all day playing and catching fish.
Get photos, dammit.
RIGHT WE NEED THE PICS
Unfortunately, I don’t have the lens for it. My longest telephoto only goes to 210. I’d need at least a 400 to get a decent picture.
Well then it’s time to get your Jacques Cousteau act on and start swimming out there to get closer. It doesn’t matter if the water is Titanic temperatures now that winter is coming. The otters are ready to pose for you.
I love otters but they are vicious little creatures! I have some friends with a summer house on a bay. They were away for several months and when they returned otters had been using the crawl space under their house as a place to store rotting fish! They almost had to tear down the house to get rid of the stench!
This is probably the wrong place to post this but this shows how smart and vicious they are!
…there’s a book about otters called ring of bright water that was pretty well known at one point…it’s a novel & was written by gavin maxwell & the otter in it (called tarka in the book) becomes sort of a friend of the kid that’s the book’s protagonist
…in real life that kid was more or less based on a guy called terry nutkin, who maxwell became guardian to…& there really were otters that the two kept…one of which in fact bit part of nutkin’s fingers off
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Nutkins
Mrs. Butcher was telling me about that movie the other day.
Oh, yeah, they’re no joke. Last year I was walking Butcher Dog and two otters were just a few feet into the water and huffing at us. Of course, Butcher Dog saw two playmates. I saw two stone cold killers.
That’s a wonderful thing!
…good luck with the interview
…as for good news…maybe I’ll have another go if I think of a better example but meg very kindly offered to be responsible for the DOT tomorrow…so I’m going to be pretending to sleep tonight & then not responsible for spoiling anyone’s morning with a slew of links to shitty things in the news…which I think might count?
That’s awesome!
Enjoy the time off the DOT 🙂
I got my Christmas lights up too. I got a bunch of solar ones this year to save a few pennies worth of oil but mostly because I don’t have to run extension cords that way. I think I’m the first on my block, but someone has to do it.
I have no external outlets out front and tried the solar lights, but I also have a front yard that only gets around 5 hours of light in winter and it wasn’t enough for the damn lights to work.
I also wish you good luck on the interview, I’m sure you will do great! My good news? I survived a week without my daughters as a buffer between me and my wife. Good test for when they move out and we did better than I thought we would. My daughters come home tonight and I made them poke which should make them pretty happy after a 17 hour drive. That is about the only worth I have to them anymore other than killing spiders.
@Loveshaq, been there. After my son moved out and my parents passed away, we had to decide who/how we were going to be together, without most non-working moments filled with familial responsibilities.
I gave up much of my life to be a stay at home dad. Now, I’m a little lost at times. Now I’m a Jack of all trades & a master of none.
A somewhat sad side-affect of the endless pandemic lockdowns is that millions of couples are realizing that they don’t like each other very much, at least not 24/7. The transition would have been easier if there were any warning it were coming, but it was rather sudden. The lucky ones got to keep their jobs and work from home but that involves converting your nest and sanctuary into a workplace, which hasn’t been all that common since pre-industrialization times, when people farmed and took in homework, like sewing and lace-making. The problems are often compounded by the presence of school-age children, who are restless and quite involuntarily (on everyone’s part) being homeschooled, usually by the mother, for reasons I don’t quite understand. I mean why not the fathers taking on some of this role?
In our relationship I’m by far the most domestic one and earn a fraction of what Forager-in-Chief does so I’m sure if we had children schooling would be left to me. It would be a disaster. All math and science classes would be barely taught. History would be filled with catty gossip about the figures involved. Literature would be something like, “‘Have the student choose a book and write about how the characters are in conflict with each other and with wider society.’ I know. ‘Valley of the Dolls’. But be careful with this copy, it’s a special commemorative re-issue.” We’d fill most of our time learning foreign languages. “Oh look, Duolingo has Icelandic. Iceland is a very small country. We’ll be among the few people on earth who’ll be able to speak it. Plus I think they believe in elves so if we ever come across one we’ll be able to carry on a decent conversation.”
Best of luck on the interview. Remember, worrying about it does absolutely no good, and above all be yourself.
The weather took an unexpected cold turn! So, first fire of the season.
Same.
2 weeks of rain and temperatures of only just above freezing forecast here
i really need to put the mudguards back on my bike
soo i guess my good thing is that i at least already have the mudguards in the shed…and they are easy to fit…..if i ever stop putting it off
I tried tempeh for the first time today and while I did not like it, I’m glad I finally tried it.
I got pretty much all of my Christmas shopping done with the exception of a couple small things for my dad.
A Possible Good Thing (?): By way of your recent (201129) “What’s The Menu This Week? posting, I found (but have not yet tried) this Italian Chickpea Soup. Since you have an abundance of chickpeas, perhaps this recipe might ‘serve’ you well (?).
[https://pickyeaterblog.com/tuscan-chickpea-soup/]
Oooh yum thank you for the suggestion!
Ceci e pasta is my favorite. Real Italian peasant food. I didn’t realize at the time that my working class family was just trying to extend the food budget with a cheap meal, because I thought of it as a special treat. So good. My grandma used to put a few spoons of sugu from Sunday in the pot to give it a nice flavor. And of course, fresh basil and a bay leaf. I wouldn’t use the food processor at the end though. I love the texture of the ceci.
Best wishes on the job interview round two! Hannibal clued me into the Ask Manager column/blog site. You may find it of value?
Great idea, thank you!
I forgot to wish you luck, brighter. Excuse my poor manners. You’ll do great.
Oh! And a good thing…I have off each December Friday. Well, technically I still have an hour or two of daily stuff to do, and am on call in case of emergency, but basically three-day weekends. Also, the fence surrounding the Christmas tree has been successful as a small boy dogs deterrent. Score!
Oh, what kind of gig is it?
Same company I work for now, just a different team.
A team with no evening or weekend work.
And a team with really cool projects.
Fingers crossed!
Broke my bicycle a couple weeks back, and have been walking ~5miles round trip from the nearest transit hub. Got home right before thanksgiving holiday to get a call from bike shop that my bicycle was (mostly) fixed. broke a spoke, and apparently also the rear axle. was probably why I had so many issues with trying to align the rear wheel, and it constantly rubbing against either the frame or the brakes, and often both.
It’s noticeably easier today. Normally, my commute home is about ~65 minutes, maybe down to ~60minutes if I’m feeling great and the lights are perfect. Often ~70+minutes if I hit the lights wrong, am tired, have a headwind, etc. Today was ~55minutes, no headwind, had decent, but not really great luck with the lights. It might also just be having several days of rest, so I’m curious to see how tomorrow’s goes. It certainly felt easier/faster though…
I still need to get the chain/sprockets replaced, and probably various bearings and races, but the bike shop advised me to just go ahead and run them into the ground, (as opposed to paying them to repack them with grease, etc.), and get a new set when that happens. This bicycle has been pretty severely neglected by me…
I also have an order with another bike shop for a new bike, that is expected to come in December, so I’m looking forward to that.
ETA: OH! good luck with the interview! 🙂
Good Luck, Brighter!!!
I hope it all goes swimmingly, and that you get the job, at a great pay rate!😉😁🤗💖
My goods;
I got to catch up with the teacher I’ll be doing distance learning with IN-PERSON for a few minutes today.
It was nice to touch base, and ask a couple of questions. I was also able to get a BUNCH of stuff found & printed, or *made* then printed out, for my other teacher…. it means that I’m *almost* all the way through her list of books she’s reading all year with the kids (one book a week, because this is ECSE😉).
I’ve gotten all the stuff from today either downloaded & into a set of folders on the drive we’re using, OR created stuff from scratch and popped them into the corresponding folders on that drive.😁
It ate up most of my day, buuuuut it means that–especially with the things I made, we have it, and can just grab what we want, and then can tweak it to fit the needs of the kids in our room, to meet their educational goals😉