I’ve been using it for years. But I have been waiting for this day to come. Because it always comes at some point without fail.

String theory makes more sense if you take some LSD I think.

There are a few that have had tea with Cthulu. Not many, but a few. Physics at this level is sometimes about taking a good hit from a pipe and going, “What if” and “What might happen if”

Then they let real mathematicians and engineers figure it out to see if they hit on a lucky guess, Oh and Grad students. Can’t forget the all important Grad students.

And that is the why.

Not that I care. It’s just that if you are going to shame one, you really should shame them all to be consistent in your shaming.

Clowns and mimes are just types of actors. So we should slut-shame the whole bunch of them.

Yeah, that pager runs your whole life and controls what you can and cannot do out here in the wilds. I hated that dispatch would hit every pager in the county all summer about any little weather watch. I mean come on! It’s just a watch. Page me when a tornado actually hits. Until then, let me sleep.

I thought about going to the city. Better schedule and more money and more calls. But somebody has to be out here in the hinterlands. There just ain’t enough of us anywhere, city or country.

You stay safe and party on!

This was a rural setting. So scheduling worked a bit different from it does in the big city.

First, we had just 11 people to provide 24/7/365 service. So, we would work 12hr shifts a week on as primary to respond first during the day. After a week of that you would move to the 12hr night shift for a week. Then you become secondary rig for 2 weeks. This meant you could stay home and only respond if the primary rig was busy. But you couldn’t leave town. And being a rural service, a second rig wasn’t always needed. So you could do birthday parties and such, but you might need to randomly. Or maybe you made only one call all day. Then you became tertiary and would only respond to All Hands On Deck emergency. You could even leave town and go shopping.

Only one time did my family witness me working call. We were headed out of town for Thanksgiving and there was a car accident-- a rollover in the ditch. My daughters got wide-eyed as I drove past the deputy controlling traffic and headed into the scene. We got close, I parked the car and jumped out and ran down the ditch. The car was on it’s side and the fire department was just finishing up securing the car. And I climbed in to start caring for the patient. The 2 EMT-Bs working that day were getting busy organizing the extrication and first aid supplies, (we suspected a broken leg). The boys had fun cutting the roof off enough and rolling the dash to free the patient, and we got them out and loaded into the ambulance. I watched the rig drive away, walked back the car got in, and we drove to Grandma’s house.

Interestingly, after that none of my Daughters ever complained about daddy missing a softball game or play ever again. When I had to skip out on the one Daughter’s graduation party, somebody asked her where I was running off to, I heard her laugh and tell them it happens all the time and I would be back in an hour or so.

Hollywood actors are nothing if not cowards these days. They pander to their fans harder than politicians on election day.

As an old medic and firefighter, I missed my share of family things. Holidays were for spending time with your closest coworkers in the ER. New Year’s Eve, (my wedding anniversary), often meant spending quality time crawly inside a car wreak to get someone out alive. My one daughter’s high school graduation I was paged out for some little old lady’s heart attack in the middle of her party.

So, was I a bad father or am I the victim of a bunch of narcistic people that decided to have the worst day of their lives and dialing 911 to ruin my any and all 4 of my daughter’s special occasions?

You need to understand that back in those days, you simply couldn’t buy but maybe a third of what you take for granted in your favorite grocery store today. You can’t cook with what you can’t get.

By the end of September, there were few fresh greens or vegetables beyond root crops. If you wanted a tomato, you needed to open a can or jar. And smoked paprika? Nobody had ever heard of it, let alone tasted it.

Jello was a big thing in the 1960s and 70s. But now it’s pretty much a regional thing. Oh sure you see it occasionally, but it’s far from the dessert staple it once was in the US.

Your Great Grandmother was all in on it, but your Grandmother not as much. And the odds are good that your mother would need to watch a YouTube video or something to make anything even close.

My 2 Grandmothers were wildly different in their cooking skills. And they both grew up thought the Depression years. So you cooked with what you had, because that’s all that you had.

One could make the most incredible sausages-- oatmeal sausages, blood sausages, various summer sausages and canned beef at home and from scratch without any recipe. But beyond that, it took a very good set of teeth to eat at her table. And forget about cookies or any kind of baked goods. Those she bought.

My other Grandmother was a classic little old Norwegian Lady. A 5-Star Michelin Chef should be that good. She made everything from scratch. Often on an old coal-fired cast iron cook stove and oven despite having a perfectly good electric stove. And the breads and pastries and cookies she would make! In a rural farm neighborhood filled with great cooks, she was considered the best baker of them all. And so many recipes. Church cookbooks galore. Carefully handwritten 3x5 cards filled a dozen metal boxes. Clipped newspaper and magazine recipes, each stored in photo books. And I never ever once saw her use any of them. Everything was in her head.

It was truly a travesty that my own Mother never learned how to cook or even cared about cooking. But, she could sew. And made most of our clothes growing up.

Why of course I have. I’m pretty good at forging with a hammer and anvil and I have branched out to casting bronze swords. Though my knapping skills are still weak…

Hey, thanks for the link! I’m not a vegan, but I do respect the choice. And I’m always on the lookout for good recipes! Good food is good food.

No.

A side story about the Okapi.

When the Okapi became a big thing to the public, a German cutlery manufacturer designed a distinctive looking cheap and useful knife that was named after the Okapi. They became popular pocket knives with German soldiers and often found in the German trenches in WW1. The Okapi knives were made in Germany until the 1980s when the tooling and name was sold to a cutlery and tool manufacturer in South Africa where they are made to this day.

They are still cheap and rugged enough for daily use. And quite popular in poorer parts of the world. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones was known to regularly carry a large Okapi knife he was given.

Hench Lives Matter!

Yep. That’s the accepted idea. But at our core we are still all pack animals. It’s hard to get away from the “lizard brain.”

That’s for sure 10-ply. There isn’t a word or phrase that can’t be used as a slur.

Surveyor stakes are the equivalent to peeing on a tree these days.

And at our core for millions of years we have been pack animals like the wolf or lion or sheep. Lemmy is filled with packs and tribes that will defend their “territory” by expulsion anyone that disagrees with the pack strongly enough. Just as humans have done for those same millions of years.

There is a difference in Octopussys here. One is slippery, the other is not.