Hristo's FI Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Prompted by Kingsnorth's most recent substack post (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/t ... is-now?s=r); Yeats' The Second Coming, one of my favorites (seems appropriate for Good Friday):
The Second Coming


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

It's official; the house is sold, and the Botev clan is now mortgage free--our days of participating in usury are behind us. Under the contract we've got through May to stay in the house while we slowly move things down to the new place. We took a trailer load a couple weeks ago, and DW has been taking loads down in the pickup truck when she goes down for work every other week. We'll rent a trailer again towards the end of May and move whatever is left; likely will hire some high school boys to help move the piano and a couple of the other heavier items into the trailer, as our current house is a 3-level townhome that makes moving things like pianos challenging, to say the least. I have to remind myself that the last time we moved I worked myself straight into the hospital with pneumonia.

The new place is a 1-story ranch on a perfectly square and perfectly flat parcel of land, so moving in will be/has been a breeze and my wife and I (with some help from the kids) can easily manage it.

Once we move in and are fully resident the priority will be getting the Airstream set up in the backyard to function as my office, getting some fruit trees in the ground, and getting the meat rabbit/laying hens/broilers operation up and running in the backyard, and the veggie garden up and running. The whole family spent a week at the new house over spring break and I got my Speed Queen washing machine and installed it in the garage, along with a cheap dryer that I hope to not have to use very often. It was wonderful to have clothes that were actually clean, using a washing machine that was actually efficient at washing clothes vs. one that is just efficient at not using water. Also got the squat rack and weights/barbells set up in the garage and got a couple work outs in while I was there--it's wonderful throwing weights around in a garage that's large enough that I'm not worried about taking out a wall or a ceiling.

Next for the garage will be a large chest freezer for freezer beef and probably pork as well. While we were down there over Spring Break we swung by the farmer's market and I made contact with a woman whose family has a Salatin style beef operation in the north part of the county, and we've got a half beef ordered to be picked up in June from the custom butcher--really, really, really looking forward to that. Probably means we'll need to get the freezer hooked up to a back up generator.

I noted that there is currently not a local pasture-raised poultry operation selling at the farmer's market; so, perhaps that might be an opportunity for me--pasture-raised broilers and rabbits.

We might ease our way into the solar thing by powering the Airstream with solar; we'll see. Florida has the net metering thing (the governor just vetoed a bill seeking to get rid of it); so it might make sense, but I don't know--it's something I have very little understanding of and am not going to rush into. That said, the house is north facing with a south facing roof in the back that gets full sun; seems like a good candidate--but again, I'll want to see how much we're spending on electric during the summer.

DD is all set up at the new middle school (same one DW and I went to). For DS we are still waiting to hear back from the Catholic school; though his preference would be to just go to the neighborhood public elementary school. I honestly don't care; the only option I'd really be good with is homeschooling. But as that is not going to happen; the second best option I think is to just home school religion, and we are planning on doing that as a family--working our way through the Baltimore Catechism and various Church history books, Lives of Saints books, and work our way from there.

School is stupid. The meritocracy is dead. I think the kids have a better chance relying upon the good ole' boy network than the meritocracy. All that I care about is that my kids are properly catechized.

In other news, as luck would have it a friend here was buying a new fancy golf course level lawn mower and was willing to gift us his old Honda for free, which is exactly the lawn mower that my buddy who owns a mow-and-blow landscaping business told us we should get (I sold all the lawn stuff a few years ago when we moved into our first townhome). My hope is to bag up the lawn clippings and let them ferment a bit and perhaps use that to supplement the feed for the meat rabbits. DS has already secured 2 customers in the new neighborhood for his lawn mowing business.

We're taking the TV with us, but it won't be hooked up to the internet and, thankfully, the antenna doesn't work there. So it'll be hooked up to the Sony Playstation 2 that we just bought used; when the kids need some down time they can watch DVDs or play 15-year-old video games.

Once we get settled the next big purchases will be a boat and some rural land in the rural part of the county.
Last edited by Hristo Botev on Fri Apr 29, 2022 8:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

The only other update I've really got is that I'm continuing to work my way through Plato with the book club, as well as some of the Greek playwrights. This month is/was Aristophanes and, well, goodness; his stuff is a little raunchy to say the least. I'm also working my way through Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy with a different book club. And our group is relatively evenly split between born-and-bred southerners like myself, yankees, and folks who moved around so much that they don't really have a southern or yankee identity, which makes for some interesting discussions. During our first seminar I learned just how much less northerners think about The War than southerners.

Plato is great, but I'm looking forward to moving on to Aristotle and then ultimately the big man himself, Thomas Aquinas. But all in good time; I'm not going to rush it, as much as I'd like to.

chenda
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by chenda »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Thu Apr 28, 2022 2:12 pm
It's official; the house is sold, and the Botev clan is now mortgage free--our days of participating in usury are behind us...Once we get settled the next big purchases will be a boat and some rural land in the rural part of the county.
Congratulations on being mortgage free, I hope the move goes well.

theanimal
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by theanimal »

Congrats on the sale and being rid of usury. That's a freeing feeling.

I'm reading You Can Farm right now so I notice your plans are very Salatin-esque. Sounds like you have some fun in store. How do you think meat rabbits will sell? Is there a market for them there? I've read of raising meat rabbits with great curiosity but have never heard of many people who actually eat them.

Best of luck in your new endeavors!

zbigi
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by zbigi »

@Hristo

On return to the land from a theological perspective, how does it play out with the fact that God (in Genesis) condemned humanity to high-effort, low-productivity endless toil as a part of our punishment? It doesn't look like God thinks it's a particularly good thing to work a lot just to produce some food - that's why he, in his anger, made us do it.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

theanimal wrote:
Thu Apr 28, 2022 9:13 pm
Congrats on the sale and being rid of usury. That's a freeing feeling.

I'm reading You Can Farm right now so I notice your plans are very Salatin-esque. Sounds like you have some fun in store. How do you think meat rabbits will sell? Is there a market for them there? I've read of raising meat rabbits with great curiosity but have never heard of many people who actually eat them.

Best of luck in your new endeavors!
I don't have any real plans to sell meat rabbits; I wouldn't imagine they'd sell very well. I mentioned the selling at the farmer's market idea as simply a "perhaps some day"; but, I'd think you'd need to pair rabbits with broilers and eggs, at a minimum, to even make back the money you'd spend just for the booth, much less to break even overall.

I ate rabbits a good bit when living in Bulgaria. It's not something I particularly crave, and would take a good bit of work to, as Salatin would say, bring out the rabbitness of the rabbit. But, if you're looking to build up some resiliency on the food front at home, seems like rabbits on a typical suburban sized yard are pretty hard to beat when it comes to input costs vs. protein output.

You're right about Salatin, I've been reading his stuff of late, and most recently his Polyface Micro book, which was very helpful. The new place has a large storage shed in the backyard, and the plan is to turn about half of it into a Salatin-style "raken" house, with breeding rabbits suspended in cages in the air and laying hens beneath them on about 18" of mulch, with the future freezer meat rabbits in the yard in Salatin-style rabbit tractors, once they are weaned. That's the plan. If nothing else it'll be an interesting hobby. My new set up will have my office in the Airstream in the backyard, so tending the animals will likely be a welcome distraction.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

zbigi wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 1:51 am
@Hristo

On return to the land from a theological perspective, how does it play out with the fact that God (in Genesis) condemned humanity to high-effort, low-productivity endless toil as a part of our punishment? It doesn't look like God thinks it's a particularly good thing to work a lot just to produce some food - that's why he, in his anger, made us do it.
This is why God did not intend us regular folks, you and me included, to read the Bible with an aim to figuring out any theological truths.

I have never understood this about Protestants; even when I was one. The Church pre-exists the Bible. Sola scriptura is absolute heresy that spread only b/c of the invention of the printing press (~1,500 years AFTER Christ).

Read the Bible as part of the liturgy; read the Bible as a contemplative prayer practice--lectio divina, e.g. But unless your name is Thomas Aquinas, or unless you are otherwise glow-in-the-dark smart AND you've spent a lifetime devoting yourself to theological study--and nothing else (and even then having the humility to know that you cannot in a lifetime come close to understanding the fullness of what the Tradition has to teach, and that even that doesn't come close to understanding the fullness of God and his Creation)--DON'T rely on selected "Bible" passages (or your attempted paraphrases of those passages) as fodder for "what about"-isms.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Western Red Cedar »

theanimal wrote:
Thu Apr 28, 2022 9:13 pm
How do you think meat rabbits will sell? Is there a market for them there? I've read of raising meat rabbits with great curiosity but have never heard of many people who actually eat them.
My dad regularly buys and cooks with rabbit - mostly rabbit stew. There is a local butcher shop/market/deli that has been around for more than a hundred years in our city. One of the reasons they are so successful is they sell the cuts and types of meat that are hard to find at a conventional grocery store.

chenda
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by chenda »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 7:48 am
This is why God did not intend us regular folks, you and me included, to read the Bible with an aim to figuring out any theological truths.
That's a very good point Hristo which has never occurred to me before. I assumed by default that scriptural dissemination to the masses was a good thing. But as they say, a little knowledge can be dangerous.

Perhaps an analogy can be made with the Internet, which was supposed to dissimate truth to the masses but instead has often done the opposite. Climate change deniers, for example, quote mining scientific reports they don't understand and shouldn't be reading without the guidance of a trained scientist to promote a false reality.

mooretrees
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by mooretrees »

I shared a meat rabbit operation with a friend for about a year. Temperature control was the hardest part of daily caretaking. DH was the butcher and he got tired of killing them....If we did it again, I'd probably take over the killing and use some kind of pellet gun. The stun and slit throat/break spine methods were good, but it was upsetting when it didn't go as smoothly as he wanted. The meat is good and they're adorable as kits.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

chenda wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 12:19 pm
That's a very good point Hristo which has never occurred to me before. I assumed by default that scriptural dissemination to the masses was a good thing. But as they say, a little knowledge can be dangerous.

Perhaps an analogy can be made with the Internet, which was supposed to dissimate truth to the masses but instead has often done the opposite. Climate change deniers, for example, quote mining scientific reports they don't understand and shouldn't be reading without the guidance of a trained scientist to promote a false reality.
Christendom and the West was built upon centuries and centuries of us common folk NOT reading the Bible; interestingly, theology has only gone downhill since the Bible was translated into the vernacular, as it likely peaked with the Scholastics (but I'm no scholar).

Regarding your analogy, I'm thinking the Internet may have created more gatekeepers, not fewer. Of course, my spidey-senses go off anyone starts talking about needing the "guidance" of "trained scientists." I honestly have absolutely no idea who is and who isn't a "trained scientist" anymore; what that means; what science is; what is properly under the realm of science and what isn't--no idea. I know for sure that the "right" educational pedigree is going to make me more leery of the claims of a "trained scientist," not less. I also know that we sure do find ourselves in quite a pickle--and when it's all said and done and we find ourselves entirely de-humanized, the "scientists" will likely bear much of the blame, even if only as cogs in and of and for the Machine.

And I didn't get that from the Internet; I got it from reading Plato.
Last edited by Hristo Botev on Fri Apr 29, 2022 2:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

chenda wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 12:19 pm
That's a very good point Hristo which has never occurred to me before. I assumed by default that scriptural dissemination to the masses was a good thing. But as they say, a little knowledge can be dangerous.
I'll note that I read the Bible (in English) every day--as part of Mass; as part of my poor-man's breviary practice (i.e., the Magnificat); and as part of my contemplative prayer practice.

I read the Bible to foster relationship with God; I do not read the Bible in an attempt to understand (or, worse, to develop) doctrine. That is not my role.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

mooretrees wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 1:55 pm
I shared a meat rabbit operation with a friend for about a year. Temperature control was the hardest part of daily caretaking. DH was the butcher and he got tired of killing them....If we did it again, I'd probably take over the killing and use some kind of pellet gun. The stun and slit throat/break spine methods were good, but it was upsetting when it didn't go as smoothly as he wanted. The meat is good and they're adorable as kits.
I worry about temperature control. I remember as a kid having a rabbit as a pet and seeing it keel over from the heat. I'm thinking that, in north Florida, my productive/pasture season might run from fall through spring, and take a break during the summer; and to manage breeding accordingly. I can manage the temperature for the breeders in the storage shed well enough; it's the rabbits at pasture that likely will present the issue.

I'm looking forward to venturing down this, umm, "rabbit" hole.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 2:20 pm
And I didn't get that from the Internet; I got it from reading Plato.
I think I'm going to stop the practice of capitalizing Internet; I'd always done that cuz Bryan Garner told me to, and when it comes to legal and other writing I do what Garner tells me to do. But, I'm starting to think it places too much import on the internet.

And ... what do you know, Garner (always one to look to trends to decipher what is and what is not appropriate for usage) may soon be (if not already) changing his rule: https://twitter.com/bryanagarner/status ... 7659379712

white belt
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by white belt »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Fri Apr 29, 2022 2:31 pm
I'm looking forward to venturing down this, umm, "rabbit" hole.
As a general rule, consuming the eggs or milk from livestock is going to make more sense from an energy standpoint compared to consuming the meat. If you’re looking to consume the whole animal, fish are much more efficient converters of feed to biomass compared to mammals.

In the north Florida region, I would look into some kind of aquaculture. Warm weather means warm water which means fish can grow faster. The most common fish to raise are tilapia and things like the native fare you find in southern waterways (various catfish, bass, etc).

Some of the popular milk goat breeds like Nigerian Dwarf and Nubian are more adaptable to heat than rabbits. Guinea pigs might be another alternative that are slightly more suited to heat.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it's been 4 months since my last update.

But, inspired by @ffj's return, what the hell.

Things are going well. Working remotely suits me, though I haven't yet got the backyard Airstream office set up as I tried to go the cheap route in getting it all wired up for power and ended up doing as-of-yet untold damage to the trailer's electrical system (long embarrassing story). It finally goes to the shop next week (been waiting several months), and we'll see how bad the damage is. Thankfully it's insured; hopefully that insurance will actually cover the repairs.

It's been great being back home, getting to see my dad on a weekly basis, spending time with all those friends who helped form me, living in the same neighborhood I grew up in, and all that.

Kids are adjusting well. Both kids have managed the parochial school to public school transition much better than DW or I could have hoped for--sports, as always, has been central to that successful (knock on wood) transition.

We've been "homeschooling" religious education, as I believe I mentioned previously. The New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism and the Story of Civilization books have been a big hit, and have gotten me a bit more comfortable with the idea of releasing my children to the public school wolves.

I've got opinions as to what the district has done to our neighborhood elementary school, the one my sister went to way back when. And perhaps I'll post some long screed along those lines on this journal some time later. But for now, I'll just say apparently I'm not as much of a "school choice" person as I thought I was, at least the "school choice" policies that involve the "money following the student" or whatever and result in setting up what are effectively private schools using public funds. But I digress (not really, I never digress).

The "new" parish (same one we got married in) is fine; priest is good and on point, none of that wishy-washy, progressive, "love is love," felt banner-y Jesuit horseshit, so that's good. I'd love to do the TLM thing, and we likely will do that and/or attend Mass at the Cathedral on occasion, it's just a trek as the new "big" city where the Cathedral and the TLM parish are is over an hour away. That said, the priest at our parish is perfectly reverent with the liturgy, the only drawback (and it's a big one) is the music--it's awful, every song is arranged as if it is ripped from a Disney movie; I keep waiting for Elsa to come swinging down from the rafter singing some Christian-ized version of "Let It Go!" It's really, really bad. But, it's a good reminder that I don't go to Mass for entertainment or even principally for me; so, I deal with it, and it's in fact been fun at times as my daughter will often joke by whispering lines from various Disney songs in my ear as the music director has a "hymn" build up to some big and ridiculous crescendo with chimes, saxophone (yes, a saxophone), and a ridiculously large percussion and strings accompaniment.

In other news, I double dug the first part of my vegetable garden and planted bush beans and corn, and it's not doing so hot. But I'm keeping notes and know it's a learning process. I've got another large bed to double dig as part of a fall garden, and this winter I hope to start getting the infrastructure in place for quail, rabbits, chickens, maybe even guinea pigs and tilapia. Lots of projects, but it's all do-able in time.

My weightlifting is going OK; I've progressed past the "novice" linear progression and just recently switched over to a more intermediate level 4-day split. This has been good and was overdue as 4 days of 2 lifts each (one intensity and one volume) is much, much more manageable now than 3 days of 3 lifts each (all intensity) had become, as the weight on the bar kept increasing. Regarding that weight on the bar, I didn't finish NLP where I'd wanted, but, it's a good reminder to me that I'm 44 years old and never have been a naturally strong person. But the numbers are fine, and there is still room to grow.

ETA: If anyone is interested, this is roughly the plan I've been following (it's archived, cuz the author and Rippetoe don't get along too well anymore: https://web.archive.org/web/20200731055 ... gth-part-2). I will probably eventually switch to a 4 day split that is squat/bench and deadlift/press, as opposed to squat/deadlift and bench/press, just to spread out the stress levels even more. I'm also doing barbell rows and tricep extensions with the kettlebell as supplemental (or accessory?) exercises, and I'm spending a good bit of time just doing hangs from the pull up bar as my post-op shoulder continues to bother me.

As for reading, since my last update I've continued through some more of Plato's dialogues and also Aristophanes' comedies, and I'm now finishing up Herodotus's History before tackling the Republic and then Thucydides, with Plutarch and then finally Aristotle awaiting me in the spring and summer of 2023. I'm also continuing to read through Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy with a seminar group, which has been very good. And in the "spiritual" reading category I've been reading Fr. Spirago's Catechism Explained, which is wonderful, as well as John Senior's book The Restoration of Christian Culture, which may go down as the best thing I've ever read--very much a Catholic Wendell Berry. A group of Catholic friends/dads will be getting together in the fall over a campfire to have what I'm sure will be a spirited discussion about that one. In the queue is Fr. Lehodey's The Ways of Mental Prayer and Frank Sheed's Theology and Sanity.

So, so, so many books to read.
Last edited by Hristo Botev on Thu Aug 25, 2022 2:22 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Also, we bought a boat. A 21-foot 10-year-old deck boat. It sits in our driveway and has been getting lots of use. All part of my wife and my plan to instill a Pavlovian response in our children that "home" = fun on the water.

MBBboy
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by MBBboy »

Great update Hristo, and welcome back. Sounds like lots of things are going well, especially finding a good church home (music notwithstanding). Such an important part of life that isn't always appreciated. One of those things where you don't realize what you had until it's gone / you move / something changes.

Curious about the electrical issue, if only so I can avoid any similar mistakes as we get our small ranch house set up and deal with the long wait for utility power.

I always find your reading list very interesting. Do you happen to know anything about Dominion by Tom Holland? I've been going through a lot of Taleb's stuff and stumbled across an essay he wrote as a foreword for the book, and seems interesting.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Hristo's FI Journal

Post by Hristo Botev »

Some updates, as I procrastinate starting my work day.

First, over the course of the past couple weeks my wife negotiated herself a pretty sweet deal work-wise; seems to be a pretty good time to be a worker as opposed to an employer, given that so few people seem to want to actually work; seems wage earners have some leverage generally if the are willing to use it.

She's going from full-time/5 days/week at the hospital to 1-day a week, but keeping the sweet (CHEAP) health care family package that you can only really seem to get these days working directly for a large hospital system that is not only self insured but also able to directly provide 99% of covered services.

And, very exciting, she's taking on her very first 1099 independent contractor gig doing private practice/outpatient stuff with a woman who has been in that game for about a decade and who has figured out how to get actually get paid providing outpatient dietitian services. It'll just be the biz owner, my wife, and their scheduler working for the business (no HR department!!!), and my wife has complete control to work as much or as little as she wants and when she wants, over what kinds of patient populations she wants to work with, and which individual patients she wants to work with (or, more likely, doesn't want to work with).

I'm excited for her. And I'm excited for me as well, because she will be working about 16 to 24 hours a week total (combining both jobs) as opposed to the full-time 9-5, and the family generally eats better and things are generally more relaxed and less hurried in the house when my wife is working part-time.

Also, we are now both effectively working part-time, as my billable requirement is 28 hours/week; which I've been doing long enough that I don't really even remember what my life was like when my minimum billable requirement was 40 hours/week. Stressful and exhausting, I'm sure.

Just as a quick (non-political) aside, it does seem as if "they" are making it harder and harder to work in a small business setting as opposed to a large corporation or its equivalent; but, damn, it's such a free-r and more enjoyable laboring life when you either are working for yourself or at least are working in a place where the business owner is in the office next to you.

Second, it fell upon me to negotiate her independent contractor agreement, as the her new boss put a contract in front of her that had (1) a 2-year non-solicit and non-compete, and (2) a "prevailing parties" attorneys' fees shifting provision. Regarding (2), that's a HARD NO. And regarding (1), almost every case I litigate involves some sort of non-compete and/or non-solicit breach claim, and I'm frankly shocked that most employees, independent contractors, business purchasers, etc. enter into those agreements with no negotiation at all, as if they are adhesion contracts (notably, I've never heard of lawyers entering into non-solicits and/or non-competes; it may even be illegal in some states for a law firm to require lawyers enter into them--it probably is because they restrict a client's choice to choose his counsel of choice). I mean, DW's new boss expected her to enter into a contract (we are NOT talking about a lot of money here in potential earnings, by the way) that would have prevented her from effectively being able to make a living in her profession outside of a hospital setting for a two year period should the relationship ever go south (folks love to pretend as if the relationship could never go south). Anyway, I managed to not screw the deal up, as lawyers tend to do, and DW got what she wanted in the mark up of the contract. I just can't believe that none of the people this woman has worked with in the past had not questioned her contract, at all.

Third, I heard back from the RV repair place and it appears that "all" that needs to be done is replacing the converter, and that there is no additional damage (though he won't know for sure until the new converter is installed). Assuming that is the case, the total price tag will be about $2,300 + tax. My deductible is $1,000, so I'll submit the claim, and I'm in the process of doing that. I'm almost 5 months into the work remote arrangement and I STILL don't have my home office set up; I'm ready for that to happen.

Finally, I went to Mexico with some friends for a fishing trip a couple weeks ago, as if I needed another reminder that I no longer enjoy travel. I went on the trip because the guy that planned it is a close, childhood friend who is a couple days away from being my neighbor again, so that is a relationship I want to take care of. But, we live on the water and go fishing here pretty regularly in pretty much the same water and for the same fish as we did in Mexico, so, honestly, the whole trip seemed a little silly. But, the food was good.

Some ETAs, we are still struggling to find our parish. We tried a different one near my dad's house Saturday evening, but per my 12-yo daughter it felt "too Protestant-y" (I knew exactly what she meant). I hate doing the cafeteria Catholic thing, but man, the MUSIC at "our" parish is SO OVER THE TOP; it's frankly sinful in the manner it distracts from the liturgy. And the parish is doing it's "parish mission" right now, which they outsourced to one of those too-slick-by-far Catholic "faith formation" businesses that charge parishes for glossy mission materials, with videos from prominent Catholic speakers, lots of stupid corporate-y type slogans and catch phrases, etc. Shia Lebouf said rather famously (within the Catholic Twitter world) during his Bishop Barron interview about the Padre Pio movie that he felt that someone was trying to sell him something at the Novus Ordo Mass, and he didn't feel that way at a Latin Mass. I feel that way for sure at my current parish--"LOOK AT US, SEE HOW RELEVANT WE ARE!!!". It's too much. I don't know, the family is a little lost right now wrt the parish thing. BUT, "homeschool" religious education continues to go well, doing The New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism and The Story of Civilization curriculums.

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