Can part of it be skatepark laser tag?
Kilnier
joined 1 year ago
Yes and no.
Tl:dr I should be dead but I’m not.
My health has become a monkeys paw. False anaphylaxis and seizures I can work around but the medication has made me healthy enough to gain weight and muscle. Then my boss gave me a very physical job. While I put on 35 pounds of muscle the doctors added osteoporosis to the symptoms list of my disease.
So now I’m strong enough to break my own bones if I’m not careful. And have dealt with chronic pain for long enough that twice now I’ve been to the hospital and discovered months old fractures because ‘it doesn’t hurt that much’. Soooo fuck me I guess?
Layer on top of that a bunch of gender identity issues and delayed puberty(second? I dunno I’m 36 with a proceeding hairline and my pecks are visibly bigger than last week) and I feel like im turning into a monster. My wife says a sexy monster which does help a bit. Pro-tip: don’t complain to your overweight wife about your anxiety around becoming physically attractive.
But I have a meeting in January to start a research project and pivot a bunch of my time at work to research and software development. I work at a lumber mill? My boss may be a complete fuckshow when it comes to safety but he’s a pretty nice guy and lets me work how I work. I do make him a buttload of money. I’ve learned to run a planer, filing cnc, front loaders and their kilns. One of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten was this year when after 18 months working the kilns they told me ‘there’s things you can do better but they are matters of diminishing returns for us so we’d like you to focus on something new’. They expected that timeline to be 5 years. I’ve developed spreadsheets and algorithms to track and extrapolate moisture data for my lumber. I led a skunkworks dev team in Turkey to make an OCR app and deployed it at work for the basis of an inventory system. One of my projects this summer is to expand that system to their entire yard from my purview at the kilns. I’ve made and iterated processes for their saw filing and tracking and eliminated about 30k/week of downtime. I’m fucking killing it honestly but still feel like shit about myself. I struggle a lot with whether I’m actually smart or just good at reading. There may not be a practical difference. I would like to be paid more. Im considering the startup route and founding my own company but having access and resources of the mill would be a huge help for development so subsidiary company? I don’t know. My boss is the kind of stupid where he gives a former apple employee a computer but no IPA so I’ve got some cards to play.
My wifes grandfather passed away last week. We moved in with him and gramma 7 years ago when I went on disability and they needed home care. Gramma is in a long term care facility with PSP(super-Parkinson’s) now. My wife is an absolute saint. He gave us a place to live when I was sick and I owe him a lot of who I am. I also knew him longer than any but 1 of my own grandparents. It’s really hard. Also the 6th person to die around Christmas since 2016 so we are pretty well done with the whole month. We don’t even know if her dad committed suicide on the 26th or 27th. Fuck Christmas.
But our time spent caring for the grandparents and various other circumstances means that we might be able to buy/inherit the house! We might own a house! Ahhh the millennial dream! Start work at 11 years old, work in 9 different industries, have 6 years of disability off work and save up just enough of a down payment to inherit a house! It’s pretty fraught. Just the whole melancholy and juxtaposition of moving upstairs and having windows again because an amazing person died is a bit too much.
And like…my dad tried to start a cult so I’m glad they’re getting divorced but having been the person to ‘not cause it, but you did open my eyes a bit’ is all sorts of fun to process. Sorry/Thanks mom. She is doing a lot better now so that’s nice. My dad not so much. Not sure if I have it in me to see him at Christmas. But as mentioned previously and statistics I worry about suicide at this time of year.
But hey! I’m autistic, high school diploma, post-traumatic and non-specific traumatic stress disorders, cycle food and environmental allergies on a weekly basis, 25+ fractures through my body, had fucking scurvy twice, 6 years off work in total and I make my national median wage, I’ve got a job that I can keep for as long as I want it, a boss who actually accommodates my disabilities and weirdness, an amazing wife, two dogs and too many cats, I look better than I ever have and my doctor told me to write my will at 21. I’m 36 now so fuck all y’all.
If anyone read all that thank you! If not it still feels good to just put it down in words.
I posted this in another comment in this thread. This poem always comes back to me when I hit these moments or these threads. Any suggestions on how to get ‘thissus offeroede thissus swae maeg’ as a tattoo without looking like a Viking fascist nutjob?
You might like this as well
http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=Deor
“That was overcome, so may this be”
The mill I work at schedules their yearly maintenance around hunting season. First week both mills are down. Second week half and half.
Easy 80% of staff are gone hunting.
I have an underwood typewriter that I fixed and used for the guest book at my wedding. It sits as a decoration now as there’s not much use to it.
I do love that font though.
Mandatory minimums for those who break the public trust. Harsh ones.
Have you found a way to parse what kind of denim they’ll be? I’ve got 7 pairs of 511s with at least 4 weights/mixes of denim. It’s better in store but even at the Levi’s outlet they had 3 types of denim 511s in different color sets.
Maybe tws earbuds with transparency mode? I’ve found it helps me hear voices more clearly and it allows for adjustable volume.
Someone like me…sort of.
Warp is more about the piling and stickering of the packs going into the kiln. Wet you can mitigate at home but once a warp is set you’re pretty much screwed.
The mill should have some sort of quality control in place to communicate these issues between the kilns and stacker crew. Find a different mill to buy from. Anything warped is pulled out before the planer at my mill and then sold as rough outs or goes to the chipper.
Ever seen 20 feet high of stacked lumber sway in the wind? Stickering can be a huge safety issue alongside quality.
I’m a kiln operator. I run a giant oven to dry red and white pine.
Dropped out of uni. Various retail and tech jobs for about 12 years. 4 years disability. Took an interview at a lumber mill because ‘cool tour’, took a job because ‘paycheck for a little while anyway’. Ran a planer for about 6 weeks and then offered kiln operator when their previous was poached.
On the job learning for me with the caveat that it was not a reasonable expectation to set. Typically one works under a senior operator for about two years not ‘you’re on your own but you’re good at google right?’
Certified by my work for government heat treatment programs, front loader/forklift operation and working at heights. One of those jobs where mindset is more important than education.
Would I do it again? Yes? I’d want more money for the work. There’s not a lot of people who will write an algorithm to interpret the data they gather in a 50c box. It’s a really intense combination of intellectual and manual labor and the compromise seems to be to plop the pay in the middle. Good pay for a lumber mill but shit pay for developing processes, an inventory system and an entire goddamned iOS app(that my boss didn’t even understand much less appreciate).
I wouldn’t expect the door to be open again in the future. There’s not a lot of kilns to run, they are increasingly automated and it’s a job people hold til retirement. The manager who hired me took a massive gamble on a physically disabled but intelligent person so that’s not easy to find either. Owner runs under the ‘warm body is better than no body’ premise. There’s not even any other mills close enough with kilns that I have other employment opportunities. I’ve got a very specific and reasonably lucrative skill set for a rare job.
Harmony Parking Lot Song - Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains
“Here’s to our lives being meaningless And how beautiful it is Because freedom doesn’t have a purpose”
Really that whole album. Taught me a lot about how to be ok with being broken.
Oh man. That is really rough to deal with. I watched my wife going through what you are and it was really hard on her. I hope you’re taking care of yourself as well as your girlfriend.
I(male, 36) have an autoimmune disorder that really kicked in during my teen years. I hit 172lbs(78kg) at 12 years old and then again at 32. At one point I weighed less than 138lbs(62kg) and I’m 6’4”(192cm). Got some medicine figured out and now I’m 215lbs(97kg), which feels and looks(!!) much much better.
It’s all a bit personal but I know to some extent what she’s going through. It’s really really hard to watch your body change even in positive ways. Hell, I was so malnourished I couldn’t do math in my head for ten years, it’s fucking weird having parts of your brain turn back on and get smarter. She’s probably going through a lot.
I’m not sure I can DM with this lemmy app but feel free to try. At the least I can lend an ear for someone for you to shit on. Everyone needs that!
My best advice, as trite and cliche as it is, would be to meet her where she is at. Talk to her. Find out what’s bothering her. Don’t judge even the silly stuff but remind her to laugh. Remind her that love is about who she is not the skin or body she wears.
She might need to be reminded or shown that not all comments are criticisms. People saying stuff about how she’s changed may be intended to be a compliment rather than a put down but it can be very hard to hear the words the right way.
Also, if you’re in a developing country this has got to suck. One thing no one talks about is god damned expensive gaining or losing weight or just getting health can be. I’ve spent about 2% of my gross income on clothing this year because I put on 25lbs(11kg) and I make around the Canadian median wage. The conflict of guilt around being an expensive person or feeling like crap in your clothes is hard. It feels stupid and invalid but it’s this constant ache of budget vs feeling like you don’t want to be seen. Maybe take her shopping if you can?