Anne N. Mouse: Blog

The rain was not quite driving for most of the day today. Indeed for part of the day the rain was more like a steady, easy drizzle. Still I was cold and wet while moving leaves with a cyclonic back pack blower.
I'm enjoying being out and about seeing the beauty of Northern CA and noticing that Lake Shasta is about 4-6 feet (estimated by me) from crest. This rain, depending on how widespread it is may actually push the state into using the emergency spillway... Yipe! I live down stream from that!

Yep, I was out running the old string trimmer once more and wandered into a patch of Ye olde Burning Oak! OUCH I itch. I need to hit the shower shortly. I know what the stuff looks like I really do, but when it is on the edge or in the middle of the path of where I need to run the trimmer... Well pretty soon I'm bathed in flying bits of it. If I see it and it is on the edge I'll narrow the path... Somewhat anyway. But where I'm out prepping campsites so that all the people from the 'gaybay' can come up here and enjoy the 'wilderness' there are times when the only option is to crank the string trimmer up to high and let the bits and pieces hit where they may.
I'm not terribly allergic and it is fairly cool here today so at least my pores didn't open up too badly... And as I told someone else recently, I like running weed whackers. Put in a pair of earplugs and crank that thing up to Bear-b-gone level and make the 'wilderness' look pretty...
That campsite where the blackberry thicket looks like it wants to maybe creep back into the site? Today it was flying chunks and bits of blackberry. The reason you don't get poison oak on you unless you're allergic or Fido chases a SQUIRREL! into the higher brush that looks so inviting is that I was out there making sure it was cut back...
Have a nice camping trip!

I know that Laz doesn't like us (for good reason) to put sites in our blog, whether our own off-site blog or something that we've discovered... Still I just remembered that I've an account at Kahn Academy. I'll only say this, that so far as I've been able to discover this site is entirely free, and one of the better sites for learning anything you want to learn. And frankly I want to learn something, anything that can move me from working part time running a string trimmer. Not mind that I dislike the string trimmer. But part time? That isn't working for me. I'm going to be homeless if I don't change something, and it seems that running a string trimmer is about the extent of what I can get for work currently.

I think I sent thank you notes to everyone who commented on my last blog, where I talked about possibly learning to code. Someone asked me to learn SQL which I'm looking into. Of course the SQL request may not yield a job that actually pays. But I shall consider it like proofreading here. That is that I do not really expect to earn any money by doing proofreading here (though I do keep hoping that I'll at least make the contacts necessary to move proofreading from hobby to profession) at least not directly.
Anyway it seems I touched a hot wire with my blog as I got about twenty responses. Wow I didn't realize I had so many readers.

So, the first question I have: Could I learn to code?
Answer: I don't see why I could not.
Question, which language should I learn to code?
There are so many answers that I just get lost in the weeds of trying to decide where to begin.
So, what to do?
I looked up what seems to be hot now and came up with ruby and ruby on rails. That looks like a good place to start...
Now to explain my last experience with writing code... at one time in my misspent youth I actually was somewhat able to use BASIC to write programs... Then I experienced my first bankruptcy and ended up working 60+ hours a week trying to dig out of that hole with a 1/4 teaspoon sized shovel... I didn't go forward and I didn't go backward but it essentially crashed my life. I somewhat recovered from that and joined the army where I sort of got sick with the FOMO/YOLO bug... So nothing to show for that except a very toxic marriage. Oh I did learn to operate a backhoe, but realized I really didn't want to drive the transporter trucks. That won't work in most areas... So I probably won't do that as a profession. I put in an application at a certain mining company but apparently my application got lost in the piles of other online applications that were put in at the same time...
So I am back to how to raise an income while doing something that I would be interested in. But enough of my bio... :P~ In short, I did know how to write in BASIC at one time. So the newer languages that don't include line numbers give me a headache. The seem to be somewhat well laid out if I can learn the syntax and what it means in general. So at this point where do I go to learn from the perspective of the utterly ignorant person who probably needs enough info to understand how to use the language, but doesn't need to go into the weeds that might confuse me as far as where something came from, I just need to know what my computer does to use it, not the code under something like this site or this dialogue box which works somewhat like a WP... in order to use it. So I probably don't need to know the background of the syntax of ruby to use it just the current syntax and how it will work and how to keep from damaging my computer (if that is possible) while learning to write.
I'm pretty sure where my strengths lie, which is in proofreading (QA) and instruction (I really enjoyed teaching my job when it got to the point that I was able to do that) so how do I turn my passions into a job? How do I get past the computer gatekeepers when submitting applications to my second tier (not that I wouldn't be very pleased to climb onto a D8/D9 or equivalent crawler tractor in a pit mine) choice of a job. After all if I could do that then I could continue to perfect my writing and proofing without concern that I will end up on the street or worse.