Anne N. Mouse: Blog

While loading downed branches in a chipper today, I thought I saw a piece of rope (major hazard!) wound up in the branch and trailing back 40 or more feet. I dropped the branch to investigate and found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicodendron_diversilobum Yes indeed ye olde burning oak emulating an ivy plant. No less dangerous to have going into a chipper, but still I hemmed and hawed for a while since it had actually set roots in the bark of the live oak limb that I wanted to shred. Finally I got on the far side of the branch from said trailing vine and very carefully watched my feet and fed it to the chipper. But the presence of ye olde burning oak meant a cold shower tonight when I arrived at home. Not pleasant considering the high temp today was something like 55 degrees Fahrenheit. BRRR all day, then because I was working in a short sleeved T-shirt I sort of look like I might have been cutting today… :(

If I could find people willing to pay $5 US per 1000 words read, I think I could make a fair living at proofreading. And frankly, after pricing proofreading service at scribendi I would say that even my preferred price of $10.00 per thousand words is pretty much underselling the market. Then again no one here (or not many) are producing professional works that are earning them a living either so I do understand that if I sell said service here I may have to price the service differently than it would be for other writing efforts. Still I have to agree with scribendi (www.scribendi.com) if you really want your work to look good, a proofreader is indispensable and the price, except for long tomes (I wouldn't be reading any such work just now...) is not really that high... Okay at $10.00 per thousand words a 65,000 word book would run $650. Like I said, for most of what I've read here I'd half that price. But again it would mean that more people would have to avail themselves of the service. Right now I'm going to be looking into paypal again. The main issue is that if I use a payment processor they require to know my actual physical address (One supposes this is so the infernal recovery scourge can find you) which makes me paranoid beyond measure. I just don't trust them not to let such info out to places other than the infernal rectal scourge. ...

Well I went to work today, it is only temporary… The reason I'm able to work this week is this https://weather.com/news/news/2019-02-11-winter-storm-nadia-pacific-northwest-snow
On Valentine's day I woke up to 10 inches of snow in my yard! Now to understand how unusual this is, just around the corner from where I live is a giant grapefruit tree that almost always bares fruit. Or in other words, Redding Ca is pretty close to a semi-tropical climate. Basically the amount of snow that came down here means that there are trees down all over town. And I'm going out and dragging anything less than 6" in diameter to a chipper that was running practically as hard as it could run today…

Or not scoring stories is odd to me, I wonder why a person fails to score a story; good, bad, or otherwise, scores are craved by most who write on these sites.
So, my reason for not voting? I don't feel that I can give a reasonable score... Maybe I dislike the subject of the story? Though usually that is taken care of when I read, either the blurb or the tags. If a story is not tagged in a way that I find compelling it rarely gets opened. Of course I often start stories without finishing reading them, so those are stories I don't score... A putative zero, if you will, but zeros are not allowed in the scoring system.
Yet that is what I assume when a story I post fails to elicit feedback or scores...

One of the reasons that I really like this story is that I identify so strongly with Tim. Except for me I'm sort of like Benny in some ways, except for forms. When I fill a form, I can almost hear someone standing over me demanding to know if what I put on the form is true.
This of course makes it very difficult(damn nearly impossible really)to fill such wonders of modern life as employment applications.
And before you say do online apps? They can be worse if possible. Don't have something like a telephone number from ten years ago? Don't bother adding that job to your job history. Even with a computer some of that is ridiculous. I've worked at several companies that have gone out of business. Also having been in the army, if I gave the phone number of my last unit that would have zero bearing today, cause it's been so long that anyone who was in with me would be retired, not just transferred, but retired!
So many frustrations, and so much feeling that there is no way to go forward.