7 Quick Takes: Hextake Edition

I feel like this guy.

--- 1 ---

I am tired. I woke up half an hour ago and I am tired. I slept for the better part of seven hours, and I am tired. I have been eating well, and I am tired.

I am tired. And I think it's chemical.

--- 2 ---

I've been having myself a little fortnight of the stews. One of my Christmas presents was a slow cooker (some regions: crock pot) that was big enough that I can make two servings (good, gut-busting servings) of a stew in it at once, and it's been getting some serious mileage. Stews are probably the easiest thing a person can make with the widest number of ingredients (and the greatest range of feast or famine), so it was a good way to stretch a pay-cheque that was a little light thanks to the continuing-to-persist malaise taking a weekend off... in my head.

I'd have to say it's suiting me well. As long as you keep the vegetables suitably varied and have a good way to get dairy, even a person with my relatively high caloric requirements can live comfortably off a solid stew twice a day and an ample supply of fresh-made bread.

I don't think I've ever gone on a proper bread-rant here, but I'm a real gluten addict and a firm believer in the powers of bread as a calorie source. Since I walk the better part of 6 km per day, not counting the actual walking and heavy lifting I do at work, raw calories actually do have a place in my diet. If you didn't own a car, they'd probably play a role in yours too.

I'm thinking of doing a food series on breads, actually.

--- 3 ---

There's a lot of xenophobia and generic rage flying around my blogroll lately. The world is consumed in the Hindsight is 20/20 virus, wondering why this pair of men, or this other pair of men, were allowed into the country at all, or why the Boston Bombers were allowed to draw on welfare.

Let's ignore for the moment the fact that I think Welfare, on both sides of our border, needs a massive overhaul, and deal with the issue of the Boston Bombers first. Firstly, until the bombers placed and detonated their explosives, they had yet to commit a crime. They still haven't actually been convicted, though I suppose that's a foregone conclusion at this point, so one of them is technically innocent and dead with a cop's bullet or three somewhere in his body. Even if they were on a watch list, that's not an indication of guilt. Innocent people wind up on no-fly lists all the time. Are we going to arbitrarily refuse welfare to people who are brown enough or radical enough that their ideas are unpopular, before those ideas cause problems?

Furthermore, what in the Inferno was the FBI and DHS doing investigating a terror attack on the Canadian side of the border? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they caught the guy, but instead of engaging my citizenry in their police actions and then just letting the RCMP grab them to make it look nice and legal, FBI and DHS should be limited strictly to training the RCMP and CSIS to do their own jobs. That's what I pay the RCMP and CSIS for.

--- 4 ---

This photo is overused.

Work is going exceedingly well... sort of. See, I pull down as many hours as there are to pull down, and I'm very, very good at it. I've got something of a record for excellence. For every night I can't finish something, there's three that I can get something extra done. As a result, I get bounced around a lot. I've been trained for every position I can reasonably obtain without the entirety of local management being axed, and I work them all on a more or less regular basis.

It's not enough. I guess that's proof positive that the economy is still on a downturn. Canada started ours late, and we're not recovering yet, our Conservative Majority government notwithstanding. My boss would love to give me more hours. Why wouldn't he? As it stands, I bow and scrape on the minimum wage, getting more done in a day than I was when I was being paid 10, 20% more than I am now, and I need to do more.

I'm tired. At 28 hours a week, I can squeak by with my life. As long as I never get sick, spend no money on hobbies, and never have to travel. I could work more, sure, but I'd need a second job, and this time of year, nobody's looking for employees with strings attached. They're looking for students, who don't know their rights, don't know their business, and hell, don't need the work.

I never thought I'd be this guy, but the last person who needs to work over the summer is some punk in high school who's getting room and board from Mommy and Daddy for free, when those of us with real bills, real rent, and real lives need to put food on the table and faith in the bank.

Instead of welfare, you should be able to apply for wage augmentation.

--- 5 ---

I think spending my time on NationStates, surrounded by liberals in the evening and conservatives in the morning, is making me further social-left, and further economic-right. It's entirely possible, all things considered. The ideas we are exposed to have a large impact on the ideas we hold dear, whether we're doing it consciously or not.

--- 6 ---

This take intentionally left blank. :)

--- 7 ---

Well, kids, in all fairness, I'm off to work. But first, someone's got to make the bread and start the stew, because, unmarried and living essentially alone, I ain't got nobody to do that for me. (Or, alternately, don't have anybody to do that for.)

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