I combine work and study right now. I study HTML + CSS and Java right now and I want to work in IT one day. It's not easy but I try to do my best. I took web development course at https://goit.global/us. It's one of the best for developers. They offer theoretical and practical knowledge for developers. I'm glad that I have an apportunity to combine work and study.
Tomorrow I will have a supposedly minor procedure, then I will drive 6+ hours away from wife and children to rinse and repeat my work week. I will try and cram in a review video here and there. I hope everyone has a good week I also have to worry about relatives who live in storm alley....tropical storms AND FUDGE...I brought along Yolopark prime to try and build him but had no time...here's to the future:
Finished year-end performance review meetings for my teams. Finally. Now, comes the Management meeting to calibrate & standardize performance pay rise & bonuses. Like watching paint dry.
My supervisor had some kind of announcement this morning at 9. She brought it up last night in our department group text message chat and I said I couldn't make it (no car, and an uber round-trip to my Job is $24 MINIMUM) . She replied "I'll just call you and give you the details" 9 AM was ten HOURS ago. I went into the group chat and asked what it was about and I get "lol, she'll call you" like, mfr, that was hours ago... *sigh* guess I'll find out tomorrow. EDIT Supervisor texted me moments ago, today was her last day at our store and her replacement starts Sunday. Gonna be sad, I've worked with her since front end.
Finally, just finished work (WFH) & it's 1am. Taking the extra long weekend Fri-Mon, with Tue being a public holiday in my state. Doin' f*** all.
I post my cattle pictures in just about every thread on this forum I can (see my notorious GT Redbull posts and the Gunpla thread), but this is where I separate Moobile Sweeties and my "son" the Pinzgauer from the inventory. Or as I call it, the "Cold Equation." Making our first cattle sale of this quarter by culling retirees out of the herd going into the Fall/Winter seasons (cut our herd size down to manageable number), and I'm letting go of my four year old bottle bull "Crowe." He wasn't a bad animal or ill tempered, but he followed his stomach one time too many this past week when he found a weak spot in the fence and was grazing in the swamp. If he had kept going south another 100 feet, he'd be in the neighboring property (a muscadine vineyard) or worse if he found his way to the highway. Hungry animals will follow their stomachs, and fortunately bottle/hand-raised animals will follow YOU when you hold what they want in their stomach in front of them. My father just plucked a handfull of what Crowe was grazing on, and made him come back through the fence where we went out to get him. Of course, my UTV's starter died on the south end of the property where we were, and I had to walk him up the pasture to the feedlot/sorting box where he remained on lockdown for the next three days until the day of the cattle auction. *Aside note: Crowe's place on the farm was always temporary. He was bottle raised after a fluke of nature being born in a cold frozen puddle where his mother rejected him after we spent an hour getting him to stand and thaw. If I didn't have to raise him, he would have been just another feeder and gotten sold sooner. We paid to have him dehorned but don't want horn genes dominating the herd when there's already 50% chance of them developing from our poled (hornless) members of the herd. Moreover he's surplus to requirement when we have roughly six other bulls; three of which are "Pillars" (herd sires) and three that are young, promising prospects. Hungy, Mr.Caboose, Grayson, Mr.Luthor, Goldo, and Jack'o. Ages 12, 9, 7, and 2 years old, in that order. Hungy has "forever" status so he will never see the inside of a gooseneck trailer. He was born here and will remain here so long as I'm around. The others aren't going anywhere either until they reach a point of succession or retirement, whenever that time comes. Crowe's time here however was productive, having produced calves that have either been sold or kept to breed back to the prospects. So he's more than paid for himself. By Tuesday afternoon we sorted out the batch of culls. Due to Crowe's size I didn't want to fill the box with yearlings/feeders or cow-calf pairs. Instead I kept it to a small number. Six, just the ones we don't need to keep feeding who are doing nothing. I manage the records for the herd and can say that the five brood cows needed to be retired. Kim, Liara, Heidi, and Lilly are four pureblood Charolais who haven't delivered calves in over a year, Lilly especially since her last calf was over two years ago. Their age is a factor as well, all of them 11 years old, but we still have cows in the herd who are older and much thriftier. On the other end of the age window, Greysi (the pale gray at center back in the picture) is the youngest in the cage and a "one and done," after having only one calf more than a year ago, never bred back. Fast forward to yesterday, just before we loaded them onto the cattle trailer, we got a call from the stockyard in Moultrie demanding to know why *their* driver (who isn't an employee for them, just a comissioned hauler) was taking them to the stockyard in Ashburn. The abridged version is we're following the market trend where older cows and bulls are bringing in better prices than what we were seeing out of Moultrie for feeder calves. *Another driver we know says the buyers who frequent the Moultrie stockyard only want particular breeds like Angus and we're selling Charolais and Pinzgauer cattle. He didn't seem thrilled to hear our answer but we told him we'll be back when the prices there are in our favor. So six cows on the trailer, bringing our headcount back to 95 with plans to reduce our number further going into the next month. Testing the waters of a market we haven't been to in almost over a decade, and hoping for a decent check. I don't expect much but at least they will pay for the feed and seed bills for the remaining members in the herd.
We've been having in store and online deals for the last few weeks. But today begins retail holiday hell. We're already hearing customers bitch about long waits at check out plus not having in store what's in the flyer. Can't wait for Black Friday, although to me the trend is somewhat dying.
Too much snow...people snowed in...can't visit my wife and kids...but I scored 20 hrs of OT More plastic crack money I guess.
Man, I worked 16 hrs, then came back to this crap apartment....spent 1 hr digging my vehicle out enough to put some chains on...when I wake up to more OT I better be able to make it out!
I thought this year I'd evade the Christmas songs at the shops but no. Copped Mariah Carey & Britney Spears back-to-back. Commiserations to all you retail staff.
$4.5k increase for next year, yay...it doesn't really do much with the inflation Every little bit helps and I'll take it.
Farming is a 24/7 business and full contact sport. Rain or shine, heat or freeze, you get out there when there's a cow in trouble. It was 22 degrees at 9PM last night, and of course the cow we're expecting to calve goes into labor on the far side of the field. Paperwork is still an important part of the cattle business, recording tag numbers, birth dates, physical characteristics, parentage, and "service" dates when witnessed to coincide with the birth records for they offspring. #146 "Jewel" from our home-born Pinzgauer stock was on the ninth day of the nine month gestation table's "Plus/Minus 10 Days" period from the date when the bull did his duty. As you can tell, the cow in question has a 4:2 record of successful calvings to fatalities (in this case, one calf that didn't make it through a winter storm and one that was dead before it hit the ground). "Mr Luthor" is a big bull, about to turn three years old and currently rivaling the size of his nine year old father, and Jewel being a well fortified and hearty cow, has a big calf to deliver. Despite the distance from the homestead and stable, she was in a location that was blocking the wind where she felt safe to deliver on her own if she could. We gave her half an hour to labor on her own since the calf's presentation was looking fine with it in the nose dive position where the front hooves and snout were visible, and she was having contractions. We saw no progress by 9:30, so we intervened. My father performed his Bovine OBGYN massage therapy to help stretch the vulva as I'm pulling on the calf's wrists. In any other situation we'd use the chains but I had thick leather gloves on and I had enough of the forelimbs to get a grip on. Mazel tov, it's a boy... a. big. boy. Even without a scale, I can tell he's somewhere in the range of 75 to 90lbs. Trust me, I know these things... he's heavy. After giving him the 'shakedown' to get all of the amniotic fluid out of his lungs, he was breathing on his own and we gave him a B-12 vitamin shot to stimulate his system. Jewel was tired and refused to stand up but was busy cleaning him. I worked with him and her, turning him around so she could lick every side of him, while my father went back to the house for a steroid shot, feed/hay/water, and booster for Jewel. Food worked to stimulate her to stand up but the calf is still limp wristed despite trying to move on his own. We gave them another half hour or so to acclimate but still anticipating the worst case scenario. Which of course means unless Jewel gets him up and nursing, we're taking the calf to the stable and get the bottle ready, while waiting to see if she follows us or comes looking for him after we've left the area. She didn't. By 11:30 we got him into the UTV and drove up the field. Jewel started to follow but turned around and stayed where she was comfortable. Wrapped him in dry towels, a warm blanket, with heat lamps and a space heater lit up around him as my father massaged his snout to stimulate a suckle reflex. We ended up tubing him to make sure he's fed and get his body temperature up with 2qts of colostrum. By midnight, I said "here we go again, again, again, again.... again." *each "again" meaning how many bottle calves we've raised without any parental aid. As of 8AM, he's still not coordinated enough to stand up on his own (we assume a slight dystocia syndrome; swelling in his face and numb tongue) so we tubed him again this morning. His head is up, he's kicking and shifting, but safe and warm. We'll work with him throughout the day as we get him past this critical period. Jewel was up at the gate by the stable this morning but it was more for the benefits of the extra ration of hay we toss for visitors outside the turnout pen, rather than demanding her calf back. As long as she's up and walking, and gets through her post partum phase, she'll either breed back and calve sometime next year or go on the truck with the next sale. Right now my arms are sore and my thumbs are still numb.. and I'm running on less than 3 hours of sleep. - STORY TIME! Believe it or not, we went through something similar to this 12 years ago. Around the same day, in the same lousy, cold and wet winter calving situation. Same location too. We had to assist a cow who labored for a couple hours, and had to pull the calf that didn't survive. What makes this story so intense is our main sire bull was there breathing down our necks (literally standing over my father's head while his hands were well inside the birth canal). Fortunately, he trusted us. In this year's version of the episode, the bull standing guard was my bottle calf born that same year... I'm glad Hungy definitely knew we were there to help.
This is the unfortuante follow up. In the words of my father: "Don't celebrate until after the third day." "Yule" didn't make it past day three. There was a brief moment of progress, but somewhere between the difficult birthing situation, freezing conditions, and overcoming physical disabilities (knuckled forelimbs, numb tongue, swollen face) there were unseen circumstances that proved fatal. No matter of everything we did, you can't stop a torsioned stomach that resulted in bloat. This calf died from a stomach ache he couldn't relieve himself and we couldn't fix without performing surgery. In spite of everything against him, he at least got to walk on grass in the sunlight. In the cold equation, we saved his mother so we have the means to make more. It still hurts, a lot. The calf was beginning to bond to me, which would be the first step in barn raising him. This is the nature of working in the business of living creatures, but it doesn't make it any easier. ...I need a drink.
So, there's a lot of "credit score" threads...but I'm going to post this here since my WORK is what pays for my bills I have 0 debt and just bills...my Transunion went down 5pts today to 817 and my Equifax went up 2 to 825....WTF On time payments 100% Credit card use 4% $1,269 of your $31,550 limit @ Transunion
