Rant for the Day (keep it clean)

Homesteading & Country Living Forum

Help Support Homesteading & Country Living Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
My sister calls me and tells me somebody dumped a love seat on The Ridge. Not cool. Sister called the township but still there. Princess and I moved it to our trash. Original owners could have done the same.

What were thinking?

Ben
 
Alabama has 4+ species of red wasps. Nasty, disagreeable and aggressive, they will attack in mass… And they hurt! As a kid we robbed red wasp nests for their larva, make great fish bait. So I have a lot of experience with the little nasties!

Last night I was reintroduced in a most unpleasant manner. In early spring and late fall there are always a few in my house. A few survive winter in my ceiling. In early spring they start flying around and I kill a few.

I got in bed early last night and laid back on a red wasp. It was in my bed!!! It stung my backbone! Dead center of my back. At first I thought a screw driver or some tool had fallen out of my pants or something. But the sharp pain continued to increase as the 1/10th of seconds ticked by. It was like a hot spike was being driven into my spine.

I hate red wasps!!!

Here are two that call my state home, paper wasps… the smaller one with the black body is particularly nasty. They kill 100's of caterpillars to feed their young so do serve a purpose.

View attachment 83819View attachment 83820
I have a aluminum truck bed tool box, not in the truck & ai store tools in it all winter, the Red Wasp/paper wasp love it.
 
Went to bed at 12:20 & got up at 1:01pm, still sore from hand digging beds & planting a few hundred flower bulbs.
My daughter & I plant her mail box & back yard with bulbs, it is late in the year for spring bulbs, but we had to wait for the house to close.
She will have a nice garden next year.
 
Ugh. I hate wasps. I also hate fire ants and fleas. Useless creatures. I hate mosquitoes but at least they are good food for frogs & lizards.
I'm going to have to get up on the roof because wasps built a nest on the vent for my range hood (on the roof).

The local hospital has people take numbers before sitting down so they know who is in line. If people aren't physically standing in a line it can be hard to tell if there is a line. I will generally let people who are carrying heavy items or only have a few items go ahead of me.

Today I wanted to get in and out fast because of kidney stones.
 
So, my rant for today.... Was cooking supper early. Wife was at an appointment. Dog was outside watching the world go by. A pickup stopped in front of my house and looked at the dog, rolled his window down, waited for about 30 seconds, and moved on. Lately, odd things like this have been going on.

Not knowing what was up as I am not trusting of anyone for the most part these days, I decided I would check out what was up. Within minutes said truck had my truck within feet of the party involved. I noticed it was a county truck at least according to the license plate and by tomorrow I will know who was driving and why they are "harassing" my animal. I was county law enforcement and local as well. I'm curious and think maybe they are looking for animals not taken care of or running after those in the street. Ours cannot so I am waiting to see what the explanation of the "visit" is.

Thankfully I have the connections and camera footage but it still angers me when people mess with any part of my family, pets included.
 
Bassing music. Why does a kids party have to be blasted to all neighbors in a 5 mile radius. Especially when you know the entire neighborhood is long over it and your closest neighbor sleeps during the day. You can’t even make an effort!? Figured since we were planning on working on the garden with us directly in line with their place. This is going to be a long afternoon/evening/night. So ready to be gone
 
My friend recently had two incidents with his ex being a controlling jealous cow. He's accepted that the woman he has a crush on will never date him and that they will be friends (but he hasn't told his ex this bc he finds it amusing that she gets so jealous- she has no right to complain given she cheated on him with at least 7 guys). Not only did his crush move across the street from them, but she also now works at the same place he does. She sometimes drives him to work and back. She also is very good with the kids (as she has a couple of her own). My friend babysits her kids sometimes and he's attached to them. They adore him. She's actually a good parent so that makes his ex very jealous bc she's terrible. Anyway, she got mad that he spends any time with the crush at all and was accusing him of cheating on her with the crush. My friend has to keep reminding her that it isn't cheating if they aren't in a relationship & she has no room to complain given how many times she cheated on him. Apparently in the middle of her screaming she stopped and said she didn't know why she was worried bc the chick would never want to be with someone ugly and toothless like him (she used some foul language in her description so I'm paraphrasing). It really hurt his feelings and he told her she needed to pack her stuff. Of course, she didn't.
Fastforward to yesterday: Crush bought him an apple watch as a gift. His ex found out and flipped her lid. Picked up an entire full trash can and threw it at him. He said he's throwing her out, but we'll have to see if he actually does. He also said he will no longer let her watch her baby unsupervised as he can't trust her not to get violent. Personally, I think he needs to report her behavior to the police. Even if he doesn't have her arrested, get a record of it and have her reported for psych eval. She's off her meds again and getting progressively crazier. I'm worried she may seriously injure him again (since she gave him the blood clot that caused his stroke) or hurt/kill the baby.
Meanwhile, she's posting for sympathy on Facebook saying how she feels like everyone hates her. I wanted to reply with "Maybe don't throw trash cans at people & they might like you better".
 
As an update, it seems my friend finally has kicked his ex to the curb. He told me having a babysitter for her baby is not worth the abuse. Said he will have to tough it out and find other arrangements but that she's not allowed over at his house anymore and she can only see her baby while supervised.

His daughter told me she was happy to see the ex gone. They used to be very close but the ex became increasingly mean and then violent and was awful to the poor kid. She told me the ex was saying "I'm da mama!" all the time and last time she said "Not for long, you're not!"

The kittens over there should be safer now-- the ex is mean to animals. She won't get to kick the kittens or the puppy now (and yes, she's the type who literally kicks puppies).
 
Typically true. Not always but some people have to be trashing someone to be "better" and that stays after you leave them.
If I have a problem with someone I will talk to them, privately as the first step. I promise there will be no doubt about my position. I can disagree with points of view and remain a good friend and I can ride someone hard (or soft) about tactics without ill feelings. I can jump in with both feet when a friend is trashed - though I am trying to ease up on that because I have been told it is not important or that they can handle themselves without my "help". I can only say I have been the sheepdog a long time.
 
My Samsung Note 4 is being a pain and telling me I have insufficient storage space to take more pictures. I swapped out the 64gb SD card for a brand new 128gb one and its still pulling the same crap. Not sure why. I'll have to see if I can get my friend to work his magic on it and send new images to new SD instead. I wonder if old one became loose. I know it works bc I put it in an adapter and got the images off of it on to my laptop.
 
Corgi's are fairly popular dogs for city people. I've had a couple that I've watched while dog sitting. I've liked the ones I've watched, but they would not be my choice for a dog.
[/Queen Elizabeth has Corgi's and one bit her a while back, I heard they can be rather crochety and sometimes biters, not my choice for a dog either, we love our shelter dog Lucy and she loves us.
 
Update with good news: my friend said something about a function on the phone that I didn't know about. I googled it and found a detailed video on how to transfer my phone's pictures over to the SD card and now I'm no longer getting the insufficient storage message.
 
Todays rant:
Scrub jay/blue Jay . Who knew they stole chicks!?! 😠 Have never had any problems with them. Not 1 but 3 chicks in an hour. Dog gone thing is back today for more. Way to smart for its own good. Mom fended it off better this evening and I got out there before a chick was carried off. Only because mom was after it a bit and it was practically locked into the pen because of what we did yesterday to secure it. Hopefully no wounds to the chick it attempted to get. Will check better when everyone settles down. We thought we had the pen pretty secure but this bird is very smart. Time to go back out and see if we can do more to keep the little family secure.
 
Last edited:
Todays rant:
Scrub jay/blue Jay . Who knew they stole chicks!?! 😠 Have never had any problems with them. Not 1 but 3 chicks in an hour. Dog gone thing is back today for more. Way to smart for its own good. Mom fended it off better this evening and I got out there before a chick was carried off. Only because mom was after it a bit and it was practically locked into the pen because of what we did yesterday to secure it. Hopefully no wounds to the chick it attempted to get. Will check better when everyone settles down. We thought we had the pen pretty secure but this bird is very smart. Time to go back out and see if we can do more to keep the little family secure.
Sorry that triggered me.(pun)
DW and MIL love them because they are so pretty.
I have to bite my tongue. :mad:
When I grew up there were 3 huge pecan trees around the house.
We picked up and processed hundreds of pounds of pecans every year.
The blue jays would drill a hole in a pecan, eat some of it, throw it to the ground and do another one. When many of the pecans we picked up had holes in them, my mom got furious.:mad:
She released the army on them.:oops:
She put a $1 bounty on each one we could blast out of the trees.
The only limit was, each of us were only given 5 shells per day so you placed your shots wisely.
But that was still a lot of money for a kid in the 60's.:D
We would sit for hours under the trees with a 20ga single-barrel and take turns.
Soon we no longer had a blue jay 'problem'.:(
On topic: Rant = Shoot the damthings!:waiting:
 
Apparently they are illegal to shoot (protected). 🤷🏻‍♀️ Who knew. Would explain why there’s so many of them.
Shooting feral hogs is illegal in Cali too, and they are overrun with them in many places. :mad:
You can only do so much stupid stuff and your world turns to💩.
If blue jays were protected, there would be only certain months you could hunt them (hunting season), bag limits on how many you shoot, etc.... No. Stupidity rules!
If you got a hog problem? Follow Alabama's lead, and put up a few signs that say:
FREE HAM, BACON, AND PORK CHOPS!!!
Problem solved! (You do need to age the meat though) Not that I know anything about that🙄.
 
Shooting feral hogs is illegal in Cali too, and they are overrun with them in many places. :mad:
You can only do so much stupid stuff and your world turns to💩.
If blue jays were protected, there would be only certain months you could hunt them (hunting season), bag limits on how many you shoot, etc.... No. Stupidity rules!
If you got a hog problem? Follow Alabama's lead, and put up a few signs that say:
FREE HAM, BACON, AND PORK CHOPS!!!
Problem solved! (You do need to age the meat though) Not that I know anything about that🙄.

It’s apparently illegal in all states. Protected under the 1918 Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
 
It’s apparently illegal in all states. Protected under the 1918 Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
No. They do not migrate. They are not songbirds either. They are garbage just like sparrows.
"Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act." If any birds signed a treaty, I wanna see it! :waiting:
 
The blue jay thing reminds me of when we lived in Guam and they imported birds (because the brown tree snakes wiped out the bird population). For some reason they brought in blue jays. There were some on the military housing I lived on and people would jog with tennis rackets because the bluejays would divebomb and attack them. I remember wondering why some guy had one and then I saw him swatting the bluejay away as it attacked.

Meanwhile, pups found the bag of paper towel rolls and chewed up every single roll. Paper towel shreds are all over and the light in the room burned out.
 
I hate mosquitoes but at least they are good food for frogs & lizards.

If I had a way to do it, I would happily wipe out every mosquito from the entire planet.

My oldest brother got bit by a mosquito some time before his golden wedding anniversary. He was definitely off at his anniversary party on a Saturday and by the following Tuesday he couldn't do anything for himself.

He ended up in a coma in a hospital in Amarillo for two months with encephalitis caused by West Nile Virus. And then a month of rehab in the Ussery-Roan Texas State Veteran's Home. If he had the Medicare Supplemental Insurance, he would likely have been there far longer. As it was, when admitted, it would take him more than five minutes to turn his wheel chair around 180 degrees. After a month, it still took three or four minutes.

If you were in the military and have the money, that Ussery-Roan home is really nice.

He tried to go back to farming but found himself unable to do it so he basically withered away until we had to put him in another nursing home. He was barely able to recognize me the last three or four years of his life and not at all the last two years of it. The last six months, he was about as unresponsive as I could imagine.

I didn't get a chance to see him before he died because the nursing home locked down because of covid. They did make exceptions when he was clearly about to pass away, but not for me because I had just gotten over covid at the time.

That mosquito bite and the West Nile Virus destroyed his life. I have little doubt that he would still be going strong on the farm and happy if not for the West Nile Virus.

If anyone ever tells you that viruses only get weaker over time, tell them that they are seriously misinformed. West Nile Virus was weaker before it went through a mutation in the 1990s that made it far more deadly. And it's hardly the only virus to get worse over time.
 
Back
Top