All they are asking for is 4 paid sick days per year. It’s not a fucking tough call at all. It’s an incredibly reasonable demand. They just need to give them the sick days.

Oh god I knew he was coming but hoped he wouldn’t this time. The moths…the moths…Every 77 years…

Run, OP. Run as far and as fast as you can. I only hope it’s not already too late for you.

Sorry to hear that. I was just joking, but learning how to ride a bike probably would actually help you with all that. Exercise definitely isn’t just for fat people, and it’s the best treatment for depression you can get without a prescription. And it would solve your transportation problem too. My advice stands.

Get a bicycle. You could use the exercise anyway.

We used to do this sometimes on trail crew back in the day. It was about 50/50 whether we could get it to work. It’s one of those things that’s part skill and part sorcery. Half the time we’d be chewing on coffee grounds. Better to just pack in a percolator.

Never know until you try.

It’s not trespassing if it’s not posted. Just because Missouri has draconian trespassing laws doesn’t mean we need to project that culture on Maine.

I’m sure they have lovely trails there, and yet…

…gestures broadly at every state with real mountains and/or coastline…

Most of northern Maine is dirt logging roads. Get yourself a gazetteer and head north. Take one of the big arteries like the Golden Road, or the Jo Mary road to get back in the woods, then explore some of the little side roads off of that. Make a day of it. Bring food, water, camera, shotgun, bag of weed. Make sure you have a spare tire that has air in it.

Go soon, unless you want to car ski. Most of these roads become snowmobile trails in winter.

The lake.

The entire North Maine Woods perhaps? What part of the state are you in and how far are you willing to drive?

My understanding is that he is asking employees to sign some kind of loyalty pledge to keep their jobs, which includes commitments like “working longer hours and overtime at a high intensity” and not working from home.

I would probably quit my job if my new boss casually demanded that I double my workload and abandon any pretense of work-life balance as well.

It’s not hard to understand why people aren’t into this.

Then again, fuck twitter. It’s not like they were good for the world before Musk either. May he run them into the ground and lose all the money he spent!

I am highly skeptical that Missouri is the state with the best trails.

Probably around 1993

With an attitude like that, your dialogue will never be believable. Gotta get the local dialect right.

Your husband made this up.

No allegedly about it. They were a director there for decades.

The best way is to become a licensed foster family through DHHS and then foster to adopt.

Not only is adopting through an agency unbelievably expensive (like $25k up front before they will even talk to you, and possibly another $25k in fees during the process), the adoption industry is incredibly shady. Especially foreign adoptions.

Many of the “orphans” coming from developing countries are either kidnapped off the street by the adoption agencies, or purchased for cash money from their birth parents, or born in baby mills where trafficked women are raped specifically in order to make babies to sell to western couples.

Go through the foster system. You may not get a baby, and the children may have health or behavioral issues related to the traumas they have endured, but they are the kids with the most need. And the state pays most of the expenses.

Fuck you

They’re trying to erase our culture.

Caribou steak

You must be eating the wrong pork pies, because usually they are the opposite of that.

That’s only if you seize the property and make it public land. Granting public access to private land is a different thing, and Maine already has several similar laws on the books. The Great Ponds Act, etc.

I think you must be thinking of some other border crossing if you’re calling it flatter. The Woburn/Coburn Gore crossing, in particular, is the opposite of flat. It’s one of the most mountainous parts of the state, just north of Sugarloaf and Bigelow, The Chain of Ponds are up there. It’s an outstanding scenic road with mountain vistas around every corner. Moose everywhere. A bit of a sketchy drive on snowy roads, but beautiful.

On the Quebec side, the first real town is Lac Megantic, a lovely little mountain lake town where they make the finest cheese curds you’ll find anywhere. They squeak when you bite them.

Revolting prison food.

But to be fair, the last hundred years or so of convincing tourists that it’s a delicacy so we can laugh at them while they eat it is probably going down in the history books as one of the best practical jokes of all time.