Some Days You Eat The Bear, Some Days The Bear Eats You

We woke up - YAY! That is how every good day begins, right?

I have been lazy on my coffee roasting so we were drinking store bought coffee, but I sprang for a lovely organic Sumatran. We were not exactly coffee slumming!

We sit at the computer to check Steem... or not. The computer is acting weird. It just freezes up, about every ten minutes. Very aggravating, so @longsilver does the virus scans and such. It improves but only a little. Now we check Steem. Ouch! But hey, this is just a ride, so far the drops don't really scare me. It does get a little depressing making post after post after post and watching your balance drop, though. It was not a big bite, but the bear nibbled on us a little with the market news.

I got a few cups of awake on board and set about my day. First, grab some meat from the freezer... Go to the porch, flip the lid open.... AHHHHGGGGG!! Pew! Ick! DAMMITOL!!! It smells of bad meat, there is blood running across the bottom. I do what any sensible woman would do... I close the lid, go pour another cup of coffee and ignore it just a little longer. The bear takes a hearty bite.

I screw up the courage to face the expensive, smelly truth... @warpedweaver is walking by just then and says "Can it!" Oh, Bear takes a BIG hunk of flesh.

A bit snippishly I reply, "Can you smell that?! I am NOT canning that!" It rips at my guts. I HATE wasting food, a freezer full of beef is an expensive loss, and I do not like to be second guessed about my decisions - especially the hard ones. This one was not THAT hard, the first package of meat I grabbed was warm, this was not fit to be eaten. I was shocked, I could not understand how it got WARM so fast. I was just in there a few days ago, it cannot have been off for very long! Once I started digging in, it turns out much of it was still frozen. It is a chest freezer, with a higher area and a lower section that acted sort of like a Walipini. The stuff up high was ruined. Of course that is where the prime rib roast and best steaks were... but the hamburger and stew meat that had been in the lower section was OK. Some was thawed or partly thawed but still quite cold, a lot was still frozen solid. I saved a lot of it, but I threw out at least a hundred dollars worth of meat. Ouch. Bear is chowing on me now.

As I am tending that odious chore, @longsilver goes out to feed the chickens. I have three roosters. For YEARS I have been trying to build a flock of white rock hens with a Cornish cross rooster. I finally got a Cornish rooster to survive last year, and he had a son. The son was on the chopping block, I was going to collect the eggs (the son has been with the girls) to hatch some birds, then put the daddy roo back with the flock. Son was replaceable! (The third roo was disposable, wrong breed.) Well, turns out sonny boy got a reprieve, as daddy roo just kicked the bucket. I know it does not sound that terrible, but he was the roo I wanted to keep for his genetics and he went to the dump instead of the freezer. Bear is feasting.

By now it is shaping into a really crappy day and that puts that an "I am just a loser" filter over everything I see. Everything I am doing on steemit seems to be failing this week. Last week I had two posts make over 5 bucks - that is HUGE for me, I nibbled a bit of bear! This week, can't make a buck on anything I do, not even for a charity! That is the kind of stuff that wears me down, not the market fluctuations. I start checking my autovote and steemfollower stuff, and nothing appears to be working like I want it to. Steemfollower says I have to upvote at least 5 posts a day, but twice in the past week the site has been down when I was able to try to upvote. Yesterday was one of them. Just call me "Bearsnack."

We did what had to be done, then we ran away to the hot spring. There we bumped into old friends. We soaked for a while, visiting with a local beekeeper who is also a regular at the pool that we had not seen in a year or more. Sometimes simple small talk is really therapeutic. After soaking I ran into into two more friends, one suffering severe depression the other going through the break up of a 24 year marriage. Bear gets around. I offered what comfort I could, looked them in the eye and told them I loved them, and it seemed to ease their burden just a bit... Take that, bear!

Then we came home and watched this spectacular sun and star-set... my camera is not great for this type of photo but here is what I managed to capture:

Arwen Evenstar Setting

Another friend dropped by to visit... She is caregiver for her 92 year old, barely mobile mother. Her sister came to help care for their mom. Unfortunately, the sister is battling alcoholism and is becoming a second patient as much as a second caregiver... that bear is just always finding people to munch on...

And @warpedweaver has been a course on the bear buffet for a couple weeks. I will let her tell her story as she chooses, but I will simply say she has been bear-chewed. Well chewed.

What is my point of getting on steemit and whining, or airing dirty laundry, or being negative or whatever you want to call it? Because I just don't buy into this notion that we all ought to get on here and only show our sunshine and roses self. I think what makes community stronger is when we share the burdens and the laughter. I am not trying to be "negative" I am describing a day in my life. Not all of them are filled with unicorns and lollipops. If there is a "message" I am trying to convey at all, it is directed at newbies on steemit... and I will steal a line from @enginewitty to summarize: JUST KEEP SWIMMING.

Steemit is not "fair." Life is not "fair." Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you. While I do not advise reveling in the pain of others, sometimes doing what you can to ease the pain of your fellow bearsnacks makes your own bear bite sting less.

NAMASTE'!