Some small announcements before I start my rant: book shop is gonna be down a few days while we figure out corporeal merchandise finally. Wrist Wizard works about as well as can be expected, I now wear my watch a full hole lower on the band. That should be out sometime in the middle of September. I'm reading The Fighter's Mind by Sam Sheridan, and I highly recommend it. Also you may notice that this isn't about Jeep, I'll get around to it.
Shoo wee been busy as hell fellers. Got around to processing our first batch of rabbits and it went really well. Got a load of meat, pelts/feet in a brine getting ready to tan, and the leftover edible parts went to my dog.
Helped some friends fell and deal with a big ass oak that was growing into their foundation. I was wielding a 48 inch Stihl for about 3 hours and never once saw the tip poke out of the other side. We measured the stump at 50 inches in diameter. The plan is to make a load of table tops, cutting boards, chairs, fire wood, and smoking chips outta that bad boy. Sad to see it go but the termites had gotten to the heart and the whole roots in the foundation deal. Truly a job for more than the 3 fellas we had.
Anywho it got me thinking about work and skills. Interestingly enough, it's only been about 100 or so years since we got away from apprenticeships and moved into more of a studious "take test get certified" type of learning. Learning by doing is always, I say again, ALWAYS more instructive than learning by sitting in a classroom. You can watch literally hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube about an armbar, but you will never know what it takes to do that move until you are doing it. The small nuances that you just can't explain really become important. School is useful though. It would be hard to get some of the information you get at school outside of a scenario like that. Applied Microbiology was a wonderful class that taught me loads about viruses and bacteria, plus it was just fucking cool to wear a lab coat that my arms didnt fit in (school was basically all nurses thus almost all available lab coats on loan were for, you guessed it: women). Ironically enough it was the class that taught me about the influenza virus, its vaccines, and how it mutates almost yearly. This led me to asking 3 highly esteemed Ph.D holding professors at a meeting about the Covid19 scare: "What are we gonna do about Covid20?". I was promptly laughed at for "not being a healthcare professional". This small conversation should show you that holding a piece of paper, specializing in a specific science, doesn't make you generally intellectual by proxy.
Anyways I just wanted to rant about how academia likes to suck farts out of their own asses and how laborers/tradesmen often get shat on. Basically my idea was the title of this little soapbox speech: practice don't theorize.