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Kamara, you live exactly the way I want to live!
No pigs, though. They can be nasty and I don't want to wind up possibly being their dinner or watch them cannibalize their kids. And I just want one dairy cow — either Swiss brown or one of those miniature cows, maybe a water buffalo and work a hillside rice paddy with her, make mozzarella di buffala and sell it at farmer's market. Have my horse and thinking of getting a mini to be his pasture buddy. Tagie loves the lil' guys and they're so cute. I saw someone selling a mini-Andalusian cross baby for $500 the other day and thought, "Oooh, can't afford it yet!" I've tried quail and turkey eggs, love 'em. I want to get some turkey eggs and make turkey egg omelettes for Christmas brunch when my mom comes up.

We had a big victory garden in our back yard when I was growing up. Some of our relatives had a big farm in Watsonville and one of Dad's friends was the stereotypical Italian gardener. He'd always show up at our house with a big crate of everything: carrots, squash, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes. We had a big back yard and had an apple tree that was riotously fertile, we had apple pie every weekend in the summer and gave them away by the bucketfuls to neighbours. Our neighbour had a similarly-fecund apricot tree and if it wasn't apple pie, it was apricot pie. It was even worse when our across-the-street neighbours' 20-foot cherry trees popped their crop...Mom grew corn and rhubard all the time and the creepers we got capers from are still trying to take over the back yard. TONS of blackberry brambles right up the hill. We never had to buy fruit and veggies, we just had this wonderful produce exchange in our neighbourhood.

I only have a couple guns, an SKS and an Ithaca 12-guage shotgun. I want to get that three-in-one gun — shotgun, rifle, small game — that they're advertising in North American Hunter. I also want to get a carbon barrel for the 12-guage and keep it for salt load, non-lethal home defense and use the three-in-one for pheasant and duck and partridge. I used to go pheasant hunting around Stockton and Merced when I was living in the Bay Area, those were very well-spent days and you couldn't beat the dinners afterwards I like to say "Game meat is free-range organic!" when people ask why I like game meat so much.

The hunting here is just phenomenal! We have pretty much everything except moose and caribou and those are only a day's travel away. Deer are everywhere, so are turkeys and bear. We used to have a bear in the hollow over the hill from where I used to keep my horse. We'd get deer and elk in the lower pastures at night but I'm not a great fan of elk meat. I keep telling myself I gotta save up to go back down to Texas and get another axis doe or mouflon. I like their meat better than elk.

Getting year-to-year NAHC memberships can be a drag, I plonked down the $200 for the life membership about fifteen years ago and there's a lot more bennies for life members (of course). It's really a good value and you can get it on installments over a year. Pays for itself after 3 or 4 years. I haven't gone on any of the life member hunts, though I keep telling myself, "Get through the cancer first!"

I work for the Somerset County Parks Commission as a Stableworker at Lord Stirling Stables (ie, I take care of horses and everything that comes out of their rears! )

My hobbies include playing guitar, writing songs, watching BNL perform, and chillin' on the computer!

~Snowy

photography is my passion. yay
but chef is my job....

Lupin:

System Administrator...

Windows says I need to notify you about a few things...

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Job: physician. I work at an ER in a small community hospital about an hour and a half away from where I live. I also have started working at a personal and work-related injury clinic in downtown Houston. ER work is not as hectic as it is on TV and the movies, but it is getting busier now that the hospital has been remodelled and updated.

Upsides: The pay is great, though as an independent contractor, I have to buy my own insurance. I am also near the top of the food chain, so I can get away with a lot of things other people can't do, like bringing a laptop and surfing the web during breaks. (I'm doing that now.) The work itself is seldom dull or monotonous. Indeed, it's the kind of job other people daydream about or upon which TV shows are based. Describing my life, I often wonder how many people think I'm making this up. I've handled life and death situations in person that others see only in drama. I can take vacation simply by specifying when I should not be scheduled; I don't have to ask for permission from anyone or allocate sick days, though I do have to specify days off two months in advance. There's plenty of job security; in this time of an economic recession, I'm still having to fend off work hours left and right to avoid overwork, because this is a job that is highly in demand.

Downsides: Finances are very complicated as I am legally my own business entity; a lot of the good income I make goes right back out to a high overhead ("malpractice insurance," for example) and accumulated debts accumulated during residency and medical school. My monthly payments on debts is greater than the median American income; after factoring in debts, income is still good, but not as good as some would expect, and sporadic, because of the odd timing of when money comes in. Work stress is variable, but high when the work load gets busy. Work is unpredictable, which generates stress. Work hours are long, and taking vacation days is difficult, because there is no vacation pay, and the need for advance notice or arranging for trading shifts once schedules are made makes impromptu events difficult or impossible. (I had to miss CageCon for this reason, for example.) I often find that unlike many people, I have the money, but not the time, to go to events. I remember it being the other way around up until about ten years ago. Also, this line of work requires constant updating; you can't just study, graduate, and go to work. You have to accumulate continuing medical education credits, and you have to keep up with a constantly changing landscape, periodically dealing with new studies that show that what you once thought was the right thing to do was in fact horribly wrong. It also involves dealing with people at their worst, when they're already at wit's end, because things have already gone wrong for them; people don't go to the ER to book a cruise or change an oil filter. (This is one reason why I think so many physicians are sued--they're dealing with angry and frustrated people.) Also, the job is not fault-tolerant. You can't miss a sick day unless you're deathly ill, because it's a critical position. There's also certain tasks that have to be done with no tolerance for error--put an endotracheal airway into the esophagus instead of the trachea, and the patient will be dead in four minutes.

Interests: I actually come from a family of artists, and I see myself as one. I just happen to be good at a lot of left-brained things as well, so I went into medicine, because it offered a stable income and job security. I misunderstood how little free time I would have; that has been a major frustration for me. (Once I get some debts paid down, however, I will be able to maintain the same living standards on substantially less work hours, so I don't feel that I've made a bad choice. This lifestyle is not, however, for those who like instant gratification.) I enjoy drawing, writing, and digital media editing. I've compiled a few cut-and-paste remixes using basic audio editing programs, though I won't bill myself as a professional DJ. Just recently, I've also compiled my first Anime music videos. (Unfortunately, copyright laws prevent my distributing these projects online.) Similarly, I've dabbled with photomanipulations. (These can be seen at http://scottgardener.deviantart.com.) I also have done some web page design. But, my writing works would have to be my main projects, with two unpublished novels and a number of short stories. I am currently doing one more revision of my novel Lycanthrope, which I plan to submit to publishers next year. (I don't know how tolerant they'll be about my having already shared a draft of it with most of the free world, but I'll only tell them if they ask.)

Work: a senior programmer at Pandemic Studios; just finished Star Wars Battlefront 2
Productive Hobbies: drawing, some writing, some game design
Nonproductive Hobbies: computer gaming, tabletop gaming, reading (mostly science magazines)

NERD

Hobbies:Collect video games, Draw, movies and talking on this forum.

Job: I go to high school, end.

Scott Gardener wrote:Lupin:

System Administrator...

Windows says I need to notify you about a few things...

Sure, let me write it down on this piece of paper, and put it in this nice round file holder.

Automotive Parts Specialist. Anyone who peeked at my profile, until recently, saw a wide variety of things listed there over the past year. DVD Merchandiser at Best Buy was the most persistant. Just one of the reasons I am only now posting to this thread.

Hobbies include (but are not limited to): Movies, TV, Surfin' the Web, and volunteering at the local animal shelter.

This winter I'm reassessing where I am in life. The stick horses and Sagittarius Moon aren't really generating positive cash flow and it's been two years. I found out about an equine massage therapy school up in Silverton and thought about going to that, and taking human massage certification courses as well; go around to horse shows, show my card and say, "I'll do you and your horse, dollar a minute."

Until I got online last night and found out the horse course was $1500 including full board, meals, accommodations, textbooks, test preparation and you can bring your horse, too. One week. That's actually the good news...get this, you can learn to pet a horse for a living for that little bit, but it costs $4800 and up (one school was $8100) to do it for HUMANS!

What the hell is dat Willis goin' on about <i>now?</i>

Anyway, I'll probably save up, go to the equine massage school after my cancer's over and done with, and do the stick horses on the side. And charge at least the $250 they're worth!!! I'll probably only sell two or three of those in the year but that's okay. With a regular job keeping me tided over, it'll be a nice little kick in the shorts to help with ends-meeting.

Ultraken wrote:Work: a senior programmer at Pandemic Studios; just finished Star Wars Battlefront 2

Wow, really? I've been playing that game nonstop for like a week.

vrikasatma wrote: I also want to get a carbon barrel for the 12-guage and keep it for salt load, non-lethal home defense

That sounds extremely painful, anyone getting hit with one of those won't be back. But can't moisture cause it to solidify? That might increase the lethality a bit. But if it's being used for home defense, I guess whoever got shot would probably deserve a salt slug.

Work
Sorry, don't work yet. Still in high school, but me and my friend were talking about getting some jobs at this everglades park with all sorts of animals. I was on the minute she said there were wolves! Now I just have to find a way to convince my mum and get a ride...being a minor sucks.

Hobbies
Random stuff. Surfing the net, writing poetry and stories, art, watching television, wathcing movies, etc...I get bored easily so my hobbies always shift around. Wonder what I'll do today...

I, am an Environmental Technician!!

my first real job since finishing college, almost took 5 months to get it though!

other jobs i have had parttime though highschool and college:

Lifeguard, Concrete/constuction, inventory, Intern at a lab, worker on a farm, manual laborer, selling cotton candy at the circus, research assistant, strawberry picker, selling strawberries, Audio-visual assistant, and a number of small odd jobs I either did part time or over the summer or winter months while not at school or as work-study or Co-Op at college.

so its definately been a long, strange trip for me to finally be where I am

Hobbies: Halo (all of it books games) Drawing, Reading lengthy novels, and biking, hiking too.

Job: I have no job. I have school where I work for hour after hour working continue..us..ly From 8-3 Food's not bad though... el taco grande me feliz... but that's beside the point... I work endlessly in hopes of a good paying job and money to pay for equitment to help my drawings... and I WILL have my Goldie poster... You will ALL rue the day... rue... the day... Ok I'm done... he he he

Vocational evaluator

Hi. I work with recycle washing machines. We collect them from the local garbage dump and then take them to my work. I dismantle them and we save the copper and aluminium plus the stainless steel. We then sell that.

The other stuff plastic and such, goes back to the dump in sorted cans one for plastic etc etc. I also weighs the machines before i start dismantling them.

I have work with this in 10 years. I and another fellow also repaired machines and sold them as used. We stopped doing that about 1 year ago because new EU laws. But i still recycling them, that we have signed a paper on that its legal.

If you wanna see some pics from my job follow this link:
http://community.webshots.com/album/537771596bUcydP

I am going to school to be an OR assistant and also get my associate of science degree. I have alot of diffrent jobs working at a local theater, store room keeper at Target, make-up artist back stage at a theater (that didn't last long because I got bored and whatnot),and small parts in theater as well.

Job: none yet, gonna be taking up a short course on Flash.

Hobbies: Fashion Design, drawing, mythology, guns, martial arts, history, general researching, studying the animal kingdom, reading stories (new hobby). The rest are pretty trivial.

hmm. what are my aspireations.. Possibly to become an engineer or archetect, but if not. I could always seek the dream of one day working in Pixar.

I don't have a career yet, but I'm currently working at a slaughterhouse/ meat processing place. I clean the processing room.

As for hobbies, I'll have to think about that becauseI really don't know.

Veruth wrote:I don't have a career yet, but I'm currently working at a slaughterhouse/ meat processing place. I clean the processing room.

I've had friends who have worked a places like that and they have all become vegitarians. Is it true what they say about how bad it is?

Edited.

Fenrir wrote:

Veruth wrote:I don't have a career yet, but I'm currently working at a slaughterhouse/ meat processing place. I clean the processing room.

I've had friends who have worked a places like that and they have all become vegitarians. Is it true what they say about how bad it is?

People like that annoy me. What were they expecting? After all, it is a SLAUGHTERhouse.

I had a friend in culinary academy. She was in the full chef's program (I was in baking) and a practicing vegetarian. Here's the turn of the screw: she was the best student in the butchery section.

I asked her, "That's interesting. How do you reconcile it?" She said that it bothered her a little then first day but the chef instructor taught them the cuts to make and after that, it was just more material, she concentrated on making the cuts right and defocused off the fact it was meat.

I guess it's the same mental/emotional gymnastics that allows shy people to be the finest of actors.

I'm in my last year of high school

I used to work in a private art shop doing paintings and sculptures, but i quit that... wasn't working out very well...

I consider myself a freelance writer (as in i write until i have something to present to important people )

My hobbies are reading, fictional writing (usually involving werewolves ), playing Playstation 2

Pretty boring stuff.