Category: family

Day one of ‘how the hell should I know?

Otherwise known as “ruminating on the current state of affairs”

So I hijacked the post template today for my daily recovery posts, and it’s a little late to make New Year’s resolutions, especially since I never keep them or even intend to keep them anyhow.

Having said that, this is a freeform post, I’m not really sure where it’s supposed to go from here, and the language is probably closer to my own internal narrative than is socially or politically acceptable.

Tomorrow is a day of taking things down, cleaning shit up and generally getting stuff done, January 1st is usually something like that anyhow, so there’s no surprise there.

So, Happy New Year, it’s been a shit-show of a final quarter in my world, deaths, diseases, family issues, and of course there’s the whole thing where the world is going fucking insane on us on a daily basis.

I think I like the choppy paragraph thing, and I think I’m going to go get a bit of a drink for the duration. I know my family is all out and sound asleep, but I’m still up, ringing in the new year alone with my worries and issues and all that crap. Here’s a couple fingers of whiskey, sit with me and let’s ruminate shall we?

whiskey helps me clarify for introspection and ruminating
whiskey helps me clarify for introspection and ruminating

Unlike so many people that do this kind of post, all;

“2024 is my year, it’s going to be so much better, new year new me, positive directions and only good vibes”

:type of this, which is awesome and works for so many people, I’m not wired that way.

I have to look around, slow down and get internal, look back to see forward as it were.

I have dreams, yeah, and ambitions, but this last year, it sucked, like I mean, truly, royally, and genuinely sucked. I seriously contemplated just cashing out, buying a ticket back to my father in heaven,  more times this year than I can count, and all of it due to the ongoing mental load that guys carry, that nobody talks about.

See, we all know mom’s are amazing, and my wife is doubly so, I need to write her a letter sharing how amazing I think she is for all of us, but that’s not the point I’m struggling with sharing at this moment. Dad’s carry a load as well, especially in this world where we’re seen only as the provider, we bring in the money, that’s all anybody will grant us authority over.

THAT’S BULLSHIT. Father’s in this day and age are as involved in the insane overwhelming and generally unfathomable level of daily minute details that mom’s are, or at least they should be. If they’re not then well, it’s time for some of y’all to review what it means to be a father.

As for me, if you’ve read back, we’ve got six kids, one with convoluted (but thankfully, fairly mild at the moment) medical issues, and three more with ASD diagnosis situations not to mention the youngest is two, and cutting molars, one of which came in broken, sideways and septic in the last week of the year, yay, dental surgery on a two year old. So, trying to parent all of that as one of a team of two competent parents is challenging enough.

Trying to be one half of a partnership, when you’re struggling with your own growth, healing and childhood issues, that makes is all the more FUN.

What I’m trying to say, since I can’t seem to come around to it, is that life is hard, really damned hard, even with the best of intentions I fuck things up, and get shit wrong. Hell, today alone I fed my kids all three meals, mostly on the fly with leftovers and patching meals together out of things we needed to get eaten up before it went bad; all during a 12 hour day where mom went to work(NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT THAT, really just not, on call is brutal, since she get’s everybody else’s “I’m sick from last nights party, and can’t make it in” as well as covering for all the booked time off like New Year’s Eve, Boxing Day, New Year’s day, probably Easter and Thanksgiving as well, but at lest she’s getting called in, she’s so amazing).

I support her in working as much as she feels up to doing, and that’s all fine and good, but it’s hard on a guy, being all things to everyone, when there’s no time left over for me to do, well, anything for myself or my own mental health. My free time, my me time, is all spent scrambling to catch up on the housework, the actual paying contract work, and so many other things, that when I get to the end of a day, it’s just a crash and burn scenario. I’m tapped out every night.

Heck, the Fitibit hasn’t recorded a sleep score over 70 out of 100 in all the years I’ve worn it. Usually it scores around the 50% mark, which is about right considering my nights to sleep time run from 12 to 6 daily, with at least two AWAKE periods in there due to restless kids that never sleep through the night anyhow.

So yeah, six kids, from 17 down to 2.5. Two adults, me and my amazing wife who’s trying to work through her own stuff and get some sense of self back after this latest round of ‘keeping the baby alive for the first two years’, and we’re all just careening madly along the rails of life, trying not to get distracted by all the lies and crap that society is trying to shove down our throats.

There’s a list a mile long that I won’t bore you with, stuff that needs done beyond the usual daily grind. But there’s some dreams I have as well, one is to be able to make love to my wife more than every other month, and another is to get us out of this house and into a larger place with room to expand outside.

So I come to the crux of things, what’s important, how can I capitalize on it and where to go from here?

My drink’s running low, and it’s almost an hour into the new year, so I should wrap this up, since tomorrow morning’s sharing post is needing to be written before the kids wake up tomorrow morning.

But here’s a list of general goals for the coming months, I’ll probably detail them a little more in depth later in another post.

First, I’m 290lbs, I’d like that to drop to 225 if I can, and get back to where I could jog a mile if I needed to, as well as overhead lifting my own bodyweight at 225-250lbs which requires full body control of another magnitude.

Second, there has to be a way to earn at least a $1000 online somewhere, somehow, monthly, to boost our income levels, as well as doubling down on my specific skills as a professional accountant in the real world, that will bring us up to a monthly salary of at least 4-5 thousand, so we can get back in the black without my wife trying to kill herself to ‘save us’ from my incompetence.

Third, new to me vehicles:

My two ideal vehicles, but the truck needs to be fire engine red. and the mustang should be iridescent midnight blue. Along this line, I also dream of a reliable and dependable ride for my wife to do all that she needs to do in life, as well as setting the kids on the right path with their own vehicles.

I’m not asking too much, am I?

Duke.

On Owing Firearms and Private Property Rights

Hi.

Me and My Beautiful Wife

I am a dad. Six amazing kids and counting…

I am an accountant, legally and properly in BC Canada.

I am a husband for better or worse; sometimes she’d prefer she was single, but then again sometimes I’d prefer to be single for a week or two, alone in the bush, fishing and hunting. Only sometimes however, I mean, just look at her, the picture above doesn’t do her justice, she glows when she’s happy.

I am also subject to daily scrutiny by the RCMP on an ongoing basis until I die or my PAL (RPAL) is relinquished or revoked. (source: https://gundebate.ca/guns-canada-get/).

Here’s a picture from this morning. Exciting isn’t it? That’s my RPAL application, the background is my office floor, with filing cabinets, and such.

I can expect to wait a minimum of four months until I hear back from them. This is a paper application completed by hand and mailed from the left (West) coast to the East coast. Because it’s important, I could send it standard letter post, but choose to send it registered letter post (10x the cost) and have the proof that it was properly received by the government.

Four years ago I had to do the same thing for my standard PAL (should have taken the RPAL then and gotten it out of the way, but hindsight is always better, am I right?)

The point I am making here is that I can file a massive multinational corporation tax and financial return online in a matter of moments, and have an unofficial reply to the same in less than a week from the point I hit send. There is a chance of audit, and of course there are the standard disclaimers that allow CRA to come back on me personally (as the accountant, legal liability and all that). To form that corporation would be a matter of a few moments, a couple hours at most, online through their business portals. Once a year somebody checks to see if the mandatory reports and returns are filed. End of review and scrutiny. Easy Peasy.

To upgrade a firearms license like I am trying to do takes a full day’s attendance at an officially recognized RPAL course with a licensed instructor. (which you pay for) Then there’s the hand completed paper forms (minimum two guarantors, signatures and sign-offs from all conjugal partners you’ve had in the last few years (in my case, that’s a grand total of one awesome woman), and official photography (head shot, like a passport photo).

Once you get all that done, you have to send it all off to New Brunswick, (literally the other end of the country in my case) and wait.

Why would I do such a painful and tedious thing you ask?

For glory? For the adrenaline rush of being allowed to play with Movie Style machine guns (hint, nope, they’re prohibited, not restricted in Canada, you can’t get one if you wanted to). How about because I am afraid.

Fear is a thing, and it’s one hell of a motivator. I

See, the Liberal government took a rather back door sneaky approach and reclassified a whole whack of existing firearms, some from restricted to prohibited, some from unrestricted to prohibited. Ok, I get that sometimes reclassification happens, and there’s a tried and proven path for such a thing to happen. In a general way, the reclassification(s) is(are) proposed, reviewed, and if the evidence supports it then the reclassification is made.

This time the whole process was circumvented to accomplish some ideological policy of the current sitting government and their ambitions. I could take a left onto conspiracy lane here but with no proof or even an inclination, there’s not really much point in doing so.

The truth is that I have a pair of long guns that I bought from a friend/relation who wasn’t allowed to possess them due to an expired PAL. Then when things got weird a few years back I took possession of my father’s old guns and mom’s one antique 410, so with a bolted in hidden safe that’s triple locked against the kids and accidents, I thought things would be ok.

The problem is that two of the three sentimental family guns I took possession of (and have no intention of giving up), are only borderline this side of the general restriction clauses the OIC includes to cover anything they might have missed in their 1500+ specifics list of newly prohibited weapons.

The fear of having those long guns suddenly become anything other than what they are led me to do a rather esoteric search for my options, which are literally non-existent.

If these particular guns get re classed to restricted then I would need to be holding an RPAL at that moment. If they were to be suddenly prohibited then I would need to either surrender them (not going to happen, I have very strong feelings about the government’s right to just assume ownership of my personal property) or disable them (remove firing mechanism by a gunsmith or something). The problem with the second option is that I am not a gunsmith, nor do I know anyone who is.

Thus, while wallowing in the mire of the problem is a tried and true tactic, I am more given to doing what I can to change what I can, and leaving the rest of it in God’s hands to sort out. Thus, the search for a local licensed RPAL instructor or course had begun. Six months later I am mailing the envelope in the picture above at a total cost (so far) of just over $200 for the training, application fee, cost of the head shot, and mailing it registered post across this great (if temporarily) misguided land of ours to somebody in New Brunswick, who’s going to have to enter all the details by hand into their system and then if I am lucky, in 4-8 months I will have my upgraded license.

In the meantime, I think it’s time to teach myself to be a gunsmith if it’s not legislated in this province like everything else is. Time to go hunting for my next upgrade. Always learning after all.

Anyhow, this has been an odd and kinda unfocused post, which I’ll probably revisit later on. For now, it’s time to go to sleep and try again in the morning when I am feeling less like a potato.

Good night you amazing person, and thanks for reading this. If there’s any questions, just ask, I’ll try to answer.

 

 

Duke of Chaos

AKA

Daniel O Casey.

Grandma Casey’s Relish

Now, I know that this is not a proprietary recipe, hell, it’s probably in the Burk’s Falls Catholic Church cookbook from about forty years ago, or even further back than that.

This recipe came from a time when cookbooks were family affairs, not something you could write and sell on Amazon.

Something will be lost if we lose these historical links to our family roots.  I can remember being somewhere under ten years old, feeding the ingredients into the old hand crank grinder/mincer while my aunt or grandma seasoned the resulting mash.

And the aroma, as this stuff was steeping and combining overnight, then the cooking next day. Few things take me back to my childhood harder than the smells I grew up with.

Fresh cut hay fields; newly tilled fields; the peculiar raw meat smell of freshly cleaned game; and of course canning, preserving and storing foods for the 6 month long dormant winter season in Ontario.

But enough about the walk down memory lane, let’s see if I can translate the verbal recitation of a recipe into text that makes sense. See, things used to be much more verbal, with only the barest of written clues to keep us on track…

*think of your typical grandmother, short, round, happy and trying to feed everybody every time they show up,  that’s my Grandma, and I haven’t seen her in far too long*

 

How to make green relish, per my grandma Casey,

– Grind up a dozen large cucumers, them one’s that’s too big to slice into pickles.

– Find the onions that are about to go to seed, pull them and clean them up, feed a dozen of them into the grinder while you’re at it.

-Now, peppers, if you managed to grow any this year, they’ll do, otherwise check with the market, or the neighbor and see if they’ve got any, three or four of each, red and green.  You guessed it.  Grind them also.

 

Now that you’ve got a huge bowl of mushed veggies, cover it all with a strong salt brine, then top with lots of salt (a solid layer of salt on top); cover it up tight, and let it sit overnight.  Drain it come morning before you start breakfast.

Now, having aired it out a little while you fed the critters breakfast, it’s time to mix in the other bits.

First, get a medium sized bowl, add a big pinch of celery salt, and one of mustard seed, then about a quart of vinegar and a whole pile of sugar.  Mix this all up and add to the biggest pot you have along with the vegetables from the grinder.

Boil the whole thing for a good ten minutes. While that’s cooking, mix up a dash of turmeric, three tablespoons of prepared mustard and three-quarters a cup of flour into enough water or vinegar to make it a thick liquid.

Once the relish has cooked for ten minutes, pour in this mix, and stir it all together. Then can it into pint jars, them big ones are too big, it’ll go off before you use it all.

I miss those days of working in Grandma’s kitchen, but I’ve got five little ones (ok, the oldest is 12 and more than 150lbs) of my own and my wife’s amazing at this stuff, so I get to help her now instead.

Therefore, in the interests of accuracy, here’s the pared down version with numbers attached.

-12 large cucumbers – minced or ground up.

-12 onions, mild or sharp depending on preference – also minced or ground

-3 red peppers, 3 green peppers – ground up as well

>>> cover with strong salt brine (water and salt, until saturated solution is reached), also add layer of salt on top of ground vegetables.  Let sit overnight.  Drain in morning.

– 1 TBSP Celery Salt

– 1 TBSP Mustard Seed

– 4 cups Vinegar

– 9 cups Sugar

>> mix these into Cucumber mix, stirring thoroughly.  Now, boil the mix for ten minutes.

>> mix together

– 3/4 cup flour

– 1 tsp of turmeric

– 3 TBSP of prepared Mustard

– vinegar to mix it with, just enough.

>>  Add to relish mix, stirring thoroughly.

>> Can the resulting relish into pint or smaller jars, quart jars are too big.

That’s about it.   I had to get this down so it made sense to me and so that the paper in the picture above could be reproduced if needed, when it inevitably succumbs to age and kitchen mishaps.

Time to get cooking.

Duke.

Ok, what is the point of life?

Yep!  That’s the question of the day.  I get almost no emotional or spiritual utility from the common actions of my daily life.  I am well aware that my wife is in the same quandary.  Both of use are often faced with the question, what is the point of life, why are we working this hard to feel this Blegh?

So, the question is why are we working so hard, and killing ourselves for something (this life) that neither of us actually enjoys on a regular basis?

Have you recently woken up and wondered where your time went, or where your childhood went, or where anything else went?  For me it was the satisfaction I am getting out of life, and I suspect (judging from the power of these feelings) that this is what drives men to the mid-life crisis state that is so touted in modern comedy and other forms of entertainment.

Men who never learned to think, who never learned to understand their own drives, would be prone to making rash decisions, buying that 1976 Charger, or the Porsche, or in extreme cases, running away from the family and starting over with the 20 something year old mistake.

Luckily I don’t like Chargers or Porsche, and I’m already married to the drop-dead sexy pretty young blonde, so all that’s left is to understand why I’m not feeling contented on a daily basis.
First.  There’s the stress of the kids..   and then the stress of renovations, and then vehicles, housework, work-work, schoolwork, and on and on and on…
Ok, granted, being a father of five (two under five and we’re thinking maybe one or two more), as well as tangentially the father of a 20 year old who’s obvious preference is the metropolis where his mother lives, in addition to being a student, a writer (only kinda) and a full time self-employed accountant, is naturally going to take a toll on the reserves of any one man, and it’s given mine a hit as well.

But that’s not the real problem.  I thrive on the pressure, until I need a break that is.  The problem is that while I enjoy the challenges, the rewards have become intangible at best and irrelevant at worst.
I like playing with my boys.  I like puttering in the shop, fixing the motorcycles, building small projects like the deck out back, but when I spend 98 percent of my time merely scrambling to compensate for things that won’t stay finished, and it’s always to settle things down so that I can get some other work done, why am I doing that?

I ask myself a question, daily.  Why am I still here?  We live on an amazing planet, and I dream of sailing off into the sunset, really I do, so why am I landlocked 1000 miles from the sea, and a lifetime away from anything new in this world?

I”ll leave it there for now.  I know this post hasn’t been educational, but I’m more philosophical today.  So sue me.

Dan.