NM perspective: Border crossing at Anthony - immediate cattle feed lots, huge freeway, and then the pile of cookie-cutter houses that is El Paso.

North into Colorado: Seems pretty much like NM, but the food gets blander and more expensive as you enter Boebert’s district. Denver is ok, but it’s like Los Angeles at a little higher altitude. If Denver had a culture, it probably died in traffic.

East into Oklahoma/Texas: There’s like… nothing there. For miles. It’s really pretty, actually, but don’t get a flat tire.

West into Arizona from Gallup: It’s like a portal into the 1950s, all abandoned route 66 stuff and super offensive 1950s native american stuff.

Culturally, I’d say most of the 4 corners zone is pretty similar “southwest”, though Texas is really obsessed with big box stores and Arizona is a bit obsessed with unmarked police cars. Colorado culturally is as bland as their chiles :D

The biggest cultural shift is traveling through the res lands between NM/AZ where you can actually go to grocery stores with local language signage.

I did something similar, and it was a painful readjustment but so worth it.

Gee, who’d have thought

Hmm. I think you mean ‘go from feeling like a teen/kid into feeling like a normal adult’? When I was in my first job out of uni, I was the youngest on my team, and definitely felt it. I slowly progressed over a few years into being one of the ones to do the documentation and training, and felt pretty ok.

When that healthcare company was taken over by a for-profit shitshow and I had to jump ship, I applied for a lot of junior roles at various places. I got several calls, but the company that hired me was the one that offered me the senior position/lead instead. That made me realize “Oh, I guess I do know what I’m doing”.

When I was heading up that group, I got a lot of management offers and when I finally departed to do consulting, it was because I had an appreciation for my professional worth. I did eventually leave that field because I just can’t handle doing defense shit anymore, and that’s really where the money is, but I still do ok.

My personal sense of ‘not feeling like a kid’ was probably when I started volunteering in my community, and doing a lot more to help the folks who needed it. When you develop strong friendships in the community that persist through things like illness and major life events, you have progressed beyond the whole ‘drinking buddy’ stage of friends.

REI isn’t who they hype themselves to be.

So now they probably want to use GenAI to create hype shots, fake reviews, review summaries, and “improve efficiencies” that are so far from their original mission you can’t see it from there.

But REI is a LONG ways from being the co-op sort of place they used to pretend to be. Now they just resell cheaply manufactured trash.

So convienent

I see you’ve heard of onedrive :D

Bandcamp, then I go to my favorite genres, and then look at the new stuff.

I’d agree with that.

When my anglo friends went to summer camp, my family always sent me to pick stuff. My siblings and I got to keep the money at least, but yeah. Farm work is freaking hard, even when you’re used to it. Esp when paid by the bucket (still one of the most common metrics)

I think you’re absolutely right. I suspect people, in general, don’t really have much grasp of ag. There’s mega industrial, and they understand that. There’s backyard/community, and they get that, but livestock? That’s probably outside the exp of probably 70% of industrialized nation people.

I always wonder about these. My parents had 120 acres when I was a kid, and we raised corn, veg, 2 cows, and sooooo many chickens.

There’s no way you’re feeding cattle on less than a hundred acres, even if you dedicate most of it to pasture. We had to supplement our cow and calf (because you have to have a cow with a calf to keep milk production) with bales of alfalfa/hay every week and they still managed to keep 40 of those acres nice and trimmed.

However, you can definitely get a tremendous amount of corn out of a few acres - more than you can easily eat yourself. Chickens are an amazing use of space, you have 30-40 of them and give them the run of the place and you’ll have eggs for days and a chicken for the pot every month (depending on how your replacement rate runs, we had about 20 hatch and survive every spring).

You have to rotate your growing production regularly to make sure the soil gets what it needs, and it’s so much freaking work. A saying when I was a kid was “If you’re bored, there’s always a fence that needs mending”…

The best part was when the foods I liked were in season, because we had loads of them. The worst part was when I got soooo tired of canning :D

I’d do it again, but I’d prefer a close knit neighborhood so that I could trade things. All of our neighbors raised the same sorts of things we did… well, and/or meth… so we still had to go to the grocery store every week. Just not for squash, potatoes, corn, blueberries, etc.

Some more good news today. Always happy to see these.

I thought racial/class bias was due to lack of education and lack of access to information.

Holy cow was I wrong.