The vote yesterday to allow mining in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area felt like a punch to the gut when I heard the news. All to line the pockets of a foreign interest who will ship what they mine to China to process. Very few jobs will be created. This wasn't a vote for the states of america, this was clearly yet another attack on the state of Minnesota for not falling in line behind the illegitimate MAGA party.

Work yesterday was just as rushed as Wednesday was and the emails and phone calls were so constant that by 1pm I had hit the overwhelmed mark. I ended up doing 52 rush requests over the course of two days, the last one coming in at 3:45 eastern yesterday for a 6pm deadline. Seriously. Like, they've had the funds ($10K) since the beginning of the school year, and they're just now calling for help?? ​I got it out to them at 5:30 eastern. Another customer on Wednesday decided they wanted to capture about $200 in unspent funds. They submitted their request at 8pm Wednesday night, and I sent it through as a rush when I clocked in in the morning and emailed it at 10:00am. And received an incredibly rude email back that I had missed their 10am deadline and they went elsewhere. I looked back and nowhere did they mention a 10am deadline and I know for a fact that the 'deadline' was a self-imposed deadline, because they had until 6pm to submit PO's. We'd gone back and forth with them all day Wednesday too since they were being dumb. It's that kind of response that makes me dislike all NYC-ers. And to be honest, we don't really care about losing their $200. Big whoop. That's less than the amount of labor on our side to process the order from quote to shipment.

Anyway.

It was 79F when I got off work, so I bicycled after dinner. 7.5 miles, 55 minutes. I took a route that I will not take again. It looked promising, with dedicated bike paths for almost the entire ride. But it went through a really bad part of town and I didn't feel safe. One man was slumped against a wall, partly on the path, injecting something. I took a turn on what I thought was the bike path, to see a man who had abandoned his wheelchair and sign (please help, handicapped) and was rummaging through a pile of rubbish. I turned around. It wasn't the path I was looking for and it did not look safe. When I found the right trail, part of it ran right next to the interstate, which was loud. The signs in the 'park' that had been restored were either destroyed, missing, or graffiti-ed. Another man was washing his clothes in the stream, and as I passed him again on my way home, his clothes were hanging on tree branches to dry and he had collected a large pile of branches stacked on a small trailer attached to a bicycle that looked like it was made out of duct tape. He, at least, was friendly and we exchanged greetings as I passed. But I was happy to get home from that ride. I was telling honey about it, and he made the comment "Life in the big city." He says it every time I tell him anything negative or he sees something he doesn't like, like a bad driver. It irritated me last night though, so I replied with, "No, that's living life as a woman, unable to go some places alone." That shut him up. He is so passive-aggressive sometimes and I call him out every time. I'd much rather him say I do not like the city and I do not want to live in the city. But he'd rather make his passive-aggressive that’s life in the big city comment.

I always love seeing the box elder in the spring: