Tons of them. Just today I taught one person about bird biology in regards to feather replacement and another I am helping prepare their family farm to hopefully host a barn owl nest we desperately need in our state.

It is also due to the great conversations I had here with people everyday that encouraged me to get involved with wildlife rehabilitation 2 years ago and it’s been one of the greatest adventures in my life. Everyone has been so supportive and has helped me develop my knowledge by asking great questions and sharing their enthusiasm with me about so many beautiful animals.

I’ve also participated in some political threads when the events were local and I’d been able to add nuance to the conversation. The trick is to just read the room and see if the thread is already trending hostile and just learn who is here to be combative vs to have real discussions.

I also just try to not be a jerk myself. I said something yesterday that got a more outspoken communists a bit insulated and I explained what my point of the original comment was a bit better and they calmed down when they saw I wasn’t being insulting to their beliefs.

I just use the same guidelines for conversation I would in real life here, and almost all my interactions here are positive ones.

I’m a guy, but much of my childhood was being raised by both my grandmothers who thankfully both lived close by, and for different reasons, they were always my main role models growing up.

Nowadays I volunteer with wildlife rescue and rehab. The field is something like 90-95% women, so you can find strong and amazing women doing every single role, from rescue and transport to all the medical and surgical positions to fundraising and finance. Everyone is there because they are very caring and kind, but also all fiercely self sufficient and dedicated to what they believe.

It’s so awesome and inspiring to be surrounded by so many that embody all the spirit that I saw from both my grandmother’s, and they are my current role models now as a guy in his 40s. Anyone of any age or gender could find things to admire from these ladies I’d say.

And as much as I don’t like having to look at the camera to back up, it does seem to have a wider FOV and the backup sensors see things even further out, and the rear end of cars are just so high and back windows are so small (I think these are now all this way for rear end crash and rollover reasons) that you just can’t see out the back like you could out of an older car. It’s pretty much just how it has to be with the safety requirements these days.

Yeah, that’s why I was fine being nice with him afterwards. Something must have clicked for him. It can take a lot to change.

It was a real head scratcher. The anger seemed like the performance. The improved version seemed more authentic. I always assumed I “earned his respect” or some macho nonsense like that.

I’m happy with the current rate of progress. As it is, I easily spend way more time than I probably should talking to people here almost exclusively about a very niche topic. I don’t need this place to be a be-all, end-all. I just come here to have nice conversations with whoever is around.

I worked in a Sear Hardware one summer during college. There was a loudmouthed old man that started coming in maybe once a week to buy one or 2 small things, and would make a scene over prices each time with whichever cashier he got. I don’t recall if people gave him a discount or if he just liked the attention or what. Then he made the mistake of seeing me at customer service one day.

He started going off about he could go down the street to Lowes or whatever and get his drill bit set for $3 cheaper or whatever it was. In a polite and professional but firm way I told him: I see you come in here and every time you harass the cashiers and make a scene to where I have other customers apologizing for you. If you take your money to Lowes, me, my staff, and every other one of my customers will be better off and you can save your $3 so we all win.

I don’t remember if he bought anything that day or not. What I do remember is that I did see him back repeatedly after that. He would greet me each time, as you entered past the service desk, and he’d usually come to me to check out and be very friendly and cordial. Never a grumpy peep out of him for the rest of the summer I worked there.

Not sure what changed his mood exactly, if it was just I was the only guy working up front, or if it was just someone finally telling him to cut the crap, but I hope that positive change carried over to other places he patronized. Seemed a legitimately decent guy afterwards. I’m sure this is not the usual way this would have played out, but for the whole $6.50/hr I was making, I wasn’t much concerned, and I did handle him calmly and other customers told me they loved how I handled him professionally but sternly.

The picture is neat! It makes me think of SimCity.

I never heard of a yard jay and Google didn’t show me anything for that.

Stellars Jays are the ones I want to meet, but I’m on the wrong side of the country.

We’ve got to stop meeting like this tonight

Now people are poo-pooing the Burrowing Owl capital of the east?! 😄

Aww, I heard Cape Coral is meh, but I was disappointed I didn’t get a chance to head there when I was in Florida last year. They have a ton of easily accessible Burrowing Owl populations and they put a ton of effort into caring for them.

Thank goodness, I knew I couldn’t be alone in this! So much adult live content has people looking like trafficking victims or has things that are just way too aggressive or violent to seem fun to me. If people aren’t smiling or laughing, I got no interest. Sexy time should be fun, at least IMO.

I’ve always been curious about this kind of stuff also. Without any real data, I just stuck to what seemed to work for me.

I post at 6am EST, right when I’m done breakfast and getting ready to leave for work. That gives early risers here about 90 minutes before I get my laptop set up at work and can bang out the easy replies for the early group. Around lunch I’ll just be at the end of the Top 6 Hour scrollers for the US/Canada ppl and can knock out those questions and any harder morning questions during lunch. That’s about 90% of the interaction with my posts, and I have the afternoon and evening off from Lemmy other than my post prep.

I wish I got more overnight comments because I feel they’d be more folks from other parts of the world and they may ask different questions or share my local knowledge about things I know less about, but I’m not sure how many Asian users we have or anything like that.

Ah, there are owls everywhere! Even in the biggest cities to the hottest and coldest places, there’s some kind of owl that lives there. They have just had 60 million+ years to perfect being antisocial.

Lemmy is what got me to finally volunteer, so I will forever share all the joy it brings me.

I use Summit on mobile because the dev included all my feature requests, so it’s an app built for me, at least for the features I use. They’re a very active developer, and it will hopefully stick around for a long time. On a real computer, I just use the plain website. I do most of my stuff on mobile so I can save drafts. I prep most of my posts ahead of time and I tend to write long things.

I’ve stuck with lemmy.world because they’re big. I don’t want my stuff to just up and disappear one day. I’ve got a lot invested here, content wise, and the .world admin have been really nice to me in the handful of times I’ve interacted with them and they’ve supported me in my real life activities pertaining to wildlife.

I’m primarily here to post owl related educational content and animal rehab stories. It started out of curiosity and now thanks to regularly posting here, I became a rehab volunteer last year.

I’ll also post to news and politics posts if I feel I have something useful to add, but with world events getting worse, those communities get a bit too angry sometimes and I stay out.

When I don’t have owl questions to answer, I scroll by Top 6 Hours so there’s a chance people will still reply to my comments. I ignore the ragebait and find I still get juuuust enough content I don’t feel oversaturated.

It is her sole occupation so it does need to cover everything! Support the arts, people!

She is good, but it’s for like 2 or 3 months, not each lesson 😄

I don’t use much cash, so I end up with 20s from the ATM when I do need cash. When I receive cash it’s usually other people’s ATM 20s or hundreds they can’t get rid of. I hang on to the hundreds until it’s time to pay my piano teacher.

I’ve got an exciting week going on.

Got to work with some great animals today. I gave a baby squirrel a bubble bath. I fed and cleaned a diamondback terrapin. Got to feed 3 young owls and a Red-shouldered hawk.

Afterwards I went out for a belated birthday lunch with my favorite clinic coworker. She got super sick on her real birthday, so I took her out for lunch today. We don’t normally get too much time to talk at the clinic, so we ended up having out for 4 hours.

Came home and replaced my ancient router. Got a Flint 2 and flashed it with OpenWRT. My old one lasted me 10 years when I looked it up, so I got my money’s worth out of that one. I’ve been having to reset it every day or so.

Made homemade curry udon (made the noodles and curry from scratch). Super tasty. I love the texture of homemade noodles.

Going for a quick getaway for 3 days. I usually plan trips, but the wife is spearheading this one, so I’m curious to see what she has planned.

I got 3 new CPAP masks coming to try. Very exciting! 😄 Trying to improve my nasal breathing and mask leak is driving my nuts with my full face mask.

And then next weekend is the clinic’s open house event. I have 2 tables I’m running. My owl table will have life sized replicas of all 8 owls of our state. I made plushies of the 2 most common owls. They are approximately life sized premade plushies I got, and I opened them up and stuffed them with beans to bring them to their correct weights. People can hold them since they can’t touch our animals. I’m also doing a table on DIY animal houses for people’s yards. It’s going to be a stressful fun, as it’s freaking with privacy 2000 strangers, but I love teaching people about our wild pals, and it will raise a heap of money for our center.

So a lot going on, but all things I actually enjoy for the most part. I’ve been having a fairly difficult year, so I’m really looking forward to a big block of fun.

That’s why that’s just fantasy 😄

You can see a good portion of the back of many owls’ eyes if you look in their ears.