Tuesday, June 14 2022

yea, I believe in math and science. I am tired of emotions, politics and religious beliefs.

Good morning. It’s 8:00 and I am in the office enjoying a moment before getting on with my day. I have been up since about 3:30 this morning. Basic insomnia Plus game 5 of the NBA finals determined that I was not going back to sleep. The Warriors got this one despite almost zero help from Steph Curry. Nobody was shooting today.

I’ve just had breakfast which was monumentally delicious. Basically it was soup with a small base of lentils and buckwheat, two types of field greens, the horseradish leaves and six or seven saltbush plants and some onions. For a starch, I made either dumplings or knadles depending on your cultural point of view. Usually knadles are made from matzo, matzo balls is another way to say this, but this time I made them out of dried peas and brown rice ground into flour and mixed with some white flour and chia seeds for structure. Wonderful. Simple. Elegant even.

This is the first time I’ve cooked with saltbush. Usually I just eat the leaves raw when I’m outside for the energy of them but they cook up quite nicely and the stems become very soft and spaghetti like. I’m absolutely pleased that I stopped cutting them down. More food for me and good food at that.

If you’d like to know the best thing about this meal it is that it didn’t really cost anything at all. I added a little bit of spices that were bought for I believe two rubles a packet from luda. Maybe I used 1/5 or 1/6 of what I have. A few pinches of salt, why not?, and an incredibly small portion of peas and rice. Almost insignificant in terms of money. Certainly a ruble at best which would be about 40 cents. And yet, the pot was absolutely brimming with greens and flavor. My belly feels full but my brain is not Bent in any way. I am not obligated to sleep. A great meal to start the day.

If I consider this breakfast a success however, it’s only because I’m holding back my other foolishness from being as lazy as I was yesterday.

Yesterday was very hot. The day was hot and I was very tired after Sunday’s effort. I am explaining my failures like a good Belarusian. I am explaining why I did not do my job. I was very tired. I had a lot of things on my mind that wouldn’t go away. I was filled with depression perhaps or largesse (large ass in English) or ambivalent inertia. I don’t know why I could not move, but I couldn’t. Perhaps that’s why I ended up talking about my relationship to insects. Sure, it’s good to have a relationship with insects but they are not great conversation partners. We should probably stay within our own species for intelligent conversation.

The factory means that I totally botched things. When I saw that the wind was blowing and the rain was starting, my first reaction should have been to go out and check on my new water system. That was a massive failure. 

There was significant rain last night. Enough to genuinely feed the field and make everything stand up and grow beautifully. Enough to completely fill up one of my rain barrels at the front of the house to brimming. That meant that there was at least 200 L coming from that section of the roof. Even the 20l bucket that catches some leakage from the opposite side was overflowing. 

But that strong wind blew over my main bucket right at the beginning. It was bone dry and not a drop of water went through the system to the other side. It never occurred to me that that bucket should be tied down or that it would be so unstable without any water in it. I didn’t even think about that. Even if I had just thrown 20 L of water at the bottom for weight, it would have been enough to hold it in place. Now, I have to do something about it and I even have to reattach its hose which came loose on its fall.

I also didn’t bother to do the work to attach a secondary overflow barrel next to that one that I just mentioned that got filled up. This is my most productive water spot and though I have a barrel right there, I didn’t do the 10 minutes work to tie them all together. I don’t know how much water I just lost from the stupidity and laziness. 

Today I get to fix all of this. I can’t tell you how stupid I feel.

Over the last couple of years, I have been trying to find some percentage of sentience that I might be able to add back into the culture. I don’t really think I’m looking for millions of dollars in income. I really don’t need a lot of money. I think I just wanted a few people to read me and start thinking along these directions.

If the argument here goes to my being more popular or trendy or accessible, perhaps there’s a good reason for my not diving into this. Popular culture is too fragmented and it comes and goes. People get an idea given to them for free in a video, perhaps it touches a note but most likely even if it does it will mean nothing. People are so overstimulated from video, they don’t even have any brains left.

Obviously, going for the high market, the legitimately literate end of the spectrum is like looking for needles in haystacks. I would be preaching to the choir only for a start but even worse, even those people who would be interested are probably already activists in their own lives and they too would prefer video to having to do the work of reading themselves.

When I was young, the idea of participating in a dying art was most appealing for me. I don’t know why this touched me so much but it has never left me. Writing for theater at the beginning of my career had this thought in mind. Certainly I cannot blame anyone for missing what I was doing.

But days like yesterday happen and I was unable to fulfill my duties. I was just too lazy and stupid yesterday to get up and do what I needed to do.

Again, I can make all the excuses for my failure. Making excuses for one’s failures is The local culture. It’s all they do when attention comes their way. And yet, the more I berate other people for their human failures, I fail too. And if my job is to make sure that I have enough water for the dry months that are coming up on us very quickly, I just lost something I had worked very hard to have just because I was too lazy to walk out and check things when the wind started blowing.

Yeah, it’s a matter of mental toughness. You have to do what you have to do and you have to be prepared.

But what if my actual failure came about as a result of my reliance on my ex partners help on Sunday? She is a Dynamo of energy one day a week and I am not complaining about the results but I cannot help but second guess that I might have been a lot happier without all of this extra work. I would have been following my own plan and my own creativity there.

I’m not going to say anything bad about my ex partner but most of the ideas that she has come from cultural expectations. She is simply doing things that she knows are normal and she wants very badly to do these things despite the fact that they are extremely difficult to sustain and perhaps even cause ecological problems.

Most of my ideas came from other people too. I also read and watched videos to learn about gardening and permaculture and water retention. I may have solved local problems by dealing with people through my own concepts of what was available but the original idea of slowing the water flow down and getting enough passive water systems to feed the trees and plants came from study.

But maybe yesterday’s Large ass came about because of how much of myself I had to give up to be able to work with my ex partner. Maybe the result of that whirlwind of energy and motion, way out of my league these days, left me requiring a massive blowback.

I’ve been watching some TV lately. American TV shows. Star Wars has a new show. There are two new Star Trek shows. There’s also a pretty cool show about time travel. I watched this stuff much more than I care about superheroes or gangsters sorry to say.

This morning, I saw an episode from the original Star Trek where the crew of the Enterprise visits a planet inhabited by brain dead hyper Christian humanoids. They lived in fundamental EarthBound times, their dress and attitude would seem to come from pre-industrial Revolution times and they were all completely passive to the will of their God Landru. Everybody walked around in a daze, smiling pleasantly at each other and wishing each other peace. But then a clock struck 12 and mayhem ensued on the everybody who was not old was obligated to rape, pillage and destroy in complete wild abandonment. I’m putting in the rape myself, most of the male female stuff was picking up a woman and sort of spinning her until she cried and screamed. I don’t know if they actually had sex on this planet.

Spoiler alert but at the end, mostly to save themselves, Kirk and Spock decide to lift the veil on this Landru character discovering that it is just a wizard of Oz computer keeping people in order. They can’t blow it up with phaser fire so Kirk just reasons the computer to death. 

LANDRU:
 The good is the harmonious continuation of the Body. The good is peace, tranquillity. The good of the Body is the directive.

KIRK:
Then I put it to you that you have disobeyed the Prime Directive. You are harmful to the Body.

LANDRU:
The body is. It exists. It is healthy.

KIRK:
The body is dying. You are destroying it.

LANDRU:
Do you ask a question?

KIRK:
What have you done to do justice to the full potential of every individual of the Body?

LANDRU:
Insufficient data.

KIRK:
Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life. The body dies. The fault is yours.

SPOCK:
Are you aiding the body, or are you destroying it?

LANDRU:
(sounding very machine-like, Davros-like)
I am not programmed to answer that question.

LAWGIVER:
Landru! Guide us, Landru!

(Kirk draws his phaser.)

SPOCK:
Not necessary, Captain. They have no guidance. Possibly for the first time in their lives.

KIRK:
Landru, answer the question.

LANDRU:
Peace, order, and tranquillity are maintained. The body lives, but I reserve creativity to me.

SPOCK:
Then the body dies. Creativity is necessary for the health of the Body.

My guess is that the meaning of creativity here would be reserved for commerce. The Enterprise is definitely run by conservative military types. There is an order of ranks up and down the starship Enterprise, absolutely named for capitalistic endeavors and in the end, there is enough male sexuality flying around to be probably completely offensive to all modern females. This is definitely a white man’s world despite the racially integrated crew. And it’s even very clear that though Kirk’s best friend is incredibly Jewish Leonard Nimoy, the anti Vulcan prejudice is obviously anti-semitism. Nobody likes Spock because he’s just so damned smart and logical. Real people are emotional and brutal. Something like that.

What I got out of it however was that the rhetoric of the computer to keep a happy society was pretty much the same crap I listened to for the first 15 or so years that I lived here. Belarus was supposed to be a harmonious place. Our national anthem passwords depicting us as peaceful people. My original lessons in Russian mostly told me that I had to speak more softly. People here are passive, 50/50, they don’t show a lot of Life themselves.

But then we had the Russians. The more I learned about the Russians while translating stories about Russian corruption and malfeasance in the western Arctic region, the more these words about the leadership maintaining creativity for themselves made sense to me. Kirk and the federation people felt they had the right to destroy this passive culture, their reason being stagnancy and the basic unfairness of a system that does not allow individuals to grow.

It’s a complicated thought. I would not say either side was completely right in this. Certainly, a little bit of peace and fellowship among people, at least the ideal of respecting the peace and doing one’s job and understanding one works as a part of the group it’s not a terrible thing. But leaning too far into the cog in the wheel philosophy means that people are unnecessarily pressured out of any possibility of personal enjoyment. Literally, everybody would be like perpetual children waiting for a pat on the head or a ribbon from their masters that’s the only form of pleasure.

I personally think my own model is the most sustainable. I run my own gig and have had my own business for many years. I recognized that I had no possibility of being a corporate person even three decades ago. I’m just not built for it. I’m too obstinate. But at the same time, I not only understand that I have to respect people to do well in the marketplace, I need to also respect nature and make sure that nothing in my business causes adverse environmental problems.

I’m not only talking about not driving a car. I gave up my last car 25 or 30 years ago. It wasn’t worth the money to me. Even when I went into building as my profession, I managed well enough without a car. Eventually, there would have been a limit on how much money I could make without a vehicle. But I never starved during this time either and even managed to end up a boss.

Yeah, if it’s about figuring things out and coming to a clear understanding of where my main problems are in life, the difference is between corporate thinking and entrepreneurial thinking. Most of the parasites in my life, most of the people that suck the energy out of my world, exist within frameworks and live for the praise of other people. Almost all of the people in my life that I am quite tired of are all wage slaves. They are wage slaves trying to move me in a corporate manner towards subservance. That’s why I’m so unhappy about having them in my life.

And the more I count the people that I actually like, they are universally people who make their own decisions and almost universally run their own businesses. In fact, looking back over my history, universally the only people I really get along with in this world are bosses like me. The only people it’s even possible to have a reasonable conversation with are the bosses. Slaves are slaves and you just can’t reason with alcoholic slaves.

If this thought is true, I might need to employ a little thinking from Lisbon.

About 25 years ago, Portugal made some radical changes to their drug and alcohol policy and decriminalized everything. They are thinking that punishment for drug addiction was not as effective or economically sustainable as understanding the roots of the addiction. The main thought in this was that substances themselves were not really controlling people, it was living miserable lives that caused them to seek out drugs.

Thinking locally, I could say that alcohol and smoking tobacco and bad dietary habits are the thing that has created so many skeletal dregs in this country or I could simply say that they are just destroyed people because of a lack of agency. They do not have enough personal power for their voice to mean anything and this more than anything leaves them broken people.

And if I take three particular items out of my own life and prop them up against this argument, all three of them have one basic component exactly the same. They do not allow me to speak. This would be true for my thieving relative, all of Florida actually by the end of it, it would be true for my chicken neighbors and their skinhead cop friend and so it hurts me to say this out loud, it is my biggest issue with my ex partner. If she ever just simply listened to me, we probably would have been a lot happier and would have fixed all of our problems a long, long, long time ago.

It’s also one of the greatest stupidities of this Ukrainian War. There have been six packages of sanctions that have economically affected everyone who lives here. But these punishments don’t really touch the rich people at the top at all. It doesn’t touch the rule makers and it doesn’t touch the people who actually have agency in this country. The only people who suffer, the only people who are suffering right now because of their sudden refugee status, the loss of their homes or even just the loss of all of their money again are all voiceless people. Voiceless and voteless.

I think I wrote about this in the preface to my book. I don’t have a whole lot of editorial thinking in that book but in the preface, I didn’t mention how I got involved with this job and then tried to make the point that at the end of the day, the big problem is that there are no individual voices that can be heard here. We are not allowed to speak. We are not allowed to vote. We are obligated to succumb to the pressure and until we succumb, like giving yourself over to our lord Jesus, the punishment simply continues.

We can make that number four by adding my daughter’s mother to the list. She is another corporate fascist. She also only wanted me to succumb to the will of Landru.

Fuck that.

Anyway, the real moral of this story is that you have to be mentally tough and do your job. Unfortunately, if your job is getting dressed and kissing ass all day, good luck to you. I’m probably not your English teacher and I’m probably not going to be your best friend. No offense. I prefer entrepreneurs and people who have their own brains.

I believe in writing things down. Make a to-do list and make sure to do everything you are supposed to do and don’t get lazy. And if you’re going to put a barrel on a pedestal to catch water and the barrel doesn’t weigh anything, throw 20 L of water for ballast to hold it in place or tie it down. That’s an engineering flaw that just cost me probably 500 L of water. Heartbreaking. Worse than cryptocurrency.

Any questions? Commentary?

Okay, enough meeting. Let’s go back to work.

***

It’s a quarter to 10:00 and I guess I’ve put in about an hour on the water problem.

When I was in New York riding bicycles, I learned a lesson about why people ride track bikes. They are bomb proof. Well, that’s not exactly true. You need bomb proof gear, parts that are of a high enough quality to do their job and do not fail very often. But because there are no breaks or derailers and the only moving part is the chain, you have much, much less maintenance. And as far as whether it’s a difficult bike to ride, if you are actually doing sprints in the city for six or eight hours a day, bike skills are not a problem. You have enough practice.

I used plumbers tape on all of the fittings and I believed that everything was sewn up correctly. I have a leak in the middle barrel. This is a problem right now because all the barrels have water in them.

They have water in them because I drained one of my barrels into this particular system to check how it works. It does. There are four barrels out there. The middle barrel was the only one not getting fed. However, when the feed barrel started getting full and I started dumping water into that middle tank, it primed itself. As of the moment, all three of the reservoir barrels are at the same level but the feed barrel is still higher than the rest. This is not a giant deal. I was feeding it at a higher level than the hose that’s bleeding it can carry water. And there’s that leak.

Something is not quite right with this system.

Secondary problem appeared from the pallet that I put under the feed barrel. Unfortunately, I tried to explain to the guys building the system that I would be capturing water inside of the fence. They did not have the materials to backtrack and retrofit it. It’s not a giant deal. It just requires buying one more clip and putting an end cap on one small piece of guttering and having both sides feed into the center. This is not a lot of materials but they are materials that I do not have exactly at this moment.

A secondary idea is one that I’m thinking very strongly of at this moment.

Inside the fence, I only really have space for four barrels. If I were to remove one of those barrels and leave only three, I can make that fix today. The fourth barrel can be moved up to the front of the house and placed under my other major waterspout. After this, I would only have to make a fitting for a secondary reservoir and I would double the capacity there. Actually, I could even probably make that three barrels as it seems that that is an extremely productive section of roof. And I think I have enough fittings for two barrels there.

This might be the best way to go. I’m really not happy with the barn roof feeding the way it does and I don’t like having one barrel outside the fence and the rest inside the fence.

I need to do more thinking about this. Today is supposed to be clear and tomorrow cloudy. I hate to think I’ve just lost a lot of water but if I don’t stay over in town, I can get whatever I need tomorrow morning and be able to do some watering with the water I have tomorrow evening.

Technically, I could go to town today. If I want to do that, I only have about a half hour to get ready. I’ll have about a half hour to find what I need before the market closes up but then I will be obligated to take a cab home. That will be the truth no matter what I do. But if I go tomorrow, I will have more time to find what I need and I can use the rest of the day to set things up as well as I can with what I actually have.

All of this is a bit disappointing. I wish I would have had a look at my system when I built it. I wish I would have dumped water in it and made sure that everything was feeding okay. Even before that, I wish I would have measured out where my water is feeding from more thoroughly and explained it more thoroughly to Dima so he would have had more appropriate parts when he came out. What we have now is not the end of the world, it’s just not the most efficient.

Don’t get me wrong, this is all a learning process and everything has to get done step by step. Yes, missing a nice fat rain was a bit of a failure. I could have had a thousand more leaders of water or something close to it waiting for use already. Then I would have been fat instead of scurrying around trying to fix a problem after the fact.

Live and learn. Step by step. That’s how you do things. Step by step.

***

2:15 and I’m packed up and done for the day on the water systems. I don’t think it’s going to rain tonight but if it is, we will have some positive water capture. The system is not completely done, but I’ve taken some good steps in the right direction. I’ll do some shopping tomorrow and see if I can get the last of what I need.

I basically redid three places. I rebuilt the platform where the feed barrel gets water from the gutter. I decided to leave it in its original place but I had to rebuild the platform a bit so it was more stable. I found the leak in the center reservoir barrel. It was just a cracked fitting. Probably it was my fault when putting it together or it was a piece of crap, I cannot say for sure. I went to take a look at it and saw what the problem was and lost a lot of water trying to retrofit the other barrels so that everything was closed up and functional. I ended up bypassing the entire center tank but unfortunately, only after all the water in it ran out.

One of the negative issues about the fittings that I bought were that everything was a different size and not very interchangeable. The piece that broke was the only one of its kind that I had. It was a fitting that went directly from the exit port as a t. I have other teas but they connect to hosing which is at least flexible. The problem happened I guess when the wind blew the feed barrel down. Maybe this pulled on all of them and because there was no flex, it cracked. I will replace it with something more reliable.

I also want to say that for the remainder of the tanks that I tied together, I’m going to drill the holes higher on the tanks and let the main borrowing action be overflow. In these tanks that I was working on today, I joined them all at the very bottom. My thinking was that pumping would be easier because we would basically be pumping from all the tanks at the same time rather than having to stop and pump from a different tank. Now that I’ve played with this though, I believe I would rather have the tanks attached higher up. In the case of a leak, you lose less water and it’s probably easier working a little higher off the ground. If I wanted to run a hose directly from these tanks, if they were all up much higher on a platform or something like that, then you would like to have the spigot at the bottom for maximum water pressure. As of the moment, I just don’t think this is what I’m going to be using. I don’t think I broke anything or specifically wasted money by putting these on the bottom. I’m just saying in the future I’m going to work close to the top.

On the back of my root cellar, I adjusted all of my gutters towards one barrel. Like I said, I don’t think there’s going to be so much rain and eventually I’m going to change that place to three water barrels tied together and let all of the gutters feed to one place. Probably what I have right now or something like it will be my final solution for this area. As of the moment, there’s just one bucket that delegates any water that falls from the sky until I hook everything up there.

Near the house though, I decided to put three barrels. Every time we have a good rain, that one water barrel fills up all the way to the top. Actually, this is the magic barrel that drains faster than any of the others. I may never understand the secret why my other barrels drain so slowly but this one just flows. I also put a wooden pedestal underneath that area and leveled it so that I can have all three barrels sitting rather neatly together. I have these pedestals under all of the water barrels keeping them level. It’s just wood. It’s not a forever fix but it looks neat and it keeps everything even. It’ll be here for this year and next year and then maybe I need to think about building some new pallets. No big deal.

Probably the last thing I want to get is some kind of downspout system. Dima brought one length of plastic down tubing and modified it to catch the rain coming off the barn roof. His point is that letting the water fall by itself is not as efficient and I can see he’s right. I would like to do a similar thing near my house. But for that, I’m definitely going to have to make a turn from the downspout and bring the water back and have it drop straight down. This will reopen a corner that has housed my water bucket for the last month or so. I want to move that bucket onto the pallet so it looks neater and all of the barrels will be even.

The only negative to this particular spot of water salvage is that it’s direct sunlight. In the meantime, I have a blanket I think that I can put over the barrels to keep the sun directly off them. The water gets warm there which is probably a positive if you believe local growers. People say that cold water or water directly from the well or from the sky is bad for plants. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know how rain water is bad for plants. That seems insane to me but this is what they say. In any case, I have a pair of grape Vines growing right there so probably in the year after next, that spot will be shady as the grapes grow over a trellis and start heading onto the roof.

Finally, I definitely want to get a new pump. I’m glad I waited, I’m not sorry about the one I have. It’ll be a good backup push come to shove. But these submersible pumps are just not appropriate for what I have. I want to be able to draw all the water out of these tanks and the only way to do that is to have a hose that goes all the way down to the bottom of these barrels. Also, if I do end up using well water, I’ll be able to pull water without upsetting my well so much. The vibration from this submersible makes the water very cloudy and it takes quite some time for it to settle down.

Are these final expenses within my budget? Yes they are. I’m not broke. I’m not rich but I live inexpensively and this is what is important.

I’m in the office right now and with the windows open this is a lovely place to get out of the heat of the day. I’ve actually done quite a bit of work in this office. I’ve done a lot of translations and I have my diplomas and such on the wall opposite my computer so they end up in the background when I’m teaching English or something like that. And if everything goes according to plan, we might even have quite a few roses and even lavender plants growing right outside the window here. That will be mixed with the natural citrusy smell that comes from the walnut tree that creates the shade here. Does this sound nice? Seems nice to me.

Other than this, I think the only genuine investment I would like to make would be to swap out these old windows for new windows. Perhaps I might think of improving the insulation in This Old House or, if it was a matter of definitely having someone sleep here in this room in the winter time, I would probably add a second wood stove in the corner where the couch is right now. This room is ridiculously cold in the winter.

Is all of that within my budget? Actually it is. I’m not rich but I’m not poor. I mean, I don’t have great buckets of American money. I don’t have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around. But in case you’ve been listening, I don’t really have any expensive tastes anymore. I don’t really need anything that costs money.

It is a little early in the year to talk about this. What I’m thinking about right now seems to be the sort of thing that you would say when wrapping up at the end of the year. I don’t want to sound too cocky at the moment when every day has more and more and more food available. I’m just thinking that I like this lifestyle very much. I like the work that I did today very much.

To be fair, I guess I’m talking about retirement. I am speaking from a place where I’m not overly concerned about my income. I talked to some of my friends and told them I was available for translations and most probably, I will do at least a little advertising in August and September and October. This is for English teaching. And of course I definitely should get all of my collected works together sometime. I agree, it’s ridiculous even talking about it. I am so ambivalent it’s not even funny.

All I’m saying is that the lifestyle I am leaving is one that does not require a lot of money. It doesn’t require a lot of money and I do not have much of a taste for things that do cost a lot of money.

I agree, sometimes I have a thought in my head that a particular something to eat as a snack might be nice. But the thought doesn’t last very long because I end up logically asking myself if I genuinely want it or if something else could be used to substitute for it. I usually go with something homemade that is cheaper, healthier and equally as interesting.

Maybe another way to talk about this though is that I think younger people could do this as well. I think there are a lot of people looking to do some homesteading. I remember when I was a young man, my ex-wife and I talked about this often. I think we both wanted to move out to the country. Of course we couldn’t because we didn’t have any money. That’s always the thing that stops people. Everybody needs so much money and because of it, we are obligated to stay in the city centers and work as slaves until there’s just no more love left in us anymore. A lifetime of paranoid number counting. A lifetime of suffering and spending and then more suffering.

I chose to be My own Boss many many years ago and I am not apologetic for this choice. I’m also not apologetic for not being a millionaire. Call me a bad person but I have chosen quality of life and I am not jealous and I am not sorry for having done it. I mean, physically I guess I miss some things about being younger. But I can’t complain. We only get one life. We only get one ticket. I’ve done what I’ve done and I’ve built what I’ve built and I have what I have. I can’t be jealous of people who have more and I can’t really start pointing fingers or looking down upon people who have less.

I could be bitter. I could be absolutely insane like some of my relatives. I could be much, much worse off than I am.

I just feel okay right now. I did a little hard work. I put my brain into a few things to solve some problems. I put in my time and I made some choices. And now I’m just being philosophical and I don’t have anybody screaming at me to stop.

Yes, I definitely recommend country Life. I definitely recommend becoming an ecologist and allowing ecology to rule your decisions much, much more than allowing economy to rule you. I definitely recommend being your own person. I definitely recommend finding a way to make your own company. I absolutely recommend that waiting to be a millionaire will take your whole life 99% of the time. I most assuredly recommend finding a lifestyle you can be comfortable with that allows you good health, fresh air and good food with the minimum amount of outside stress possible. I absolutely believe in having as few bosses as you possibly can. That’s the way to do it. I absolutely recommend that.