Backage

So, I have been lurking about, playing Internet Allergy to find the cause of my malaise, which got worse since Saturday, but in a weird, bleh kind of way.

Internet Allergy is where I "fast" from the Internet, then add back in things and see what brings up the rash.

Results:
Writing LJ entries: no rash. Beneficial habit. Wrote longhand LJ entry to self while waiting for daughter after school. Hate writing longhand, HATE, but needed to write down contents of head.
Reading LJ: Okay. No rash. Must unfriend Katsucon group.
Reading non friendslist blogs: Depends. Squid, okay. Badger, okay.
Read blogs about comics: slight itch.
Read blogs about comics that talk about recent clusterfuck convention in New York, yet call it a success: hives.
Read one blog entry about "being happy for five minutes" that four women got promoted to jobs at companies known for faux-core porn: uncontrollable itching.
Consider posting about how people deserve the conventions they get when they have a shitty experience, and yet say they'll return, and how they excuse said fuckups because the convention, being run by a company that puts on conventions, was in its first year: face swells, airway closes.

So, we write the journal entries. We read the flist when time and motivation permits. We peruse the work of the MumboJumbo on DeviantArt, because she make awesome maquettes and is a sweetie. We read the Manolo shoe blog.

We make the sculpture and the comics.

O, Possum, Where Art Thou?

Last week and this are Rubbish Week here. This means all the crap we cannot normally throw away, we can. This is cause for celebration! The rained-on bags of donation clothes that got that way because King put them on the patio: GONE! The dead office chair: GONE! The broke-down folding chairs: GONE! The junk from the side of the house: GONE!

We have a shed in our backyard. It was in okay shape before we moved it, and has been decaying since. King put many boxes o' stuff out there, after which it leaked, and boxes o'stuff turned to cardboard sludge with encysted stuff. We went at it with lawn and leaf bags and a shovel.
Dizzzzzgusting. But fascinating! We found stuff we'd been missing for years. I found my too-badly-damaged-to-keep copy of Gay Merrill Gross' The Art of Origami. I'd given it up for lost and replaced it a couple-three years ago. I found most of the art from my first pro comics job. We found two savings bonds. King's high school ring. Pictures from when Girl was three, and Boy not even walking yet. A copy in the box, of DPaint II for Amiga, which looked like it'd just come out of the shrinkwrap.
It was weird what didn't decay, and what did.

We also found a possum skeleton. It was clean of all connective tissue, parchment-colored, and brittle. I spliit the skull by bumping it. Girl and I poked through the dirt and found the spine, ribs, pelvis and leg bones. BUT NOT THE FEET BONES. Aaaaaaa! No claws to be found. None of the skeleton was smushed (except by me), so we figured it died because it died, not because something fell on it. Girl remembers watching a possum waddle into a hole in the shed about 18 months ago. The rats and ants did the rest.

This is the thing about the skeleton: it was within two feet of the door. That tells you how much we avoided the shed, and how long. We never saw dead possum, nor liquid possum, nor partial possum. We got there after Nature's cleaning crew had done their flensing.

Possums have wicked-looking teeth, like a cartoon of an angry grimace. They have FANGS. I will never fuck with a possum. What they lack in cool, they make up for in dentition that looks like it could fuck you up one possum-sized bite at a time.

Our final lawn and leaf bag count was fifteen, I think. That, plus the stuff not bagged, was at least one cubic room's worth of crap we never have to deal with again. The scary shed is one more Rubbish Week from being empty, and then demolished.

Rubbish Week is also Scrounge Week. I saw a truck two days ago that had its bed packed, gate down to accomodate more stuff including a stove which had a good six inches hanging off the open gate, the whole lot roped in with clothesline. I've already seen a vehicle lose a load at our corner, when someone took the turn too fast and dumped twenty 8" diameter PVC pipes into the road.

But a stove hitting concrete at 30 mph would be like a fiesta!

Question

Here's a question for everyone: why is there no law to protect the rights of freelancers? "Just because" is not good enough. "Because then we'll have to pay for insurance" isn't an answer, either.

I'm not talking about extending insurance, or vacation days, or leave, the things full-time employees get. Freelancers deserve the same human rights as employees: not being treated shitty because of gender, race, sexual preference. Same pay for the same work.

That's your answer.

Except, of course, plenty of female full-time employees in comics get treated shitty.

Where would I start to get the law changed to protect freelancers, women especially, from getting cornholed in the market by employers taking advantage of their non-employee status? Because the days of exploiting freelancers have got to end. They way things are is wrong.