Lab rat for hire

I’m still paying off our land with my brother. Right now we’re in this horrible place that does testing for multi-billion dollar pharmecutical companies. You get a few thousand bucks, but geez, I’m very opposed to these people I’m voluntarily working for and aiding. They feed you their fucked up drugs, they treat you like a child, and all that makes it worth it is remembering where your paycheck is going.
Any suggestions for other money quick options?

P.S. The upside of being in here for two weeks is that I’ve had an excuse to spend hours a day on this site. I’ve busted out of ‘newbie’ status at least.

start picking mushrooms. there are collection sites that pay a pretty good wage. sell some timber on your property. lease out hunting rights. look around you, there is money everywhere. selling a few big trees isn’t the same as clearcutting. I don’t know your land, or what is appropriate to do, but I’m sure there’s gold in thar somewhere.

for more immediate cash, you could always donate your plasma to the cosmetic industry.

anything but get a job, right? I feel you on that one. I would have to private message with you my non-job strategies…if you’re picking up what I’m puttin’ down…

I found more ‘free’ money…

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

Thanks, that hit thing is interesting fer sure. My brother and I have aready decided not to sell anything on our land for profit. We could have it payed off in a week with just a few trees but I don’t really want to start off with a monetary relationship to our home. Thanks again.

hmmm… tough choice, but, it makes sense to whore yourself out first, before you volunteer the other members of your community! personally, I wouldn’t be all Jean-Luc Picard about it. If I had to sacrifice a few trees to save the forest (even to ‘save’ it for myself), I would do it.

May I ask you to expound more on you and your brother’s philosophy? What has led you to make that comitment, and are there perhaps other choices you could make, like grow vegetables, and sell them, or make crafty things and sell those? Cause if out and out selling timber doesn’t seem like a good idea, (an idea I can sympathize with considering you guys are in the face of logging everytime you drive around), maybe one tree could become many sets of chairs, or troll figurines, or something mor personal and palatable.

Good luck, whatever you choose. I was a lab rat once, with the plasma donation, and it still looks like I’m a recovering heroin addict(the scars in my krelbow)!

Yeah I sold plasma for many years and have the scars to prove it. That is not money. That’s just coffee and a couple hot meals when your living on the street.

If you don’t mind working harder than you thought possible, I used to make pretty good money planting trees, and you live in the right place for it.

It’s part of the industrial forestry scheme but at least it’s putting something back in the ground instead of taking. It doesn’t matter what you look like and it has an end. With two people you might pay off your land in one long season.

You could go to the Yakima valley or the Okanagan and work the fruit season. I did that for many years too. You get to hang out with hundreds of Mexicans and maybe make good enough friends to be able to have people to see and places to go in Mexico. Which I also did. I loved working with them. They can really show you how to do it.

Thanks heyvictor, I’ve been told about this, but not how to get in touch with the people I need to talk too. The sugar beet harvest sounds cool too, a little chilly though. I’ll poke around on line for the fruit harvest info, but if you know the best way to get started would you mind sending me a message? I’d really appreciate it.

[quote=“TonyZ, post:6, topic:491”]May I ask you to expound more on you and your brother’s philosophy? What has led you to make that comitment, and are there perhaps other choices you could make, like grow vegetables, and sell them, or make crafty things and sell those? Cause if out and out selling timber doesn’t seem like a good idea, (an idea I can sympathize with considering you guys are in the face of logging everytime you drive around), maybe one tree could become many sets of chairs, or troll figurines, or something mor personal and palatable.[/quote]You guessed it tony, seeing the timber industry in all it’s glory my entire life has curbed any appetite I could have possed for taking part in it. Seeing trees stacked in a logging rig because of my actions would make me feel like absolute garbage. The furniture thing is good though, I could do that I think. As for ‘whoreing’ myself out first before volunteering others that have been there much longer than me and play a much more positive role in the environment, well yeah, it only seems right.

[quote=“TonyZ, post:6, topic:491”]If I had to sacrifice a few trees to save the forest (even to ‘save’ it for myself), I would do it.[/quote]Yeah, me too, but in this case, the forest is already ‘saved’, we’ve already purchased it. We will be out there soon enough, 2 years max till it’s paid off in full, hopefully 1 year. The trees can wait, so I guess I can too.

ha! I was channeling my own horror when I live for a year in Maine, so I could only imagine where the industry was much more well-entrenched, whereas minus Baxter park (and the parts of Acadia that didn’t burn down in 40’s), Maine is mostly 75 year-old saplings compared to the great Cascadian stands.

There was this patch of woods I had been walking through from my house to a farm we were doing some work on in between winter weatherizations, and one day, it was gone. In that sick, take everything, trample everything else to death way. I couldn’t imagine that happening to me all the time.

So the price of your land doesn’t sound too steep then if you have a few year plan, and you aren’t desperate.

When I was in Michigan, the gentleman I was working with told me he earned a dime on a pound of wood for firewood, but dollars on a pound of wood for mushrooms. Quite an increase!

If you do get crafty, let us know what you are building, maybe someone around here needs a new nightstand or coffee table.

Good luck and happy struggles!

The way I always did it was to just show up in the area and start knocking on doors. But there wasn’t any internet then.

Toppenish, Wapato, Yakima, Tieton are all places I used to work in the Yakima valley. The Wapato area had some big cherry orchards back in the 80’s when I was working there. Cherries is the first thing that comes on in June. There is also apple thinning in June, and July which can be pretty good money.

I also worked around Wenatchee picking pears and apples, which of course is not until August and Sept. at the earliest.

I worked around Orondo and Chelan and also Tonasket which is a pretty cool place with a very active and cohesive alternate culture for a tiny farm community. Plum and peach harvests fill in the gap between cherries or apple thinning and the main apple harvest. Which are the main money makers.

Now I’m thinkng that things in those areas may very well have changed since I worked there. In the northern Okanagan in B.C. a lot of the fruit has been converted over to wine grapes which I have never picked. But I hear that can be good money too.

Maybe if you get ahold of the agricultural employment offices in those towns that I mentioned they can give you some information about start dates and stuff.

There’s pruning that takes place in the winter but that can be harder to line up unless you’ve done it before and have connections.

The thing that’s good about this work is that you can go do it, camp out in the orchards, live real cheap and then the harvest ends and you can be on your way. No dress code, no long term commitment, and it’s piece work so if you want to work hard you can make more money. The Mexican workers got that part down, man.

I enjoy hard work, just not the same work day after day for two years. That’s why I had to quit my last job. Thanks again for the info.

Brush up on your Spanish. The person you need to ask for a job may not speak English very well.

Doin another study right now. Easy money at the price of my healthy liver is just too hard to pass up I guess. ::slight_smile:

If you have decent build/repair skills a a means to haul furniture, Big trash day can be a cash cow. My mother used to make a middle class living picking through the garbage of the affluent, fixing their broken furniture, and selling it back to the through an antique shop. It wasn’t even hard work. Often the only overhead was the cost of a can of paint, and the materials were free, so good prfit margin.

Thats a good idea, and while I am pretty handy, I don’t even have a license. I’m gonna go the leather working route though, and see how that serves me.