08:10 – We’re now halfway through season seven of Heartland, watching three episodes per evening. In addition to binge-watching Heartland, I’m binge-reading the works of R. Austin Freeman in publication order. I haven’t read them since I was a young teenager, and they’re as good as I remembered them. If you enjoy Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, give R. Austin Freeman’s Thorndyke stories a try. Freeman is a better writer than Doyle, and Thorndyke is a better detective than Holmes. Freeman was prolific, but his works are available in e-book form, many or most of them free.
I just bought a $0.99 collection of his short stories, The Singing Bone, on Amazon.com last night. I was surprised to find that this ebook is DRM’d. So I installed Calibre on my main system and downloaded the plug-ins needed to strip DRM from Kindle ebooks. I do wish that Amazon would stop offering DRM as an option and that authors and publishers would stop using it. All it does is annoy the paying customers.
11:45 – We have one of these steel shelving units in the basement that we use to store kit components. I think I’m going to add another of these for food storage. Right now, our kitchen cabinets are crammed with canned goods and dry goods. The only real problem with that is that it makes it inconvenient to rotate stock, keeping the older stuff toward the front. Using one of these shelving units that is accessible from both sides would make it easy to add new stuff to one side and remove older stuff from the other side. It would also help to unclutter Barbara’s kitchen cabinets.
One of these shelving units provides 50 square feet (5 square meters) of shelf space in about 2.4 cubic yards (2 cubic meters). It’s rated to hold 5,000 pounds (2,272 kilos), which is more than sufficient. That part of our basement isn’t climate-controlled but it stays pretty cool in summer and reasonably warm in winter, so it’s fine for long-term food storage.