08:10 – Barbara may have overdone it a little yesterday. Her knee is bothering her more than it has been lately. Last night, she tried using 50 mg tramadol rather than 5 mg oxycodone. She said that one tramadol didn’t do much for the pain. Taking a second one helped some, but not as well as one 5 mg oxycodone. But the pain is gradually decreasing and she thinks she has enough oxycodone left to cover the worst of it.
I didn’t get around to doing laundry yesterday, so I’ll do it today. I’m sure Barbara will want to clean house, but she won’t over do it.
Kit sales have slowed down a lot, as expected for this time of year. We did about 73% of our total January revenue in the first half of the month. If history is any indication, this slower pace will continue through June. In the third quarter, our revenue should be more than the first two quarters combined. The good news is that the slower pace will give me more time to do things other than building and shipping kits.
10:48 – I noticed that I’m running low on Zippo lighter fluid. As a pipe smoker, I go through a lot of it. I have to refill my lighter every day or so. I’ve been using actual Zippo-branded fluid, but in the past I’d used everything from 95% ethanol to wood alcohol to Coleman fuel to unleaded gasoline to VM&P naphtha.
The real Zippo fluid comes in 12 fluid ounce cans that cost $7 or $8. Looking at the Zippo MSDS, their fluid is indistinguishable from VM&P naptha, which costs about $8 per quart or $15 per gallon at big box home centers. So, rather than paying three to five times as much for the Zippo-branded stuff, I just refilled my lighter with VM&P naphtha. As expected, it burns indistinguishably from the Zippo fluid. Same flame height and color, and if anything it actually ignites more easily than the official fuel.
I carry a Zippo lighter (or two) routinely, and gave Barbara one of the propane-fueled Zippos to keep in her purse. There’s also a liquid-fuel Zippo lighter in each of our car emergency kits, along with a 4-ounce can of Zippo fluid. But I think for routine use I’m going to keep using VM&P naphtha.
Yo, homies, it’s Super Bowl Sunday!
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/charles-goyette/were-gonna-get-rich-in-phoenix/
Mrs. OFD is back from Mordor but was feeling crappy last night, thanks to some nimrod down there sitting next to her who was sneezing and coughing up a storm without covering his pie-hole. So she stayed at her 89-year-old aunt’s house down in Burlap-on-the-Bay, said aunt gallivanting down in Virginia and Florida with her 86-year-old little sister, the MIL. The older sister kayaks on the lake, rides a bicycle and drives all over hell by herself. And some old biddy a couple of towns over from here, out in the real sticks, just checked out at 105; she was still humping in and out of mass every Sunday under her own steam. Imagine that: born in 1910 and seeing the Great War play out as a little kid and surviving the Influenza Epidemic of 1918.
Hmmmm….one wonders occasionally how the ancients among us are mostly wimmenz…don’t see many centenarian menz.
Another sunny, single-digit day, frozen marinescape here…
Women are much more robust than men. That’s the price men pay for our size, speed, and power. Testosterone does us in younger.
So does that mean they can quit crabbing about the monthlies and menopause and suchlike? That’s what I tell them; they have that stuff and we check out earlier. Of course they say we got the better part of the bargain.
And I guess our testosterone lasts pretty much our whole lives; to wit, those old War Between the States veterans marrying young women who then lived into the 1960s and had kids.
With the late Senator Thurmond being one example of that sorta thang:
“At age 68 in 1971, Thurmond fathered the first of four children with his second wife, Nancy, who was then 25.” (Wikipedia article)
Men and women are different! Not just differently-built, but damned close to splitting into different species.
THEY have the period pains, the PMT, and the menopause, and WE suffer what they have. They also have breast and uterine cancer, and WE (along with them, granted) suffer all that too.
Then it all stops, for them; and WE start suffering.
Men’s heart attacks pick up around about the time women shut down. So do strokes. That could form the basis of at least a hypothesis.
Then men start suffering from prostate cancer.
We’re built to keep our baby-making apparatus in operational fettle as long as possible, but it comes at a cost. We suffer both prostate cancer and younger wives or girlfriends. Can you imagine having to mollify a youngster who likes rap, or even 100% heavy metal, and TV sitcoms and soap operas, and teenage or twenties heartthrobs? And been brought up to think firearms are evil – not just tools of the devil, but demonic in themselves.
Mother Nature is a BITCH, and she’s gender-biased against us, too!
79 F today in the Land of Sugar. All the neighborhood out there running around in the sunshine. Gonna be 38 F in the morning.
I have been wondering of late if we men could swap our blood out once per month, would that do any good for us? You know, just throw some clean saline in your veins. I used to donate blood four to six times per year then they would not take it once I got on all these drugs to keep me alive. Now I get yelled out by my cardio doc for too many HDLs, LDLs and triglycerides.
@Don regarding DRIED MEAT
REPEAT steps 1,2 & 3 as many times as necessary,…
Could you define necessary?
It would also help mentioning the common number of times based on experience. I assume that it will be different depending on the meat type being used but mentioning the number of times and the necessary condition for, say beef, would give a clearer indication on when to stop.
Could you define necessary?
Bob, I was about to suggest you try the operation. This is why. I KNOW the process works, but I haven’t actually had feedback about the instructions – whether they work or not. I’ve written enough Operating Instructions to know that not everyone reads them from the same viewpoint I wrote them. If you like, I’ll recast the instructions to try to make them bullet-proof. Hell, I’ll do that anyway, even if you don’t get them.
Marcelo, “as necessary” means once per colander-full of meat, until you run out of raw material/ raw meat to process. It takes enough work that it is not worth doing until you have around a minimum of four or six colander-sized measures of raw material (a “colander-sized measure” may only result in a half-full colander of the cooked, drained meat – your choice as to what is convenient).
It’s a batch process, except for recycling the cooking liquid – one iteration per colander of meat. You DON’T recycle/ reprocess the meat – that would be a way to guarantee that the dried “gravel” had lost all flavour, and tasted like gravel at the end.
“…but damned close to splitting into different species.”
There it is.
Fiat lux, even.
My boyz won out in Arizona tonight. Shouldn’t have, they were not playing up to par throughout. They won on a fluke interception by a rookie, after an inexplicable call from the Seattle offensive nabobs. When they should have just lost at that goal line.
Then a big rhubarb right after that, with some lunatic throwing a punch at Gronkowski, who is several inches taller than me, about thirty or forty pounds heavier and in terrific shape. He hit the guy back and the dude was laid out about six feet away. If a guy Gronk’s size was coming at me, I’d hope to have my shotgun handy with Number Four Buck or sumthin.
And that also goes for having Vince Wilfork coming at me.
Don: my bad, thanks.
The way I read it it meant repeating with the same batch. That would ensure a very low fat end product but as appetizing as saw dust. 🙂
My sixth-grade teacher, appropriately named Mr. Lynch, had been a POW in a German camp for three years; he told us they were given bread made from sawdust. Probably not too appetizing unless you had not much else.
He was quite a character, too; used to hit me and the other class wise-ass across the backs of our heads with his huge Army Air Force ring. Hard enough so our heads would hit our desks. We affected like it was major agonizing injury but knew we had it coming.
I used to work with an awesome engineer who was a B-17 pilot. He was shot down on his second bombing mission over Germany and got to spend the next 18 months in a POW camp. He was 6’2″ and came out weighing 108 lbs when liberated. He used to tell me that a good day was when their potato soup pail arrived with some actual potato in it.
The Allied prisoners in the German POW camps were fed pretty much the same as their guards, all of whom were reduced to scraps and sawdust as the war wore on. The Russian prisoners did not fare as well, and Mr. Lynch told us they used to tie them outside naked and pour water on them to see how long it took them to freeze to death. Later, the ordinary schmuck German POWs in our camps were treated worse than animals by that German-hating SOB Eisenhower (no we do not like Ike; who was Dugout Doug’s right-hand flunkie when they marched on the WWI Bonus Marchers down in Mordor and burned out their tent city in the Anacosti area) and many tens of thousands died from that treatment. While we took in former Gestapo and Nazi intelligence operatives to work against our new enemy, the Soviet Union.
I will, but probably only with a pound or two of ground beef. We are storing ground beef, but it’s canned and includes some fat. I buy it in 28 ounce (0.8 kilo) cans from Keystone Meats. They have a best-by date five years out, but in reality they’ll be fine for many years after that. I currently have a dozen cans (21 pounds or 9.6 kilos), but I plan to order another dozen soon.