Font Size:     

Month: May 2016

Wednesday, 11 May 2016

09:54 – More work on science kits today. We have a couple thousand bottles labeled and ready to fill. I need to make up several of the solutions we need.

I think our cow neighbors are getting used to seeing Colin. This morning, there were about three dozen in the field near our back fence line, including half a dozen small calves. A dozen or so of them turned to watch Colin and me as we walked along the fence, but none of them said anything. Until recently, several of them would have let out a warning moo, and occasionally one would bellow at Colin. I’m sure they recognize a wolf when they see one, but I think they’ve seen him often enough with nothing bad happening that they’ve decided he’s not a threat.

I just cooked two cups of rice to put aside to make fried rice for dinner tonight.

Read the comments: 74 Comments

Tuesday, 10 May 2016

10:26 – Work on science kits today. Barbara labeled another several hundred bottles yesterday. And UPS showed up with three more cases of bottles. The boxes are as beat up as usual for UPS. I suspect their last step before loading the trucks is to run over all of the boxes with the truck they’re going into. At any rate, we’ll be filling bottles today.

Reading various opinion pieces, I see that Trump has no chance of winning in November and that Clinton has no chance of winning in November. I hope they’re both true. Someone posed a problem for me: you spot Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton in a sinking rowboat surrounded by sharks. You have room for only four more people in your boat. Whom do you save? My answer: None of them. Which I suspect is the same answer most of the electorate would give.

Read the comments: 66 Comments

Monday, 9 May 2016

09:39 – The King Arthur Flour No-Knead bread recipe I mentioned yesterday turned out very well. Far better than the earlier recipe from Allrecipes.com that we’d been using. That despite the facts that we used bread flour rather than the recommended all-purpose flour and that we made no adjustments for high altitude.

The loaves with made with the older recipe tasted fine, but they were very dense and damp. The loaves we made with the KAF recipe were light and dry, indiscernible from bread from a bakery. Barbara and I both liked the KAF loaves much better.

Read the comments: 33 Comments

Sunday, 8 May 2016

11:25 – We’re baking today. We just made up enough bread dough for a couple of large loaves, using the King Arthur Flour recipe for No-Knead Crusty White Bread as well as dough to make the Allrecipes.com Soft Oatmeal Cookies. If you’ve never visited the KAF website, you’re missing an excellent resource for newbie and experienced bakers alike.

One of the things I really like about KAF recipes is that they give measures in volume, traditional weight, and SI mass. Like most scientists, I’m uncomfortable using volume measures, which are by their nature imprecise and not reproducible. So I use metric mass units, weighed to the gram on one of our AWS SE-50 shipping scales. They cost about $25, run on the included AC adapter or AA cells, read out in pounds and ounces to 0.1 ounce resolution, or in kilograms or grams, with 1 g resolution from 0 to 20 kilos and 2 g resolution from 20 to 50 kilos. They’re extremely useful for many tasks other than shipping and cooking, including counting bulk items, repackaging bulk staples, and so on.

Read the comments: 23 Comments

Saturday, 7 May 2016

09:35 – We ran errands locally yesterday afternoon. Among those was opening a corporate bank account. In Winston, we had both our personal and corporate accounts at the Allegacy Credit Union. When we moved up here, we closed out the personal account in Winston and opened a new account at the credit union up here. Unfortunately, they don’t do corporate accounts, so we had to go to one of the local banks for that. Now I just have to get the new account set up in PayPal so that I can transfer money from PayPal to the new account.

Donna Edwards, the lady who took care of setting up our account, mentioned that she and her husband own a farm. Barbara asked what they raised, and she replied (of course), beef cattle. She said they kept a small herd of about 60. When Barbara mentioned that our property backs up on Judge Doughton’s land, she said that he ran cattle on a much larger scale, several hundred of them. It seems like every third or fourth person we meet up here has a cattle farm, including Lori, our USPS carrier, and one of the women that Barbara met with the Friends of the Library Group. Donna also mentioned that in the last 10 or 15 years the number of dairy farms in the area had fallen from about 150 to a dozen or so. Apparently, it’s more profitable to raise beef cattle.

Barbara is out doing yard work this morning, creating and mulching flower beds around the house. We also plan to put in a small garden for herbs and vegetables, maybe a 10×20 foot plot at the side of the house. Barbara is going to ask Al if he’d mind bringing up his rototiller on their next visit. We’ll also install a fence to keep the deer, rabbits, and other predators out of the garden. Barbara seems to think that chicken wire won’t be enough to stop them, so we’ll probably go with a four or five foot chain-link fence. We’ll grow most of the herbs in pots because some of them can be incredibly invasive, but I do want a small patch where we can grow vegetables, mainly for seed-saving.

USPS just showed up with the bulk of my Walmart order. As I expected, they shipped one jar of the beef bouillon rather than the 12-pack they claimed to be sending me, but one jar for $2.98 was reasonable, whereas 12 jars would not have been.

Read the comments: 36 Comments

Friday, 6 May 2016

10:08 – Barbara is working out in the front yard, spreading mulch. Colin was standing at the front door watching her work, and just let out a ferocious bark. Barbara came in the door and said that a deer had just come around the far end of the house on a dead run and passed her, heading for the neighbors’ property. We don’t see deer very often during the day, and certainly not that close. But we have a significant deer population, and I’m sure they’re out in our yard every night.

The plumbers came yesterday to switch out our sediment filter and show me what needs to be done periodically. He said the filters I’d picked up at Blevin’s yesterday were extremely fine and may need to be swapped out more frequently than the package recommends. It says they last for 8,000 gallons or two months. That’s 133 gallons a day, and I doubt we use that much water. The price at Blevin’s was $8.99 for a two-pack, or $0.80 cheaper than Amazon Prime.

I told him that the electrician said we had a 120VAC well pump. He refused to believe it wasn’t 240VAC until he looked at the main breaker panel. Then he said he wanted to take a look at it, so he went out in the front yard and pulled the concrete cap off the well-casing shelter and pulled out all the fiberglass insulation. We expected there to be a plaque in there with the name of the drilling company and details about the depth and well head, but there wasn’t one to be found. We’re going to have to check county records to find out what company drilled the well and hope they have the details on record.

Not much prepping this week. I ordered some monthly PetArmor Plus flea/tick treatments from Walmart. That ran only about $25, so I needed another $25 to qualify for free shipping. So I ordered ten more jars of Bertolli Alfredo sauce, which has gone up from $2.14 the last time I ordered to $2.23, a pack of Walmart house-brand egg noodles just to try, and some 15.9-ounce jars of Knorr beef bouillon. Walmart had those on sale, at $2.99 for a 12-pack, or about $0.25/jar. I thought it must be a typo, but they confirmed the order and shipped it. If they really ship me 12 jars, I guess I’ll be giving free jars to family, friends, and neighbors. The stuff keeps for a long, long time, but not long enough for us to use 12 jars.

Oh, and I read Surviving Abe. This has to be the strangest prepping novel I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. The author is a leftie/prog climatista eco-greenie true-believer. His event is a continent-wide storm, which the Weather Channel dubs Abe. It kills millions, but that’s the least of it. A sub-thread running through the book is that organized eco-greenie terrorists have been waiting for just such an event so that they can pile on by destroying infrastructure like the electric grid, water purification plants and so on. Their goal, which the author apparently approves, is to cause a mass die-off of humanity, reducing the world’s population from 7 billion to 2 billion in order to make things “sustainable”. The author is real big on sustainable, and apparently approves of mass murder as the way to get there. Geez. Don’t bother reading it. To add insult to injury, the book ends in the middle of the story and there is no sequel, nor apparently will there be.

Read the comments: 65 Comments

Thursday, 5 May 2016

09:17 – It’s pretty miserable out this morning. Damp with a fine mist in the air, winds of 15 MPH (24 KPH) gusting higher, and temperature in the upper 30’s (~3C), with a wind chill below freezing. It’s a good day to stay in.

I think we need to replace the in-line cartridge water filter for our well water. We’ve lived here five months as of today, and haven’t touched it. Barbara and I have both noticed that our water flow rate seems lower. I just called a plumber to schedule a visit for this afternoon. I want him to show me how to replace the filter and tell me what else needs to be done routinely to maintain our water system. Neither Barbara nor I has ever lived anywhere that didn’t have municipal water, so we need to find out what we need to do.

We started re-watching Deadwood last night. I think it’s been ten years since we watched, and about all we remember is some of the main characters. Like most HBO series, this one features lots of good dresses. It’s also well-written, which makes a striking contrast with Chicago Fire. That started out as a mediocre soap opera and keeps getting worse. With very few exceptions, on-air network series succeed by pandering to the low tastes of the American public.


Read the comments: 98 Comments

Wednesday, 4 May

09:31 – Forty-six years ago today. Four dead in Ohio. Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer. Kids minding their own business. Murdered by the government. Never forget.

Barbara is spending the day in Winston-Salem, running errands and meeting the HVAC company tech at the old house so they can do a system check and replace the central filter. Colin and I are on our own for today. He’s watching the cows. There are a couple dozen along our back fence, including several babies who aren’t much bigger than he is.

More science kit stuff today. I’ll be running more labels for bottles and making up solutions. Barbara labeled about 1,000 bottles yesterday while she watched House of Cards on Netflix streaming.

It now looks pretty certain that it’ll be Trump vs. Clinton in November, two candidates whom almost no one likes, including the rank and file of their own parties. My guess is that Trump will beat Clinton. A lot of voters hate him, but the same is true of Clinton, so it’s a matter of voters from both parties holding their noses and voting for whichever candidate they hate less. How did we get to this point?

12:16 – Colin just took me out to get some exercise. For me, not for him.

As we went out the door, I threw the Frisbee as far as I could toward the treeline on our southern boundary. Colin ran after it and caught it in the air a few yards short of the tree line. He then lay down and waited for me to walk over to him. When I got about five feet from him, he grabbed the Frisbee and ran over to the north side of the property, 150 yards or so away. He lay down, dropped the Frisbee, and waited for me to make my way over to him. When I was about five feet from him, he picked it up and ran back over to the south side of the yard. Rinse and repeat. This dog has the shittiest play skills, not just of any dog I’ve ever had or known, but of any dog I’ve ever heard of. What other dog, ever, doesn’t know that when his human throws a toy he’s supposed to go get it, bring it back, and drop it to be thrown again? Colin absolutely demands full participation. He does the same thing in the house. I’ll throw the ball. He runs and picks it up momentarily, drops it where it was, and runs back to demand that I go get it and bring it back for him.

Read the comments: 64 Comments

Tuesday, 3 May 2016

10:24 – I walked up to Bonnie’s house yesterday while Barbara was out at a Friends of the Library meeting. Bonnie bought her scooter used, and didn’t get the manual for it. It’s a Pride Mobility Victory model, and I figured it’d be easy enough to grab the manual PDF from their website and print it for Bonnie. Turns out, they make/made a whole bunch of different models all named Victory, and there was nothing obvious on the outside of her scooter to indicate which specific Victory model it was. So I looked at the images of the control panel in all of the PDFs until I found one that looked like hers.

When I dropped off the manual, Bonnie gave me some chicken plants for Barbara. She planted those yesterday, so I’m expecting a good crop of eggs once they start growing. When I mentioned that to Barbara, she just rolled her eyes. When I mentioned that if we wanted eggs we might need to plant some eggplants, she almost threw her book at me.

More science kit stuff today. We’ll spend the day labeling bottles.

Read the comments: 20 Comments

Monday, 2 May 2016

09:43 – Barbara is at the gym. When she returns, we’ll be doing more science kit stuff. Barbara labeled 200 sterile 15 mL centrifuge tubes yesterday for the BC03 bacteria culture we sell as an option to biology kits. I need to reculture that this week, make a phosphate-buffered saline suspension from that culture, sterilize our filling equipment, and fill those 200 tubes.

I’ve also been looking at water issues this week. Our hot water is at 48C, which is a bit cool. The standard is now 50C rather than the former 60C, which was hot enough to produce third-degree burns on adults with about 5 seconds’ exposure. One issue with the lower temperature is that the bacteria that produce Legionnaires’ disease thrive at 50C, so the federal government recommends 50C for everyone other than households with an immuno-compromised resident, for which they still recommend 60C. Oh, yeah. Our well pressure tank is a 32-gallon unit, which is smaller than I’d prefer but larger than I expected. Which reminds me that I need to call and bump the electrician, who was supposed to be installing a cutover switch for our generator.

Read the comments: 81 Comments
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- // end of file archive.php // -------------------------------------------------------------------------------