10:09 – Things are pretty quiet around here. Barbara is finishing up her Christmas decorations today, and we’ll probably bake cookies. I’d also like to try making up some peanut butter fudge.
It’s a good day to stay inside. It’s gone from cool, breezy, and dry to warm, breezy, and wet. We had more than an inch (2.5 cm) of rain overnight, with another couple of inches expected today and tomorrow. It’s just lucky that our temperatures have gone up 20F or so, or this might have been a real mess.
Barbara said yesterday that we’d had only 0.03 inches of rain from early October until now. That affects my water planning. Until now, I’d though that our rainfall was very evenly distributed throughout the year, with roughly one inch per week, usually in two or three weekly rains. Going almost two months with almost no rain means we can’t depend on rainwater capture, at least unless we have a lot more storage.
We’ve been doing a fair amount of baking-powder baking, and our only can of baking powder is almost empty. Barbara is going to pick up another can from the store today, and I just put in a Walmart order that included four cans of baking powder as well as half a dozen cans of Augason potato shreds and three pounds of Hershey’s unsweetened cocoa powder.
We still have a 250 pounds of macaroni to repackage for LTS. It’s the Walmart house-brand macaroni, and it’s smaller than some brands. I discovered experimentally yesterday that it can in fact be funneled into 2-liter bottles. It’s basically free-flowing, which surprised me given its shape. I figured it’d logjam almost instantly in the stem of the funnel, but it didn’t. The trick is to use the cut-off top of another 2-liter bottle to make the widest possible funnel. It’s helpful to have a second person to hold the funnel and keep it aligned with the 2-liter bottle mouth, but I was actually able to do it by myself. When a jam did occur, gentle jiggling freed it easily.
Incidentally, if you order Walmart macaroni (or anything else from Walmart or Amazon particularly) be very careful about pricing. I ordered the 250 pounds of macaroni on two separate orders. The first, for 100 pounds (20 five-pound bags) was $4.48/bag. The second order, for 30 five-pound bags, was $3.17/bag. The last I checked, it was back up to $4.48/bag.