Merry Christmas to all…
May the blessings of this season find you and yours.
Thank you all for continuing to stop by, and making this place great.
Enjoy the day, make some memories, live your life, and celebrate His.
nick
Mon. Dec. 25, 2023 – Christmas Day
69 Comments and discussion on "Mon. Dec. 25, 2023 – Christmas Day"
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A very Happy Christmas to you all, and special prayers for anyone who is not happy today; someone is thinking kindly of you.
From yesterday…
Another thing you can do is sieve out the lumps, keep the powdery flour, then put it out in small piles in rain-protected locations outside early in the springtime. Bees can substitute flour for pollen in times when pollen is scarce (a cold springtime, for instance), which gives them a hand up in getting the hive thriving as early in the season as possible.
Everybody knows that bees need nectar, but we forget that pollen (or another source of nitrogen, like flour) is essential too
Home-made Play-Doh: ingredients are flour, salt, oil, water and cream of tartar. Food colouring, if you want it pretty. You’ll find a plethora of recipes online.
Huh. Learn something new every day. And thanks! Now I’ve done my learning for the day and can just bumble around like a fool for the next 19 hours.
Merry Christmas to everyone.
Merry Christmas!
For some reason, I couldn’t access the site last night around 9pm Central.
Oh, Christmas Tree.
Oh, Christmas Tree.
Drama goes on
In the SEC.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
Up early today, as the 12yo was VERY EXCITED!!!111!!!
Presents opened. Got a couple of cool tools and a new DMR Radio. That’ll have some learning curve I’m sure as I haven’t done any digital ham radio at all.
Coffee has been drunk, now for some breakfast…
n
Merry Christmas everyone. Have a safe holiday week.
Last night around 9:00 pm Central I also could log in.
Merry Christmas!
Sunny and a breezy 38f this morning.
47F and gusting, it’s chilly in the house. I’ll have to notch up the Tstat without anyone noticing.
n
Greta will notice. She is also angry about the lump of coal in her Christmas stocking.
So what, enjoy Christmas and loved ones.
Merry Christmas to All!
If you have extra cookies, send them to me.
EXTRA cookies? I’m not sure what you mean…. ;-p
n
Cookies… nature’s perfect food!
Word to the wise, it’s not what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s what you eat between New Year’s and Christmas that matters. This is what we waited for. Enjoy!
@Nick
I was given a pre-Christmas package of these:
https://cravnflavor.com/product/candy-cane-with-peppermint-creme-double-stuffed-chocolate-sandwich-cookies/
I’ve tried them with milk.
I’ve tried them with coffee.
I’m going to wrap the rest of them up four at a time and put them in the freezer as my “emergency” cookies.
They are almost extra.
I will be taking ingredient inventory this week to make sure I have supplies for the Last Saturday of the Year Quadruple-Batch Chocolate Chip Cookie Bakeree. The oven, baking stones and multi-tier cooling rack that I got three years ago are ready.
Not seasonal, but I’ve been watching this guy’s shorts and they are both entertaining and educating…
The language used in particular interests me. It’s a complete stand alone dialect of english, maybe even a patois.
https://www.youtube.com/@Odawgdiggitydawg/shorts
NSFW or most places, watch your audio level…
n
I’m not a cookie fan; I made fudge for most of my neighbors. Two batches of Million Dollar fudge. My wife’s secret recipe which is now all over on the net.
Passed some of it out yesterday the rest I be delivering in today.
Merry Christmas to all!
DMR isn’t real ham radio.
Just kidding, I thought I’d put that out there first. I haven’t done digital yet either, except a bit of FT4 during field day at the club.
Next thing, you’ll be needing to set up a Raspberry Pi hot spot for your new radio. Then cross-band repeaters to get DMR to talk to D-Star and C4FM. Repeater isn’t the right word but I can’t think of it right now, and I”m too lazy to search.
GMRS radios which the folks in a local Desert Exploers (4WDS) use. That type which I will get next.
Ah, a nap and I’m feeling a whole lot better!
GMRS- technically needs a license, the license covers your whole family and lasts several years. No test, just a payment to FCC. Most repeater owners will want to know your call sign, so it’s worth being licensed. That’s right- GMRS is real radio, even though it’s supported by blister pack walkies, and overlaps with FRS. There are a couple of GMRS mobiles that allow use of full power, and repeaters. I can’t remember which hand helds support repeaters, but I’m sure the club has that info.
There is a fairly big GMRS repeater network in the Houston area.
————–
Time to get dinner in the oven.
n
Hmmm, there were a few fire works, and some bottle rockets last night, the first for this neighborhood. Things continue to slowly decline.
We got a boatload of fireworks last night after midnight. I took the dog out at 1 am and multiple houses were shooting off fireworks. It was weird. In fact, I at first thought that there was an animal (coyote) in the backyard so I took the dog in, grabbed two flashlights and a gun, and checked out the entire ¾ acre backyard. I found nothing but then I noticed that there were fireworks going off in several directions.
Oh, Christmas Tree.
Oh, Christmas Tree.
Drama goes on
In the SEC.
Not at TAMU, we already went through our drama.
Greta will notice. She is also angry about the lump of coal in her Christmas stocking.
I heard it was 10 lbs of coal in her stocking …
Merry Christmas to All!
If you have extra cookies, send them to me.
Merry Christmas to all !
I had two iced sugar cookies and a boiled egg for breakfast. And two huge cups of coffee with International Delight white chocolate mocha liberally poured in. Take that my cardiologist who said I should never have coffee or caffeine again !
There are only two iced sugar cookies left. I am thinking about hiding them for the future, yeah the future me.
47F and gusting, it’s chilly in the house. I’ll have to notch up the Tstat without anyone noticing.
It was 65 F in my bedroom when I woke up at noon. I turned on the heater also to 66 F. It ran the temperature up to 69 F while I was grabbing sustenance.
Since I zoned the bedroom 4 ton a/c / 120,000 btu/hr system between the four bedrooms (two zones using electric dampers), the a/c works great but the heater overshoots like crazy. I need to move the thermostat to an interior wall so it gets a better interior temperature reading.
@lynn, future you with thank past you for thinking of him…
Going to do my prime rib roast in the slow cooker, just because. The sale meat was ‘select’ not prime, so even though we generally eat good beef red to purple, I’ll go more traditional to med rare. It’s resting on the counter to get to room temp right now. Wife wants to eat later than I thought, so I’m not in a rush anymore, should take 3-4 hours to cook, plus half hour to rest. I thought I had some Penzey’s Prime Rib rub left in the cabinet. It’s been years since the Penzey scion told me and voters like me that he didn’t want us as customers, so maybe I used it up before now. In any case, I can’t find it, and the recipe calls for a pretty simple rub. Mostly butter, garlic, salt and pepper, and a bit of thyme.
The delay means I can do a loaf in the bread machine too. Yum.
For lunch I think I’ll just eat cookies and fudge.
n
Guess who is on Dilbert Reborn today ?
Yup, Mickey Mouse. Maybe a little bit early as I believe the copyright expires on Jan 1, 2024.
My wife made apple pie for desert tonight. The top crust is replaced with cinnamon rolls. I might just have to make an exception to the low carb lifestyle this evening.
ok, changed my mind. Going with this technique
https://www.seriouseats.com/perfect-prime-rib-beef-recipe
as it combines the slow low heat of the slow cooker, with the high heat of crunchy outside, and takes about the same time… but leaves more ‘fudge factor’ time at the end.
n
Wait until the accountants get to work.
My youngest child might be at College Station this fall.
We always use the gas grill for pizza on Christmas Eve for the very precise temperature control.
I’m playing with the settings right now to dial it in for yeast rolls … and reheating pizza while I calibrate.
Driving out to the boonies of Wisconsin while avoiding tolls, we got quite a tour of Illinois, including Weber-Stephen HQ!
“A “Textbook” Sudden Stratospheric Warming Event Appears To Be Unfolding”
https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/textbook-sudden-stratospheric-warming-event-appears-be-unfolding
“Meteorologists on social media channel X are posting weather models about the increasing threat of a so-called sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) over the Arctic, which could unleash wintry weather across the eastern half of the US in the new year.”
“”A textbook sudden stratospheric warming event looks to be unfolding,” private weather forecaster BAM Weather (BAMWX).”
“Judah Cohen, Ph.D. and an atmospheric and environmental scientist who studies the polar vortex, told FOX Weather an SSW event takes “about two weeks for the effects of the sudden stratospheric warming to impact our weather.””
Oh my.
Ok, roast is in the slow oven. ingredients are in the bread machine. Half the rest of the menu is selected.
One disadvantage of the slow oven is not being able to cook stuff along side the roast. I guess I’ll do mashed potatoes instead of baked. If I want a real mess, maybe I’ll make home fries.
n
Loss of 1M$ /year to the local economy.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-feel-family-member-has-died-small-new-york-town-devastated-gun-plant-shuts-down
“Shocked” but in the next breath mentions the unfriendliness of NYS to guns and gun owners, high taxes, and business unfriendly policies…
We are clearly in the stage of decline where people move for political reasons, sorting themselves geographically.
n
Arggg. I was going to keep all the comments and post today on the positive side. Guess I screwed that up.
n
@greg, it’s been a while since I used it but I loved using the rotisserie on my BBQ grill. Birds, roasts, anything big enough that it didn’t crisp up, the rotisserie made short work of it with great results.
We bought the kit as an add on, from ebay, because the factory one was crazy expensive.
It’s another way to use what you’ve already got…
n
Repeated strip mining by private equity didn’t help.
The difference of course is that the “migrants” are a huge drain on taxpayers, and the people “fleeing high taxes” are by definition, taxpayers… so the states lose doubly.
nice graphic.
n
Also true and probably ongoing, but not germaine. The company persists, for the moment, just acknowledging they are not welcome in NYFS. And they have already fled to warmer climes.
Holy heII. Battlespace prep.
They are trying to get ahead of the earlobe thing…
n
If the world doesn’t want us to point out its suckitude, perhaps it should try sucking less.
Please share the recipe with us. I love fudge.
Body doubles. The film to watch is The Eagle has Landed (1976). Worth it for just the chemistry between Donald Sutherland and the lovely Jenny Agutter, but also a great film.
Off to bed now. We did Christmas German style yesterday, with presents etc. Today was a lazy day, with steak-frites, two bottles of red wine and ice-cream for dinner, followed by a couple of games of Tabu and Uno. Great fun.
Sure…. 1.6 million. Isn’t that a typo? Or just what they have caught and released? What about the rest of illegals? The other 10 million?
The bread machine is doing what it does. Every loaf is different, always tasty, but sometimes it doesn’t quite rise or worse, it rises and collapses. Fresh warm bread with enough butter? It’s good.
I have chicken thighs thawing and they will be heavily sprinkled with black pepper and Fiesta’s Chicken Rub. Something I forgot about on the spice rack. I might as well use the stuff. Just to get rid of the clutter. It’s old enough to be in second grade. It’s a simple rub. Salt, “Spices”, more salt aka MSG, garlic and onion powders. Plus a wave of lemon powder for a slight hint of Lemon Pepper.. Rice flour as a filler and the usual anti-caking chemicals.
Anyway. The chicken will go into the oven for an hour or so. Veggies? Someone will pick a can from the pantry.
Loss of 1M$ /year to the local economy.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-feel-family-member-has-died-small-new-york-town-devastated-gun-plant-shuts-down
“Shocked” but in the next breath mentions the unfriendliness of NYS to guns and gun owners, high taxes, and business unfriendly policies…
We are clearly in the stage of decline where people move for political reasons, sorting themselves geographically.
“The company would suffer a loss in sales volume and a tarnished brand name following the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.”
“Investigators said the assailant, Adam Lanza, 26, gunned down 20 children and six adults using a Remington Bushmaster AR-15 rifle.”
“The tragedy sparked a wrongful death lawsuit in which the families of nine victims and a teacher who survived the shooting linked Remington to the tragedy as the gun’s manufacturer.”
“In February 2022, Remington settled the case for $73 million.”
This should have never been allowed to go forward.
Do you use yeast or starter dough? If the former, do you buy packets or a jar? How do you store it? If you buy packets, keep them in the cupboard, and grab one when you want to make bread, stop doing that. Get enough yeast, in a jar or as packets from the same box, for several loaves and keep it in the fridge, then note whether you get consistent results.
If you still get inconsistent results, make sure you’re measuring carefully and consistently. For instance, water being off by a tablespoon is enough to screw up a loaf.
If none of that is the problem, maybe it’s the bread machine. I don’t think I’ve heard of one having inconsistent temperature during the mixing and rising, but I guess it could happen.
My authority for this: at least a thousand loaves of yeast bread made in a bread machine, plus hundreds by hand or with a stand mixer, with consistently good results.
“How to Remove Bloatware From Your New PC””
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-rid-a-new-pc-of-crapware
“A new Windows PC typically comes with software you don’t want. Here’s how to deal with it.”
Crapware sucks and has been why I hand built our PCs until now. At least Dells do not come with a lot of crapware.
The Million Dollar Fudge recipe is easily found by searching the net.
Three of comments regarding making it:
1) The sugar mix must be constantly stirred to prevent burning.
2) The sugar mixed should be heated on low until the sugar is melted then the heat increased while stirring constantly while it boils.
3) The fudge is very creamy; cooling it (I covered it and I placed it outside for a couple of hours) before makes cutting it with hot knife helps a lot.
I clearly remember the Bushmaster being featured on the front page of Cabela’s Christmas sale insert in the Vantucky paper back in Christmas 2011. $499! Cheap!
One of the Chinese relations who drove up from California was trying to pick a fight at Thanksgiving about Florida and Treyvon so he feigned disgust with the Cabelas specials.
The Cabela’s owners sold out to Bass Pro not long after Sandy Hook. At the time, the writing was on the wall about what was coming in the court system.
My last new Windows machine not built by me was a Lenovo T series laptop with a moderate amount of bloatware. After a difficult break-in period, I wiped the drive clean and reinstalled Windows 10 using an ISO image downloaded from Microsoft and haven’t had any problems with the machine since then.
The digital license covered the reinstall activation.
Bread machine recipes have to be adjusted to add additional flour or use less water living within 100 miles of the Gulf. The amount of adjustment varies so, when we had a machine, I added flour a little at a time during the kneading cycle until the dough stopped sticking to the paddle.
The technique requires some practice, but the mistakes are generally tasty.
Ok, been meaning to link this, not because of the technology used, which is the focus of the article but for what they inadvertently reveal…
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Spectroscopy_Helps_Unravel_the_Mysteries_of/p5/vo221/i1437/a69389
There’s more… but the irony of protecting wetlands only to increase methane release and get an 84X multiplier over carbon…. Ha ha!
n
Dell small business machines are generally bloatware free, except for the Dell crep.
n
Bloatware/crapware. I bought my wife’s notebook from a MS store a few years ago on a black Friday. OEM W10 with zero crapware. W10 still runs fine. I bought my desktop from a MS certified refurbisher several years ago. Came with a new hard drive with an OEM W7 installed, which I upgraded to W10. Zero crapware. Still runs fine.
Every time previously, I built my own boxen, and would do a bare metal install of Windows. No crapware. The new or refurbished with OEM Windows have been the same. I may be on to something…
The refurbs, primo boxen from major manufacturers, have been better than what I built myself, with far less of a learning curve. I credit Newegg for their excellent buyer reviews. To be fair, I am taking advantage of the purchasing power of Dell and HP, who cherrypick the good stuff from the big Chinesium mfrs. They do the research, and I buy broken-in hardware that gives me a few more years of dependable service. The bonus is that it is way cheaper than the components I could buy myself. Bob might do the same if he were still around.
My latest HP laptop (via Amazon and a third party that replaced the spinning hard drive with 4TB SSD) did not have any crapware, except for Norton AV which I immediately removed (I use Sophos). I did have to disable something related to MS signon, but everything else was OK.
But that all could have been because I used a cloning software to clone my previous laptop to the new one, moving all programs. Perhaps the crapware got overwritten.
re:
Spectroscopy Helps Unravel the Mysteries of Methane Emissions
Author is a non-technical manager with a BA (University of Derby) and an MBA (Open University). That is not, in itself, proof that he could not write about some simple results of atmospheric measurements.
But the text of the article is non-sense and not supported by the graphs, which do not show that 2020 is any different than years before or after.
The link to the alleged work
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Methane_levels_surged_in_2020_despite_lockdowns
has only one graph, “Methane Over South Sudan”. (the two in the first article are absent) The three years of data (2018-2020) for the Sudan show seasonal variation of 25, 40, and 60 ppb. That is not enough to:
a) even begin talk about what is “normal” for that region
b) have a significant effect on global averages
There are no links to the additional work other than recent past measurements in East Africa.
What we have is typical global warming research in a small area which gives small results that are over-generalized and used to produce scary quotes that are in turn used by bad, incompetent writers to produce more scary quotes. Models are involved, as expected, as is bad math, bad statistics, and bad writing.
For anyone interested in atmospheric methane I recommend two articles:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/19/methane-much-ado-about-nothing/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/02/09/methane-spikes/
Note the inclusion of a familiar graph in the second link.
If you want to spend even more time, take a look at:
“Atmospheric methane and climate change” in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
Your eyes may glaze as you read over the jumps from nmol/mol (what’s that in ppb?) to percentages, but hang on until you get to:
Inasmuch as the last 800,000 years includes exactly one partial interglacial (the one we’re still in now) and one partial glacial (the Pleistocene, which lasted 2.5 million years) and consequently one transition between, I have a very high confidence that the inclusion of b.s. such as this indicates that wikipedia is fully in the bag for global warming zealotry.
Well that recipe and method worked VERY well. No hassle, no fuss, and delicious result.
Mashed potatoes with sauteed garlic, onion, and bacon mixed in, corn, and fresh bread. KINGS!
4 ¾ pounds with bone, one small serving left. Two teen girls, my wife and me. Granted the kids don’t eat many sides, but they ate a lot of bread today.
I definitely recommend the recipe linked above.
n
What a bunch of horse hockey. Methane in the atmosphere converts to CO2 and water in less than a decade.
Methane comes from many sources: humans, cows, swamps, critters, etc.
The people who want to regulate fire are doing this to lord it over the rest of us. Their grandchildren will use our grandchildren for footstools if this nonsense continues on.
Fixed it for you.
Yeah, I noticed that the world map of methane sources seemed to have a bright dot on Chez Ray.
BC: Santa’s New Self Driving Sleigh
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2023/12/25
So that is why Santa did not show up at my house last night.
WRT liion battery fires… from a newsletter.
Wouldn’t want one in the garage under my master bedroom. Watch out for the white clouds.
n
Merry Christmas to one and all.. (currently boxing day here in Oz..)
Been raining in Melbourne which is upsetting the traditional cricket boxing day test match.. 🙁 Otherwise Christmas came and went without any drama. Weather was pleasant, 30c / 86f and is cooler again today..
@SteveF.. re working clobber for your daughter.. look for “natural” fibres where you can, (cotton/wool etc), rather than polyester/ nylon etc., which will melt or worse burn when exposed to welding sparks, or even leaning against hot material. Same goes for feet & hands. A leather apron and spats might be an option.. (of course you might be already aware of this.. ) 😀
Cheers
– not my favorite Dr Who era, and can’t say I remember the man in the role he played. Lot more acting chops than any 10 people in any recent Marvel movie though.
n
– not my favorite Dr Who era, and can’t say I remember the man in the role he played. Lot more acting chops than any 10 people in any recent Marvel movie though.
Does the Wandavision TV series count ? The followon Wanda / Dr. Strange movie was kinda off though.
I buy yeast in a jar. It goes right into the fridge from the store. Current jar is Red Star brand. Yesterday’s loaf turned out great.
Instead of “add ingredients as listed” I put the salt, sugar, and powdered milk in first. Then added the water. Sloshed it around to mix. Next flour and hit the start button. Then the yeast.