Fake News Friday

 

October .EQ. Potatoes, Persimmons, Raspberries and Apples

 

In Russia, they have folk-songs about raspberries.

Alternating bites. Persimmon in Quicksilver's right hand. Bunch of ripe raspberries in her left.

Life is very, very good. Especially if you are blessed to be a grandparent.

I got another 100 feet of potato row dug. I really need to start writing things down. The north half of the potato patch was Lehigh and the southwest 1/4 was Kennebec. My memory was that the west end was Lehigh and the northeast quarter was Kennebec.

I really want to be sure to keep at least 40 pounds of Lehigh to plant next season. I can get Kennebec seed potatoes locally, so I don't need to save seed potatoes from them. 

Today's plan is to take Quicksilver apple picking and to dig another 100' of potatoes.

 

Commies gonna be communists

 

Mrs ERJ watched one of the political debates. The debate was hosted by the local public TV station. The moderators didn't moderate. They joined the communist by cross-examining the conservative and letting the communist use much of the conservative's time to interrupt and launch verbal harpoons.

Obviously, the entire "PBS" and "NPR" universe hates Trump with the heat of a million, white-hot suns. He stopped their gravy-train and commies gonna commy.

The 40k ft fly-over is that the debate was a draw. The communist kept talking like he was running against Donald Trump (who is not running for Michigan's 7th Congressional seat) and the conservative could not get the communist to own the fact that, by his own posts on social media and video footage, he wants to dismantle the police and prison system and outlaw fossil fuels. 

God and my wife laugh when I make plans

I had great plans for yesterday. Most of them are now great plans for today.

We had drop-in company.

Mrs ERJ had to run errands and I was tasked with watching Quicksilver. 

My truck got stuck out-back.

The trailer I went to go look at had been sold.

I took a nap.

On the positive side

After about 10 days of being drunk-and-disorderly, I pulled myself together and went for a run. I only went two miles but it felt fast. I felt like I was gliding.

Let's see, digging potatoes, my back hurt, I helped somebody move, dental issues. All good reasons to take a pause. But now it is time to go back to work. 

And I did a few deadlifts with the concrete-and-black-iron-pipe dumbbell after that same 10 days off. Nothing outrageous. I dead-lifted it once and held it fifteen seconds and then slowly put it down. I repeated that three more times over the course of about an hour. The concrete-&BIP dumbbell is a set 205 pounds so there is no warming up with a lighter weight. As Yoda said, "There is no "try". There is only "DO"."

I have an appointment with the dentist for November 10 to deal with the missing filling. 

And I tilled the parts of the potato patch that we had already dug. 

This is the "Before" picture. From the west end, looking east.

 

This is the "After" picture. From the east end, looking west.

My intention is to scatter red clover seeds and let if fallow for a year. Red clover fixes nitrogen. Maybe not enough in a year to get a full crop of potatoes but perhaps enough to allow me to sprinkle less of it and still get a full crop.

Another thought from yesterday on the manager at Quality Dairy

People calibrate based on your "normal". In instrumentation, it is called auto-ranging. If "F-n-c-k" in some form or another comes out of your mouth three times in every sentence, then one more "f-n-c-k" will not get anybody's attention. But if you very, very rarely resort to strong language, then using it once will electrify people.

If your verbal interactions point out the positives 75% of the time then the 25% of the time when you have to make a correction, it is much more likely to be taken to heart.

The positives cannot be BS. They have to be actions that you want to reinforce and want to see repeated. "Susy, those bronze sparkles in your hair go well with your eyes" don't cut it. "Denver, great job picking up a broom and sweeping for five minutes while you waited for me to get back to you" does cut it.

The boss who practices using the minimum amount of "correction" in their tone has a lot of head-room when they need to amplify the signal. 

Phoenix Suns

 If I was superstitious, I would bet on the Phoenix Suns to win the NBA championship. Quicksilver is now "into" combinations of purple-and-orange.

At first, I was afraid that she might be a Minnesota Vikings fan...but the colors more closely match those of the Phoenix Suns. If I read the odds correctly, they are a 15,000-to-1 long-shot.

Hornady H2266

The Hornady H2266 is a 55 grain, .224" diameter, "soft-point" projectile often used in the .223 Remington cartridge.

It is available as Hornady #80255 as loaded ammo. 

It has many limitations: It loses velocity like a beachball thrown into the wind, accuracy suffers from cross-winds, its light weight means it cannot breach barriers and reliably perform on flesh.

However, if you work within those limitations and can keep the impact velocity between 2300fps +/- 400fps then it works surprisingly well on deer-sized animals.

At 2500fps it offers 14" of penetration on ballistic gelatin, full mushrooming with 40 grains of retained mass. Higher impact velocity means less penetration and more violent mushrooming. Lower impact velocities mean deeper penetration and less mushrooming and weigh shedding.

A broadside shot through a typical deer's ribcage is only 6" or 7". Not all shots are broadside so the hunter has to use discretion. That is not a total deal-breaker, though. Even guys shooting 300 Winchester Magnums have to pass on shooting when the only part of the animal they can see is the rump.

If you are considering it for defensive purposes, be mindful that it might only offer 11" of penetration at across-the-room distances and that the "BOOM!" will be deafening in a closed room. 11" is less than the FBI standards but only by the tiniest amount.

An aside: I melted the lead core out of a H-2266 and determined that the copper-alloy jacket is 27% of the mass of the projectile. That compares to 33% for a 180 grain, Remington Core-lokt projectile from a 30-06.  More copper means a harder, deeper penetrating bullet. They are in the same neighborhood.

One final complication: The actual muzzle velocity will vary between what the box bases its claims on rifles chambered for .223 Remington and what it will actually deliver out of a rifle chambered for 5.56x45mm NATO. The 5.56NATO chambered rifle will often have measured velocities that are 300fps slower than the listed velocity. That is actually to your advantage because 2950fps is much, much closer to the 2700fps-to-1900fps sweet-spot for adequate penetration.

Since the bullet loses about 100fps for every 25 yards it travels, the projectile out of an AR pattern rifle in 5.56NATO will be at the upper-end of that sweet-spot after traveling about 50 yards. 

Indiana natives: Ungovernable

 

Technically, if you are traveling in reverse then the driver is in front of the steering wheel.

Bonus image

 

Write something every day

I had two interactions yesterday that I want to share.

I stopped at Family Fare (a regional grocery store) yesterday morning. At the checkout line I mentioned to Randy that $1.99 for four pounds of sugar is a great price.

He looked at the three packages I was buying and observed "And it never goes bad."

I said "Yeah, but it can solidify into a brick."

Then Randy suggested "It doesn't have to. You can store it in dry mayo jars or some other type of plastic container and it will stay pourable for decades."

I thanked him for that idea. It had never crossed my mind.

The other interaction was on the same shopping trip. I stopped into Quality Dairy (a regional convenience store) and purchased a jug of cider and a jug of milk.

Things were chaotic when I got up to the counter. One guy was resetting the gas pumps and was looking away, out the window. One guy was stocking the cigarettes 8 feet to my left. The guy who was immediately opposite me behind the counter was multi-tasking...trying to fix the receipt printer on a cash register and in-process a package that had just been dropped off by Amazon. The manager had just clocked-out for her break and was walking out the door to have her morning cigarette.

The gas guy had turned and locked up. Deer in the headlights time. There were too many things going on for him to process. The manager said "Troy, can you help the customer" and she nodded at me as she skated out the door.

The dude fighting with the receipt printer moved over a fraction of a foot. Troy moved to where he could work a register (maybe five feet) and he processed my transaction. (His name wasn't Troy but I needed to call him something in this short vignette). 

The manager had not raised her voice. She didn't have to. Maybe the dude fixing the receipt printer is grumpy and Troy didn't want to ruffle his feathers. The manager handled it. Troy just needed the tiniest nudge to get off top-dead-center and the manager stepped up to take grumpy's ire (if he dared).

After I stowed the jugs in the truck, I mentioned to the manager that I thought she had handled things well back in the store. Not that it was a big deal. A calm "suggestion" at the right time can nudge future events away from ever becoming a big deal.

The manager had managed the art of "just enough" and "right time", and it showed. 

So, two excellent customer interactions in two different businesses.

Canning notes

From the comments "I love seeing Mason jars, but it’s nicer to see full Mason jars😋"

A couple of nights ago, Mrs ERJ asked me "Can I put away all of this canning stuff?"

I waffled. "Maybe..."

We originally planned to streamline our pantry and only preserve the amount of food we expect to consume in the next 365 days.

Take apple sauce, for instance. We go through one quart a week like clockwork. There are 52 weeks in a year. The correct number of quarts of apple sauce to have at the end of canning is 50(ish) quarts.

But then Quicksilver started eating our apple sauce and she is going through a growth-spurt. Mrs ERJ suggested that we put up a few more quarts. Since the canner handles 7 quarts per load, it became a question of "How many loads?"

Mrs ERJ deigned 2 loads, 14 quarts, to be adequate margin. So...we made and canned 14 more quarts and since we had 3 extra quarts (math is hard), we canned those too. So our 49 quarts grew to 49 + 17.

"What do you mean, "Maybe,"?" she queried.

"Do you remember that young man who graciously volunteered to pick apples for us in the Upper Orchard?" I asked her. "It would be a classy thing if we made some apple sauce from the apples he picked and gave it to him."

Mrs ERJ knows this particular young man and has the universal, maternal urge to feed him.

"What can I do to help?" was her response.

So...Mrs ERJ selected the apples that went into the blend and washed the pint jars. She suggested smaller jars because single guys who eat out a lot don't always go through food quickly.

Even Quicksilver got into the act. She enjoyed turning the handle on the Squeezo-strainer and watching the cooked apples go into the hopper, apple sauce flow down the chute and the pomace eject from the far end of the screw. She was also fascinated that I ran the pomace through the tool a second time to squeeze as much pulp out of the skins and seeds as possible.

Seeing how the cheerful volunteer struggles to keep body-weight on, his custom-made apple sauce had 2 pounds of sugar (about a 12% bump in sugar), 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 2 teaspoons of citric acid (as suggested by the latest USDA guidelines) AND a substantial dollop of molasses (for depth of flavor).

We can stack up to 20, small-mouth pints in our canning kettle. The load which started out targeting 14 pints ended up at 18 pints.

I let Quicksilver eat the left-over apple candy sauce in the mixing kettle. She didn't complain.

Are we done canning for the year?

Probably not.

I want to can 18 pints of chicken in wide-mouth jars.

I want to can the same amount of venison and, perhaps another 18 pints of ground pork. 

We like using wide-mouth jars for canning meat because some of the meat adheres to the sides of the jars and wide-mouth jars are easier to scrub. One hack is to fill the jars with water and then add a teaspoon of lye (sodium hydroxide) to soften/dissolve the adhering meat overnight before scrubbing. Exercise caution because the lye solution is till caustic in the morning.

And if 20 pounds of steelhead or salmon fell into my possession, I would pressure can that but I would probably opt for 8 oz jars instead of pints.

I might pressure-can cooked beans but I have to study the economics of canned-beans-on-sale vs the cost of the lids.

I would like to have most of that done before November 3, if possible. 

However, I think it is safe to say that we are done using the Squeezo-strainer for the season. 

May be the best minute you invest today

 

Busy like squirrels

 

Squash on shelves

Squash in oven. Both of these squash had a soft-spot on them that made the non-starters for storage.

Containers of potatoes getting tucked away in various places.

We have been appreciating 7 gallon, fabric nursery bags for storing vegetables in the root cellar. They are very inexpensive, collapse down to a very small size for the off-season, breath, don't create "pressure sores" on the rinds of vegetables. They have two handles that are easy on the hands.  There is a lot to like about them.