Snow, smoke and sore muscles

 

A dusting of lake-effect snow while walking down the road

Smoke plume from a neighbor's outdoor boiler on a cold morning.

Snow squall, looking across my front yard.

Gym notes

I got to the gym today.

I successfully completed my maintenance routine: 135lb x 6 deadlifts, 185lb x 6 deadlifts, four sets of 205lb x 6 deadlifts.

The last lift was a grind but I made it.

Today, I kept the stop-watch running. I wear one to ensure that I take my entire five-minute recovery between each set. Without the stopwatch I get impatient and rush.

Five minutes between sets. Between 60 seconds and 75 seconds to grind out the six repetitions. Once I pick up the weight at the start of the set I do not release it until I lower it at the end of the set. 

I am going to be feeling some muscle soreness tomorrow and the day after, but it will be a good soreness.

Walking and "Weedy" and "Common" is good

I went for a three-mile walk today and a two-mile walk yesterday.

OK, maybe I am gilding the lily. I turned around 40 yards short of the stop-sign because the brush that was breaking the wind stopped.

14F actual. +1F if exposed to the wind (which I avoided).

I was wearing carpenter jeans (unlined), tee-shirt, Sherpa-lined and hooded overshirt, light work-coat, gloves. I also had a knit hat and was wearing socks and light hiking boots unlike savages in Alberta who stroll about Oddmanton in January wearing cargo-shorts, boonie-caps and crocs as they nibble on pickled eggs skewered upon their dirk.

God willing, I hope to lift tomorrow at the gym.

Neighbors

I ran across a neighbor while walking. I collected his phone number which could be handy in the future.

Weedy trees and trashy fish

I had a fellow kindly point out that Black Locust is considered a "weedy" tree in many locations.

The weedy trees to the left of the ditch are mulberry trees. China. Mulberry can be a very abuse tolerant species. Source of image

I am not going to disagree with him. Any species (plant or animal) that is described as "weedy" generally means that it thrives in the disturbances created by humans. I, for one, appreciate the over-achievers that increase in spite of our insults to the environment. Yes, orchids are beautiful but there is much to be said for mulberries, Black Locust, Box Elder, dandelions, blackberries, bullheads, Channel Cats, rabbits and starlings.

Even tomatoes can be weedy. I have seen a dense jungle of Yellow Pear tomatoes growing on a a sandbar in the Red Cedar River half a mile southwest of downtown East Lansing. Squash can be a weed in compost piles and grape vines along fences.

I sort of understand the mystique of exotics, but life is so, so very much easier if you invest the majority of your effort on boring, proven, robust crops and technologies:

• Potatoes
• Cabbage
• Corn
• Beans
• Squash 
• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Garlic
• Cucumbers
• Turnips 
• 12 or 20 gauge shotguns
• .22LR rifles
• 9mm-to-.45 handguns
• .308 Winchester or 5.56 NATO rifles (or anything in between). Or if you have a source of ammo, 30-06, .303 Brit, 8mm Mauser, 7.62X39mm Ruskie.... 
• Lots of patches and ATF fluid or 0-20 synthetic motor oil for cleaning and lube
• Knives with full-tang, carbon-steel blades between 3" and 8" long
• Angus cross beef animals or Holstein or Jersey crossed with anything.
• Plymouth Rock or Rhode Island Red chickens 

Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett would have been thrilled to have any of those technologies available to them.

They are "common" to the point of forgettable for very good reasons. They work. 

The five-hundred pound gorilla in the room...

I am not going to write about that. Too much mud in the water. I would just be stirring it up since I have no unique insights nor have I been breathlessly following every pundit and new shred of evidence.

Nope. I am going to wait this one out. I have people working on it and I (mostly) trust them.

Recreational Plumbing

I have a leak beneath the faucet in our newly remodeled bathroom.

I turned off the valve and the leak continued, so it is not on the fixture side of the valve.

I felt the threaded joint between the 1/2" nipple and the valve and it does not seem to be coming from there.

By the process of elimination I deduced that I have a flaw in the 1/4 valve. I purchased a replacement this morning and as soon as I feel motivated I will replace the valve and see if good things happen. That will probably happen AFTER Mrs ERJ takes her shower. Dumping the water pressure as she is stepping into the shower is likely not make me popular.

Power outages and emergency lighting

Mrs ERJ was talking with her sister on the phone last night. My S-i-L expressed a concern about power-outages. S-i-L eyesight isn't the greatest even in good light, so she was fretting about being able to find a flashlight and even being able to find and manipulate the on-off button.

Source.  14 hours of light (each) on three AA batteries.

Mrs ERJ mentioned that we have a "Pull open to turn on" lantern in every bedroom.

Roasting a chicken

The plan is to roast a chicken today. Mrs ERJ told me that we have a lid for the dutch-oven in the pantry...I went looking and she was right. I think her sense of aesthetics were offended when I used a cast-iron skillet as a lid.

Having messed around with meat birds, the heavier birds are almost always male and have a better meat-to-bone ratio. The birds at the grocery store varied between 4.7 pounds (dressed) to 5.9 pounds. Since they are all slaughtered at the same age, that means that the 5.9 pound carcass came from a boy bird. 

Property values in Minneapolis

Median house price in Minneapolis. Summer of George Floyd circled in red. Source

 

Affordability index. Higher numbers are more affordable. Something happened near the time of the yellow line to cause a step-function in affordability

I was looking at the housing market in Minneapolis to see if the recent unrest was impacting the housing market.

The short answer is "Not Yet".

I was surprised by how little the unrest around George Floyd's death impacted the housing market. It was nothing like the Detroit race riots.

The Detroit race riots marked a secular shift in the demographics of the region. The Minneapolis market shrugging off the GF riots might be evidence that people recognized it was "business as usual".

Hard to say with any kind of certainty. 

From my brother (worth sharing)

He knows about my housebound situation and has been sending me things to read.

‘Personal finance is never really about the money,’ says CFP Akeiva Ellis at The Bemused.

“I wish I had known sooner that while financial literacy and knowledge are important, personal finance is never really about the money. Though I had a lot to learn, not knowing was never my biggest obstacle to progress; doing was.

Real progress started when I finally asked myself, ‘Why am I like this?’ when it came to money management and began unpacking the hidden beliefs and narratives I carried about money. Those often unexamined stories act like a bossy backseat driver, influencing decisions without you even realizing it. Once you address that part, the tactics finally stick.”

Source

Many successful dieters say that they cannot keep weight off until the understand and reconcile the relationship they have with food.

I am pretty sure it is the same thing with money.

Margin Retreat

"Margin Retreat" is when an enterprise drop simple, less profitable products/services and "retreats" to the high-end of the market because their costs have gone up and they lose money on the cheaper products.

Trucks and cars and snowmobiles and ATVs became bigger, faster and loaded with more "mandatory" features due to margin retreat.

A base S-10 pickup truck cost $12,600 in 1999 (and you could usually pick one up even cheaper at model close-out). Today, a Colorado work-truck has an MSRP of $36k or 3X as much. The annualized, compound interest of 4.3% in price doesn't seem outrageous but the official CPI numbers are a 93% increase and an "official" rate of inflation of 2.6%.

Fast food

The fast food industry shows how the market creates a conveyor-belt that pushes enterprises into margin retreat.

McDonalds opened a drive-in restaurant but didn't make a lot of money, so they famously decided to only prepare and serve those items they made money on. They got rid of the girls on roller skates and the fancy glasses. Hamburgers, fries and soft-drinks all served in paper. They printed money.

The idea caught on. Thousands of me-toos sprang up.

Competitors offered bigger burgers. McDonalds matched them. Competitors offered fish sandwiches. McDonalds matched them. Menu complexity grew.

Real-estate agents became adept at sniffing out where McDonalds was shopping for new locations. The asking prices went up.

Civic leaders started leaning on McDonalds to "contribute to the community" as if providing thousands of kids their first employment experience was not enough.

Customers started suing McDonalds, not because McDonalds is bad but because they have money.

Stockholders expected dividends. 

Staffing became a challenge.

And a flotilla of bare-bones burger-joints opened up that undercut the bottom end of McDonalds menu; competitors with names like In-and-out Burger, Just-a-Burger. In time, if they are successful, they will acquire the non-business costs that accreted on McDonalds, like so many layers of water depositing calcium carbonate on a stalagmite. A company that was once agile and nimble is now cemented to the floor by costs.

Margin retreat is everywhere

You see it in the cost of housing.

Builders say they lose money on stick-built houses smaller than 2000 square-feet.  That is sad because two empty-nesters don't need 2000 square-feet and many of us don't want to live in apartments.

Lots, utility hook-ups or on-site wells/drainfields, driveways, garages, worker rules, waste disposal rules, ever-advancing insulation and electrical codes...all add to the cost of the building and don't add a single, salable square-foot. In fact, the insulation requirements reduce the usable, interior room.

Getting back to trucks

Back in the 1990s, it became fashionable for ranchers and people who grazed animals to leave their $35k pickup parked in the driveway and use a simple UTV + trailer to do fence maintenance. Why use a vehicle that can go 90mph and carry 2000 pounds of cargo when you needed a vehicle that could go six mph over rough ground or maybe 35 mph on gravel roads while carrying (or towing) 300 pounds of fencing tools and supplies?

Maybe you had a way to carry a light varmint rifle or a shotgun for targets-of-opportunity but the that was the extent of the frivolity.

At that time, UTVs like the 400cc Yamaha Kodiac/Grizzly seemed to hit the sweet-spot. MSRP of about $6000.

Today, the smallest engine that ride comes with is a 700cc motor and the MSRP plus mandatory destination charges will cost you $11k. 

And, just as sure as God made little-green-apples, there are competitors flooding into the space the big names abandoned.

Civil relations requires concessions from all parties

An Indian couple was awarded $200k in a court case when a college told them to stop using the microwave ovens to heat their curry sauce. Other students/employees complained about the smell and the mess.

I expect that in very short order, large numbers of students and employees will be firing up their George Foreman grills and filling the air with the sweet smells of barbecuing beef.

It is hard to imagine that any judge could rule AGAINST beef-eaters for cooking the traditional foods of their peoples even if it makes other employees retch.

For the record, I once worked in a factory that forbid the cooking or reheating bacon in the break-rooms. I wonder why. 

I went to the gym today

I had low expectations. I was not disappointed.

I was not able to complete my maintenance goals of warm-up and then four sets of six reps of dead-lifting my bodyweight.

The warm-ups went OK. My warm-up isn't very scientific. It is six reps of 135lbs (the bar + a 45 pound plate on each end) then six reps of 185 (the bar + a 45 and a 20 pound plate on each end).

I managed one set of six reps of my bodyweight and my glutes and hamstrings said "Enough".

I don't think the flu made me weak. I think the inactivity that went along with the flu did.f

I expect the stamina to come back quickly if I lift once every three days and walk on the other two days.