Applesauce

Today is an applesauce day.

My goal is to make and can 14 quart. My stretch goal is 28 quarts.

It comes down to BTU/hours and how many hours can I stick with it. I started washing the first batch of apples at 8:45. It is now 11:45 and the first jars have been in the canning kettle for about 20 minutes and are not up to a boil, yet.

From the standpoint of conserving hot-water and clean-up, it makes sense to run the set-up as long as possible. Cleaning up after 28 quarts is no more work than cleaning up after 7.

That means that I won't be working on deer blinds or fixing mowers or verifying the optics on any equipment today. 

28 quarts would get me a little over half-way to our goal of having 52 quarts in the pantry.

Update: The last load "Dinged" at 4:40. We netted 30 quarts which was two more than the stretch-target. I gave one to Quicksilver for helping with the project and we put the other orphan in our refrigerator. 

Anton Daniels reaction videos

 

Anton Daniels is a long-time Detroit native and he is a content creator. He has been doing many "reaction videos" to the Black community's response to Charlie Kirk's death.

If you want an even shorter example (different video), start HERE and listen to the 2:50 mark 

Clearly, not EVERY Black person responds in the same way, but some of them are feeling dissonance between what the echo-chamber and mainstream media tells them happened and what they see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears. 

Human spirit

 

Human spirit knows no limits when it comes to age. Two minute run-time.

Those old ladies have spines of steel. I wonder who hope to gain financially by the sale of the convent. 

Dating as an information-gathering tool

 

My opinions obviously "date" me as old-fashioned.

Dating is what I did to find a mate. It wasn't supposed to be a lifetime occupation or just a pleasant way to pass the time.

If a lady proposed that I buy her groceries for our second date, I would find that perfectly acceptable if she also offered to prepare and serve me a home-cooked meal in her apartment in lieu dropping $100 on two dinners and drinks. I would bring the wine.

How much can you learn about somebody going to a movie (where you cannot converse) and then to a restaurant? She could have kids or a live-in boyfriend and there is no guarantee you would learn that in the artificial, contrived scripts of traditional dating. She could be a slob or be OCD. She could raise reptiles for a hobby or maybe she collects books. Maybe she decorates with empty vodka bottles or maybe she paints watercolors. Perhaps she plays the accordion or bag-pipes.

What does she consider an honest, home-cooked meal: A frozen pizza and Little Debbies nutty bars or salad, roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans and home-made apple pie? Or, perhaps she is too "liberated" to cook?

If you look at the cost of a date as the cost of acquiring actionable information, dropping $100 on groceries could be the wisest $100 you will ever spend. You might learn that she is a keeper or might see a bunch of red-flags that tells you that she is somebody to drop like a hot potato. Most likely, you would find that she has promise and is willing to be flexible, excellent qualities that are often under-rated.

There is probably a plot for a good Rom-Com movie in that scenario. 

 

From the comments

"Swedish Candle". Three axial chainsaw cuts. Build a small fire on top of the log. Embers drop down. Length of cuts is enough to pull a draft.

Alternate method: Split log into quarters or sixths. Re-assemble the wedges but in a different order so they don't fit line-to-line. Bind them with a couple wraps of wire. Light small fire on top.

Work-from-home

Healthcare jobs have the lowest rates of unemployment world-wide. Delivering babies and changing bandages is hands-on work. You cannot phone-in your performance.

"So, you wanna work-from-home? No problem!"

I heard a lot of griping from people who were working "essential services" jobs during Covid and had to keep working their minimum wage + $5/hr jobs. They were griping because people who made three times their wages could sit at home and get government checks or they could work-from-home via the internet. 

So, guess which jobs are difficult for AI to replace? Pharmacy techs, nurses, dudes stocking Kroger's shelves, truck drivers, plumbers and factory workers.

All of those non-essential workers and people who gleefully agreed to work-from-home volunteered to be in the first tier of employees displaced by AI.

But fear not. They can always work in the organic farm fields pulling weeds. 

Leverage

There was a thread in a previous post exploring "How can regular people be effective in these tumultuous times?"

Arguing endlessly with the "tools" and "ratchets" on the internet isn't effective. It doesn't change anybody's minds and the t&r enjoy the feeling of power.

To be effective, the people who need to be converted or replaced are elements in the Command-and-Control structure.

A short (and incomplete) list:

• Judges
• Clerks who assign cases (The odds of Boasberg randomly getting four Trump EO challenges in-a-row is approximately 1-in-38,000)
• County and Township clerks who run elections (the clerk of Ingham County is a proud, hard-left activist) 
• School boards
• HR departments
• Credentialing organizations (States threatened to remove doctor's credentials if they didn't toe-the-line during Covid) 
• People corrupting Wikipedia entries by larding articles with language that changes their meaning

With regard to the last category on the list, the Left immediately pivoted to "Both sides are guilty of political violence" and then hold up the murder of Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota State Senator as their (only) example.

The article was modified/written to front-load information where "experts" and "a neighbor" speculated that the perp was a hard-right, MAGA extremist. It also noted that he was registered as a Republican in 2004. Parenthetically, Donald J. Trump was a registered Democrat in 2004.

The evidence that the perp had switched sides and was attempting to curry favor with Governor Walz (failed US VP candidate, by the way) was buried deeply (744 words deep) in the text and each piece of evidence was immediately "qualified" or diluted by low-quality commentary.

Since the perp fully expected to be killed in his assassination attempts, his "manifesto" is basically a suicide note which are generally considered to be very honest and are considered "admissible evidence" in criminal court cases.

That editing, that is, the ordering of the text and the one-sided "poisoning" of the evidence with partisan commentary gives talking heads like Jessica Tarlov air-cover to make statements like "The violence is from both sides".

The NPCs, tools and ratchets then take Tarlov's comments and use them to fill their echo-chamber.

Deer stands and burning stumps

Deer stand update

Looking out of the deer stand that I am re-siding. Looking northeast and downhill. There is a path between the goldenrod and the trees at 115 yards.

Looking north. You can see that the rail on the side I am working on is lower than the one that faces northwest because the shots will be downhill.

Looking northwest

Looking west

 The goldenrod was buzzing with honeybees.

Burning stumps

I tried something a little bit different.

This pear stump was hollow. I cut a tall, narrow wedge of "cake" out to provide a draft and then started a fire inside of the stump. The stump is about 20 inches in diameter and this is what it looked like after three hours of burning. 

No wood was added after I got it started although I did put a hollow section of log on top of the stump to act like a chimney.

This is what the bottom of the "chimney" log looked like when I tipped it over.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

The Frozen Thames painted 1677

Abraham Hondius born about 1631 in Rotterdam and died in 1691.

He was one of the painters during the Dutch Golden Age.

Notable for providing graphic evidence that southeastern Britain was cold enough, for long enough of a period to ice over heavily enough on the Thames to support traffic and that it happened on a yearly basis. Doubly amazing when you consider this region of the Thames was far enough downstream to still experience tides.

This was during the Maunder Minimum (sun activity) during the Little Ice Age. 

Frost Fair on the Frozen Thames painted in 1684