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November 20, 2020 – French Toast, from garbage to delicious

November 20, 2020 /

This is one of those recipes that I don’t make often. The biggest reason that I make it is usually to use up old bread before it becomes inedible. How many of you bake bread? My observation is that a whole loaf can last several days if the crust stays intact. Once the loaf is cut in any way it will start to become stale overnight.

This time I had half a loaf of the pumpkin bread left and half a loaf of gluten free bread that has been sitting for two weeks. Another nice thing about this recipe is that is prepared ahead of time so it can all you have to do is pop it in the oven in the morning. As long as you have an hour to wait, you don’t have to do any work to make it.

  • 2 tablespoons Butter
  • 1/2 cup Brown Sugar
  • 4 slices of Bread
  • 2 Eggs
  • 1/4 cup Cream
  • 1/2 teaspoon Vanilla
  • 1/2 teaspoon Nutmeg
  • 2 Apples or Pears

I cook a lot by ‘feel’. Meaning I am dynamically sizing and scaling ingredients as I go. For instance, I may add more or less egg depending on the initial moistness of the bread and the size of the pan. Pumpkin bread was pretty moist to begin with so it shouldn’t need a lot of egg. Unfortunately in this case, I had eight pieces of bread to begin with of which the dog ate four while my back was turned and I was melting the butter and scrambling the eggs. So all that is to say my pictures don’t really match what I should have done.

Start by melting the butter and spread across your baking pan. Then, add the brown sugar on top of the butter in an even layer. Put the bread on top of the sugar/butter layer. Next, mix eggs, cream, vanilla and nutmeg. Pour over bread. Finally, slice apples and put on top. Cover the dish in foil and put in the refrigerator overnight.

When ready to cook, start the oven at 350 deg F. Leave the foil on the dish and bake for 45 minutes. Take the foil off for ten minutes and it is done. Serve with maple syrup or whip cream or we usually eat it alone and enjoy.

Enjoy some french toast and enjoy the weekend.

November 19, 2020 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

November 19, 2020 /

Some would say, and I agree with them that the pump action shotgun is the most versatile firearm there is. As with every compromise, none is the ideal solution. It just so happens that this is a pretty good one.

I own several pump action shotguns of different brands and gauges. It used to be back when I was young there were essentially two brands Remington and Mossberg. The Remington 870 was the king of pump action shotguns. The most popular Mossberg 500 came with two barrels: a field barrel of 28 inches and a defense barrel of 18 1/2 inches.

Today Remington’s future is in limbo, Mossberg is going gangbusters and there are a whole lot of clones out there. The clones have interchangeable parts with one brand or the other. That allows you to accessorize by adding or changing your shotgun as you please. Some examples of things that you can change are: barrels, stock, fore end, add a laser, add a light, add an optic or extend the magazine.

I would be remised if I didn’t mention some of the other peripheral details. There are some other brands like Weatherby and Winchester as well as old brands like Ithaca. I am not sure what the situation is with aftermarket support. So, buyer beware in those cases. You might want to ask the seller about those details.

Also, not every shotgun is as easy to accessorize, notice I didn’t use the adjective ‘pump’ here. When you start to get into the foreign brands like Berretta/Benelli or Browning there are some extra barrels available but they are far and few between. Mossberg does a pretty good job of supporting all of their products and offer rifled barrels for their semi-automatic shotguns, but that is it.

I wanted to talk about my experience shopping for used shotguns for a minute. My son and I were looking around this time last year. We went to a very large gun show and I had a difficult time finding an inexpensive and serviceable shotgun for him. In fact, there were not that many to choose from period. We saw a couple and they were old for nearly what we could buy a new one.

Old is not bad but be aware there are a couple potential limitations. If you are not hunting, it probably won’t ever matter but the first limitation might be chamber length. Old shotguns could only chamber 2 3/4″ shells (really old might be 2 1/2″ chambers). Three inch shells are prevalent for waterfowl hunting.

The second is the interchangeable choke feature. Almost all shotguns come with the ability to change chokes. The choke is the mechanical restriction in the barrel dictating how broad the shot pattern will be. That makes your shotgun a turkey gun, a deer gun, a trap gun or a sporting clays gun. Chokes are not 100 percent necessary to change for every situation, my son shoot everything with a full choke. But, they do give a little more advantage when applied in the right circumstance.

In my opinion, if you are going to buy used it needs to have the features above or it needs to be a significant discount because all of those things can be added, but at a cost. If you are buying something specific or rare discount this advice however you are not reading this for education anyway.

I should also add that most what I am talking about has been in twelve gauge. I have noticed that there is lesser aftermarket for Remington in the 20 gauge and even less so with other brands. My dad has a 870 in 16 gauge. Good luck with finding extra barrels or chokes for that. Sometimes finding ammunition is even difficult.

I have found that looking for accessories is best done online. I guess that there is not enough interest in keeping well stocked stores with extra barrels and such. You will often find one thing but maybe not exactly what you want. For instance, there are three types of rifled barrels. One has a scope attached, one has just a mount and one has sights (or neither). They also make one that has sights, but is not rifled. All of them are called ‘slug barrels’. Not everything is equal.

One experience that I had was I bought a Mossberg barrel for my Remington 870. As the barrel heated up, it didn’t have the clearance between the barrel and the forend and the action would get stuck. I had to Dremel out more clearance (this is a good reason to test your gear, it only happened after the second shot).

There is lots more to say about this subject, but this is a pretty good introduction into what to know about accessorizing a pump action shotgun.

November 18, 2020 – Updates to the Virtual Book Club today

November 18, 2020 /

Yesterday, the thinking about 1984 by George Orwell left me partially excited to go into that book again and partially disgusted to think about what has happened on my watch. I am going to save the stronger editorials to another time to get to a happier place today.

I spent this morning backdating the progress of the Left Coast Cellars Culinary Book Club. With the impending second lockdown and the weather really getting wet, it is a good time to read and cook. I have created separate pages, by year on where we have been as a club in case someone was interested in where we have covered. Those links are on the left hand margin.

I am strongly thinking in the future that I will repurpose the ‘Approachable Wine’ page and change that into a ‘Resources’ page for people interested in the things that I am such as freedom, gear, skills and books. That page was really intended for a different purpose. I was wanting to build an app and tie all of this together, but I didn’t get started and probably wont.

So, we have bunkered up into our ‘two week freeze’. Our Thanksgiving shopping is done and the menu is largely set. There definitely won’t be more than six people at our table. As Thanksgiving signals the end of the harvest season, it is time to appreciate the year behind and look forward to the year ahead. Do some reading in your free time.

November 17, 2020 – When will 2020 cross into 1984?

November 17, 2020 /

I have been mulling over this topic for a while now. One catch-22 is that I want to stay as apolitical as possible. But I watch some of the things and I have a hard time not screaming for people to wake up as they seem to be stuck in a logic wormhole. I am trying to evaluate fake news and propaganda versus real problems and I have a difficult time separating or seeing the truth.

One thing that is extremely apparent is that many people are scared out of their minds over Covid-19. I hear it and see it all over the place, particularly with the more aged and health susceptible people in my life. I know people that still believe hiding out or washing and sterilizing shopping bags, voting for the right person or refusing to associate with people will tip the scales on this virus and outcome.

I am one of those people that believe that collectively we have more in common than we have differences. I watch in disbelief as our governor threatens the citizens of my state. And, just as fast as the threats went up, they seem to have been whitewashed. It is difficult to find the quote in the news stories for this post.

November 11, 2020; OPB

I would like to point out (again) the extreme lunacy in the current social distancing schemes by using an example.

  1. Put on mask to leave the car and enter a restaurant
  2. Be seated, take off mask
  3. Be served with mask off
  4. Get up to go to the restroom, put on mask
  5. Return to table and remove mask

Does anyone remember the earliest debates about mask usage? They were originally not recommended, largely because they are generally not considered medically viable. Just as all things get thrown into the meat grinder and become distorted and re-propagandized, it has now become the ‘must have’ accessory to make people feel better about doing nothing. I believe that the guidance was changed for the appearance of doing something that we as humans have very little control over, the spread of a disease.

I am not saying masks are equated to freedom. What I am saying is that people are losing their ability to discriminate between fact and feel good. I have no issues with wearing a mask when required to participate in society. Any private entity has the right to make rules or conditions for entry i.e. masks. People have the right to ask people to adhere to hygiene practices or social distancing to enter a residence. I do have an issue when the government limits how society will associate together. This I find to be strictly un-American practice.

People are abdicating their responsibility to use common sense in situations and wanting the government to handle it by policy, rule and regulation. I draw that conclusion based on the overwhelming election results to double down on state policy that will never work. I read a headline this afternoon that 75% of Americans support an national mask mandate. I am wondering if this is really true or this is another propaganda push?

I will leave with the non-scientific but logical litmus test for this entire situation.

  1. Does the bubonic plague still exist? The answer is yes.
  2. Does polio still exist? The answer is yes.
  3. Does the Spanish flu still exist? The answer is yes.

Covid-19 is never going away. It is never going to be eradicated. Children still get cancer, not just smokers. Shit happens and we don’t know why. Pharmaceuticals may some day do wonders, for now have to do the best with what we have.

I feel like I am living in the transformation of the world of George Orwell’s 1984. We have the surveillance state with the Patriot Act in collusion with social media. We have perpetual war in the middle east and Afghanistan. We have xenophobic hate egged on by the partisan groups. We have a population that subsists on processed food garbage and funded by government rations. Most of all, we have a population that is numb to critical thinking and is spoon fed ‘news’ that gets rewritten .

Just wait, there is going to be some neighbors turning other neighbors in when seven people are gathered. I can sense that it will soon be time for my re-education.

November 16, 2020 – Testing some changes and building a template

November 16, 2020 /

Supposedly, things are working the way they should. I did finish my post on Friday, not without struggles. Things were adjusted again and I will see if they working better. In technical jargon, there was some caching issues and a bunch of sessions on the server, more than were allowed. I have a hard time buying that, but I guess time will tell.

As another side note, I have discovered that it seems like my maximum image size is 2500×2500 pixels without upgrading server resources (paying more). It seems like I am going to have to edit every image in order to get them to post. I guess where I find this frustrating is that this is not the cheapest plan, I don’t know how the cheaper plans would work beside just plain text or a simple static site.

OK, accountability time. I didn’t finish the mantel on November 4 because I didn’t stick to my schedule. And I didn’t stick to my schedule because I wasn’t feeling like it. Part of my excuses were fiddling around with this site more that I should have. Part of it were other things in life going on and a lot of it was I was just not being disciplined.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t made progress or that I am not close, because I am. I have the final fitting and the finishing to complete. I think that I should be close by the end of the week. But, what I wanted to talk about today is making a template for the proper fit.

The mantel is not even depth across the width. It is an inch wider on the right side than on the left. I was also concerned about different angles so I built a template of what the top should be so that I could try to get this as close to perfect on the first try. This is a technique that is used by counter makers to try and accommodate for uneven walls.

To build a template, one way to do it is use thin pieces of wood, hot glued together to follow all of the contours and angles. This also helps as a mock-up technique as well to make sure that you have an idea of the proportions of what you are building. This template is then used to trace on your work so that with an accurate cut, you get a perfect fit.

To get the very best fit, the template should be scribed against the wall. Scribing involves using a compass following the wall at a set distance. Once the line is made to fit all of the contours, cut to the line and test the fit, it should fit like a glove. I realize that this is vague and probably warrants a video or separate post. Check this tutorial for a primer.

Templates can also be made with paper or cardboard as well. Use what you have on hand and what is convenient to work with. Take your time and sometimes a template is the right technique to use.

November 13, 2020 – Persimmon Pumpkin Bread

November 14, 2020 /

On a whim, I bought a couple persimmon fruit at the local grocery store. I always enjoy the challenge of finding something to do with unusual ingredients. I don’t usually see them in the stores and haven’t worked with them since I lived in South Carolina. So that has been over fifteen years.

Persimmon is an Asian fruit. To me it has a little melon flavor and texture. When I was looking up what to do with them, the majority of the suggestions were to bake with them. Apparently, it can be used to swap in with pumpkin on a 1:1 basis. Note: this is a double recipe, so it makes two 5×9 loaves.

  • 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking soda
  • 2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground clove
  • 1/2 teaspoon ginger
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 4 eggs, room temperature
  • 1 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 3 cups pumpkin puree/persimmon
  • 1 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup walnuts

We also had some leftover pumpkin so I mixed the two of them together. I used the immersion blender to unify the pumpkin and persimmon. Pre-heat the oven 350 degF while you are assembling and mixing all of the ingredients together.

Combine all of the dry ingredients together. Combine all the wet ingredients together. Once both are thoroughly mixed separately, combine the wet and dry ingredients together.

Once everything is mixed together, pour into two loaf pans and bake for an hour or so. Don’t forget to grease the pan before hand.

I paired this bread with some Vietnamese rice porridge. I kind of made up the recipe after looking at a bunch of different variations. Regardless, it was well received. I think it would pair well with any kind of soup. I also believe this would make good French toast as well.

November 12, 2020 – Escalated to Level 2

November 12, 2020 /

I spent probably an hour with support today. They can duplicate my problem, but not resolve it. My support case has been escalated to level 2 (which is a good thing). So, I am definitely slow playing anything further until I can resolve images.

I have to say that I have been very happy with the support that I have used so far. The level one is not just reading from a script but is actually trying to fix the problem. So far, level one has been two out of three in resolving issues. I know that this is a tough one because I have been working on it several days myself.

I have some good stuff in the queue. Hopefully, it won’t take too long so I can really get started.

November 9, 2020 – How the election results prove the left right dichotomy and is making conservatives look like fools

November 9, 2020 /

This past week has been a strange and sad week. If you have followed me for some time, you can probably guess my political orientations by my life outlook. Over the years I have become much more apolitical because I don’t believe that either party has my best interest at heart.

My view of voting has really changed as well. I went from red blooded, eagle scout to non-participant. I got in a ‘light’ debate with one of my family members about the fact that I wasn’t going to vote. Her attempted position was that I was setting a bad example for my kids. In fact, I believe the exact opposite, I am not brain washing my kids to believe every vote matters.

Take my state, Oregon. I actually voted as an experiment. I voted a ballot where every candidate of the choices best represented my values. Only one out of the entire ballot won their election and that was on the county commissioner position. Almost all of them lost by a landslide, it wasn’t even close except for state senator and state representative. You tell me that my vote mattered.

I want to go back to the dichotomy. I know people that are refusing to except the presidential election results. I didn’t know them at the time, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they thought Obama was not a citizen.

I also know people that called to rejoice that their candidate won, how great and historical this was, etc. These were the people that claimed Trump stole the election and cried when George W Bush was elected.

None of these people are bad people. I know them all, but they are blinded by their beliefs to the point that they are willing to hold fast to out and out nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, With hundreds of millions of votes, a few are bound to be erroneous, fake or suspicious. But what everyone is missing is that the system is getting over on them regardless of who wins.

This may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I want to use some other examples of how this works. Take a person like Rush Limbaugh, he is a master of the same craft that Trump has used. Say something outrageous, let everyone get into their galvanized camp and use your supporters to make you more money. I do believe that Rush is sincere in his general positions but he is a master at manipulating his strong supporters and detractors for his own gain.

This is almost every politician on the national level and it is definitely pushing down to the state level. At the lower level it is often not monetary, but policy.

Has anyone been to a restaurant or bar lately? How foolish is it that you are required to wear a mask to enter but as soon as you sit at the table you are now in some sort of bubble where masks can be removed. It has got to be one way or the other. The mask needs to be on or it needs to be off.

Notice what is happening from a political standpoint. Both sides know that they cannot strangle the social aspect of the economy. They have made rules that make no sense and are not effective to appease the mask vs. no mask crowds.

Take football. Why is it that the NFL is fining coaching staff when caught with their masks off and the players are playing like normal? Could it be virtue signaling? Don’t the coaches go through the same testing regimen as the players? Is there such a thing as acceptable risk? It all makes no sense to me. We have another half in and half out situation here.

If you think that INS is keeping kids in cages or that dead people swung this election, you need to slap yourself in the face. Trump out trumped himself. He turned off people that were lukewarm in the last election and he certainly motivated people that weren’t engaged in the last election and lost by a very slim margin. Now, slap yourself again because regardless of the election results, we are just going to stand around while we lose our freedom at an accelerated pace. That is where the outrage should be.

I will leave with one more thought. Why do you think Trump did not want to release his tax information? Because if he did, the general public would find out that he is not ‘paying his fair share’. Meaning, the people that write the rules don’t write them for themselves, they write them for everyone else. Why else would insider trading be illegal for everyone but congress people? It is the most egregious and in your face example of a double standard as there is. They literally make the government contracts that can legally enrich there own pockets that is illegal for a citizen to do so.

You have heard of the saying ‘What is good for the goose is good for the gander’? There has been a lot of show over not releasing tax returns, but in the end none of them want the real game exposed – at least while people are paying attention.

November 7, 2020 – Sunday Bonus: What does a chemical engineer do?

November 9, 2020 /

It’s career day at Alt-F4. Well, not really especially since I have never had the title of chemical engineer. However, I have done the job. A chemical engineer does a lot of scaling, unit conversions and process type work. I spent over four years doing very similar work early in my career.

So, why the heck do you really care what a chemical engineer does? Well, from a practicality standpoint sometimes you have to do some unusual stuff. In my case, I am still struggling with the leaf blower, I bought some 40:1 fuel thinking that was probably the ticket. I incidentally ran across the manual this week and discovered that it is supposed to actually take 16:1 fuel mix.

First, good luck finding a 16:1 pre-mix in the store. I don’t think any of the modern engines run that kind of ratio. If you are going to make it yourself, that is 8oz of 30 weight oil to 1 gallon of fuel. I don’t really want to make a gallon especially now that I have almost a full gallon of 40:1 that is not really useable in any of my other machines. Another added bonus is that I could make 40:1 into 50:1 in the same way to use in my trimmer or chainsaw. This avoids having a bunch of cans of different mixes lying around because I don’t use that much anyway.

Another thing that I don’t want to do is leave a bunch of fuel in the the tank. I don’t know when or if I will use it all. So, my plan is to make up 1 cup at a time of 16:1 out of the 40:1 that I already have. I have to do some relatively simple calculations so I can use the equipment that I have to do what I want.

  1. Work in units that are ten based (i.e. metric) for easier calculations

According to the manual, the tank is 16.5 oz. The conversion is 29.57 ml/ounce.

16.5 oz * 29.57 ml/oz = 487.9 ml of fuel in the tank, round up to 488 ml

2. Figure the oil component of the mixtures

If the tank was full of 16:1 mix then I will calculate how much oil that is by dividing the total volume by the ratio.

488 ml / 16 = 30.5 ml oil in a full tank

488 ml/ 40 = 12.2 ml oil in the tank in a 40:1 mix

Now, subtract the difference between what you need and what you have and that will tell us how much straight oil I would need to add per tank.

30.5 ml needed – 12.2 ml have = 18.3 ml oil to add per tank

3. There are simpler ways to do this, but I will do it again for emphasis to make up my mix per cup.

1 cup = 8 oz

8 oz * 29.57 ml/oz = 236.56 ml in a cup

236.56 ml / 16 = 14.79 ml oil at 16:1

236.56 ml / 40 = 5.91 ml oil at 40:1

14.79 ml – 5.91 ml = 8.88 ml oil needed per cup

4. Convert ml back to imperial measurement (teaspoons)

1 teaspoon = 4.93 ml

8.88 ml oil needed / 4.93 ml/tsp = 1.8 teaspoons oil per cup to make 40:1 into 16:1

I hope that I made my point that sometimes this kind of math can be useable. My points for doing this this way is to protect the machine from excess fuel in the tank and using what I already have have.