End your programming, do things that matter.
Maybe I am unlucky or maybe tools go bad after sitting around for 15-20 years with little use. This is another tool repair and casualty of the pantry project.
I have decided that I am going to talk about preparations for life (i.e. Caronavirus) next week. I will also likely finish my project next week. It will be a whole new chapter for me after that. So with that, have a good weekend.
We have an exchange student for the year from Spain living with us. Unfortunately, part of his agreement to be here is that he cant participate in the things that are the most uniquely ‘American’. For instance, no shooting, no driving, no ‘high risk’ activities. We spend a fair amount of time enjoying those activities.
However, for Christmas, he purchased this book for me called ‘100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation’ by Clint Emerson. I have been slowly reading this over the last couple of weeks.
Now, I like to learn and I believe in the philosophy of preparation. Given the recent COVID-19 hysteria, I am noodling going quite a bit deeper into this next week. The title ‘Tacticool’ is denotes something that might look better on the surface than it really is as well as bring a little humor into my work.
Quite frankly, a lot of this book is mental masturbation such as how to ditch a plane, use a flight suit and swim into another country without detection. I learned a few things like cell phone cameras can pick up IR light or how to make a polymer from milk (casein). I think the value of this book is around the idea of situational awareness: where weak points in hotels could be or tactics around kidnapping and escape. Of course the likelihood of this ever happening is extremely small.
If you are a budding Mall Ninja or an untrained SEAL then this is a manual for you. Otherwise, it is primarily for fun. Remember that your brain is your biggest tool/weapon/asset and keep exercising it because you never know when you need recall the best technique to survive a grenade attack.
The end is near… probably not near enough to finish by the end of this week, but maybe if I work into the weekend then I will be done. I am hoping to have the final cabinet assembled tomorrow. I still have the face frame to build and paint as well as the final attachments and painting.
I am going back out to the shop to paint again. Talk to you tomorrow.
Have you ever seen a whole beef liver? I don’t know the exact weight, but according to a quick internet search, the average weight is 10-15 pounds. If you haven’t seen one then it is hard to conceptualize, but it is huge.
Since I usually get one with the beef that I order, I am always on the lookout for recipes. I have tried boudin and that needs some practice. Once a year I make liver and onions, that is about all I can sneak that in. I recently heard a recipe about Vietnamese Jerky that I though I would try.
Usually with new recipes, I scour sources for three or four different recipes and try to find the commonality, but in this case there are four or five different names I found that were all different. So, I just went with the comments on the podcast and did the best that I can.
The results on this were 1) there was still an underlying liver flavor 2) it was a bit too salty (could have been my technique of salt/rinse) 3) the frozen stir-fry vegetables were distracting 4) its a challenge to try new things, but still fun.
I would like to say a few quick words about cooking liver. This is one of the cuts that is at its best when it is fresh, like the day of the slaughter. Cook liver lightly, it really does not have an unpleasant flavor when cooked to medium (145 deg F). Do not make more than you will eat in one meal, reheating overcooks and results in the iron flavor and mealy texture.
I would love to hear other ideas, techniques and recipes. I am all about frugality, preventing waste and trying new things. So let me know if you have some liver ideas.
Yesterday, my wife and I attended a funeral of a family friend. He was a man that I really didn’t know much about, he just seemed to always be around. He would have probably been considered of the Korean War generation, but wasn’t from this country at the time he was of age.
We had to travel to Eugene to attend the funeral. It is a city that I have spent very little time and is very foreign to me. Navigation is confusing and nothing seems familiar. We decided to take this alone time and do something we rarely get to do, go to Indian Food. It was here that I stumbled across the label ‘Unflavored Towels’.
I havent seen the polling numbers on people that prefer flavored versus unflavored, but I assume that it is probably fifty-fifty (insert ha-ha here). The point of all of this is that you don’t have to understand the exact meaning or translation to get a sense of the intent.
Here was a man that was 87 years old and the church was full. I would estimate 200 people were at this funeral. Every seat was taken, the vestibule had twenty or more people, the mothers room was full. I haven’t seen that very often.
His family was bigger than today’s standards but not huge, survived by a wife and four childeren. He was one of ten, but being from Mexico and older, there were only three siblings in attendance. That means that in order to get that sort of turn-out, at that age, given those circumstances you had to mean something to quite a few people.
As I stated, I didn’t really know him. Juan and his wife bridged age the gap between my wife’s grandparents and parents. They lived almost 100 miles away, but yet they seemed to be at every family function, including the Sunday afternoon barbeque and the Thursday night birthday party. Spanish was his native and preferred language, but he could speak fluent English as well. For me, that is a bit of a self conscious barrier to communicating with someone, unless they initiate the conversation.
Probably a third of the service was also in Spanish. Again, I wasn’t totally clear what was being said. The words were spoken very rapidly but given the setting, body language, audience participation, etc I got the spirit of each particular speaker.
The results were tears and laughter and a huge turn-out. Isn’t that the way that you would want it to be remembered? I don’t think that you have to know the man to understand that was a life well lived.
Yesterday, I got the parts I needed to repair my 20 year old nail gun, so I did a quick video on how to repair it. I thought for a moment about just tossing it, but when I looked at how much it cost to replace ($170), I thought that I would look a little closer at repairing it.
The parts cost $21.22 plus about three dollars for shipping. The repair was easy and now it is back in service. Check out the video.
Last week’s entry was about functional fitness. I feel more like functional sickness lately. That being said, it was the monthly trap shoot last weekend. I took a picture of my range bag dump to show what I lug around to these things.
Starting at the bottom
I typically take another old shopping bag that holds targets, extra muffs, garbage and/or brass to take back home. I have experimented with taking cleaning supplies and other things before, but I have kind of settled on the fact that if something goes really wrong, I probably need to stop and fix it at home rather than keep going.
I have also found that all this gear starts to really add up in weight and bulk. There is the rest, weights, spotting scope, lights and more tools like a drill. It starts to get overwhelming just loading the car, so I try to keep it paired down when I can.
I would be interested in hearing what your essential gear is. Thanks for reading.
I still pay for the newspaper, I have always read the newspaper. Even when I was in grade school, I would look forward to the afternoon delivery. In college, I subscribed to the daily newspaper. When I was living in South Carolina, I was getting two newspapers because the local one only came twice a week. I wanted to see what was happening, I like the feel, I like the coalition of advertisements and I particularly think it is the best aggregator of local news.
That being said, when I woke up on Tuesday, I saw two headlines. The first one was “GOP senators walk out again” and the second one was “Trump piñata draws ire of far-right”. I read the articles and I did a lot of thinking yesterday – which is partly why I didn’t get a post in. I was thinking that this might warrant a more proper essay than a blog post.
I took a lot of notes and did quite a bit of research yesterday, but I think that this post will be a bit more succinct. Let me try to explain the situation of the walk-out first. Oregon requires a quorum in the senate to be able to vote on bills. Our senate has one short of a super-majority of democrats which means that legislation tends to pass in block form by party line. Oregon is also a part-time legislature, which means that there is a year session and there is a one month session the second year.
What is happening is that there is a set of bills that the democrat party is trying to pass which is related to ‘Cap and Trade’. This means that each entity (business, person or otherwise) is allowed by law some sort of carbon emissions maximum. If that is exceeded then you are taxed in an excise fashion for the overage and there is an offset where you can pay to plant trees to mitigate your excessive carbon.
The republicans have literally left the state (enforceable jurisdiction) to prevent a quorum from occurring and thus passing the legislation. This tactic was also used at the end of the full year session in 2019. There was a lot of name calling, threats of arrest etc, to the point where one local senator was barred from entering the capitol and he subsequently apologized. He was dismissed from this particular vote by the senate president.
There has been a lot of sword rattling from the governor Kate Brown stating “The Senate Republicans who walked out of the house are not against climate policy, they are against the democratic process”. Which to some degree is true, I suspect that this tactic will be used again given now that this is the second time this has been done in the last year.
The Statesman Journal states Democrats “have been given a mandate by a majority of voters to pursue climate change”. Here is where I think things are going off the rails and where history, demographics, geography all intersect.
The second headline was about a local bar setting up a piñata of Trump on Presidents day and running a theme entitled ‘Not My President’s Day’. Once local conservatives found out they started writing fake reviews in order to tank the overall rating of the bar and now both sides are mad about the situation.
The history lesson and deeper conclusions needs to wait for another post. For now, lets talk about a couple issues. One is that since the 1990’s Oregon is now a state where politics are completely controlled by the Democratic party. So, no matter how you vote, it doesn’t matter. The majority is becoming increasingly emboldened and radicalized. The riots over a Wallstreet, the dually elected president, the destiny comments, etc. are telltale signs of the future direction of the state.
There is a theory that getting caught up in the political dichotomy by picking one side or the other fuels the rise of extremism. By spending your time defending one sides actions over the other allows both sides to manipulate the population as a whole.
The use of the term Fascist gets thrown around all to often. The term has been propagandized and applied far beyond what is reasonable. We have the tools to change our government, but we don’t have the will or the desire because we live in the political dichotomy.
By far and large, we probably agree on more items than we disagree. Within my circle of associates, I am sure that we would disagree vehemently on political items. Heck, even my wife are opposites. But, there is very little I can do to change what is happening in Salem or Washington DC. And truthfully, there is very little the president or the governor have done to change my life.
One things for sure, this government does not reflect my values and we sure aren’t getting closer to more freedom. Those are the things that are important to me. So, I will move on to bigger and better things.
“My Paris Kitchen: Recipes and Stories” by David Lebowitz is the February 2020 book selection for the Left Coast Cellars Culinary Book Club. David is an American food blogger that has lived in Paris for the last ten years. You can check out his work in the link.
This work is a cookbook, where the stories are largely about some aspect of the recipe in focus. There were a few interesting factoids that I picked up reading the book like most apartments don’t have kitchens in Paris, service at most stores is curt to nonexistent, mustard is the French salsa and the most prevalant cheese used is Gruyere (which is Swiss).
The section that interested me the most was the appetizer section. It has the most variety of recipes and is not strictly French cooking. Influences of Africa and the Middle East are very apparent in this section, like the use of Harissa.
David does a good job of Anglicizing the recipes as there are ingredients that do not exist the majority of the United States. He talks about what is considered proper and what he would use (in some cases does use) in its place.
The photography and food stylizing make the recipes look very appetizing. This month, the host of my book club will not be available. So, we will not be focused on a specific meal but just appetizers. I think that I will make ‘Sardine Spread’ as my first foray into this cookbook.
Truthfully, I don’t see myself using this cookbook much. I think that it is largely the lack of classic French dishes and the plethora of cultural fusion in the book. My go to cookbooks are written by subject matter experts on the particular cuisine, like Rick Bayless for instance. Nevertheless, I want to try a few things before it gets filed away.
Sorry, my sickness is still impacting my productivity and probably the quality of what I am putting out. It has been some time since I posted a project update.
I have made quite a bit of progress, all of the rough lumber has been milled. I am in the midst of fixing some mistakes before moving forward, like I mis-measured the refrigerator and it doesn’t fit in the cabinet I built. I didn’t realize that there was a hinge that caused the overall height to be greater than what I had measured. Normally, I would have built more tolerance into my work, but cabinets are specific (working) heights and I am pushing the threshold of maximum height already.
I already know about measure twice and cut once. So, my lesson today is when sizing something specific, look very closely at all angles to make sure that your measurements are adequate. Another note worth sharing is that mistakes can be very costly, in time. I am tearing apart the fridge cabinet, plugging the holes, relocating the shelf, re-assembling the cabinet, refinishing and leveling again.
I have also experienced some other tool failures recently. My 16ga brad nailer is not consistently returning the hammer back to the proper position. I took it apart and found that there is a plastic piece that has disintegrated. I am going to create a video repairing that next week. My planer is filling up with chips causing me to have to stop and clean it out every twenty minutes. What I know now is that that a few years ago, the planer broke off a knot and tried to push it through the chip blower. That in turn busted the fan housing and now chips are blowing into the planer causing the height mechanism to clog up. I will probably make a video about that too.
Have a great weekend everybody.
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