MORNING
I was up past 3:00 AM. That's last night, until about three hours ago. One of the videos I watched was about cheese and it was disappointing. For all the manufacturers out there, I guess I just assumed there were more different types of cheese. You’d think it looking at the pretty packages at the market. Instead, several professional chefs took it down to six or seven types. My favorite remains American cheddar and the sharper, the better. I ceased being a great consumer of cheese in 2003, but it turns out there are not that many types I have not at least tried. Alas, within months, US cheese was off my diet. To many additives.
When I say expensive, I mean the cheese itself, not the rarity of the milk source, like moose or yak milk, but the cost of the process. This brand, which I don’t dare pronounce, is reputed to cost $650 per pound. The explanation is that I’m considering, after thirty some years, of ceasing to eat margarine. I learned to like the flavor, but after reading what they’ve done to it, I may quit it altogether.
Now that talk of food has lulled us all into a comfort zone, it finally happened. A potential ebola spreader has protested that the mandatory quarantine infringes on her “individual rights”. Put another way, she has, in her view of herself, the right to potentially infect anyone she pleases with a deadly infectious disease. Her rights, you understand, and to hell with yours. These people care not how they get famous for their fifteen minutes. Well, it is Florida so I hope somebody will stand their ground.
Now some trivia. Chickens won’t lay eggs unless they get 12 hours of light per day. The prevailing knowledge when I grew up was to heat the henhouse during the winter to keep the hens laying. Turns out it was the light produced by the heating method, usually electric light. Be aware that unless you are eating free range, the chicken and eggs you get from the chain store are a genetically modified organism (gmo) due to the food they are given.
I am doing a lot of research into food, now that I am pretty much convinced it is the strange things done to the North American diet by the factories that is causing most of the illness they would have you believe is due to an aging boomer population. First they tell us we are the best nourished in the world, then you see hundreds of food-related conditions that were unheard of fifty years ago. We ate many foods cooked with lard when I was a kid and nobody was fat.
Something new for me is the concept of clarified butter. I’ve eaten it in restaurants and seen it in recipes but the concept is completely alien to my upbringing. Who would boil butter and take part of it away? Anyhow, the reason it came into focus was apparently if you buy preserved or canned butter, this is what you may be getting. Boiling apparently removes, among other things, the water naturally present. I did not know that.
NOON
Nothing going on except learning welding and I know you are not as thrilled about that as you are about my electronics, so here is some more trivia about my upbringing. Bear in mind, I am a boomer, so I have nothing to do with the Great Depression and I was born long after Elvis Presley.
This is the model of kitchen stove we had. Ah, the nice little pictures it conjures up of soup in the pot and fresh baked bread. Buddy, get your head screwed on right, these pigs are labor intensive and I was glad to see it carted off to the junk yard. The one shown here has more chrome and costs $7,500 today. The burner box is at the top left under the first two burner lids and underneath it is the ash box. Which requires constant emptying.
Most of the cooking is done on the left two lids, for a quick boil, you use the lifter and set the pot into the hole right against the flames. My parents used to lift the lid and light their cigarettes that way. There are more lids to the right, but they are cooler the further you move to the right.
On the far right is a water tank. The water was not drinkable, it contained rust and flies and anything else that could crawl in there, but we had to scoop it out for jobs like cleaning or doing dishes if the big hot water tank in the pantry quit. Which it liked to do. The water also buffered the heat in the over, which is the center compartment with the wooden handle. See the thermostat? This is the oven where I baked my own birthday cakes from ages eight to fourteen.
Incidentally, that water tank is not an option. There is a copper conduit from the firebox to the tank and the water gets scalding hot. If you let it run dry, it wrecks the stove. This conduit is the source of heat for the other burner lids, which would otherwise be pretty useless. Actually, they are pretty useless.
The temperature is regulated by the dampers, which are somehow different in this picture, but they must be there. You had to watch what was baking every twenty minutes and adjust the heat. That’s because the firebox only burned one temperature, you fed the precut pieces of wood through the front hatch, which loved to shower sparks on tender little hands.
Still think it is romantic? Good, now get out in the bush and cut down the trees and lop off the branches and saw the blocks and chop them, load them on the wagon, haul them to town, stack them up beside the barn. And for the rest of the year, don’t you dare walk in that goddam door without an armload of split firewood or you’ll get your goddam stupid head slapped. And it don’t split itself, you know. Only you, not your five brothers and sisters. They are always too young or too old or some equally believable excuse.
The stove will heat a large room by itself. Just keep in mind the heat radiates from one corner and it is fry belly and freeze back. The top of the room is hotter than near the floor. And the stove can be heated too hot, you can see the reddish glow of the metal when that happens, expecially in a dark room at night. The legs under the firebox also get hot and over the years sort of melt their way into whatever they rest on except stone.
Now don’t you forget not to cook on Mondays. What, is that another one of them dumb religious customs? No, because the chimney sparks and soot will get on the neighbors laundry hanging on the line and make your school clothes smell like smoke. That will really let the town girls know you were raised in a barn. Just what every teenage bass-playing boy wants.
I have not forgotten the overhead “warming” cabinet. Where you keep the fresh buns warm for supper. Nonsense, the space cannot be used without leaning over the top of the frying hot stove, so it is mostly storage for rarely used pots and pans. God, some of you people have been watching too much Walt Disney.
On the other hand, when they enact the New World Order for you surplus city-dwellers, I’ll be well-equipped to survive on my own. Relatively speaking, that is. I mean, compared to the conditions of my upbringing, I might prefer life in the FEMA camps.
[Author's note: do not take my description of the wood-burning stove as gospel. I am working from distant memory on how it was and the stoves are labor-intensive. Our actual stove was called a "Renfrew", a word which I cannot pronounce. They were made at a foundry in Canada and sold through Sears. We were the only family in town that did not have gas or electric. This is why I know so much about coal oil lamps, which I also dislike because they give me a headache. Only me, not my five brothers or sisters. Because they didn't read much, that's why.]
EVENING
This is a welding magnet. Who would buy such a contraption? That’s what I thought until I tried it out. You need this magnet, budding welders. It holds things that are weldable, and therefore magnetic, at exactly the angles you want the most. I still haven't figured out the center hole, but all joking aside I’m sure even that has a handy purpose.
Club Jimbos may be around for a few more yet. The offer to purchase fell through. This is rumor only, but that large area to the back is apparently not covered by the lease arrangement. Of course, nobody is going to sink any improvement money into the club unless they can get some use out of that back lot. There is space for a tiki bar and parking, even a band shell back there. The layout of the property would fool anybody, but as it turns, that is not part of the deal.
Plus, it seems the landlord is not willing to part with it either. Something about big plans to turn it into something else. Odd, because, you would either have to enter from the alley or walk through the club, but there is no accounting for landlords. I was a landlord you know, from the time I was 21 to 36. That is the strangest money you’ll ever make, the old English class system at work. Unless you inherit a building to live in, you pay rent for the rest of your live. I had no ancestors who every made that sacrifice, so I have actually never outright owned a place to live.
Then again, neither have most people reading this.
ADDENDUM
This is mostly to do with club developments and events. And some electronics thrown in, as it is that type of club. The reader should be aware that I regard the bulk of the Internet to be nothing more than a disseminator of false information akin to the peasant lore network that caused the Dark Ages. The last two generations [of today] are undoubtedly more illiterate than their parents and it requires complacency on a massive scale to allow it to propagate like it does. We need a computer Renaissance and all those idiots out there aren't going to join up on their own.
Insomnia, it can be productive if you use it right. I’ve developed a small test circuit for the Arduino, but I based the speaker output on a diagram (shown above) from a highly touted book for beginners. The circuit had only four wires and still they got it wrong, and this was the third edition. This relates to the discussion of last evening. In my day, beginners books did not contain such mistakes. I know the problem is the author did not do his own proofreading.
My point is that after this, I would not normally ever trust this author again. Nor am I likely to buy another book from him. I am not about to contact him and give him infinite chances to explain and apologize. If he has not caught his mistake after three editions, well, think of your own metaphor. If you can’t see his error, neither would most beginners.
This led to a secondary discussion of organization. Whereas Agt. M and I agree that building a worthy robot is a team effort, we don’t think the same about the composition of the team. I believe that a person on a team should be placed where their interest in the matter lies. M says they should be placed where their existing skill set is most useful to the larger group. That is, where it benefits others even if it does not benefit himself.
That sounds too Canadian for my liking. Where people can be forced to "volunteer". In my world, we do not vote on what the other guy is supposed to think. We may throw him out the door, but we do not dictate to him what songs he is supposed to like. Oops, wrong topic.
Example, the one female in the class is a design engineer. But I happen to know she joined the meetup to learn about sensors. I would not tell her the choices are "design or resign". A lot of this is experience on my part. I believe all team members should be hands-on aware of what the other teams must accomplish. M says that is not necessary if they are competent in what they do. Is that even possible? You see this is not a shop where a customer expects to know nothing. I would like any team member who asks for a weld to have actually welded a seam himself to know what is involved.
And I believe if I had a team who could all read diagrams as opposed to a few specialists, somebody would have spotted that earlier than I did. I wonder how many Arduinos were damaged by connecting this circuit.
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