Some very nice presents showed up on our porch today: two books on using a smoker, which will serve us well for the next meal we make. Thanks Renie and Tony!
The seedlings are on the sixth day of their hardening schedule, so they’re up to 6 hours of indirect sunlight outside. The plan this weekend is to get as many of them into tubs as possible and get the back panel of the greenhouse taken off for airflow. I was going to rebuild the water platform this spring, but with wood prices being what they are I think I’ll punt until next year and set it up with a rain barrel. I pre-fertilized the tubs with bonemeal and nitrogen mix, hoping it’ll give them all a leg up when they hit the new dirt. They’re all getting huge, so my hope is we’ll get blossoms quickly and start producing fruit.
My other weekend project is to rent a welder and install brackets on the Scout bumper, as well as put a couple of captive nuts on the front for a license plate. I’ve got to hit the Harbor Freight for a cheap welding helmet and a couple of triangle magnets to get started.
Last summer I was moving plants around in the greenhouse and a branch on one of the tomato plants caught and pulled the AirPod out of my left ear and flung it out of sight. After searching for five minutes, I couldn’t find it anywhere and began to panic. Somehow I thought of Find My app on my phone; both AirPods appeared there immediately but the location tracking wasn’t precise enough to pinpoint the missing unit. I noticed a button on the app which said Play Sound, and I was able to toggle that to have the missing pod play an audible tone. This led me to find it behind a stack of pots in a far corner, someplace I never would have looked otherwise. That alone would have made the purchase price worth the money—beside the fact that they are awesome.
Apple announced today they’re opening up the excellent Find My service to third-party manufacturers. This could conceivably mean I could put a Find My tag in all three of my cars, on my bicycles (ahem Finley’s bicycle), and on my car keys, and use their system to keep track of them all. What I don’t know yet is how it would connect to dumb unwired devices—would I have to charge a battery on the tag on my bike, for example—or would it be a dumb chip like Tile? Either way, I’ll be keeping a close eye on this, and when the car versions come out, hardwiring one into each of our vehicles.
Wow, I’d forgotten about this excellent site: The Internet K-Hole, which is basically just posts of old pictures from the 70’s through the early 90’s. I am guilty of several of the fashion disasters here, as are most of my peers; I’m just glad I haven’t found pictures of myself yet.
Jen has been bugging me to try smoking some meat since my first abortive attempt in June of 2015, when I turned a chicken into a block of cement. The smoker has been sitting in the garage since then, taking up space, silently mocking me. Fed up with waiting, Jen found a recipe, drove us to the butcher, and kicked me out of the car to go buy some meat. Sunday morning I cleaned out the smoker, lit some charcoal, and rubbed spices into two cuts of tri-tip. Throwing some wet mesquite onto the fire, I put thermometers into each cut, laid them on the grill, and said a prayer.
It’s pretty obvious in hindsight, but cooking meat with a good thermometer changes the game entirely. The smoker did a great job and I was able to get the meat up to temperature right on schedule. I ran out of charcoal so Hazel and I ran to the 7-11 to pick up another bag. They had no matchlite, so I had to resort to lighter fluid. Because I was in a hurry and not thinking, I didn’t set up the new charcoal the way I should have, and I wound up flash-burning my hand pretty good when the chamber full of vapor lit off, as well as ruining a good fleece jacket. Lesson learned.
After four hours smoking, I wrapped the meat in foil and let them get up to final temperature, which took less time than the recipe called for. We had an early dinner at the table with coleslaw and French fries, and the meat tasted absolutely fantastic. I made a Manhattan to go with it. We all ate until we were stuffed, and decided there will be more smoked meals in our future.
After some hesitation, I put Finley’s blue bike up on Craigslist this afternoon. in hindsight I should have done it last year, when people were desperate to get bikes, but for some reason I waited. Ever the sentimental fool, I’m sad to see this one go. It’s the one she learned how to ride on, the one Santa brought her. It’s even the same color as Ox (this was not coincidence). But her legs are almost as long as mine now, and it’s time to find a new rider. I hope it makes good memories for the next little girl who climbs aboard..
On Saturday I re-organized the greenhouse so that the spare table is up front where most of the light will be, and prepared a bunch of bins with soil and fertilizer. The seedlings are on their second day of hardening, so by next Saturday they should be ready to plant. There are seedlings on one tray that are 8″ tall at this point, which is fantastic; I’m much further along this spring than I was last year.
I made a little progress with the bumper project over the last week, up to the point where I need a welder. To recap: I originally bought 1/4″ box steel which wound up being way too thick, and bought another length of 1/8″ box steel which worked out perfectly. After a little coaxing I cut the edge off the bar and then cut two sections from that, leaving me with a pair of C-shaped sections ready for pilot holes.
I used a stepped drill bit in the drill press and then ground off about 1/8″ of each edge to get them flat, parallel, and shallow, then test fit everything on the bench.
As for welding, Brian took his rig back a month or two ago so I’m without anything here to use (and truth be told, the welds I was making before he came and got it were terrible). I called a local mobile welder who quoted $125 just to come out; while everybody’s got to make a living I’m having a hard time rationalizing that when I could spend another $150 and get a decent 110-amp starter MIG for myself. Or, I could spend $40 and grab a simple 110 MIG from the local rental center, and I wouldn’t have to deal with yet another large tool taking up space in my already cramped garage….perfect!
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This morning I’m sipping some coffee on the 10th floor of the cancer building at Hopkins, waiting for an appointment with my oncologist. The building was being erected while I was going through chemo, and I think all of my subsequent checkups minus two have been in this building. The old cancer center was a retrofit of existing buildings, and so it was smaller and darker and had that mid-70’s vibe that can’t be fixed with a coat of paint and updated furniture. The new building is big and spacious, has windows everywhere, and it’s clear they thought carefully about the needs of modern cancer patients when they organized it.
For checkups I have to forego eating or drinking anything before the CT scan, so I walk in to the phlebotomist’s area already low on power. After giving blood I head upstairs to the CT floor, and they give me two bottles of iodine-spiked water to drink after asking me five times whether I’m allergic to contrast or not. The iodine has actually gotten better over the years—it used to be two liter-sized bottles of terrible-tasting limeade pisswater; it’s now down to a pair of 16-ounce bottles that barely taste like anything. They put a second IV in and take me back to the machine, where I lay down on a chute, pull my drawers down to my knees, and a primary scan is taken. Then the nurse pushes contrast into my veins through the IV, which feels like the hottest hot flash ever combined with an urgent need to pee my pants. They take the second scan, the nurse removes the IV, and they send me back outside.
I then head upstairs to the 10th floor, where the café used to be, and stake out a chair along the wall facing Baltimore. It’s pretty quiet up there so I can lower my mask and guzzle coffee and breakfast. Presently, the iodine and contrast want to get off the bus, so I head into a spacious bathroom stall to take care of business. This is usually a multi-step process, and so I am grateful for the 2-hour interval between CT and my checkup meeting.
While waiting, I charted out my bloodwork—the results were back within an hour and a half and posted to my online health portal; modern medicine is amazing sometimes—and it looks like things are generally trending downward across the board. My white blood cell count is back to where it was in July of last year, which is discouraging. Platelet count is up, Neutrophils are up, but absolute neutrophils are slightly down and lymphocytes mirror the white blood cell results. The radiologist did not find any new travelers, though, and my lungs look clean, so there’s that!
Meanwhile, I’ve got a bandage on my chest from the removal of a basal-cell carcinoma yesterday; from what the dermatologist told me, it was most likely kickstarted by the radiation I got and then stopped cold by the chemotherapy. Now that I’m getting (somewhat) healthier it decided to pick up where it left off, and I got it removed. Getting older is lots of fun.