Would someone post a comment so I can see that the commenting system (take two) is working for people other than me?

--------------------
UPDATE: It has come to my attention that some people may not be able to see the Disqus commenting system when they load the post page. Any one else?

Click the "droppings" link below. You should see just this post reload, and then at the bottom of the post you'll see a link back to the main page: "MAIN (Home)", then the Disqus comment system should load. There should be a handful of comments, then a box for you to leave a comment.

Also on the left sidebar, you should see a list of "recent comments". Right now the latest one was from Melissa in Texas. This should be above my "Daily Territory" blogroll.

If any of this does not show up for you, would you drop me an e-mail at desertcat10 (at) cox (dot) net? Thanks! If I need to, I will switch back to the Echo comment system.

Labels: blogger hell

...back to last weekend before the "week-from-hell" took over my life.

More Daisycat practicing her turns and starts and stops:

Here she comes!
we-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e

Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r

P-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t

There she goes!

The smoke is temporary. We have a rich fuel-oil mixture for the break-in period. Also the muffler has a catalytic converter that kicks in once it is warmed up. In this series, the engine was just started a few moments before.

After Christmas was also a big canning weekend. I grabbed a super cheap Christmas ham and Daisycat was given another turkey as a Christmas gift from an employer.

Ham slices went into pints

Turkey chunks went into quarts

And the hambone and turkey carcass each went into a stock pot for more broth


Here are the completed jars after emerging from the pressure canner


I also found a fantastic deal on butter the week before Christmas. It was something like 60% or 70% off the regular price. So Daisycat and I canned butter as well. Melted, poured into half-pint jars, lidded, and tossed into the canner together with the rest. It is possible to can butter without a pressure canner, but this seemed the safest and easiest method.

In the background are quart jars of lard. Most prepackaged preparedness food suppliers omit dietary oils and fats, and only note in passing that they need to be added separately. I think a lot of people probably overlook this detail. You would severely regret it if you did. Everyone is worried about eating low-fat today, but in a crunch situation, the absence of dietary fat would quickly lead to health problems. In addition it is a relatively compact and high-energy but slow-burn calorie source.

Preserved lard will keep a long time in the canister it comes in, but it won't keep forever. I decided to can what I had on hand to extend its useful life. If it fails before I need it, it can still be used in soapmaking.

Finally the soup bones are done simmering and into half-pint jars goes the broth. As we did the last time, all the good meat that came off the bones goes in the jars with the broth, plus the spices necessary to make a heavenly soup when they are opened.

Taste testing the broth

"Uhmm! Fantastic soup stock!"

Shortly after these photos, Daisycat called from town all hysterical about one of her infamous plumbing "issues". I was in the middle of installing an alternator on Mitzy, which I botched in my rush to get it done and on the road back to rescue the silly damsel from her pipe dragon. Thus I became stuck in town for two days while I addressed both the alternator issue and the pipe issue. And of course as you all know already, I was greeted by one of my favorite furry woodland creatures on my return home, as well as the impending loss of my commenting system.

Now, this being another holiday weekend coming up, I am *done* for the week. Going home and there I will *stay*. We'll see what projects I get around to, but for now the thought of leaving this week behind is a sweet one.

Labels: San Pedro homestead

Nevertheless, here is take two on "new commenting system".

Fear not, intrepid readers and commenters! Recent comments may appear to be gone, but we wait with bated breath while Disqus imports them.

Meanwhile, try this new commenting system out. It's free. It's customizable. And it's integrated into the individual blogpost page--that is to say, comments do not pop up in a separate window, but are included after the post on the individual post page.

Scratch the litter. Leave a dropping.

Update: If you really want to read the old comments before Disqus is done importing them, I have enabled the Echo (formerly Haloscan) commenting system on the Archive pages. Click December 2009 (right sidebar near the bottom). The link that just says "Comments" is the Echo/Haloscan comment link.

If the import fails, I may be forced to keep Echo in the background for a while if I want to maintain old comments on the archive pages.

Labels: blogospheric navel-gazing

I came home this evening to see a skunk scurry away, *inside* the cat enclosure!

The cat food bowls were empty.

I cornered him under the storage trailer and blew his ass off with the .410.

Goddam woodland creatures.

Now the place (and me) reeks of skunk again.

Labels: San Pedro homestead

Haloscan has hornswoggled me into upgrading (or else!) to their pay subscription with their mere 14 day (!!) notice. Over the holidays, no less, when everyone is busy with family and celebrations and travel! Buggers.

If I had more time and I weren't inundated lately with stuff to attend to, I would ditch their ass and switch to a new free commenting system. But there are only a few days left to make the switch and I have not had the time to get a new (free) system in place. So they get my cash, *this* year. Only!

Supposedly the transition process is entirely automatic, starting with all new posts and working back through older posts to the beginning of time. We'll see. I have a completely custom template, so I don't have high hopes. If any of you have problems accessing comments or leaving comments, would you drop me a line at desertcat10 (at) cox (dot) net?

Thanks.

Labels: blogospheric navel-gazing, misanthropy

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Labels: felicity and jocularity

American Thinker Blog: Looks like something big is up in Israel

Jinkies, cats! Whaddaya s'pose THAT's about?

Ok, I can finally talk about my recent activities.

My gift to Daisycat this Christmas is a motorized bicycle. She wanted one in order to commute to a couple of her jobs that will be close to her new place. To save gas (up to 150 mpg). And for the fun of it.

However this motorized bicycle did not come ready to ride, but came rather as a 7 speed "beach cruiser" style bicycle from Sears, plus a bicycle motor kit from Spooky Tooth Cycles. Not wanting to have her wait Christmas Day as I assembled the both, I set to work last weekend putting it all together.

Well.

The manual said, in the first paragraph, "Note: Mechanical aptitude and ability is required to perform this installation."

Um, yes. Well there is an understatement. I wouldn't recommend to probably 90% of the people I know that they attempt this themselves. At least not adapting the engine kit to a beach cruiser, which is rather different in a number of ways from a standard men's ten speed bike frame (or similar), for which this kit is designed.

I of course, was able to complete this installation successfully, because I have said mechanical aptitude in spades. But it took me all or part of...five days.

Here is the engine, fresh out of its packaging on my coffee table. For this project, my living room was converted into a workshop.


The brackets are sized for the standard size down tube and seat post that ten speeds are made. The angle and spacing between the brackets on the back and lower front of the engine are set to match the standard angle of a ten speed. As you can see, the tubes on this beach cruiser are much larger, and the down tube curves up toward the fork very differently.

The kit comes with a number of spare parts and pieces and suggestions on how to adapt the kit to fit a non-standard bicycle frame. They wax eloquent on how "rewarding" it can be to design and fabricate your own custom solution.

Yes. Well.

After a day and a half of staring at the angles and the parts available, fiddling with parts and swapping them around, running to the hardware store a couple of times, and running through numerous iterations, I finally got the engine mounted satisfactorily.


Now on to the rest of the installation. A second sprocket is attached to the opposite side of the rear wheel from the pedal sprocket. It is actually attached to the spokes by clamping the spokes between two rubber rings with metal shims inside and outside. The whole sandwich is painstakingly clamped together by gradually tightening nine nuts and bolts so that the whole thing is evenly tightened down all around. I say this to indicate that it is a rather time consuming affair.

Here is the sprocket on the rear wheel with the new chain and chain guard installed. The chain itself required sizing to the application.

Well. Do I have a chain breaker just lying around waiting for the once in a blue moon opportunity I may have to break and reassemble a bicycle chain? No, no of course not.

Fortunately I had that "Knack" at my disposal, and between that and a check on the internet for any thoughts on what I planned to do (disassemble using a makeshift punch--not recommended by a couple sites due to difficulty...oh well) I successfully removed the correct number of links and reassembled the chain.

However...

However once it was all assembled, I realized I had a bit of an alignment problem between the rear sprocket and the sprocket on the engine. The chain clattered on the front sprocket ominously, as it tried in vain to jump off the sprocket. The assembly manual said to move the engine over to align with the rear sprocket.

Oh. Yeah, sure. I spent a day and a half figuring out to get this engine properly mounted. I do *not* have any leeway in moving it. It is *fixed*, baby.

Next day I disassembled the rear wheel and sprocket assembly and flipped the sprocket over. See the teeth are offset just a bit from the centerline of the sprocket. The manual was not at all clear on the matter of which way the teeth faced. Oh they tried to be, but they failed, leaving it quite ambiguous. I had chosen the wrong direction. So it came apart, and just as painstakingly as before, I reassembled it the other way.

Hey, we're on the homestretch now!

Onto the handlebars went a clutch lever, below the left brake handle. This is going to take some new muscle memory development. Knowing which lever to grab in which circumstance will take some getting used to.

I really wanted to get her a single speed bike with a rear coaster brake. This would have eliminated the problem of needing to swap between clutch and brake on the same handle, as the rear brake would be actuated by the pedals. But she really thought she wanted a multi speed bike ("in case I want to ride it like a regular bike for the exercise".) The good news is that the clutch has a locking pin so that it is possible to pull in the clutch and then still switch to the brake for stopping. For emergency stopping she is going to need to know to grab both brakes hard and hit the engine kill switch--nevermind the clutch.

The bike came with a little ringy-dingy bell that makes me giggle every time I ring it.


Not pictured, I installed the carburetor, the throttle assembly, and the electrical system. There again I had to adapt a bracket for the spark coil. What came with the kit was sized for a standard bike frame.

Finally this morning I took it outside to test and and adjust. It turned out I had an intermittent electrical problem preventing it from running reliably. I had to disassemble the wiring and replace the connectors with better quality spade lug connectors (which I *did* happen to have a stock on hand).

Daisycat showed up in the middle of my testing and last minute fixing and adjusting, so I let her see it and sit on it, even though it was too early for the regular gift giving.

Here she be, finished and adjusted, after returning from a short maiden flight down the road (by me).

Tomorrow I get to teach Daisycat how to operate it.

Pray for me.

Update

Motorbike Mamma, getting the hang of it!

She was actually getting the clutch/throttle/brakes/pedaling kinetic memory stuff down pretty well by the end of the day! She took a motorcycle training course several years ago, and in my observed opinion, there's a whole bunch of kinetic memory being revived here to make this easier.

"Light saber sold separately"

As for me, I got a wonderful, heavy weight Turkish Terry full-length *hooded* robe! Just what I wanted for staying toasty at my computer when I have the house thermostat set low.

I also received a black Ivy hat and a "Machine Shop Trade Secrets" book.

Labels: minutiae, San Pedro homestead

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Labels: felicity and jocularity

It's a wonder we reproduce at all.

Oh, wait...

Labels: felicity and jocularity

What?

No, I got nothing. Go back to sleep.

(Actually lots going on. I just can't talk about it.)

Labels: minutiae

Indentured Servant Girl has made a Rule 5 post that features my favorite and ORIGINAL Daisy Duke!: Tribute to Short Shorts & Daisy Duke



Whew! Whatta gal! Eat your heart out, horseface.

Labels: Friday feminine beauty

For those of you who enjoy Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas music, I have created a Pandora Music station that includes this music and similar: Mannheim Steamroller Christmas. It is also on my sidebar at the top (only "Mannheim" fit, not the whole title, unfortunately).

Enjoy!

Labels: art appreciation

Everyone around me at work for the last couple weeks has been dropping like flies to what seems like the common cold. I managed to fend it off so far through a combination of a couple of powerful "cures for the common cold".

Today I have come home run down with a sore throat and headache. It is time to pull out all the stops.

I have two weapons in my arsenal for dealing with colds and flu. The one I have used for years to successfully fend of about 90% of all circulating bugs is colloidal silver. There is only one commercially prepared brand available in stores that I can recommend. It is Sovereign Silver brand. I have tried some others that are completely useless and worse. There is another brand available only via internet and that is CS Pro. Their product is substantially cheaper than Sovereign Silver, but in my experience it is fully its equal. The reason it is less expensive is 1) a whole lot less marketing overhead and 2) larger container volumes that save on packaging costs. I finally broke down and purchased their high-voltage colloidal silver generator so I can make my own as needed.

My method for using colloidal silver to fight a cold is to lie my back on a bed with my head hanging over the edge and tilted down, so that my nostrils are facing straight up. I pour colloidal silver into my nostrils from a salvaged nasal spray bottle or via dropper, until my entire sinus cavity and nasal passages are full. It stings like a bastard when I first put it in if I have some kind of infection (if I don't it doesn't sting at all). I lie there for at least ten minutes, preferably more, in order to give the silver time to saturate my mucous membranes and kill off any bacteria and possibly viruses. (I am convinced it is effective against bacteria. The jury is out whether it is actually effective in destroying viruses or whether it simply interferes in some way with the virus propagation.) I repeat this treatment up to four times a day if I've got it coming on pretty bad, once or twice a day if I'm fending it off in the early stages.

This weapon is most effective against colds and flu that have not gone past my nasal and sinus passages. Usually I can stop it in its tracks after a day or two of treatment. But once it gets into my throat or chest, I have another weapon I pull out.

This is an old recipe that has been around the net a few times in one form or another. But the best news is, it works!

Create a throat salve as follows:
1/4 cup honey, preferably unpasteurized
1 tsp ground cayenne (hot red) pepper
1 tsp fresh grated ginger (preferred) or 1/2 tsp ground ginger
6 to 10 cloves fresh garlic, crushed or minced fine.

Mix the whole mess together. Take it in your mouth a spoonful at a time, allowing the honey to slowly melt and carry the mixture down your throat and past your infected tissues. The honey actually makes the mixture--if not tasty--at least palatable enough to get it down.

Consume the whole mixture within about an hour or so. Once it gets into your system you will feel a rush of energy like you may have never felt before. And the cold germs will feel it too! One word of caution--avoid social situations! For the next twelve to twenty-four hours you will be able to knock people flat at five paces.

Honey is antibacterial and very soothing on a sore throat. Cayenne is antibacterial and has a metabolism boosting effect. It also increases blood flow to tissues to help speed healing and boost phlegm production (which flushes out germs). Garlic is a potent antibacterial and also comes out of your bloodstream into the lungs, right where it is needed if the cold has gotten in there. And ginger has similar antibacterial effects in the upper respiratory tract.

I'm working on my bowl of honey concoction right now. I will soak my sinuses before bedtime. We'll see if I make it to work tomorrow or not.

Labels: health and lifestyle

The author of this article describes the circumstances in which Plan B must go into effect (you *do* have a Plan B, don't you?)

A Wilderness Hide Location for a Planned Evacuation, by J.I.R.

I have been thinking about this for some time now, and I want the members of my retreat group to read this, now (yes, you, you, you, you and you.) We need to implement the planning stage of this preparedness step. I've talked to you all about this before--we need to start on an action plan.

For obvious OPSEC reasons I can't discuss any details with the rest of you here. Please read the linked article and the links within that article to a couple of very good resources, and come up with your own fallback/contingency plans. I will say this: if a sufficiently powerful group comes upon my place with *any* warning whatsoever, I plan to be nowhere around, with little of value left behind. (And then you better beware of snipers in the hills...)

Labels: San Pedro homestead

Rocky Raccoon
Stepped into his room
Only to find Gideon's Bible.

I got another skunk last weekend after we saw evidence of raccoons trying to break into the chicken yard. The tracks I saw were definitely raccoon and not skunk.

Finally yesterday morning I got tha bugga. Big-ass fellow he was! No surprise there. He had been digging up the dead skunks and (**squick**) eating their decomposing carcasses! (**B-bla-a-arghhh...**)

Plus eating the cat food. That was the first clue we had raccoons again. I thought maybe the cats were eating more because it was so cold for a while, but then for a few days the did not eat nearly as much again. Well it wasn't them, but the masked raider.

If it hadn't been 5 AM on a work day, I might have skinned him out for a coon-skin cap. He had a thick winter pelt. But the other problem with that is that state law is screwy in that when I shoot a varmint for being a varmint, I can't keep the pelt. If I shoot a varmint because I have a hunting or trapping license and I am "hunting" or "trapping", rather than "varmint eradicating", I can keep the pelt.

Go figure...

Labels: San Pedro homestead

Friday and Sunday afternoon, I continued working on the shelves and walls for my workshop. As of this afternoon I have the second set of shelves with walls attached to everything else. Next up is building doors at the west end.


Saturday and Sunday Daisycat came out and we processed and canned four turkeys that I had bought on sale before Thanksgiving.

Boning out the carcass:


In the bowl is all the meat we could readily remove from four turkeys. The jars have a clove of garlic, a half teaspoon of poultry seasoning, a quarter teaspoon of pepper and a teaspoon of salt:


Chopping up the meat and packing the jars:


Into my Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry 30 quart pressure canner they go:


All of the bones, skin and scraps of all sorts went into a big stock pot to boil on low for the next 24 hours. Goal: soup stock!


The pressure canning process takes a couple of hours. Daisycat babysat the pressure canner, meanwhile I made yet another repair on my poor abused tire. This is the same tire that I previously blogged about repairing. And once again Slime saved the day.


I noticed Slime dripping from my wheel well Thursday morning. Apparently I had taken a nail sometime earlier that day. But the Slime did it's job and the air held. The vehicle sat all weekend until Sunday afternoon with no further loss of air.



Here's da bugga! This time it was a square-cut concrete nail:


Here's the previous plug from a few months ago, still holding air just fine. At right (top) is the new plug, waiting for the glue to dry.


Finally the jars are done and the pressure canner cooled down enough to open. As I pull the jars out, they are still boiling internally, because the pressure in the jars continues to drop.


Thirteen quarts of turkey laid up for a rainy day!

As they cool, the lids give that satisfying "tik" sound as they seal.

Back in the kitchen later this evening, the bits and bones are finally done cooking. In the bowl below is the broth. I picked through that entire basket and pulled out another large container of good meat. The remains will go to the chickens tomorrow morning.


I canned up the salvaged meat and broth into pint jars this time. Since these will be starters for soups, gravies and casseroles, I decided that pints make a more versatile size. The salvaged meat and the broth made fifteen pints.

As I type this, the pressure canner is slowly cooling down from this last batch. Time to go check it.

Labels: San Pedro homestead

Painting the roof with solar ink (Photonics Spectra | Nov 2009 | Greenlight)

Covering rooftops with solar cells came one step closer to reality recently when JA Solar of Yangzhou, China, announced plans to commercialize technology developed by Innovalight, a San Francisco Bay-area company that makes a silicon solar “ink.”

The Innovalight concept puts a twist on traditional silicon solar manufacturing. The difference between making regular silicon solar cells and those with solar “ink” is that the ink process uses high-throughput atmospheric ink-jet manufacturing rather than low-throughput vacuum-based processing. Silicon ink is made by a process in which tiny silicon nanoparticles are suspended in a liquid that can be applied to rigid and flexible substrates.

As a Professional Engineer, amateur tinker, and confirmed technology geek, this is the kind of stuff that makes me go "skwee!"

Click to read the rest of the article. They also talk about a new coating that can turn windows into solar collectors too. Picture if you will, a 60 story glass-walled building, the entire east, south, and west faces of which are solid photovoltaic collectors. Imagine, if you will, that this entire solar photovoltaic array was installed at an additional cost of only $1 per watt.

Prices for common current technology commodity panels run about $4-$5 per watt. $1/watt is within reach with some of these new technologies. Solar has the near-term potential of breaking out of the realm of head-in-the-clouds greenie eco-wacko daydreaming to practical grid-parity, cost-effective wide-scale application.

Labels: ponderings

Say "NO" to Copenhagen!

Labels: liberal stupidity

I drove through a stretch of winter storm on my way to work this morning. At the top of the road approaching Oracle the rain turned into snow as I ascended into a fog layer. It was not accumulating on the ground--melting as it hit--but the wind was blowing it around pretty hard.

It lasted all of about three miles or so before I dropped down out of the snow elevation and back into light rain and fog. I dropped below the fog in another couple miles. Still it was interesting to feel the rusty, creaky old winter driving instincts begin to kick in.

Marvelous weather though! I never thought I'd find myself saying such. I used to give the stinkeye to native Arizonans who would gush about rainy, cloudy weather. But we've had an awfully dry summer, and months between rain leaves everything dusty and brittle. This is the beginning of the winter rain season and El Nino promises to make it a wet one.

Let it rain I say! Every week all winter! I work for a water company. This is manna from heaven, falling from the skies and percolating into the aquifer so that we can pump it up again and sell it to our customers so that I have a job. And also so that the aquifer my artesian well flows from remains full and pressurized. Gush on the Catalinas! Trickle down the canyons! Soak into the strata that wind their way slowly underground, downhill to my well!

Labels: minutiae, ponderings

The concert was very enjoyable. Chip Davis himself was not there, recovering from recent neck surgery we are told. I have to say I did not realize how much of his music was indeed capable of being played live. Because the timing of so many of his songs is so incredibly precise, I have always assumed that much of it was programmed. I didn't think any musician or group of musicians could successfully reproduce it live. Well these players, the musicians of Mannheim Steamroller totally blew me away with their impeccable performance of these songs.

Because I have listened to these albums over and over and over for the last ten or so Christmasses, I have a very keen ear for differences in the live performance versus the recorded version. The pianist/synthesist hammed it up a bit on a couple of songs, and the drummer (newer addition to the group I understand), maybe overdid his embellishment in a couple of places, but I was stunned at one point watching the pianist/synthesist on one end of the stage precisely timing interwoven notes with the harpsichordist/synthesist at the other end of the stage. All without benefit of a director. Magnificent! You have to know they've been playing together for a very long time to pull this off so successfully.

I also marveled at the sound processing that magically transformed an ordinary grand piano into handbells (I *think* it was on "White Christmas"). I had read in the album jacket some years ago about how Chip Davis had meticulously sampled actual handbells to produce the pieces that required handbells in the original recording. In this performance the sonic transformation all happened electronically from the input at the piano to the output at the speakers.

My only real disappointment is that they did not perform Pat A Pan. This is my top favorite Mannheim Steamroller Christmas song:


If you are googling about this concert because they have an upcoming performance in your city--and if you are any fan of Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas music--you will absolutely love it performed live! Get the tickets and go!

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Update: Ooh! I am excited. I have been watching for any new Christmas albums from Chip Davis that were not compilations of old compositions. Somehow I missed the fact that in the last two years, not one, but *two* all new albums have been released! A few years back a compilation was released, and this year another 25 year anniversary compilation is being released. But the following two are all new music:



I just ordered them from Amazon. Click the images to go directly to the order page.

Labels: art appreciation

None worthy of photographing anyway.

Oh I did stuff--put up a track light above my desk, pulled down a bunch of dead wood off trees in a thickly wooded corner of my lot, did a bit of cooking, cleaning, and chaos taming, and I put up winter window plastic on my windows. But I've been distracted all weekend with the thought that it will be cut short--tomorrow I'm heading into town to attend a Mannheim Steamroller Christmas concert with Daisycat. So I was having trouble focusing on getting back to working on any of my major projects.

So tomorrow is spoken for and then the work week starts again already. Ugh.

Labels: San Pedro homestead

Crazy

I couldn't find the Crystal Gayle version of this song. Gawhd I loved her voice! Whatever happened to her?

So nice

It's all I want, really.

Just for fun:
The Nice Kitty Song

Labels: art appreciation

Desert Cat, you're such a Charlie Brown!

Don't you know by now that Lucy is going to pull that football away *every single time* you try to kick it? Yes of course you do! Every year she gulls you into trying it again, and every year she pulls it away and you land flat on your ass, condemning yourself for falling for it again!

It's not her fault, you know. It is your fault. Sure, she's the one who fetches the football, and she's the one who seeks you out and convinces you to give it yet one more try. But if you weren't so damn naive, if you weren't such a social retard and Aspie, you would see right through her shenanigan and just walk away. But you just can't can you? No, you're so damn *sincere* that you really believe deep down in your sincere, gullible heart that other people *must* be sincere also, even though they've proven to you year after year after year that they are basically narcissists and sociopaths.

Remember, *she's* the one with the psychiatric practice, and *you're* the patient!

Related (old post--how easily you forget, Charlie Brown.)

Labels: women

Keep your bags packed Daisy-baby. This is still a very likely scenario...

An Israeli Strike on Iran
CPA Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 5

Labels: watching the skies