Stuff too short for an entire article all shoveled into one post. I also complain about stuff. Well, okay, so I complain about stuff a lot but it’s worse than usual because I’ve been up since about 4 AM because I’m trying to get off the allergy medication and it isn’t going well so I’m even more grouchy than usual And because I’m tired and grouchy there are probably a lot of typos and other problems with this but the heck with it, I’m going to hit the “publish” button and be done with it.
We got frost at last the other day. According to the electronic temperature recording thingie hanging on the wall it got down to 27F and most of the lawns around here were covered in white when I got up the other morning. Then a few days later it got even colder and even the cars were covered with frost.
What’s in a name? There are rumors Facebook may be changing its name in the future. But if you have a huge, stinking pile of s**t laying around in your backyard, calling it a “rose” doesn’t change the fact that it is still a huge, stinking pile of s**t.
Can you say “reducetarianism” boys and girls? This is a term I’ve seen being tossed around in the food industry media recently and apparently this is a real thing. These are people who kinda, sorta feel bad about eating animals, but not bad enough to actually stop eating them. Maybe? But enough to at least cut back a little? Maybe?
Look, if you have moral objections to eating animals, good for you. I think you have a valid point. If you believe eating meat and animal products is bad for your health, also good for you because there is a lot of research out there that says you’re probably right. But if you have legitimate health concerns or moral objections and all you do is just cut back a little? Seriously? No. Sorry. That’s like one of those celebrities who lives in a 10 bedroom mansion with a swimming pool and private helicopter who buys a Prius and then claims they’re saving the environment.
National “Whatever” Day… While I’m on the subject of people just making sh*t up can we just stop already with this “It’s National (insert word of your choice here) Day” nonsense? Marketers took over this whole “National Whatever Day” nonsense long ago and have made it not only utterly irrelevant but more than a wee bit stupid. Everything has a “National XXX Day” now. There’s probably a “National Slather Yourself With Cheese And Call Yourself A Sandwich” day for all I know. Just stop it. It isn’t silly and fun any more, it’s annoying.
By the way, I am not against silliness. I strongly approve of silliness and do my part to add a bit of silliness to people’s day. Like riding around town on a bicycle with a squeaky duck wearing a propeller hat glued to my handlebars.
About that bowl… Somebody asked me what ever happened to that bowl I was working on in that test video I made the other day. It was a really beautiful piece of wood and I had high hopes for it but, well, sometimes things go wrong. Like this.
After I did that video I got caught up in a few other things that absolutely had to get done so it sat on the lathe for a couple of days and when I came back that’s what it looked like. Lots and lots of nasty cracks. Not just surface cracks, either. They run almost all the way through the piece of wood. I’m a bit upset about that. That was a beautiful piece of wood and I paid more than $40 for that block. Why did it crack? I have no idea. It shouldn’t have. Usually you get cracks like this when a piece of wet wood dries down to fast. But my moisture meter said it was down to about 10% so that shouldn’t have been the problem.
Anyway, here I am with a badly cracked $40 piece of wood… MrsGF and I stood there and looked at it for a while trying to figure out what to do with it. If it was just one or two cracks I’d just stabilize them with CA glue and keep working. But it isn’t. It’s cracked like that all the way around and the cracks run almost all the way through the piece. MrsGF finally suggested I just let it sit for a while until it stabilizes and then see if I can salvage anything from it. Sigh…
Amateur Radio Stuff… Pretty much nothing has been going on there for a variety of reasons. A while back my primary computer got taken out by lightning, which was the one I used for logging, controlling the radios, doing digital communications, etc. So I also lost all of the software, my contact logs, all of that stuff.
My computer/electronics/ham radio room down in the basement was an absolute mess so I decided to take the opportunity to reorganize everything and deal with the rat’s nest of wiring that had accumulated behind the equipment. And then I got involved in more important things like cleaning up the gardens, dealing with a leaking water heater… Well, you get the idea. Anyway, I’ve only just gotten started on trying to get all of that put back together. And now I’m trying to remember how everything was connected because, of course, I didn’t keep notes on anything. Sigh
My much repaired OCFD antenna broke again a few months ago and I left it down because we were going to have the tree in the backyard taken down. But that didn’t happen, so I need to get the replacement for that strung up before the snow flies
Amaryllis … We had this dopey amaryllis laying around for something like 5 years now. After it bloomed the first year MrsGF kept the thing because she’d heard you can get them to blossom again. BTo be honest I thought the thing was dead or dying because it would make a half hearted attempt to send up a green shoot, then die back. But for whatever reason this year we got this…
I don’t know how she does it, MrsGF. The woman can take a shriveled up old piece of root, throw it near some dried out patch of worthless dirt, and a few weeks later end up with thriving plants.
The Joy of Allergies… Well, here I am, it’s 4:30 AM and I’ve been up for half an hour thanks to my allergies. Sigh… I am trying to wean myself off antihistamines. I’ve never bothered to get myself tested to see what I am actually allergic to, but I know tree pollen is in the mix, along with cats, grass pollen, and a rather lengthy list of other airborne irritants. It isn’t bad enough that I’m rendered nonfunctional or anything like that, but it is uncomfortable and annoying and I feel like I have a cold pretty much all the time. The end result is the same no matter what it is I’m allergic to – my eyes feel like they’re full of gravel, my sinuses are stuffed up and produce copious amounts of gunk that gets into my throat, especially when I lay down, so that makes me cough, especially when I try to sleep. Over the counter medications don’t do much or have nasty side effects for me. I have found one that works relatively well, and it has the added benefit of being very, very cheap. I take one in the evening before I go to bed and that helps a lot. But…
This is about the time of the year when my allergy issues tend to get better and I shouldn’t need to keep taking this stuff. But as is often the case there is something called a rebound effect. When I stop taking it, the symptoms come back worse than they were before I started taking the stuff in the first place. My sinuses start producing even more gunk which gets back into my throat making me cough, which gets even worse when I lay down so it makes it hard to sleep. Grrr.
Interestingly, when I’m traveling and get west of the Mississippi, usually about halfway through South Dakota, about, oh, Murdo or Wall, my symptoms start to go away. The first time I noticed I was in Wall, SD. I’d stayed at a motel there and woke up and felt, well, good. I mean really good. I could breathe through my nose without effort, my eyes didn’t feel like they were full of sand and I actually thought something was wrong with me for a while until I realized what was going on. On the way back by the time I got into western Minnesota all of the symptoms were starting to come back. Which is why I’ve spent so much time in SD, Wyoming and Montana. So the stuff I’m allergic to apparently doesn’t grow out there.
Anyway, if I don’t give into the temptation to go back on the stuff so I can get a good night’s sleep, it will take me three or four days before things start to improve so I’m going to be even more of a grouch than usual. So if I seem to be even more irritating than usual, that’s why. (sniff sniff cough cough)
That’s enough of this for right now. I have a lot of stuff coming up. I need to get started on Part II of the resin guide/tutorial thingie, I need to try to get my ham radio stuff put back together, software installed, etc. I found some slabs of black walnut from some trees a friend cut down years ago out in the garage that I want to do something with. I got that brand new Nikon camera and haven’t been doing much with that. I got the GoPro video camera and I haven’t done much with that, either. But the resin project will give me a chance to give that some exercise. Sometime in the future I want to talk about Chinese and Korean romantic comedies and dramas, which has become something of a fad in the US. I’d like to talk about advertising, especially advertising back in the early days of the 20th century…
Will I ever get around to doing any of that stuff? Maybe…
grouchyfarmer 