Warm again, in Houston anyway. Some places are going to get some winter, and it looks like they are going to get it hard. Stay safe and use your preps… I’ll be wearing shorts. But then you all know that we sweat balls in the summer, and hurricanes regularly tear the place apart, so there is that.
Yesterday I did more present wrapping. Got W and D2 out the door and to the BOL. D1 made plans and W allowed them, that monkey wrenched our family plans. I am going to strenuously object next time. And I’ll have some leverage because D1 missed her curfew and caused further shifting in plans.
Today I’ll sleep in a bit to make up for the late night, then load the minivan and head up. We should be eating french meat pie and opening presents later tonight. Clearly, we won’t be having a white Christmas this year. One year we missed it by only a day or two though. We do get snow in Houston occasionally, but in my opinion and the opinion of my joints, warmer is better.
I hope no one here is doing any last minute rushing around unless it’s something you wanted to do. I know I wanted to be done with messing around before now. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out.
Enjoy the time we have. Stack a few things…
nick
What a lovely almost-Christmas present I got: First post!
I may be doing car work today but I’m not touching anything until it’s locked down that another portion can be done in the near future. Replacing a control arm messes up the alignment, so you don’t want to drive any further than necessary before get an alignment done. But the other work, which I’m actually going to break down and pay someone else to do, will also mess up the alignment, so I want to do them together. The end-of-year holidays and vacations are causing scheduling conflicts.
The Child’s first professional performance is tonight. Best wishes to her, with the only luck needed being that she doesn’t freeze up from stage fright.
A neighbor had an overbred small dog with a special diet. When she (the dog, not the neighbor) died, she (the neighbor, not the dog) gave me her (the dog’s, not the neighbor’s) leftover food, thinking that I could feed it to my chickens. Absolutely not, without knowing what was in it. But, come Winter, I did set it out for wild critters to eat.
It’s telling that both the dry food and the canned food that I set out went untouched early in the season. It wasn’t until the critters got really hungry later on that they’d eat what I put under the cover of some bushes. It makes me wonder just what was in that crap. My nose isn’t nearly sensitive enough to pick out whatever was deterring the critters but I can tell you that the dry and the canned each smelled worse than normal dog food.
No labels on the food?
Or was it some boutique carp brewed up like Love Potion #9?
The bag and the cans had labels but nothing leapt out at me as distinct from other pet food. Not that I’m any kind of expert.
I’d previously set out leftover dog food, ordinary Iams or whatever, not special for delicate inbreeds, and critters ate the piles every night.
The local Mod Pizza franchise went kaput, and Round Table Pizza recently replaced them in the space.
Round Table is another West Cost chain, a sure sign of infestation of an area by Californians along with In-n-Out.
Which reminds me – @Ray, I saw that In-n-Out now has locations in TN, including one in the home town of Cracker Barrell, Lebanon.
The company moved HQ to Franklin earlier this year.
It looks like Tennessee is on track to get a serious infestation.
You want the alligator to stick around. Just don’t feed it, and make sure the tenants know that the gator is off limits.
Without an alligator, you will get ducks, and the ducks will cr*p all over any available horizontal surface, especially if man made.
What? Ducks are cuter?
Start at the 9:45 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaZJs26oRwI
Gators are also easier to deal with than snapping turtles because the turtles tend not to be scared of people.
Happy Christmas, Chicken Boy!
Second and third rounds of emergency purchases have been accomplished. The guys at the hardware shop recognised me and let me in at 12.57, although closing at 13.00, to grab a set of drills for my nephew, 11, to put under the tree for his father, my BiL. Emergency bananas and frozen chips (French fries) were secured, and a bouquet of fresh flowers for W1’s mother.
I also showed said nephew how to wrap presents. Hard to believe that he knows how to chat and game on the internet all day, but not how to use a scissors, sticking tape or wrapping paper. I distinctly remember learning about paper and scissors (safety version) in pre-school. We had to wrap our own school books in brown paper.
Very festive here. It is actually snowing. High time to crack open a bottle of bubbly and begin the celebrations!
Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas!
Try it. It’s delicious. Just remove the stones from the dates first… If you want to be really fancy, replace the stone with a smoked toasted almond before wrapping the thinly-sliced bacon around. You might need a cocktail stick to secure the bacon strip.
I wanted to make sausage rolls / pigs in blankets, but although I am in the spiritual home of the sausage, Germany, I couldn’t find any sausages or sausage meat I liked the look of for that use. It really needs good Irish sausages…
Well, when I went to light the pellet stove this morning the chimney exhaust fan wouldn’t turn on and the flame went out.
The plan to keep myself alive is to light matches, one by one, until they are all gone and the cold claims me.
Goodbye you all.
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I suppose I could use my electric heaters, or my propane heaters, or my kerosene heaters, or the diesel heater.
Up, moving, kid is home. Coffee, quick shower, and load up. Two things to wrap…
n
The kid’s car keys, to keep her from driving, and her mouth, to stop the excuses?
One-Bowl, Overnight Cinnamon Rolls Recipe | BraveTart
As requested. Bravetart == Stella Parks, who had a meteoric rise in the cookbook/youtube/web universe, burned out, and hasn’t been seen in a while. Her recipes are detailed, labor intensive, and by-and-large wonderful.
They didn’t rise in the fridge overnight; I’ll let them rise on the counter and bake them later. I have errands to run and I don’t want them to rise too much.
How old is the recipe? Refrigerators today are commonly set several degrees colder than they were in the 1960s. IIRC, baking yeast is also slightly different than it was several decades ago, though I don’t know the details. Depending on the strain of yeast, the difference between 41F back then and 37F today might be the difference between rising in the fridge and not rising.
Could be fridge temp, or yeast age, or the fact that it was a fairly short “overnight” due to my late start. I’m not worried. The first rise was pretty good.
It’ll just mean we get Cinnamon rolls for dessert after dinner and leftovers tomorrow instead of having them for brunch.
@EdH, or you could bath in the hot blood of your enemies?
I’d like to hear about the diesel heater. I’ve picked up a couple in different styles and haven’t had the chance to test them. Do they smell? Are they dirty? Do they seem effective and efficient? They are everywhere in my auction so a lot of them get returned, but then a lot of them are getting purchased.
Getting closer to heading out.
n
Municipal water supplies also have a lot more chlorine in the system than they did even twenty years ago.
Does Houston have toilet-to-tap like New Orleans?
If you can’t use bottled water, let the chlorine evaporate from tap water before adding the yeast.
I took some coins to the credit union for deposit. $32.05. Funny, it felt like more! I used to have about half that amount on average in my car in years gone by.
Driving home, I realized that may be the last time I ever deposit coins. How often do you use cash anymore? I still carry bills, usually around $100, but I typically have those same bills for a year or more.
I have one. Used it for a while a couple years ago to make sure it works, then packed it up for emergencies which haven’t happened yet.
There is some smell, but that’s expected from burning diesel. Efficiency seems good, putting out a lot of heat for the fuel consumed. I think that my unit can keep the basement warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing but it’s hard to be sure because I can’t think of a good way to measure the heat transfer from a heated basement to an unheated upstairs.
You’ll need a DC power source (car battery in an emergency, but I have a Li ion “power station” and solar panels) and some kind of setup for the hot pipes to pass through a window or dryer vent without burning anything.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNKTZosL6d8 and several other videos by the same guy. He modified his unit several ways, to use old cooking oil, to run the heat line through a sand bed, and I don’t know what else.
I pay cash for everything that I can. It’s not the credit card bank’s and assorted snoops’ business where I shop.
Yeah, I’ve been harping on the wisdom of practicing in the secondary economy before need, and that means cash.
At one point I used almost no cash, preferring the receipts and records for my own use. Now I carry and use cash as much as possible.
Remember that a change in habits is as suspicious as doing something suspicious. Establish some alternative patterns now, while the tech is still young.
——-
Now I’m off.
n
Oops…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/23/epstein-unredacted-files-social-media
Spousal unit and I had Christmas. It is just the two of us so not a big deal. We each had a couple of gifts we got each other. We both knew what we were getting because I bought mine and ordered the spousal unit’s gifts online. Tomorrow will be just another day.
I got a new wallet. Kangaroo leather so thinner than cowhide. The old wallet was too thick and bothered me when I sat in the truck for long periods. I also got a portable monitor that I purchased on Wednesday the day before Black Friday. Costco had a good price. The monitor runs completely off USB-C on the MacBook, no power cord. It does need a 240-watt cable. It may use less but I do know a 60-watt cable will not work. Quite thin and will work when traveling.
Wife got, well, ahem, had me order, a foam cutting blade, electric and uses heat to melt the foam. She also got, ahem, ordered, some angle power driver attachments for the DeWalt impact driver.
The leg is about the same, maybe slightly better. The cream from Walgreens, antibiotic and pain, helped the pain and seems to be reducing the inflammation, such inflammation being the infection. I don’t think it is serious enough to consider auditioning for a peg-legged pirate.
+1 for the monitor arms. Getting rid of the monitor bases really frees up space on the desk. I need to rearrange some items when I get rid of the power switch thingey that sat under one monitor. I will wait until my 12-outlet power strip arrives from Home Depot, which was surprisingly cheaper than Amazon. Once that is installed, power cables set up, I will then have to start re-tying up the wires under the desk to make it neat.
I did take the old monitor, probably 15+ years old to the dump. Along with my mini-disc recorder and portable player. I also tossed about 15 mini-discs. I don’t ever see myself using them ever again. MP3’s and portable MP3 players along with cell phones have completed changed the music listening requirements.
I next need to digitize some cassettes, then toss them and the player in the trash. I have about 150 albums I need to do something with. Digitizing is probably the better solution. But a few of those albums date from the late ’60s and may be worth some money. Or not. All are in really good shape having been played on high quality turntables, tone arms, and cartridges.
As for all my CDs, those have been imported into iTunes, lyrics added to many, and stored on my iPhone, iPad and MacBook. I suppose I should consider selling those. Many are from the Time-Life collections that were popular in the ‘90’s and early double O time frame. I spent a lot of money on those and thought of tossing them does not sit well.
And how in the blazes did I go from monitors to CDs? I need a life.