(Old) Firin' up the grill in the MMP

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffeinatin’. YAWN ‘Tis 59 Amurrkin out and clear with a predicted high of 84 and mostly N.O.S. for the day. Today is laundry day. Be still my heart! Also, I have a “wellness check” appointment at ten-thirty a.m. It shall be confirmed that I am indeed alive, can draw the hands on a clock, remember a series of numbers, know not to hurt myself by trippin’ on a rug, and some other stuff that proves I am not as of yet ready for the home. I think it’s stoopid, but my PCP is keen on me doin’ it, so do it I shall. Plus, Medicare pays for it, so there’s that. The doctor who performs it looks to me like she could do with a “wellness check” herself. ISTM she could do with a “wellness check” herself. Sup shall be grilled chikin tenders on sallit with cheesey garlic bread.

RealFish here’s hopin’ that your PCP and others can come up with a fix for your ailment.

sari maybe Echo will come around. Right now she probably sees the pups as pests. I too look forward to tales of puppy shenanigans.

Now I need more caffeine and to feed rumbly tummy. Then, I suppose, bother of bothers, I must needs purtify and don attire acceptable for bein’ amongst the great unwashed. Woe is me!

Happy Tuesday Y’all!

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Similarly, many who claim to be good Christians are big on the “Thou Shalt Not” part and not so good with “Love one another.” Because what fun is that when you can sit in judgement… but I digress.

One’s imagination runs amok… um, body parts? Snakes? A tray of cupcakes?

Kinda like a well-baby appointment for big babies?? :rofl: I just had my semi-annual once-over last week. I’ve noticed lately when the nurse is doing the preliminaries, she asks if I’ve been depressed. Now, I know I have RBF, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the trigger. < snerk > And my doc (actually, a NP) pretty much starts with “So, is anything bothering you?” which is a nice, wide-open question. I can tell her what’s bugging me or ask if I should be concerned about certain things. It’s a pretty good system. Then she gives me a printout at the end that summarizes what we discussed - thanks to the laptop where she can jot notes immediately.

FWIW, I’m glad you’re not ready for the home.

I don’t understand what my brain is about lately. I wake in the wee small hours thinking it’s close to time to get up when it isn’t. Not sure if it’s because of dreams or if my brain is just messing with me. But it can be confusing, not to mention annoying to wake a couple-three times during the night for no apparent reason. No wonder I fall asleep in my recliner while reading.

Last night, I ordered this and a roll of underlayment, since we plan to put this on the concrete outside FCD’s shop. The kids will have a ball - especially Tobias - he’s a water baby for certain! Daughter says he’ll put his face in the water when bathing. Roxy still won’t do it. Anyway, we’ll set it up along with the canopy so we won’t get sunburned. I still need to get a small tarp to cover it and keep leaves and crap out of it overnight.

School is almost done at Daughter’s - her seniors graduate on Firday, then next week is clean-up and field day for the remaining kids. I know she’s looking forward to the end of the year - she’s had a stressful learning curve about being in charge. Weather promised to be decent, so I’ll be taking the grands to a playground after I pick them up.

FCD plans to start waxing the boat today. I just hope he’s meticulous about it - doing a section at a time and not moving on till it’s all been done. When we were washing the cabin over the weekend, he told me he’d finished one side, but when I looked, he’s completely missed the last lower section. It was easy to see the line between dirty and clean, but I’m not sure waxed/not waxed will be as obvious, considering the condition of the surfaces. I guess we’ll find out.

And so it begins. The little guy will be here in an hour or so - I’ll enjoy my quiet while I can.

Happy Tuesday!!

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Good picnic with the family. All but three of my 12 grandkids were there, as was my only great-grand. My daughter was missing because of COVID. Even the ex-wife was there. Beautiful sunny day with a nice breeze.

Today is rain and thunder, and the rest of the week looks to be the same. It’s clean up the air, which is good, and knock the dust off the moose up north.

64

Good morning everyone.

It’s currently 47 degrees and cloudy. Cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon, and highs will top out around 65F.

The kids and grandkids came over yesterday, and we all had a very nice visit. I took them to my favorite nursery, and my son-in-law bought a vast hanging basket to take home. They love mine and wanted one like it. They found one, it’s not quite as big as mine, but it’s nearly as large. I also bought some more plants, including some alyssum. I love the smell of it. I plant it below my great room window so the scent wafts inside, especially on warm summer evenings.

The grandkids wore us out, and we all had fun. There were no meltdowns until the very end, and by then, Zoe was becoming tired and cranky.

It’s back to the salt mines today. I’m exhausted this morning and did not want to get out of bed. I should have taken another day off, but I have a lot of work to do, and I’ll be off this Friday anyway.

I need some more coffee. I’m barely functioning.

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Oak (usually white oak) is my base wood if I have it around. Probably has to do with my Eastern European background, where oak is the traditional smoking wood. Otherwise, I’ll use apple or maple for that. I then like to add some “flavoring” wood like hickory or pecan. I don’t know when or why I started using pecan, but it’s similar to hickory, but seems a little sweeter or smoother or something to me.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I’d be reliably able to pick out various woods in my food. Ideally, one would like, say, a barbecue class, where they cook up five shoulders, controlled as well as possible to be equal, and cooked over, say, oak, apple, cherry, hickory, and maple. And then taste them one by one and compare notes. That would be ideal. Because smoking it at home, it’s really hard to remember and accurately assess the taste of one wood over another from one day/week/month to the next. Plus there are variables like letting your smoke burn out for about a half hour or so, so you don’t have bitter white billowy smoke on your meat. Yesterday, I didn’t have the option as I had to leave to do an early photo assignment, so I stuck the pork on the smoker as soon as the coals were fully lit. And I could taste that little bit of bitterness in the bark of the final product – it’s not something that bothers most people, but I can tell when it’s been a “clean” smoke vs not. Some people might actually prefer it because it seems “smokier” but to me it seems “sootier.”

I also bought the wood chunks on Amazon. Better selection and much cheaper than what I was able to find at Home Depot. The Kingsford hickory chunks were almost $17 for 350 cubic inches (four pounds.) What the hell? They didn’t have the cheaper Weber brand there, so I bought both pecan and oak online for $8-$9 for the same size bag.

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Morning all. Another 6am wakeup, looks like I’ll have to wait for my next sleep-in day, at least it gets the day started early. 65F heading for 82F and most N.O.S., albeit the weather folks added the weasel words “A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible…” Not much on the agenda today, probably should hook up the new hoses/carts to the outside spigots so I am ready for lawn watering when the need strikes. We’ll see.

Taters, Cookie, sounds like a lot of fun with the families.

FCM, schools pretty muched finished here last week, and looking forward to pictures of the kids in the pool.

swampy, have never had a ‘wellness’ check (at least as far as I can remember). Do go see the doc every year for a checkup, maybe they’ll start that routine with me one of these days.

Boo Fae, What’s in the Bin?

Nellie, don’t know Sarah Millican, but that is funny and FWIW you can buy panties that say that…

Flyboy, quite a story for Memorial Day. Respect.

Sari, good luck with the pups and know that you did it to yourself… :wink: :face_with_spiral_eyes: :slightly_smiling_face:

OK, need to go break my fast and be about the day. All y’all take care.

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That would be an interesting experiment. I feel like, out of the 5 woods you listed, all of which I have smoked with at one time or another, I could always tell hickory apart since it’s pretty distinctive, but the other 4 maybe not so much.

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That doesn’t sound good . . .

I hope all goes well.

I haven’t had a yard since I lived in the States decades ago. My BBQ skills are nonexistent at this point.

Last night was a PTA meeting for my son’s 7th grade class. It’s strange being both a subject teacher and a parent at the same school.

I’m teaching the kids the be verbs (am, is, are, etc.) and gave the example sentence “My mother is beautiful.” I had kids run to the right side of the classroom is they agreed with the sentence and to the left side if they disagreed.

Being middle school kids with an attitude, most of the boys headed for the left side, until I reminded them that I’d be seeing all of their mothers later that night. That brought everyone back over to the right.

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Good morning, kids!

T’was a lovely four-day weekend in the House of Nine. I finished my book and started another, went for several long rambling walks, and played a whole bunch of Boltgun - if you’re a fan of old-school DOOM/Quake-style retro-shooters and/or Warhammer 40K, give it a go. It’s cheap! I read everything from the last few days, particular hugs to Real Fish and Nellie.

This week I’ll be finishing the shelf-moving project here at work and hopefully getting the new study stations set up. Then come Monday I’m flying to Montana for another conference. Other than that, not much to report.

That’s hilarious, I love it.

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Yeah, hickory is definitely in my “more aggressive flavoring wood” category, along with pecan, and certainly mesquite (which I don’t use in my smokes–I might grill over it, though.)

I know the conventional profiles for various types of wood and their supposed flavors and appearances. For example, they say that cherry wood enhances the reddish hue of smoked meats more than other types of wood. Or that apple is “fruity” and “sweet.” However, I can’t say I’ve personally observed this to be consistently true. It makes me question the validity of such claims, and I wonder how much of it is just typical BBQ folklore versus what can be uncovered through a meticulous scientific experiment.

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Hi all! Good to hear of Sari’s crazy puppers and that Nellie still has her sense of humor to go with the Giant Green Guilt Monster perched on the back of her head courtesy of that long-running worldwide conspiracy centered in Rome.

Lazy day yesterday here with a walk to/from a late breakfast out being the sole accomplishment of note.

Today has been lazy so far with breakfast in and a long yak with a friend / co-worker. Early afternoon I have a dermatologist appointment to scrape & burn two cancer spots we biopsied a couple weeks ago. No big deal. Might hit the groc store for an item or two on the way to/from the doc. Such an exciting life.

Tue-Thu are my off/overtime days, then my irkweek starts again on Fri.

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Yeah, I have a go-to salmon dish where I swore by not only using maple as a smoking wood, but the maple from a specific tree in the backyard of the first house I bought, going on 30 years ago. Sadly, I moved away over 20 years ago, and whittled the last of a well-seasoned branch of it down to nothing a couple years ago making chips. But, I think other maple wood I’ve used since then is almost as good as my backyard maple was :smirk:

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SIL wanted us to go with them to Great Wolf Lodge the end of June - essentially the 4th of July weekend. It’s an indoor water park. I’m sure the kids will love it but FCD and I kinda hate the idea. I think SIL hoped we’d split the cost.

Oh, and all 6 of us would share the same room. Another NOPE! Plus having to do something about Higgs…

About time to feed the toddler.

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I have no idea, I wasn’t about to look! The people next door have a history of refuse and recycling disasters though…

Many years ago, the council provided every household with a small food recycling caddy for kitchen waste and a larger green receptacle to put outside for collection alongside the biiiiiiig recycling bin. They also generously provided two rolls of green bags to go inside the caddy and collect the food waste before the full bags were transferred to the larger green thing. For the majority of people, this was not an onerous task, nor something hard to work out. We recycled our food waste in the proper manner, it was collected and disposed of for us.

The neighbours, however, couldn’t work that one out at all. At the time we also had large green boxes for recycling materials (cans, bottles, plastic containers, paper and cardboard). The neighbours decided that instead of putting green bags full of leftover food, peelings and suchlike in the bin provided, they would just tip the waste directly into the bin. They dutifully put the bin out. It did not get emptied. A note was left with it explaining why. A week later, the binmen came back to find the same container outside waiting for collection. They left it behind. For several weeks, this container was left on the street - the neighbours wouldn’t move it, the binmen wouldn’t take it away. Eventually we reported a sighting of rats, so the environmental health chaps came to deal with it instead!

With the current recycling plans, we have a large bin that takes glass/plastic containers/tin cans along with paper and cardboard. The food waste collection idea was “binned” long ago because so few people put stuff out. This last weekend, the neighbours have had someone working at the house to dismantle and replace a small bit of roofing. Corrugated plastic. I suspect that’s what’s in the recycling bin - which they won’t empty because it’s thick plastic and therefore non-recyclable.

TL;DR…the wrong kind of rubbish!

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Great Wolf Lodge in Washington state? That’s a hell of a long way to go for a water park/casino!

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One morning when I was in second grade I was in the boy’s line, (the lines were always segregated) walking from the Mass at Church to the school to begin the day. I was talking to the kid next to me and suddenly I was dragged out of the line my Sister Mary Lorenza. She slapped me and yelled at me for a few minutes then parked me in the corner of a hallway. She told me not to move from that spot until she came back for me. This was probably about 8.45am since the 8.00am Mass was counted as our first class and attendance was taken.

I was still standing in that corner, in the dark, at around 5.00pm when my Mom and a police officer came through the school looking for me because I had not come home from school.

Sister Mary Lorenza had forgotten about me. This was sixty three years ago, and typing this still brought back memories of how frightened I was.

Every person who went to my elementary school from the late forties until that school was closed in the mid seventies has at least one horror story of an encounter with this woman.

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In our part of the world the various municipalities have all stopped all forms of recycling. The public simply Does. Not. Care.

They will dump anything in any bin, recyclables mixed with food mixed with random trash in whichever sort of container the city has provided or not. It takes like 95+% compliance by everybody to make the programs work. We had more like 20% compliance.

So now 100% of everything goes into the landfill which around here is a series of multi-hundred foot tall mile wide manmade garbage mountains. It’s the only cost-effective way to dispose of random mixed municipal refuse.

Which reminds me of a famous song

78

There haven’t been any Dopefests I’ve heard about in a long time, and the posts here by nelliebly and longhair75 make me want to organize one.

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There’s one in Williamsburg, VA and one about to open in Perryville, MD. And a bunch more…

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Okay, that makes more sense, lol!