That’s what a charcoal starter is for. As well as starting charcoal, that is. :)
I’d like to add a few thoughts about health in general. My grandfather smoked horrible smelling cigars with his friends in my house for many years. My uncle Tony smoked De Nobili cigars all of his life. De Nobili’s smelled liked burning sweat socks. My grandpa lived to 89. He would have lived longer but he ended up with leukemia. Back when he died, in the 1970s, it wasn’t so curable. My uncle Tony outlived him for 6 years.
So. My grandpa and my uncle were big guys. You might say, bigger than life. Every Wednesday Grandpa would go to the track to bet the fillies. If he won, he was happy. If he lost, you stayed out of his way. If he won I’d get a gift, like a new bike. If he lost, see above.
But every Wednesday, like clockwork, the guys would come over to play checkers and drink red wine. And smoke cigars.
Gran and granpa lived downstairs. My parents lived with me on the second floor. My brother and I had bedrooms on the third (attic) floor. Smoke goes up. My mother hated it. The whole house would stink until Friday.
Anyway. The guys were grandpa, uncle Frank and Johnny. Uncle Frank always had a 45 revolver in a shoulder holster. He worked at a pawn shop. He needed it. I don’t know about Johnny, but I guessed he packed. Because I hear them talking about the business. Henry was a made guy. I didn’t know what that meant back then, but that’s the word that was used. Made. Made guys were badass as far as I could tell. They always talked about that word. Was this guy made? Who was gonna be made?
Johnny never took off his hat. Or his jacket. Always wore a tie. He was really nice to me. He would always give me cash. Sometimes a 20. Sometimes a hundred. Then my mother would take it away from me and tell me not to take money from him.
Uncle Frank would bring me shit from his business. One day it was a brown paper bag of nylon triangles. They were used for umbrellas. I had my grandmother sew them under the arms of a sweater. Then I was Spider Man!
He also would bring me gold rings with huge red stones. For him they would be pinky rings, for me they hung off of my fingers.
My Wednesdays were me and sometimes my brother playing in the room while these three drank lots of wine and smoke smelly cigars. They played checkers with these large hollow plastic checkers. On a huge checkerboard made of cheap thin plastic. They would slam the checkers down and yell things like ‘EYEGLASSES’ or ‘SCISSORS’ and “KING ME!”
At some point my grandfather would say, “Cummere ya kid. This is my grandson! He’s a tough kid.” And he’d 'teach me how to box. He actually was a boxer in Philadelphia. He’d make me hold a couch cushion up. Then he would punch it and knock me over the couch. “That’ll teach him to be tough. He’ll be a fighter.”
Then Johnny gave me money.
Fun baby. That’s fun.
Oh yeah, my point? I’d rather drink wine, smoke cheap cigars and die as young as my family than worry about cancerous fumes from grilling meat. Fuck that noise.
We have an induction range but it feels like a waste of money for the moderate amount of cooking we do. Seems like most people just get a separate unit for boiling pots of water.
What I miss most about gas is for an in-ground grill. No propane tanks, just flip the valve and pay the gas company a few dollars at the end of the month.
My biology professor described doing things that were described as unhealthy with being similar to pulling the lever on a slot machine. If you smoke, you’re pulling the lever more often than if you aren’t smoking. You could very well get all the cherries before someone else, or the person who pulls the lever once might get it and you make it all the way till 90.
And of course 100 years from now they’ll look back at us and wonder what the heck we were thinking about something we don’t even know yet.
[quote=“Nesrie, post:13010, topic:30028, full:true”]And of course 100 years from now they’ll look back at us and wonder what the heck we were thinking about something we don’t even know yet.
[/quote]
To maximize life expectancy, in the future everyone will get castrated shortly after puberty, eat low-calorie diets and never leave their housing pod unless they are driven by a certified Google autocar.
Sucks to be them.
Because while the house was being built extending the line would have been cheap. Now the line would either require trenching out the concrete floor or running it above the ceiling (very high ceiling, open concept) and then taking it down an exterior wall, so expensive, plus the new stove. We actually have talked about doing it but the money is needed for roof repair and replacing my 16 year old truck.
Oh interesting. My house is a 70s house, and it has gas in garage, water heater, and a valve of some kind on the deck. I do have a crawlspace though and an attic so I assume if I want that route they would use that route with some cost bot nothing dramatic. You have nothing under you though huh.
Like I said though since there is gas there, in my dreams I am envision stonework out back and a permanent line to a grill! You could do that, maybe
I have neighbors who have run lines as you describe, but I am not sure he did it with a permit. Yea, my situation is a little unique in that the kitchen and the gas are basically now at opposite ends of the house, with a concrete floor (in California only really old places would have sub-floor crawl spaces where I live). We do plan to update the kitchen at some point so we may look into the added cost at that time.
School day at the refugee center! We’re running an English summer school, about 50 kids each day. I’m only there 2 days a week - I have no idea how full time teachers find the energy!
Props to you Skip, that’s a good thing you’re doing.
Just went through router troubleshooting hell with Linksys and error 2118. I am pretty sure, although it doesn’t seem to tell you, it’s the Media Prioritization. I set the router back to factory default, but since I had my wireless setting snapshot, it was pretty easy to bring it up. This is the second high end router I’ve had just decide to become corrupt on me in the last couple of years and it’s the second factory reset for this specific unit.
I have a Netgear warming up to replace it. I despise Netgear as a company. They’re a lawsuit happy, attack your customers who resell evil assholes… but LInksys and their pain in the ass logins combined with this being the second router that’s done this… ugh.
So the stove was delivered today. As well they finished the floor in the bathroom. All we are waiting for is the installation of the shower door. I’ll tell you, I feel, at this late date, like I’m almost an adult. Does anyone understand that feeling? Like you’re faking it. I have a pretty nice house now. And I keep wondering when I’m going to grow up. At 58.
So the stove is a strange thing. It looks really good and it has a shitload of features. You can put a frozen thing like a pizza in it, set it to frozen pizza and put in the baking time and temperature, and it doesn’t have to preheat. The oven figures out the actual time needed. it has a fast preheat for the times you want that. It also has a fast boil setting on the cook top. A special warming place to keep sauces or soup warm for up to an hour. A melt setting for melting chocolate or butter without burning. Three different oven racks. One for heavy items. One for basic baking. And a rack that can be split so that one is there and one hangs down or can be removed completely.
OTOH the actual cook top has issues. They warn you that using aluminum or copper bottom pans at high heat can leave indelible marks. If you use cast iron or ceramic clad cast iron you never want to move them by dragging them. That can scratch the glass. A lot of things can scratch the glass. Trade-offs.
As much as I’d prefer gas, I really love this sucker. All of my present pots and pans are All Clad or cheaper knockoffs. No aluminum bottoms.
And convection, so I have that going for me.
Next stop shower door installation.
In what might be the closest I’ll ever get to either fame or professional photography work, I discovered today that two of my photographs were used with credit by a local news paper in a story about the Goatalympics–a really cool event put on by a goat rescue a work associate of mine is involved with. It really is a ton of fun; with and it’s hard not to be swept up in the enthusiasm and fun with the kids competing. The obstacle coarse and owner/goat lookalike contest are always highlights.
I’ve volunteered the past few years as an event photographer, but I always feel a little out of place or amateurish because there are usually two or three other people there with professional-grade cameras and massive telephoto lenses, and I’m just using my tiny little Fuji X100s with a fixed 35mm lens. They’re Photographers, and I’m just a guy with a camera.
Anyway. It’s hard not to feel a small amount of pride seeing my name in print along with a picture I took.
This is amazing! Both the lovely photos and the awesome-sounding event. Goats are so delightfully weird :-D
Congrats! Great shots. And a great event that I had never even heard of. Good article. I had not realized that abandoned goats was a problem. Or that goat ownership was even a thing as a pet.
To follow the goat theme…
I’m with the goats on this one.
Goats are incredibly efficient and low maintenance at clearing weeds. You can rent them around here for that if you have a field worthwhile to use a few of them, or if you’re lucky, just ask someone with a few goats to borrow them for a week. If they didn’t learn to ram people when they are young, fun to pet and enjoy too!
That is so awesome. My heart goes out to them braving such a touch world and likewise to you helping them.
I’m kinda behind. Congrats!!!
I have a question I’m worried about the answer to. I have a window air conditioner that was in my office where my computer is since my computer gave off so much heat. Cooling the whole house instead of just my office made more sense. One of the times I got so sick last summer coincided with me using the old AC unit and since we left it out there year round (it was 10 years old) I was concerned something was growing in there that could compromise my lungs. I didn’t use it this year, so yesterday I got a burst of energy and decided to take it out to prepare the window for a possible replacement. We unscrewed everything and before I knew it the AC unit fell out of the window taking part of the the window housing with it :( Apparently water had been collecting and it rotted all through the window frame, and deep into the wall, the insulation etc. Last night was not fun as the wife and I worked until 3:00 am to rip out all the wet stuff we could get to and not knowing what to do to keep bugs and water out, we just sprayed Stuff expanding foam in to fill the cavities. We then we put insulating shrink plastic on the inside to try and keep bugs and water vapor out. Is a repair job on this as bad as I think it’s going to be?
I’m starting to look at some videos to see if I could do it myself… because I’m crazy, well and probably can’t afford it LOL. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+fix+rotten+window+frame+and+wall
It actually doesn’t look that complicated, provided you have the right tools. I’m no handyman, but if I had those same tools, I could probably manage that project in about four hours. :) For sure not the four-and-a-half minutes it took them in the video.
Yes, you could maybe do it, but prepare for complications. And some stress. And lots of dust. Not sure how your health would hold up, come to think of it.
Wait a minute. I missed this. How far down past the sill? And how badly rotted?
If it’s more than just the sill, better at least have a pro look it over and give you an estimate.