drafting

How I spent my last hour.

What I did with about three hours of my day

Yes. Really. This took me about that long.

I reminisced back to the 10th grade, when I had a drafting table to use, rather than just a picnic table. It would've cut at least an hour off of the project.

This is a piece of sign metal I trashpicked. I still need a yellow permanent marker to fill in the arrow on the bottom (which will be covered on one side so that it's not just a tease.)

One of the things that I learned (remembered) is that I should always letter right to left.

It's been a moment

Oh my gosh, it has been, hasn't it?

I'm considering taking this blog down, and starting another one. Those of you who know who I am, pretty please: I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. If you know me, you know how to contact me. If you don't (all 0-3 of you) you can leave a comment (I moderate comments, so it won't be posted.)

Okay, with that:

This one will probably only be even vaguely interesting to the Burners among us. This is how I set up my Lip Goo so it dangles nicely off of my playa pack, reminding me to use it. I'm more than happy to give specifics if anyone would like.

And this is a project I spent about an hour on last night:

It's a short but very boring story. Super short version: I fixed the door of a laundry dryer.

I had a mostly great, minimally terrible, time in DC this most recent weekend. Ask for details if you want them.

Okay. Get in touch soon if you'd like to know the next blog adventures. Semi-spoiler: Bartholomew will be the lead on the project!

Breakfast!

Okay, maybe not the prettiest plating, but it has ONIONS, so whaddya want?

At that, fresh spring onions that I know the person who grew and harvested then yesterday, and brought them to the farmers market.

Nom nom nom.

Make Your Own Pizza Night!

At the "Little House". After a full day of work, and then a community meeting about riverfront improvements.

Onion, vegan sausage, daiya, and avocado (not pictured). On K's homemade pizza dough.

Yum.

Fancy sammich!

Today's fancypants sandwich (before it got sandwiched to take to work): 

vegan turky slices, just mayo and Dijon mustard on sourdough, ONIONS, kale, tomatoes, and kosher dill pickles. 

I just ate breakfast, and blogging this makes me hungry for lunch. 

Hiking food porn!

Okay, granted, this is a hotel room edition.

The mere 6.3 miles of hiking I did today was some of the most challenging I've ever done.

Time to eat!

Cambridge food porn!

Hopefully speaks for itself.

New to us!

After a couple months of flooring repair, and then a ridiculous run-around to get the carpet installed, RP is finally fully open again!

breakfast? Yep!

Nothing wrong with a fancypants vegan grilled cheeze and trkey sandwich for breakfast. Hey, look: I'm a grown-ass adult! (Not that I wouldn't feed a kid this for breakfast...)

Guest room reboot!

Here's what I did with my afternoon, with before and after pics:

Finished the hardwood flooring repair, built a couple of beds, put down a couple area rugs, while we're waiting (2+ months now) for the carpet installation.

It's a little rustic, but we have another guest room back on line!

Broccoli!

Well, and: onions!

This was a side dish I made last night for about 19 for dinner. It's shown before roasting, because I thought it'd make for a prettier picture.

And now:

A return to your regularly scheduled programming. I can't blog that serious heavy shit too often. Gets me really riled up.

So here's some food porn: deluxe vegan grilled cheeze sandwich, with spinach and onions! It quickly became closed face, but open face made the prettier picture.

Food Pantry: a rant

This is most definitely not food porn. 

Trigger warnings: poverty, systemic oppression, capitalism, sadness, anger.

This is what 120 bags of groceries look like, packed today, for distribution at the Food Pantry tomorrow morning. It's basically one each of: small can of green beans, small can of kidney beans, small can of string beans, small can of beef ravioli, a 6 pack of ramen noodles, a box of corn flakes, a concentrate of cranberry juice, some sugary granola bars. The big "treat" is that we have real, brand-name Pop Tarts to give out tomorrow. We don't have a lot, and they'll go quickly.

When I get there at 8:00am to set up, there will already be a line for the 9:00am distribution.

Also tomorrow, currently in the the freezers, there will be (one per bag) bread, and (one per bag) desserts, from the Kroger Manager's Special "Woohoo" (closeout/expired) department, and cheap meat. People are already excited that some of it is, unusually, frozen chicken breasts. Until they run out, then it's the usual of (one per bag) eight-pack of shitty hot dogs. Yeah: Woohoo.

In order to qualify for one bag of this, you have to prove that your household GROSS monthly income for a household of one is $1,276 or less. For a family of four, $2,628 or less, then you can have two bags. And so on. Add $345 for each additional person after eight.


It's fucking heartbreaking. 


This isn't meant, in any way, to cheapen the heartfelt commitment and love of the people who packed these bags, many of whom I'll be distributing them with tomorrow morning. They're kind, beautiful people.

Rather:

WHO THE FUCK ARE WE? 

WHAT IN THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE? 

How the fuck are we spending untold billions on foreign wars? How is the West Virginia legislature spending approximately $35,000 per day in extended session having stupid ideologue arguments about the budget, while people are barely getting by?

Remember the concept of the War on Poverty? To paraphrase a song / story lyric from (fantastic, amazing band) Dry Branch Fire Squad, his grandmother had been fighting the War on Poverty so long, she went down to the courthouse and offered to surrender.

Well, here in rural West Virginia, many are still fighting the War on Poverty. They're not surrendering. But they're most certainly on the losing side.

Today I helped pack a lot of food, half of it junk, none of it enough to meaningfully sustain a household of even one for even a week. Tomorrow I'll help give it away, and load it in people's cars, helping many people who can barely walk, much less carry a bag of groceries.

And these people will all struggle through another month.

And we'll do it all again next month.

While the West Virginia Legislature increases regressive sales taxes, and lowers income taxes.

And don't be confused: this isn't just a West Virginia story.

Look around. See if your city/town/community has a food bank, a food pantry, a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, human beings living in cardboard boxes under freeway overpasses, in doorways. Living in the woods close enough to walk in to do day labor, if they're lucky enough to get a backbreaking job for a few hours, with no benefits, no work comp, no day to day reliability, because they're an "independent contractor". Being arrested for the crime of being poor, and homeless.

I assure you, you do. Look around.

This is ALL of us. Many of us are lucky enough that we don't have to live it daily. Think on that for a minute. Or sixty.

Pickle in a Blanket!

You probably can hardly tell under all that goodness, but that's a pretty classic PIAB.

Gonna go build some ramps so I can get the riding mower into the park now. Long story.

Today's installment

in the Breakfast Sandwich Chronicles.

Half Strong Lines(tm) isn't bad, right? I mean, if you hit .500 in baseball you're a legend for the ages!

Perhaps the best breakfast sandwich ever?

Even if not the prettiest plating.

But: Strong Lines(tm)!

Hello, My Name Is:

Maybe my new official title should be:

Mid Level Manager,
Ministry of Unpopular Opinions and Inconvenient Truths

(the backstory is complicated. Some of you know some of it. It rhymes with build.)

GARLIC.

Why not add an entire head of rough chopped garlic to those onions?

ONIONS.

Obligatory shot of a whole bunch of onions, in a super fancy cutting board (a torn up pizza box.)

blood and gore

I don't recall if, in over 1,300 posts, I've ever posted a yucky picture of a body part. (I happily specialize in beautiful food and bicycles.) Well, why not? First time for everything, right?

Here is what I had done yesterday:

The technical name, like many things in medicine, makes it sound abstract (or at least not so yucky): ablation. The reality is that the doctor (in this case, my wonderful smalltown family practice doc) cuts out half (or sometimes all) of your toenail to fix a constantly ingrown toenail.

I first had this done on the other big toe when I was 19, and it took three months to get an appointment with a podiatrist at Kaiser, and hurt like hell. A week ago when I went in for a tetanus shot (gored my leg on rusty barb wire while hiking in the West Virginia woods) my doctor was like "yeah, sure, I can do that. Do you want a full ablation or just half?" The procedure yesterday didn't hurt at all.

So anyway, this is what it looks like when you get half of your big toenail cut out.

/EOF

Bleh: Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I wanted to stop about a quarter of the way through, because simply put, it's just not a good book. It's a good memoir: but as a purported sociological study, it's terrible.

A big part of what never sat right is that while J.D. Vance can certainly self-identify as a "hillbilly" if he wants, it consistently rings untrue.

He writes at length about Jackson, Kentucky, but throughout the book really only goes there for funerals. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and while Butler County and Warren County, Ohio, are most certainly the Rust Belt, they aren't Appalachia. Vance himself acknowledges this late in the book when he talks about going to "Appalachian Ohio" to visit a lovely state park.

Despite the conservative heart warming nature of his National Review-worthy bootstrap pulling rise from working class poverty, Vance started writing the book while a third year at Yale Law. He continued writing it while an associate at Sidley Austin, ranked #7 in the AmLaw 100.

J.D. Vance is a tool.

One among many things that made the bile rise in this supposedly dirt poor hillbilly memoir was that in his senior year of high school, he had been taking golf lessons from a "former golf pro" for a year.

I'm not a "hillbilly". I do live in southern West Virginia right now, but I didn't grow up here. I'm not an Appalachian, or a "hillbilly". Not by a longshot. But neither is J.D. Vance. Not by a longshot.

Butt typing

Well, really, pocket typing. Here is what happens when your phone stays on in your pocket:

pmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlp pompompmkomkomkomkomkpmkpmkpmlpmkpmkpmkpmlplpmlpmlpmlpmlpmllmllmpoll's llamo

Giraffe

I'm not usually one for cute animal photos on the interwebz, but, c'mon: have you ever in your life seen such an adorable plate?

My favorite pack decoration

I waxed nostalgic about my old Camelbak and its replacement in this post.

Now, confidential for F, here is the decoration that makes me happy every time I see it.

It's got a little playa, a little hiking, and a lot of love.

another "Bike as Multipurpose Cargo Vehicle" from the archives

This actually inspired me to go back through the archives and add a new label of "cargo bikes".

If it's insufficiently impressive that this photo was taken on November 29, 2015 (the internetz tells me it was a high of 44 that day); I was just starting to ride about 3.5 miles through Boston city streets. (Watertown, Brighton, and Allston for those who know the city.)

dusk moon

With absolutely no regularity whatsoever, google photos occasionally sends me "hey, these are the photos you took on this day last year!" reminders. 

Here is a photo I made on March 18, 2016, in Cambridge, MA, of a gorgeous waxing 3/4 moon bright in a dusk sky. I was wandering around geocaching while waiting to join F for a gallery showing of "Not Art". 

This wasn't in a gallery, or tagged on a bus stop shelter, but it was certainly nature's art. I barely did it justice by photographing it with my phone. Kind of makes me want to get back to photography in a serious way. 

Ohhhh, yeah. Fancypants vegan grilled cheeze.

This is my (truly super delicious) vegan grilled cheeze:

In absolutely no order at all, since I just want to keep eating it: tofu, grilled onions and green bell peppers, cilantro, daiya "cheddar", and the weirdest looking, biggest Claussen dill "half" pickle in the jar.

This is so damn delicious.

Time? No, I don't think so.

Is it time to retire these pants?

A few weeks ago I sewed in a new zipper (the white zipper, with the blue thread), since the original one utterly failed. 

Then today the zipper pull on the new zipper disappeared (I only noticed when I went to go to the bathroom), so I tied in a little bit of paracord. Red white and blue, baby! I'm so patriotic! It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that these were the most functional materials I had on hand! Fuck yeah 'Murika! 

Time to get rid of the pants? Nah, I don't think so. I have this thing for repairing pants and shorts long after what most people would consider their useful life. We'll see if I get any really funny looks when I go to the Kroger later, but I doubt I will. It's amazing how little attention people pay. 

Clickbait, or the face of jesus in my bread?

You be the judge:

My coworker made fresh bread the other day, and this little loaf is very clearly animated. Is that a cute pudgy little jesus waving? Or a stoic waving walrus?

Could it have anything to do with the notion that the first full solar eclipse to pass entirely over the contiguous United States, August 21, 2017, is being hailed as a religious event, and/or as a sign of the endtimes? (Just google those if you want, I don't want my blog to be the referring link to such quackery.)

Spoiler alert: we ate the bread, so the droves should not descend on rural southern West Virginia to ascertain if their particular flavor false prophet was hanging out in a roll of fresh homemade bread.

Weird stuff that has to get cleaned

File this one under weird crap that it's easy to forget (or never really realize) needs to be occasionally cleaned: the nose pads and nose pad arms on eyeglasses.

I was just looking at myself in the mirror, and while a photo wouldn't really have done it justice, I realized this little area full of nooks and crannies was quite nasty, and multi-colored. Seriously, readers who wear eyeglasses on a daily basis (as I have since the ninth grade): if you have eyeglasses with nosepads, take them off right now, and look at them carefully. And then go get the rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip or two. (Shoutout to F, who loves them a good Q-tip!) The stuff it took off was even yuckier than the first glace would have suggested.

For context: I do a lot in the outdoors, I ride my bikes a lot, I do a lot of woodworking and building and fixing things in old houses, I camp in muddy rainy fallow cornfields, I take my eyeglasses to Burning Man, and so on. So, yes: I do a lot that can and does make me and my accessories dirty. But probably everyone who wears glasses daily has some built up dead skin slough and other unidentifiable yuck.

Speaking of stuff that we do know need to get cleaned, it's been a rough day already in the various bathrooms I keep clean. So far I've cleaned up poop, extensive dried urine, random detritus*, and the mess from someone who looks like they tore out a bunch of their hair over the sink but didn't bother to wipe up any of it. Oh, and a couple of just generally filthy toilets. And while I was walking in to use the bathroom myself this morning, someone was standing silently behind the door in one of our (single occupancy) bathrooms, lights off, door mostly open. It scared the shit out of me.

Okay, I'm gonna switch to the fun stuff for a while. Specifically, repairing a hole in a 120 year old hardwood floor.

*A sadly underused word, if you ask me. 

Some backdated posting

I'm realizing that I didn't post much at all during December. It was a busy, wonderful, strange, hard, lovely month.

This is the latest installment in the long storied history of the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree series. See the xmastree label for more! This is in a hotel room in Durango, Colorado.

the "Internet of Things" as proxy for ultra creepy capitalism

Aside from the incredible creepiness of this, I hate it as hyper consumptive coercive capitalism. 


http://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelarthur/2016/02/24/the-next-big-thing-in-retail-programmatic-commerce/#74c1e5243f52

(this is a dated post that got stuck in draftlandia, but still seems timely.) 

Fancy. Pants.

FPPIAB: Fancy Pants Pickle In A Blanket:

With vegan cheeze, red ONIONS, vegan sausage, and of course, pickles.

It was delicious, on a long, cold, strange day.

What is art? Who am I?

Circa 2016, in honey buckets at a place where a couple of you have been...

More Cowbell! Or maybe just more pigpen

This is a lattice door frame for the pigpen Pig Hilton.

Today's hike: Cascade Falls, VA

It was lovely.

building from random scrap

I'm building a pigpen. No joke: a pigpen.

This is OSB I'm cutting strips from to tie together panels I cut from 100 year old doors that would have otherwise been bulldozed (since they were part of the June 2016 flood.)

More photos (may or may not be) coming soon!

Soup Night!

What binge blogging day would be complete without a little good ol' fashioned food porn?!?

Last night was soup night (for 25). I made, from top left: veggie chili, more veggie stock for next time, potato leek, and that's a skillet of ONIONS and vegan soy crumbles for the chili.

Oh, and: my phone has a soup emoji, but it doesn't make the leap from phone to blog. Instead I have to settle for ramen: 🍜

How did we ever possibly survive without adorable minute cartoonish images on our phones and blogs?

And as a totally separate complaint, with every new update to android, my phone makes more typos and ridiculous auto-corrects, and Swype doesn't work as well. Apologies in advance. 

Adventures in plumbing!

Unfortunately I already discarded the photo i took of the p-trap this one replaced: it had a hole rusted right through the bottom.

Damn you, google, and your unnecessary auto backups and account storage quota.

Long-time readers will find more nasty hair logs and biogoo photos under the home renovation label. This relatively tame one was just dangling from the pipe when I removed the old p-trap.

Television

I've now watched the first four or so episodes of The People vs. OJ Simpson, and I almost stopped after the first two. I have no idea what folks think is so fantastic about it.

I honestly think it contains the weakest performances I've ever seen from both John Travolta and Cuba Gooding Jr. ... I mean, Gooding is just terrible as OJ. He's way too small to plausibly play an NFL Hall of Fame running back. He's whiny and squeaky and immensely unlikable. Travolta swings wildly between forgetting to chug his Adderall and pitching totally unconvincing temper tantrums. 

Sarah Paulson is weak and her character shown as incompetent. Her almost nonstop stylized, affected smoking is an utterly unnecessary contrivance, and wasn't allowed inside public offices in California in the mid 90s. Sterling Brown is working mightily to portray struggling with an existential crisis but failing. Pretty much every character (except Johnnie Cochrane) is thoroughly unlikable.

Folks say it's gritty and realistic and gripping: Noppity nope nope. It's none of the above. 

So: got any binge watching recommendations, dear readers? Netflix (thx mom!) or free on Amazon Prime, please.

three and a half dozen peanut butter oatmeal vegan cookies

Res ipsa loquitor.

One more

Since you've missed the food porn. Here is garlic bread I made for a family dinner:

SAUERKRAUT.

While not necessarily the prettiest photo of this food porn blogging binge,

the sauerkraut prep is definitely my favorite. Two big heads of cabbage that lead to one decent sized crock of sauerkraut. It's been a while since I made sauerkraut, and needless to say, I'm excited!

BANANA BREAD!

We had a whole bunch of extra bananas:

So I made five loaves of banana bread:

Received many nice compliments. A couple folks were baffled that it was vegan.


fsdsdffds

ONIONS. YES.

Kinda of amazing how this many ONIONS:

results in only this much (delicious) caramelized onion:

Catching up now on West Virginia food porn blogging. More to come!

Veggie broth!

Thank goooodness, some more West Virginia food porn! This is what one small part of my afternoon looked like:

This is making veggie broth from scraps, my second batch of the week. They'll turn in to a big soup on Friday when we're hosting several dozen people. We cook big enough meals here that one or two generates enough vegetable scraps to make six to eight quarts of stock.

I might post the soup or stew that comes from this. Woulda been nice this morning when it was 2 degrees above zero. (I'm still working on the frozen pipe problem.) 

Tedious projects

I actually volunteered for this project:

And thoroughly enjoyed it. I got to do it while also maintaining breakfast for a couple dozen people, and enlisted the help of half a dozen curious people.

I didn't actually count, but roughly half of the pens didn't work. And while I really dislike waste, I confess that I derive immense satisfaction out of throwing away pens that don't work. 

WV food porn!

This is the beginning of the prep for two big lasagnas I made last night.

Anaheim peppers, yellow squash, cauliflower, mushrooms, and lots and lots of stuff off screen. 

DO NOT

This is just outside the toilet at the Food Lion in Blacksburg, Virginia.

I guess it can speak for itself.

But... doesn't it just kinda, sorta, make you want to push the red button?

Just a little?

Just to see what happens?

Wild and Wonderful Recycling.

On my first full day back in West Virginia, this is by far the cleanest and tidiest pile I dealt with.

We spent a couple hours sorting recyclingpocalypse in a small town. These bags were only the properly pre-bagged #2 plastic (think milk and laundry detergent containers.)

And in case you're wondering, that's the old police station we're in front of. It's now mostly storage for lawnmowers and other landscaping equipment.