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.