After driving since 0830, I am finally back home. And tired. And probably not going to blog again today.
Cats need attention.
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Food for Thought – September 30
Equivalence? How about New York City holding parade to celebrate record-setting at Auschwitz? The Chicoms hold a place in history as the biggest killers of their own people, but you’ll never hear it here because the Left is enamored of anything communist.
Today in History – September 30
1452 – First European book printed with moveable type, Johann Gutenberg’s Bible, in Mainz, Germany.
1544 – King Henry VIII draws his armies out of France. His army leaves behind a considerable amount of genetic material.
1791 – The National Constituent Assembly in Paris is dissolved; Parisians hail Maximilien Robespierre and Jérôme Pétion as incorruptible patriots. Yeah. Just like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are “incorruptible patriots”.
1841 – Samuel Slocum patented the stapler. Hey! A milestone IS a milestone…
1938 – The League of Nations unanimously outlaws “intentional bombings of civilian populations”. Yeah, that worked. The League of Nations died. If only the UN would do the same…
1949 – Berlin Airlift ends after 277,000 flights. America faces down the Soviet Union. Today’s Left would not only have signed West Berlin Over to them, but would have held a star-studded concert to celebrate.
1954 – The U.S. Navy submarine USS Nautilus is commissioned as the world’s first nuclear reactor powered vessel.
1968 – 1st Boeing 747 rolls out. American aviation shows the world how it’s done.
2005 – The controversial drawings of Muhammad are printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Muslims are driven to a killing frenzy by cartoons. Who knew? Other things that drive Muslims into a killing frenzy: days that end with “y”. Puppies. Music. People smiling.
100 Miles North
Further north than yesterday, more or less.
Rolled out of bed at 0630 this morning, enjoyed a little breakfast then drove over to the station. I fired up the laptop on the station wireless and checked email, the I and the station controls technician did a bit of troubleshooting on a problem he’d been having. He’d have probably fixed it himself but the drawings were ambiguous and incomplete and referred to a component that nobody seemed to be able to find.
The hurdle with the drawings was that two different upgrades had taken place in the past few years and nobody did a really good job of documenting the changes. A pair of pumps that were supposed to start automatically didn’t, but they would run in manual operation. A couple of folks had worked on the problem, but they always hit the proverbial brick wall with the “missing” device.
Today I took all the documentation he had at the station and we started the process known in electrical troubleshooting as “shaking out the wires”. The wire in question left a terminal in a control cabinet on an air compressor and went to a motor control center on the other side of the building. Fortunately it was the only yellow wire of the dozens that took the same path, and after I popped a few doors open, I found where the wire went, and with it, the missing devices that nobody was sure even existed.
Once those were located, we did a couple of tests to see if things worked as we thought they should, and lo and behold, the problem disappeared. That’s not entirely unheard of because the missing device was found in a compartment at floor level and was dusty and coated with high impedance spiderwebs. Our testing exercised it, and it’s working fine now. Better, though, is the fact that now the station tech knows where the darned thing is and he trusts his drawings a bit more, so if it quits again, he’ll be able to fix it without drawing my old butt four hundred miles.
At 1030 we got a phone call from the electrical supply house in the nearby town advising us that our part was in to fix the bigger problem. A trip to pick up that part coincided with lunch. After lunch, we put the part in, a twenty minute task, and then tested that fix. I finished my day two for two, so I hopped in the car and drove up here to wait until the morning when I will go to the next station to do a bit of peeking, picture-taking, and data-gathering.
And that’s what working for a living looks like to some of us.
Food for Thought – 29 September 2009
Today in History – September 29
1789 – The U.S. War Department first establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.
1916 – John D. Rockefeller becomes the first billionaire. Oil!
1936 – Radio used for 1st time for a presidential campaign. Obama loyalists try to get the ads pulled.
1938 – Treaty of Munich signed by Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier & Chamberlain. “If we give them a little of what they want, they will think we’re nice people and stop doing mean things.”
1942 – French government of De Gaulle cancels agreement of Munich. French government actually in FRANCE is collaborating its butt off. That 1938 agreement in Munich wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.
1991 – Military coup in Haiti. Still having trouble with that whole ‘election’ thing…
Food for Thought – 28 September 2009
Four hundred miles
400 miles from home. Actually, I should be further, but I was tooling through Baton Rouge en route to northern Mississippi when the cell phone rang.
Me: This is me.
Caller: This is Mike in the middle of the cotton field. We had a fire.
Me: Oh, sh*t!
Caller: It’s out now. We were turning on the oil heaters to the turbine and we had a little fire in the electrical controls. We need you to come up and look at it.
Me: Have I got a deal for you. I just happen to be in Baton Rouge right now. I should be at your location in four or five hours.
Caller: What are doing in Baton Rouge?
Me: I was on the way to visit your buddy at the next station up the line. How about calling him and telling him you just ruined our plans.
Caller: Gotcha! See you in a bit.
And so I altered my route a bit and arrived at the station with the new problem a bit after 1 PM. I helped the station guy troubleshoot another little hickey and then opened the door to the “fire”. As fires go, it wasn’t much. Something got crosswise, 480 volts shorted. A breaker tripped. It was over.
We have a damaged contactor, an electrical device meant to send electricity to a set of electric heaters in an oil reservoir. There’s no spare, natch, so I ran up the road to the nearest town with traffic lights and walked into the electrical distribution sales place. They ordered me a replacement. It should be here, courtesy of UPS Red at 10 tomorrow morning, which means I get to sleep late. Swapping the parts out is a fifteen minute job, and then I’m on the road to the next adventure.
Today in History – September 28
1066 – William the Conqueror invades England: the Norman Conquest begins. Part of what makes us what we are…
1781 – American forces backed by a French fleet begin the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, during the American Revolutionary War.
1850 – US Navy abolishes flogging as punishment.
1928 – Sir Alexander Fleming notices a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory, discovering what later became known as penicillin. He wasn’t “Sir” back then, just a science geek playing with bread mold.
1938 – Dutch Premier Colijn sends radio message “No war coming” . See! They had pacifist moonbats back then, too.
1940 – Nazi occupiers present “New Dutch Culture” in German. Premier Colijn (above, 1938) is now right. The war was short and nasty and the Netherlands lost. Now they have ‘peace’.
1939 – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agree on a division of Poland after their invasion during World War II. It’s a neat agreement between two blood-thirsty amoral dictators. Two years later Hitler decides that he wants ALL of Poland. And the Ukraine. And everything else.
1958 – France ratifies a new Constitution of France; the French Fifth Republic is then formed upon the formal adoption of the new constitution on October 4. The way things are going, the next one will be written in Arabic.
1961 – A military coup in Damascus effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria, which brings up a seldom-considered point: If the Arab world DIDN’T have a common enemy, Israel, they they’d be quite happily slaughtering each other.
The Name Game #210
As is usually the case in Louisiana, the passing of the autumnal equinox marks zilch. We’re either yawning through yet another stretch of our summer pattern, only slightly cooler, or we’re eyeballing the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico hoping for a turn in the path of one or anther hurricane. This year it’s the summer pattern, low near seventy, high near ninety, not unpleasant in the morning, a bit too hot in the afternoon. It was seventy-five when I traipsed out to pick up the morning paper.
While eating breakfast, I found that two hospitals had reported forty-nine births total between august 10 and September 21. Thirty of the new babies are born to parents with different last names. If you want to think that’s because the parents married but kept their names, you can believe that. You can believe in unicorns, too, if you want. Ten of the new babies showed up to little mommies who couldn’t figure out what to put in that pesky “father’s name” block on the birth registration.
Let’s see what we get this week.
Under the “Punctuation make my baby special” category, we get a single sad entry:
Paris W. & Ali L. present their new baby girl, little A’Leigha Amari.
Next we’ll look at those “manly names”:
Nicholas & Joann P. present their son, little Ty Vincent.
Tessie A. & Trey C. bring their baby boy, Drake Edwin. do you think they’re harking back to America’s first oil driller, Edwin Drake? Or are they just making noises?
We have a handful of people who can’t meet all the social and creative obligations with only two given names:
Charmaine C. & John K. Sr. tag their son with John Clifford Joseph Jr.
Michaela B. & Marqus B. Sr.(different last names) present their baby boy, little Marqus Lyle james Jr.
Cody & Ashley V. show their little girl, Kayson Alexis-Lee. Hey! You named your baby girl “son”!
Ashley & Louis J. Sr. present their baby boy, little Dustin Travis Joseph.
Then we have the people who just know that if you take a name that’s pretty common, you can change up the spelling and everyone will recognize your obvious taste and intelligence:
Miss Tiffany V. saw too many “Kinsey’s”, so her baby girl is Kynsee Marie.
Candace C. & Todd T. present their daughter, little Madisyn Klayre. “-syn” tells you that they didn’t name their daughter “-son”. The spelling of “Claire”? You figure what they were thinking, that is, if thinking was involved at all.
Heather & Kevin S. named their daughter Sayge Alexis, chaning the spelling so you’d know she wasn’t a bottle on the spice shelf.
And then there’s the thundering herd of “duh”:
Miss Jessica C. tags her new son with Justus Darnell. As in Social Worker: “Hoa many people lives here?” Miss Jessica: “Justus”. Because she didn’t name a baby daddy.
Wages & Tiaffany A. bring their little girl, Acelyn Paige.
Santanna W. & Jerome H. show their baby girl, Syanna Morgan.
Same hospital, two days apart, Velvet (!) K. & Collin H. have a son, Conner Cole, and Kenneth & Heather A. have a son, Connor Benton. Glad they didn’t spell them the same, aren’t you?
Heather A. & Todd P. bring their baby girl, Addison Bree. hey! You called your daughter “son” and named her after a cheese. Well, at least it’s a GOOD cheese.
Micca D. & Joshua R. go all tryndeigh on us with their son Kaysen Lance.
Miss Crystal H. Sr. names her daughter after herself, giving us little Crystal Lynn Jr, marking the first time in this column that we’ve had a female “junior” named after her mommy.
And that’s as good a place as any to shut ‘er down for the week.
Today in History – September 27
1777 – Lancaster, Pennsylvania is the capital of the United States, for one day. For one brief day the population becomes example of large number of self-serving… nah… THAT’S Washington today. It took them a while to get that way, but they’ve got the act down pat now….
1903 – Wreck of the Old 97, a train crash made famous by the song of the same name. “They gave him his order in Monroe, Virginia, said “Steve, you’re ‘way behind time…”
1908 – The first production of the Ford Model T automobile was built at the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan. You could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black.
1941 – The SS Patrick Henry is launched becoming the first of more than 2,700 Liberty ships. America’s might produced ships like cupcakes…
1964 – The Warren Commission releases its report, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It is widely debated as a cover-up.
1979 – The United States Department of Education receives final approval from the U.S. Congress to become the 13th US Cabinet agency. Public education is fast becoming equivalent in quality to public housing and public toilets.
Irish Soda Bread
Nothing says “kitchen” quite like a home made breads. When I was a youngster, grandmothers were still in the bread-baking mode. Frugality was the order of the day and putting a loaf of bread or fresh rolls on the table was a common thing. I won’t quite say “daily”, but certainly for Sunday dinner there were bound to be hot yeast-risen rolls.
I like making the occasional loaf of bread myself, but sometimes I don’t have the gumption to hang around the kitchen for the time it takes to mess around with resurrecting yeast and coercing it to my purpose. For that, there are “quick breads”.
This recipe is for Irish soda bread. You can look up similar recipes on the internet. This is a frugal recipe. Four ingredients are all it takes, and in an hour you have a hot loaf of bread on the table.
So here goes:
Ingredients:
Flour – you need a pound. Or four cups. Preferably with no protein enhancing insects. You can do whole wheat. You can do white. It should be “all-purpose”, not “self-rising”. We’re going to do the “rise” part.
Baking soda – sodium bicarbonate. Not “baking powder”. Baking powder has baking soda AND an acid together that react in the presence of moisture to give off carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide makes bubbles in the dough to make the bread rise. We’re going to supply our own acid. For a pound of flour, you need a teaspoon and a half of baking soda.
Salt – a teaspoon of salt.
Buttermilk – Fourteen ounces. A bit shy of two cups. Or you could leave some regular milk out overnight and see if it sours.
That’s it!
Oh, by the way, this recipe doubles well. Make TWO round loaves or one long one.
Preparation:
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Take 2 round cake pans. Grease the inside of one pan and then shake flour in it until it’s coated.
Dump the flour, soda and salt into a big bowl and do whatever you have to do to mix them. I used a stout serving fork to mix them together. You could sift them. You could just swirl stuff with your fingers. After these are mixed, start pouring in the buttermilk and stirring. Pour a little, stir a bunch, pour a little more. Somewhere about the time you’ve used all the buttermilk, the dough will pull together off the sides of your bowl. This is what you want.
Through your lump of dough onto a flour-covered surface and knead it a couple of times, but not too much, because once your soda and buttermilk have reacted and released their CO2, there’s no more, and over-kneading will give you a still edible but dense loaf.
Form the kneaded loaf into a round shape and put it into the floured pan. You can cut a cross into the top of the loaf with a sharp knife if you wish. Or not. Put the second pan over the top of the loaf. This simulates the traditional cooking method of using a cast iron Dutch Oven or, according to the information off the Web, a “bastible pot”. Put the assemblage into the oven and bake for thirty minutes covered, then remove the covering pan and bake for another fifteen minutes.
It’s done. I hope I don’t have to tell you what to do with fresh warm bread.
If there’s any left at the end of the day, it keeps for a few days wrapped in aluminum foil and slices and toasts well.
This is a frugal recipe from folks like my ancestors who didn’t have time or money for niceties every day. That’s okay.
But you and me, we’re a little better off, and we’ve got a recipe in our hands now that will make us a loaf of bread in an hour, but we want something a bit fancier. No problem. Addition of sugar or honey or molasses, a third of a cup or more makes this a sweet bread. Throw in a handful or two of raisins and you’ve got “spotted dog”. If you want to get cute, soak the raisins overnight in whisky or rum. You could add nuts. Oh, darned! You start adding all these things and it’s starting to look like a fruitcake. Except it’s YOUR fruitcake, with the things YOU like.
Domesticity
Early on a Saturday morning. I rolled out of bed at 0800. That’s my “sleeping late” day. I went through the laundry basket and picked out a load of colored clothes for the first batch of the day. Saturday is laundry day here, especially when you figure that the first two days of your next work week will be somewhere in north Mississippi and you want to make the trip with clean clothes.
After the washer was chugging away, I put a little pot of water on for a bowl of Vietnamese instant noodles. That’s a quick and easy light breakfast. After the kettle whistled, I dumped hot water over the instant noodles and walked out to get the paper to read with breakfast.
Finishing breakfast, I put lunch on, the pinto beans I’d put to soak last night before I went to bed, along with sausage, onion, garlic, RoTel tomatoes, slat and pepper, all in a pot on the stove, first boiling, then simmering. They’ll be ready by lunchtime, along with a pot of rice to go with them.
On the agenda for the rest of the day? Grocery shopping. Vacuuming a cat’s worth of hair off the floor.
I’ll get as much help as I can from the teenaged son still asleep in his room right now, but as I tell him all too often, this is MY house, and everything that gets done her, I usually do myself. Help is appreciated but almost non-existent.
Right now, though, the beans are bubbling and it smells good. And last year at this time, I didn’t have electricity after Hurricane Ike, so this is a good morning.
Food for Thought – 26 September 2009
