Morning coffee in the office tasted like road salt, though even with the salt-flavored taffy taste, that flavored coffee of week, Chocolate Fudge Coffee was pretty damn good. I wiped the salt off my face but still everything was just so salt encrusted as I sat behind my desk. I guess it’s extreme mental illness, being a sad desperate individual without a ginormous Ford F-350 with the Godzilla. But I thought you wanted to be a millionaire hog farmer when you retired, sitting around all day shoveling manure, smoking dope and singing along with Karen Dalton?
It was a pretty darn quiet day in the office, 🏢 the programmers are still dealing with the library issue and linker so we can’t do the database update 💾 so I’m just twiddling my thumb waiting for the next big project to come in. Spent some time studying my pictures from West Virginia I have hung up in my office. 🖼️ Had that extra cup of chocolate fudge coffee, after coming into the office salt encrusted with wet pant ankles 👖 so yeah, it somewhat negatively impacted my sleep last night. Had lots of pinto beans yesterday, both for lunch and dinner, I kind of over salted them, but whatever.
I guess I’ll ride in today, 🚲 I am a little on the fence as it was so wet yesterday. I don’t love riding Corning Hill but there is still too much snow on the Rail Trail I think so it best to wait until next week. ☔ I am really excited about the possibility of rain come next week. Next Wednesday through Fridy, we might get as much as an inch of rain to melt away a lot of the snow, with several days in the 40s. I wanted to take off half a day next week to look at trucks but maybe not in the pouring rain. Tomorrow, I should ride in because I’ll probably have meetings downtown, but might be colder 🌬️ but yeah, it’s Friday the 13th in February which happens before Valentines Day, ♥️ so yeah I’m kind of paranoid.
Creeping towards the weekend, 😀 a long weekend that should be nice, not too cold and with lots of sun. ☀️ If I still had Big Red on road, I would probably up in Rensselearville or maybe Madison County Horse Camp 🐴 having fires, burning stuff 🔥, smoking dope listening to Country Joe and Fish, and riding my mountain bike slinging mud. 🚲 But I will be stuck home, but that’s fine as I need to run to the store. I should get to Hannaford tonight or maybe tomorrow morning, and get some candy 🍬 to hand out to staff and remind them to sign out of the building 🚒 so that when the fire truck comes, we can tell them not go searching for the lost staff. Next week, I want to do that half day to look at SuperDuty trucks but yeah, I don’t know if that is going to happen with the rain. I certainly don’t want to go in this weekend with all the hyped Presidents Day Sales. I want time to actually look at and test drive a truck, and get an initial out-the-door offer, before I get lots of quotes form dealers.
Somebody said that to me the other day as they frequently see me riding back and forth to work on Erie Boulevard.
I don’t think Erie Boulevard is that dangerous to ride compared to other city streets like Madison Avenue but I understand people’s concern, especially as the news media always makes a big deal about fatal bicycle crashes but rarely automobile crashes.
I would argue the health benefits to riding to work far exceed any risk of getting hit, especially if the crash is fatal. Feeling good and being healthy now is more important than the risk of death. Diseases that kill you slowly like obesity and diabetes are far more harmful to a life than a fatal crash which is likely to be immediate.
I’ve been bicycle commuting long enough to know all the danger points in my commute and I either try to avoid them or use extra caution by looking twice, reducing speed, and making sure I have good sight lines and visibility on my bike.
Certainly plenty do if you spend any time around homesteader and off-grid groups, especially people who live in more wide-open rural states.
It is really difficult to get away from having trash service, taking your garbage to a landfill or transfer station every few weeks unless you are willing to burn plastic packaging. Even if you are careful on how much packaging you buy, choosing mostly unpackaged, whole foods, there is always some trash that isn’t paper or compost that you either have to burn or bury. Everything these days seems to come packaged in plastic, from food to livestock feed to tools. Plastic is everywhere, and it kind of sucks.
By being willing to burn plastic packaging trash, you greatly cut back on the amount of materials you have to haul off the homestead for landfill or fake plastic recycling. Fortunately, with the decline of PVC plastics, most plastics now are fairly non-toxic to burn, even if they do contain plasticizers and other noxious chemicals you don’t want to be breathing in. You should keep your burn barrel down-wind, and it’s good not to have neighbors nearby who very much may not enjoy the wift of toxic plastic smoke. Having enough land is key and staying up wind.
There have been many years in my life where I go to the transfer station once a year, primarily will tin cans and glass bottles, but also milk bottles and other recycables I accumulate in winter when I don’t have so many fires up in woods. However, I do see the advantage of having a burn barrel or other “safer” incinerator to burn burnables, including paper and plastics, to greatly reduce my reliance on off-site disposal. Indeed, if I had a trash pit that I would be willing to fill with debris and cover, like many remote homesteads and farms have, I could be completely independent of the landfilling industry and those ever growing mounds of garbage on the outskirts of the city.
Not saying I endorse stinky trash fires or making pollution. Burn the shit hot! But you got to do something with the garbage, and if you can take care of it yourself, the better.
