Or something like that said the dairy farmer page I follow said. Silage and cow shit. I’m continuing to read Mark Kopecky’s Managing Manure, learning more about the micro and macro-nutrients in manure, testing, storing and spreading shit. It’s actually quite interesting, despite all the books I’ve read about livestock, farming and homesteading over the years as I’venever read a full book on manure, as I chew down my breakfast.
Starting at 4:50 AM this morning I was up, putting the beans on the stove and bread and acorn squash in the oven. 🍞 Just basic whole-wheat, water, and yeast bread, the beans are the 15-bean soup mix, so that’s a bit processed though I the nutritional facts don’t seem to contain anything too alarming. I added the remaining pinto beans I had in another bag, to extend them. 🫘 Had some of the bread this morning dipped in the balsmatic vinger and it was pretty darn good, along with an omelet, 🍳 first fried up then covered with veggies I ground up in the food processor and then made crisp in the oven by using the broiler. Good stuff, especially as it’s kind of a cold morning and I refuse to turn my heat until the nights are well below freezing and the days aren’t much warmer. It’s not like heat is particularly effective or cost-efficent with my apartment becoming so drafty and diaploated. I find it hard to believe it’s been 18 years here, and the maintaince the landlord has done over the years has been pretty minimal. 👷
I’ve also been listening to Peter Wolhileben’s The Secret Life of Nature🐸 about the interconnections of natural systems and ecology between species, and before I finished that book, I stumbled upon Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City, about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of the 1970s. I find modern history to be quite fascinating, especially when it’s close to home and helps explain why things are the way they are. Why is tution no longer free at CUNY and SUNY? Well, the fiscal crisis is a big part of the story. 📚 There are just so many interesting e-books and audio-books that I can read and listen to from the library. I also find myself reading the NY Times each morning and sometimes the Times Union now that the library provides them for free over the internet. Not that the Times Union is worth the paper it’s printed on – it’s mostly a paper of crime portrayed as pornography and random liberal whines about how bad the Trump administration. 🗞️ Trump is bad on many levels, but the liberals are so obnoxious. I read about all the new gun control laws and I get so angry. Or look at Google Maps and see all those rural homes and farms with burn barrels in Pennsylvania and nobody really gives a damn out in country. 🔫 🛢️ Truth is the liberals want to close to all off the woods, declare all public lands wilderness and ban all public use except for gawking at it out of the windows from SUVs on expressway. 🌲 You mean you shoot deer 🦌 and fish 🐠 and have fires 🔥 up in wilderness, you awful people.
It looks like the neighbor had their junked car hauled off 🚙 after crashing into the tree and their fire place. Already got a loaner car as their car is rebuilt. That lady was quite elderly, she probably put into the wrong gear, and hit gas when she meant to hit the gas. Still it’s kind of sad that most people are so dependent on motoring everywhere even when they really shouldn’t be due to declining vision and health.
Discovered a thumb tack in my front bike tire on way out. Pulled it and air started to leak, put it back in and the leak stopped. I probably should pull that later, and hopefully the fix-a-flat will do the magic or otherwise I’ll need to patch that. All while that was happening, I watch as one of my elderly neighbors crashed her car into an old brick fireplace and tree at her place. She looked dazed but okay, maybe I should have gotten involved, but I was running late and she looked okay. Cold ride into the office with the wind and freezing temperatures but other then that fairly quiet. As of the lunch hour, my bike tire is still holding air, I should be able to get home. I kind of want to pull the tack and patch the hole but I’m okay leaving it in if I can make commute through the rest of the week.
I mean it’s a logical thing for the library to suggest Mark Kopecky’s Managing Manure book when I was looking for a read about homesteading as well hogs, cattle and goats produce a lot of poop. Manure produces hogs, cattle and goats or at least the stuff that feeds them. Seems timely read with the month of November coming right up around the corner. And yes, adding MSG to your homemade pancake mix goes give them the taste of a Fritos Lays corn chips.
Looking out on the brightening skies 🔅 ➡️ 🔆 as the sun is rising over the land. It will be somewhat dark for the morning commute, though lately I’ve not been getting in the office much before 9 am even when I get up with the tea strippers, though this morning wasn’t an earlier one as I wanted to make sure I fully caught up on sleep and took a while to cook down the pancakes 🥞 though they were good with the apples. 🍏 Wally World has a special on Gala apples this week, and being out of farmers markets apples I couldn’t resist getting two bags of 3 lbs of apples each. So I’m using them for a lot of purposes, and they are very sweet, including as a snack in office. I eat a lot of apples, along with bananas 🍌 throughout the day in the office to ward off hunger. I haven’t had MSG in a long time, but I saw it in Walmart and thought it would be fun to add to food. Gives food an interesting flavor, and can give a lot of zang especially to boring vegetables and even fruit, though I don’t necessarily love the after taste. I’m not convinced it’s bad for you, though it’s often used in processed food to cover up the crap bland flavors of processed crap. But on broccoli 🥦 it’s rather healthy. 😋 And yummy.
Ended up sending $175 at the grocery store, 🛒 well Walmart but admitly my pantry was pretty bare, and I needed more coffee ☕ and another pair of jeans 👖. Lately I’ve been buying the cheapest containers of coffee, which I don’t like because it comes in that mixed-film packaging, which is fine as I burn the paper and plastic, but I don’t like having to deal with the aluminum bottom even though I do recycle that. But I don’t like encouraging production of such materials, and the all plastic coffee containers are more recyclable and definately more reusable. That said, they did have balsamic vinegar in plastic, so I figured I’d try that. Got whole wheat flour, so I’ll be making bread later in the week 🥪 and lots of bean soups. Oatmeal for use in my homemade pancakes, and for grinding and using with frozen fruit and sugar-free syrup. So much for being frugal, but granted my pantry was kind of depleted after vacation despite spending $50 bucks lats week on groceries. But now it’s pretty full though in retrospect I wish I had gotten one of those half gallon bottles of Frank’s Hot Sauce and sugar-free peanut butter powder. Maybe the next time I’m at all Wally World but do I need more sugar and fat?
Bringing in a bottle of apple cider vinegar into my office. 🥛 Usually I drink water 💦 in the office plain or with ice but I do like apple cider vinegar – just a little – to flavor my water. While I know the health benefits are pretty dubious I like the flavor and that gets me drinking more water and hopefully less coffee ☕. I was getting into a very intense discussion on a frugal living group on Facebook about eating brown rice 🍚 – I was arguing it is quite healthy especially with beans but others disagree, 👎🏽 especially carb haters. I guess you can’t make every one but I like things simple and tangy. And I use lots of turmeric with my arsenic loaded brown rice which people say is healthy as long as the turmeric itself lacks much lead. Rather get lead poisoning then live a life of processed food and garbage and morbid obesity. Even if I do burn trash I try to reduce the amount I must illegaly pitch into the flames 🔥 while giggling 🤭 with my now legal smile. ☺️
It turned out to be much nicer weekend then expected, ☀️ and I should have headed out of town to Schoharie, but I didn’t. I just was tired of camping 🏕️ in cold and wind, with gray skies 🌥️ and I feared that’s what Schoharie would have been like. While I got two acorn squash and a spaghetti squash at Wally World, I would have much l read, there is a lot to be learned about poop. I was on my best behavior this weekend and being that I didn’t camp, I didn’t burn a lot of gasoline or plastic or used motor oil and pallets nor did I drink 🍻 or smoke weed. The colors 🍁 in the woods were good without being super stoned.
I say that facing another harsh winter ahead – the darkness, the cold, the ice and road salt – makes me glad to see the days come and go too quickly. Still, I can fathom at one level that I am staring down the barrel of winter so soon. It’s not that we haven’t had snow earlier in the year some years, or that we haven”t had colder late October days, but I’m just not ready for it all.
One week from now will be the time change. 4:48 PM will be the sunset. Then it will be too dark to ride all the way home, and I’ll need to catch the local bus home. And who knows how soon the cold and snow will make it impossible to ride in, though when I can I will still ride. It’s going to be harder now to do the express bus option eliminated and the local bus schedule not closely corresponding with the transfer from the shuttle.
Mom and Dad keep dropping hints of the time once they are gone. What is going to happen to the dog? The home, the 5-acre homestead? It’s pretty obvious my sister doesn’t want to move out to Westerlo and I do need some place to live after my apartment and I don’t think the off-grid cabin is going to happen right away while I’m still working in New York. And with my job, I am tied to Albany if I want to maximize pension and now decades of experience.
Still, it seems like time goes by too quickly. It seems hard to imagine a world without my parents, even though it is proably not that far away. But first to make it through the winter in my cold drafty apartment and enjoy whatever time remains …
Sunny and clear out here in Delmar, though I’m not sure the same thing could have been said about Schoharie. Maybe I should have headed out of town for the weekend, but it was fun riding down to Coeymans Creek Wildlife Management Area, Henry Hudson Park and Moh-He-Con-Nuck. And the bugs didn’t eat my alive at Moh-He-Con-Nuck.
Moh-He-Con-Nuck is kind of a crap preserve, indeed one where the Glen Jobs Corps dumps their garbage along, 🦌 but there was lots of Blue Jays, Red-Headed Woodpeckers and that doe to check out. I was surprised that I only saw one bow hunter at Coeymans Creek Wildlife Management Area but maybe there was others observing me pissing on the trees. While I’m sure that area is soaked with mercury from the cement plant before they installed scrubers and already dumped with a fair amount of old farm garbage, it is a remarkably neat to explore and now they have a designated and somewhat cleared yellow-blazed trail down to the Coeymans Creek, though the water levels were very low. 🎣 I wasn’t going to spend much time at Coeymans Creek thinking there would be a lot of bow and small game hunters out and about, but seeing no hunters pickups in the lot, I figured I’d walk and ride around a bit. 🚴 Bikes aren’t allowed off road on public hunting grounds, but you ride them on roads, though it can be a hard to know what is a road and which isn’t there. It was a 25 mile round trip, by the time I came back via the Albany County Rail Trail. And yes, I used the still closed ramp to Cherry Avenue, the concrete is well dry at this point but the politicians haven’t had their public maturation pleasure of cutting the ribbon. 🎀
I was home around 4 PM 🍲 and made a big pan up of rice with the remaining rice, lentils, onions, and soy sauce I had. It was good, I had the stove on very low so it took a lot longer then expected. Read to library books yesterday – kind of picture books – one on the History of the Adirondacks 1930-1980 and one featuring historical postcards of the US 20 in New York. Both can be found on Libby. And finished up Michael Moss’ Salt, Sugar, Fat. 📖 Libby and Hoopla are such great assets, I don’t ever get physical books which are much to easy to destroy from the library. 📚 📱 Finished up at the split pea soup – all two pounds of it in like two days. Good stuff, I don’t complicate it, just peas, some onions, shredded carrots and a bit of salt. But don’t you need a million other ingredients to make it taste good? Of course, these are morbidly obese people who are horrified I could ever drag on a cigarette or smoke some weed up at camp. 🚬 Don’t you know smoking causes cancer, please pass the hamburger and twinky, 🧁🍔 the woke people says.
Heading out to Five Rivers this morning, 🐦 then I’ll shower and probably do a quick hike up Bennett Hill before heading out to see the folks. 🚶 Then I’ll go to Walmart on the way home and get flour and some of things to eat for the week like fresh and frozen vegetables. Need to empty out the compost bin when I’m out at the folks house, and I should return my beer cans from vacation as their currently in a big garbage bag in the back of my truck. ♻️ At some point I should also see if I can 🥫 toss the smashed cans for recycling in my parents bin, or ask the neighbors as while I don’t use many cans, I’ve accumulated a half bag since the last time I emptied the recycling barrel in April or so. I tend to burn out the cans, which makes them flatten better and recyclers don’t mind if you burn off the coatings – it’s actually better for their recycling equipment and doesn’t smell or attract bugs as store it before recycling. 🔥
Woke people are those who believe they are doing virtuous things while living the high-consumption consumerist livestyle promoted on television.
They can’t be bothered to do much besides mail checks to the Sierra Club, put solar panels on their 5,000 square foot homes full of their monthly discarded electronics and perfectly heated and cooled to 72 degrees year round, and wash out their non-recyclable plastics for the 96-gallon overflowing toats with their weekly subscription garbage service.
They spend their nights watching MSNBC so they have no time to cook even the simplest foods, and are forced to eat chemical-laden industrial crap from Nature’s Own Organic Brand, and a dozen other organic products that are full of toxic chemicals and addatives. The idea of eating basic, whole foods, purchased from a place like Walmart just horrifies them – they’d rather eat something encased in layers of “labeled for recycling” colorful plastic that is branded organic and natural, is an industrial soup of chemicals not fit as rat posion. But the label said it organic and natural and was supposed to be put in my 96-gallon weekly picked up toats! And I have solar panels that are tied to coal and gas fired grid!
The woke are like “I am so virtuous even if I am poisoning myself and everyone around me, my life is non-negotiable, I am better then you heathens.”
