Category: Miscellaneous

Indigo Bunting

I like watching the goldfinches eating the ornamental grass seeds. Today, though, this blue bird showed up too. Looking up small blue birds, we found a rare blue bird native to, like, Venezuela … seemed rather surprising to see one here. And then I scrolled to the next small blue bird — the Indigo Bunting — which is fairly common and native to our area. So … yeah, I’m going to go with Indigo Bunting.

Locking Adjustable Latches

We bought adjustable latches with a little extra metal bit where you can lock them. The problem, however, is that the range of adjustment is limited by the lock attachment point. Eventually, the screw bumps into the lock attachment and you cannot adjust the lock any smaller. If they had offset the lock attachment point, you could adjust the latch the full length of the threading.

Because we needed some smaller latches, we had to use a hacksaw to cut off some of the threads. Now it can be screwed down to its smallest size and our baby chickens are secured in their tractor.

Using Excel To Decrypt ROT

Anya has made us a scavenger hunt complete with clues — clues that are encrypted! While working out a ROT-1 or ROT-2 decryption isn’t terribly difficult, it was getting a little time consuming [especially when what was advertised as ROT-1 was actually ROT-(25) and I had to do it all over again!], so I made a quick spreadsheet to decrypt strings. The letter pairs are in the first two columns, then VLOOKUP is used to convert the printed character to the actual one. I found a trick card!

Nothing like a fish

I had an older friend explain why he was absolutely certain his wife and he were going to have a long, happy marriage (they’d been married for a few decades by this point, so he wasn’t speculating). They went on vacation to a small town to get married and honeymoon. Small enough town that the wedding license department and fishing license department (as well as all of the other government functions) were in the same place. Dude wanted to get a fishing license, so he offered to go get both. Shows up and gets his fishing license. Then asks about the wedding license. Government dude says the wedding license dude is on vacation today. Come back tomorrow. My friend asked if government dude could do it. Nope, cannot do it. Friend asked what if his girlfriend looked like a fish, was that close enough? They laughed, and government dude said both people need to be here anyway … so come back tomorrow, and bring her. We’ll get you sorted.

He goes back to their hotel, tells her they both need to be there, and that license dude wont be in the office until tomorrow. The next day, they head back. Dude and his girlfriend walk into the office, and government dude looks at them and says ‘you are wrong, she looks nothing like a fish!”. Future wife says “how about now” and makes her best fish face. They all laugh.

He told me there’s nothing wrong with not wanting your spouse to make fun of your face. And there’s nothing wrong with joking around either. The problem is when the two people aren’t on the same page. They could still make it work, but the jokey partner is going to go through life having to curb their immediate impulse to turn something into a joke. Or the other partner is going through life being humiliated by someone who is supposed to love and support them.

Costco

We’d talked about joining Costco for years — a new store was built not too far from my office, and they had a membership promo. It was rather far away from our house; and, without checking it out first, hard to tell if it was a good deal. Especially without storage space for, say, a gallon of lemon juice. As we’ve been producing more at home — vegetables, meats — we’ve also gotten a lot of storage space. Loads of canning jars, chest freezers, vacuum sealer, shelves. So the idea of buying twenty pounds of apples is now appealing — can a bunch of apple sauce and apple butter 🙂

So, on Friday, we went out to Costco and got a membership. They’ve got a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, we were there about an hour before closing (why in the world would a company have limited hours on the weekend?!) and didn’t get to check out everything. Lots of electronics — a big TV that Scott would have loved to get. A couple of mesh WiFi systems. Fridges (not the one I want to get, unfortunately). And the expected huge containers of foods. Stuff I have a hard time finding in the grocery store too — they never have thick cut pork chops, so I end up getting a whole loin and cutting my own. But there were really nice 1″+ chops sitting right in a cooler. A tasty looking kale pesto. And a huge bag of frozen mango chunks (also a similarly huge bag of blueberries that I hope to not need in a year or two once our bushes start producing!). The coolest thing was that they’re loaded up with organic options (that are generally cheaper than the non-organic variety at the grocery store).

We also learned something about pickup trucks. They are great for hauling home the materials to build a chicken pasture fence. They’re great for hauling chest freezers. They are not great for bringing home groceries … I get why people have those tarp things that pull over the bed. We loaded all of the heavy (and low wind resistance) things into the truck bed, but ended up piling a bunch of lighter / breakable things in the cab with Anya.

Overall, the place seems like a score. And very much in line with my mom’s parents’ approach to living out in the country on a mountain. They’d not plan on going anywhere from October through April — stock up on food, get supplies for any winter projects, and just do their thing for six months. An approach that seems far more reasonable now that I’ve got my own couple hundred foot driveway curving up a mountainside.