elainegrey

I wonder if somedayseattle would have fun with this idea:

Bangles vs Kansas?

Things that need to be returned:

1. The mailbox post that has a spring at the base and an anchor for asphalt. The current mailbox "post" is a 16" (or more) diameter pine log lashed to T posts with the mailbox nailed on it. Christine rigged this up when our first post was finally run all the way over. It's shorter than standard and the post office wants it brought up to standard height by 1 Feb. We've ordered a replacement already.

2. The smart watch i ordered as a Yule gift for myself (refurbished) which seems to require enterprise management software from Samsung to activate. I was attracted to the military grade "ruggedizing" and figured it would last during yard work. Turned out it was a little smaller too, which was nice. But no go.

Advice to get tested:

1. Sister: ... I am going to go get tested as well to have confirmation. Please urge dad to take him and mom to the Pittsboro urgent care today to be tested too. I called and talked to B---. Love you all. Brother:... I am going to get boys tested ASAP.

2. Pittsboro urgent care: Wait five to seven days after the contact tests positive, unless you are having symptoms.


There are three homes for sale in our zip code that are under $400,000, two of which are town homes.

I've 47 overdue to do items plus 4 for today. After marking things done that were done, and doing one, over half are gone.

I've become strangely fascinated with looking at the panoramas taken by National Data Bouy center. It started one or two hurricanes ago, when i first noticed how the size of the waves reveals itslef with the tilt of the horizon in sections of the panorama.

Yesterday i traced the high seas as Hurricane Ida moved slowly through the gulf, peering at the images where twenty foot waves were being measured. Dark and stormy, yes, but the intimidating sheer cliffs that were computer generated in The Perfect Storm, no. It's still dark in the gulf this morning and the buoys with twenty foot waves have black strips.

Ah, the joy of facilities being built out in a 4k town as it is being developed for 60k more residents. Home to home for x rays was less than 30 minutes.

Meanwhile the temperature outside is falling. 39°F tonight?!

So this is ... wow. Puts all the calls about "your car's warranty is about to expire" in perspective:

In its own statement, the DarkSide group [which FBI says is responsible for the fuel pipeline cyberattack] hinted that an affiliate may have been behind the attack and that it never intended to cause such upheaval. Like some other ransomware groups, DarkSide offers to sell its malware to others in what is known as “ransomware-as-a-service,” according to the cybersecurity firm Cybereason.

In a message posted on the dark web, where DarkSide maintains a site, the group suggested one of its customers was behind the attack and promised to do a better job vetting them going forward.

“We are apolitical. We do not participate in geopolitics,” the message says. “Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society. From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”

Zzzzz. Carrie woke us up at 4 am Thursday, barking -- outside? Had she been out all night? Christine woke and dashed in concern, but apparently Carrie was on the back porch with Marlowe, so she must have crawled out the cat door onto the porch. The game cam revealed a rabbit in the glade at that time. Surely that's not it.

The game cam has also revealed opossum, deer, and squirrels. No foxes or coyotes or raccoons. I am delighted to see the regular trot-by of the possum. I am sad that we might have scared the foxes away with Carrie's night life. I am delighted to not see coyotes as they seem just a little more predator than i want to deal with. I suppose, though, that before i feel confident at the missing foxes, i should move the camera somewhere else.

Today is Friday? Work has been packed, and i've worked late. It has been ages since i've had to propagate errors, but i think i've come up with some defensible estimates from partial data.

I've also been participating with the just in time planning of an event that starts this weekend. The Friends' business process in the group feels so lush, even when informal.

Christine and i have had weird sinus discomforts for a while. The humidity is lower, but it's not that low: 56% to 45% as the highest high and lowest low in the past month. I've installed MERV 8 filters in the HVAC system, which should cut cement dust from the work outside. I'm not sure i'd want to install any stronger filters as it sounds like the systems is having to work to pull air through these. It's the sound of, "Huh, i should check to see if the filters need changing."

Why does Feb not have 29 days, and then the months alternate 31, 29/30, 31, 30, 31, 30...? Apparently July and August had to be the same length because politics. Surely Pope Gregory could have fixed that?

The Roman month Februarius was named after the Latin term februum, which means "purification", via the purification ritual Februa held on February 15 (full moon) in the old lunar Roman calendar. January and February were the last two months to be added to the Roman calendar, since the Romans originally considered winter a monthless period.

Of course, the month of purification is made shorter.

Must run. Edward did his "get the monkey moving" ritual of holding Luigi down and biting his neck, knowing Luigi will squeal loudly and i will mutter, "Don't make me get up!" as i get up to separate them. Past time for them to have breakfast and for me to be at work.

I've Baker Creek Strawberry Spinach (Chenopodium capitatum) and extra Baker Creek Salad Burnet seeds. The Strawberry spinach wasn't robust enough for this climate. The Salad burnet is doing just fins, but there's only so much i can use. Might be more interesting in alkaline soil than in my acidic clay.

Also, Tronchuda or Portuguese kale - https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/kale/tronchuda-kale -- if the plants take off this spring i'll have plenty. If the plants go to seed, well i am growing them hoping they will be perennial. And if they are freeze killed, sigh.

Dear See's Candies: i ordered from you without you advertising at me. Stop sending me promotional email now!

Ah, Sharper Image, the catalog where you can see a man delightedly using a nose hair trimmer.

--== ∞ ==--

Have you tried a milk punch? A drink where some punch has been mixed with milk so the milk curdles and then the milk is strained out, leaving an apparently pleasurable and fairly stable beverage? I'm curious about just making it with a spiced tea. It become clear from reading the alcohol is not a necessary part of the process, but that milk clarification "takes the edge off," with notes that the edge was probably much more pronounced in alcohols from the 1700s.

https://www.cooksillustrated.com/science/844-articles/story/the-key-to-crystal-clear-cocktails-milk-really

From Cooks Illustrated, whole milk is the best thing to use, which is not something we have around the house. Half and half may work; the experimenter had inconsistent results. Evaporated milk apparently doesn't curdle. Apparently one can get soy milk to curdle (depending on whether anti curdling additives have been added).

Of course, once you have curds, the curds can be turned into cheese (if milk) or tofu (if soy).

Apparently the milk curds are very good at straining out tannins. So i'm imagining some tannic tea steeped with spices, strained through curds, and wondering at the result. Also wondering whether the curds would taste dreadful or interesting.

I'm wondering about my attempt at a local nocino from our black walnut trees and from the berries from the spice bush. (I made the walnut steeped alcohol a couple years ago. We don't drink much or often, so that's still around. This year i found a spice bush with plenty of berries and steeped those in a sugar alcohol mix.)

All the recipes seem to be in quantity...

The path of research into the safety of milkweed consumption — particularly butterfly weed, A tuberosa — revealed too much generalization. Milkweeds have milky sap, except for those which do not. Milkweeds are poisonous, except the content of toxins varies between species and probably varies within a species and certainly varies with plant part and maturity.

Toxicity of potatoes comes to mind. Solanine is in the flesh of a mature and “unstressed” tuber in non-toxic amounts. There’s relatively more in the skin and in “new” or young potatoes. There’s much more in bruised or green potatoes. There’s more in the eyes of the potatoes and even more when the potato sprouts. [See https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/solanine which includes a very useful extract from Michael Storey, in Potato Biology and Biotechnology, 2007]

If i was living off potatoes daily, peeling and digging out the eyes would be fairly important to reduce the overload of toxin. Eating potatoes less frequently, eating the skin and ignoring the eyes is of less risk.

What brings this all to mind in this moment, is fears of malting (sprouting) rye and “getting ergot poisoning.” I was reading up on sprouting rye and found a number of cautionary warnings about “do it yourself” sprouts. Ergot‘s life cycle, it turns out, relies on an infection when the plant is in bloom. If one has healthy rye grain, sprouting the grain is never going to produce ergot.

On the other hand, growing your own rye may result in ergot. And i think one of the stalks of rye in a vase near me, grown this spring as a cover crop in my stilt grass fight (side note: i think oats stopped stilt grass better, but the rye was quite pretty!) has an ergot spur. I wonder how many folks who fear sprouting rye grains would accept rye from a small farm? Or wheat, or oats? (Sigh, oats get ergot.) I find myself thinking of all the posts I’ve read of people growing a small bunch or wheat in their yard and making their own bread with it. My thoughts in the past were to ponder the expense in time to harvest and thresh and grind the grain: now i need to add, clean the grain of ergot.

I think back to scurvy and skim the history of cures and beliefs, noting how there are confounding practices, such as preparation of some edible in copper pans that led to compounds that prevented absorption of a chemical. It makes me ponder how risky eating can be. A chef with a novel ingredient who knows traditionally it has been cooked in such and such a way with some list of other ingredients. Could one ingredient mitigate another, preventing a toxin from binding with receptors? But how would one know that that’s why those ingredients were always eaten together.

So as i ponder novel meals of violet greens and sweet potato greens and okra greens and milkweed and poke, it’s with caution. I’m not sure if I’ll spring for milkweed — although butterfly weed with its lower toxicity is not as concerning... but it’s concerning enough. Pokeweed? I’m currentl avoiding. It’s possible that one mess of poke salat in the spring would be harmless, but why bother? Admittedly, thrice boiling may be less bother than sun chokes, which appear to need fermentation before consumption, but boiling takes energy.

It’s all makes me feel sympathy with the picky eaters out there. Those genes were probably pretty useful when the adventurous gatherer was celebrating the delicious find of the season.

Guessing at whether trees were native to Northern Europe by how many syllables are in the English word


* ash: Old English æsce, aexe, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch as and German Asche.
* beech: Old English bēce, of Germanic origin; related to Latin fagus ‘beech’, Greek phagos ‘edible oak’.
* birch: Old English bierce, birce, of Germanic origin; related to German Birke.
* elm: Old English, of Germanic origin; related to German dialect Ilm, and Swedish and Norwegian alm.
* oak: Old English āc, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch eik and German Eiche.
* pine: Old English, from Latin pinus, reinforced in Middle English by Old French pin.
* yew: Old English īw, ēow, of Germanic origin.

Nordic but not Anglo-Saxon trees

* fir: late Middle English: probably from Old Norse fyri- (recorded in fyriskógr ‘fir wood’).

The two syllable tree names that appear to have Anglo-saxon word roots are under-story trees

* apple: Old English æppel, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch appel and German Apfel. Probably originally for Malus sylvestris and then reappropriated with central Asian apples made their way to England.
* elder: Old English ellærn; related to Middle Low German ellern, elderne. Probably Sambucus racemosa
* hazel: Old English hæsel, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch hazelaar ‘hazel tree’, hazelnoot ‘hazelnut’, and German Hasel, from an Indo-European root shared by Latin corylus.

One syllable tress not native to northern Europe

* fig: Middle English: from Old French figue, from Provençal fig(u)a, based on Latin ficus.
* plane: late Middle English: from Old French, from Latin platanus, from Greek platanos, from platus ‘broad’. Looks like prior to 1492, just the Platanus orientalis would have been known to English speakers.

Two syllable trees not native to northern Europe

* cedar: Old English, from Old French cedre or Latin cedrus, from Greek kedros.
* cherry: Middle English: from Old Northern French cherise, from medieval Latin ceresia, based on Greek kerasos ‘cherry tree, cherry’.
* chestnut: early 16th century: from Old English chesten (from Old French chastaine, via Latin from Greek kastanea) + nut.
* cypress: Middle English: from Old French cipres, from late Latin cypressus, from Greek kuparissos.


I find i am most curious about two syllable maple: it doesn't appear likely that there were many significant native maples to Northern Europe

* maple: Old English mapel (as the first element of mapeltrēow, mapulder ‘maple tree’); used as an independent word from Middle English.

"The type species of the genus is the sycamore maple, Acer pseudoplatanus, the most common maple species in Europe." (More on this as i grouse about the word "sycamore") Not native to norther Europe but "native to Central Europe and Western Asia, from France eastwards to Ukraine, northern Turkey and the Caucasus and southwards in the mountains of northern Spain and Italy."
https://maplesociety.org/sites/default/files/deJongWorldwideMapleDiversity-vf.pdf

The tree name i find most annoying is sycamore. I grew up with the sweet gum, Liquidambar styraciflua, being called sycamore. When i moved to Philadelphia i became aware the American plane tree was called sycamore more commonly. (It is a tree much less prevalent in young southern American woods). Then i found in England sycamore belonged to a maple tree. And in the bible it refers to a fig. So in MY list of trees, sycamore is a useless term and just means that the leaves might be lobed. Ugh. "The name derives from the ancient Greek συκόμορος (sūkomoros) meaning "fig-mulberry"." At least figs and mulberries are in the same plant family, although not that close.

I'm out of sorts.
( weather, cats )

Hours later....

Just signed up for a personal account at Equifax to temporarily unfreeze my credit report. The email i received says, "Welcome to myEquifax?" with the question mark. Well, if you're uncertain i'm welcome....

Carrie is adorable as she applies her limpid, deep brown eyes to communicating that she would appreciate the crust of the cold pizza i am eating. Please? Marlowe dragged the empty plastic wrapper of the pack of toilet paper out from under the door (where i had put it in reach of her questing toes) and proceeded to kill it. She is now dashing around like a mad thing, crashing to the top of the cat tree and threatening to ambush me. I've tea made and took the last of the pizza and some bean dip out from the fridge if the power goes again. The rain tank is full. We are safe and dry.