What’s on my plate

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A. Drudge Work Monday and there’s no getting around it today. Mr. Big Food tied up one of the kitchen trash bags in preparation for the taking out of the trash and then went out to cut The Peninsula. I was employed in pepper picking. When he returned to the kitchen, Mr. Big Food discovered that one of the dogs– which is to say Missy– had decided to investigate the trash bag. When I returned with a basket full of peppers, I asked why there were coffee grounds on the floor. I was told he had locked the dogs in the Den. I will be engaged in some Drudge Work today.

B. Freezing peppers. We have a lot of peppers which is a good thing.

C. Trip to town.

D. Twenty to thirty pages of proofreading.

C. Ham radio programming. Let me note that this is not at all intuitive. There is a program, Chirp, into which one can load frequency information and so forth. (You of course need a specific driver to do this.) The program saves the file in .csv format. But the radio does not read .csv files. It only reads .img files. One would think that in the gazillion tutorials and videos demonstrating how to program a Baofeng radio with Chirp this would be the first thing to note. It is not.

D. The Apartment. In just a few weeks, someone will be living in The Apartment. It is currently uninhabitable.

E. Giving the donkey a carrot.

Giddy

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That was Mr. Big Food yesterday evening– positively giddy. He said this was his favorite time of year. Moussaka with homegrown eggplant. Stuffed green peppers. Fresh lemon cucumbers for the salad. Home. Grown. Tomatoes. What would life be without homegrown tomatoes?

I cannot argue with his sentiment.

Announcement!

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Came as a complete surprise this morning! Male. Four or five years old. Very gentle– can pet him and lead him around on a leash.

So we’re in the donkey business!

Radio Silence

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Amateur Radio. Mr. Big Food is on board, too. We are going to get out amateur radio licenses and some equipment. Blog silence is thus explained.

It’s all quite interesting. I’m taking notes. SueK– I found this to be the best bird’s eye view introduction to ham radio. Almost jargon free and very accessible for someone who wants to enter ham world. Comes at it from the perspective of a prepper but not a bat-sh*t crazy TEOTWAWKI SHTF OMG THE WORLD IS ENDING prepper, which is nice.

Amateur radio is, for Mr. Big Food and I, a compromise. As you are know, I am a Full Professor in The Department of Redundancy Department and as such am leery of having only one means of connecting to the world beyond the gate. As you may also know, Mr. Big Food is a Full Professor in The Department of Don’t Waste Money Department and as such is none too happy about spending hard earned money– to the tune of about $1200 a year– on a landline phone that rings off the hook all day.

Enter ham radio. We will begin with handheld devises and once we’ve familiarized ourselves, we’ll move on to a base unit.

This could keep my little brain occupied for months!

New tag: ham radio

Human-ities

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Any talk of saving culture, or restoring culture, begins with a defense of the humanities. Any hope of cultural revival equally begins with a re-emergence of the humanities. Any hope to truly celebrate—though not uncritically—the human person rests with being drenched in the dewfall of the humanities. The death of the humanities really does mean the death of the human. It represents the final destruction of the Lebenswelt, the great cultural inheritance that has moved man and earth. Our current metaphysical and ontological impoverishment is very much the result of our cultural impoverishment. Any revival of the human being, of culture, and of tradition, is tied to the resurrection of the humanities.

“In Defense of the Humanities”

The Humanities are alive and well here at Farther Along Farm.

M-i-s-s-i-s

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NOAA weather radio is beeping at us. Flash flood warning. Up to three inches of rain has already fallen.

Mr. Big Food remarks that he will not be cutting today.

I need coffee.

Radar, Satellite, and Eyes

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  • Lake Charles, LA
  • New Orleans, LA
  • Mobile, AL
  • Ft. Polk, LA
  • Jackson, MS
  • Shreveport, LA
  • Columbus, MS
  • Ft. Smith, AR
  • Little Rock, AR
  • Memphis, TN
  • Birmingham, AL

These are RadarScope (RS) screen shots captured between 10:04 and 10:05 this morning. To orient you, we’re going west to east beginning with the southern most states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, then again west to east one notch further north.

While is is true that the center of the low pressure system that is/was Barry is over the western edge of Louisiana, it is not true that central and northern Louisiana and almost all of Arkansas are getting inches and inches of rain.

I will not bore you with more images, but looking at “storm total accumulation” on RS, I just want to bang my head on the desk.

Shreveport twitter is reporting trace to over an inch of rain today. How is that 10-20″ of rain? It’s not even 6-10″. In fact, looking at accumulation totals, no one except those in the south east corner of Mississippi got anywhere near 8″– the most I’m seeing is about 4″

I swear. It’s enough to make you want to tuck your head under your wing and make it all go away. Keep in mind that I did not want to scare you away with the satellite images. But you should have seen them– or maybe you did.

Just FYI– I think I’ve found something new on which to obsess.

Sunday Travels: Back Roads

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We went to Jackson last week. Stopped for gas on the way home about 10 miles from the exit we normally take. Mr. Big Food suggested rather than getting back on the interstate, we cut the hypotenuse on the back roads. Very pleasant.

  • Crossroads; there’s an election coming up
  • A very nice house in Vaiden, Mississippi
  • Well-kept
  • Straight & narrow
  • Turn right
  • There are churches everywhere
  • Keep going
  • Abandoned school?
  • Looked positively terrible
  • Dollar General

A Little Exercise

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In reply to SueK, who commented that she could not fathom 20″ of rain– what’s forecast for NOLA.

20″ is indeed a lot of rain. We could get up to 10″. Here’s something I once had my students do– a very long time ago– when teaching both metric system, and some environmental biology.

Take some paved outdoor space of reasonable dimension– driveway, small parking lot. Measure length & width in feet or yards. Set aside.

1 inch of rain is a volume of water– 1 cubic inch.

1 inch = 2.54 cm. 2.54 * 2.54 * 2.54 = 16.39 cubic cm. Round down (so as not to over inflate the eventual stat) and once inch of rain is 16.3 cubic centimeters of rain.

By definition, 1 cubic centimeter of water = 1 ml (and has a mass of 1 gram but that’s irrelevant here) [and I can’t remember but there’s a pressure component to this too]

1″ rain = 16.3ml.

Convert your measurement of the driveway to cm. Let’s say 10′ x 20′ … 304.8cm & 609.6cm, respectively.

Now, drop an inch of water on that surface.

304.8 * 609.6 * 16.3 = 3,028,639.1 cubic centimeters or ml of water.

How many liters is 3 MILLION milliliters? 3028.6391 call it 3028.

Divide by 2 b/c everyone knows how much is in a 2-liter bottle.

One inch of rain falling on a paved surface measuring 10′ x 20′ is more than 1500 2-liter bottles of water. It can’t go down, so it runs off.

Burn ban head scratcher

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I swear to God, those folks in Louisiana make us Mississippians look down right intelligent some days. Let’s go look and see if the iPad has a therefore sign. It does not. But you know what I’m talking about. That little triangle of dots that indicates, e.g.,

Hurricane therefore burn ban

WTH?