Michael

What Can You Do?

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There are people that do amazing things. Like “racing” from San Franciso to Portland, route chosen by the rider. Like eating from his garden and what he could forage for a year. Like a team of six guys taking a raft trip to prove Kon Tiki could go from South America to Polynesia. Today I’ve run across a new person doing something incredible, walking the Pacific Crest Trail, starting when he was 400 pounds.

Yes, 400 pounds. He felt he needed to do something to get his life back in control. Here are a few selected videos for you to find out for yourself.

There are 95 videos including lots of adventures. He never did hit his goal of 200-pound loss. Instead, he hiked the entire PCT at 300 pounds or more. That is epic.

Flour for Bread

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We went to buy flour today. It was at Tabor Bread. They are a bakery, café, and seller of flours. You might, like we did, go to King Arthur Flour for high-quality flours. Or maybe Bob’s Red Mill for a variety of flours. We have certainly done all of these things.

Over the next week, we’ll test the flours. I’m very hopeful about the products. We got Rye, Cornmeal, and Hard Red flours. The “oldest” one was milled on Wednesday. The other two were milled today. Shall we talk about fresh?

We’ll let you know.

Sourdough Pricing

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I saw a YouTube video about “Sourdough – Starting the Starter” in the Home section. Thought I’d check it out. And wow. I’m disappointed. The guy uses and recommends starter from King Arthur Flour and Sourdoughs International.

Wow! $8.95 and $15.00 for starter. This is flour and water, mixed, left to do its thing. And you need to feed the starter with what you’d mix up to do a starter. What is the point of paying for something that occurs naturally?

King Arther has instructions for doing your own. In fact, they have a variety of starters. Rye, Gluten Free, Small Batch, and more. This is a great, honest company.

Perhaps I’m missing something. But the time to process an order and ship it to you takes about the same amount of time it would take to do it from scratch. After a starter is fed in your environment it’s going to get the unique balances of flora that exists in your area. It’s all yours – the joy of sourdough.

Books vs eBooks

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They claim the content is

This is intended as satire. The author is not yet ancient, cynical, technophobic, or curmudgeonly. He’s actually a pretty pleasant guy who enjoys many modern conveniences. 

David Ferrer

but don’t believe it. There are lots of reasons why books are better than ebooks. Read about it in 50 Reasons Real Books are Vastly Superior to Ebooks.

My favorites include Marginalia, Decoration, Used Books, and well, you get the idea. There are lots more favorites to have.

It’s Called Lobectomy

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That’s what I had this fall. And it seems to fit today. A day of fixing things that shouldn’t be broken, but they are. A website that wasn’t updating. Another one that hasn’t migrated. Then there was the car not locking the car up. It’s one of those things where you close and lock and unlock with a thing that you press the button on. Not today. Or the rebuilding of a laptop since the old one was stolen. And there was the lookup of jamhome.us, saunter.us/wanderings, and all the rest. Name resolution broke. And that lead to people’s email to me failing, and that lead me to needing to figure out why it broke. Which I did. But I should have a while ago. Before it was totally broken.

So with all the stuff broken, I may as well tell you I had a lobectomy. Upper node on my left side was removed. No, I don’t smoke. No, I’ve never smoked. I did have radiation treatment way back when, when the blasted you with as much as you could tolerate. Arteries would suddenly pop and I’d cough up blood.

Two good things come out of this. 1) I should remember what it’s called, lobectomy. 2) Now, maybe, I can scuba dive since I don’t need to worry about the lung spontaneously bursting.