chromedome

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Thought I'd share it here, in case anyone's interested. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/the-tinkerers-who-opened-up-a-fancy-coffee-maker-to-ai-brewing/

They're still very small, so I'm going to keep them in pots for another couple of years until they're bigger and sturdier (potting up regularly as they grow, of course). They'll need lots of sun but also some degree of shelter; in our climate they need a favorable microclimate so we'll need to work around that and also their mature size of 10-20 feet in height and diameter. If all goes as we hope and intend, we're going to build a second house on a back corner of the property. It'll be designed from ground up for accessibility and "aging in place," and it'll be set partially into the hillside. We think we may ultimately plant them so that they frame this new house from the front, because that spot would combine the desired shelter (from the hill and the woods) in one direction, and also give them the maximum quantity of sunlight.

A quick look at some of the early blossoms around our property. We have a whopping two red trilliums at the edge of the woods to the south of our house, but I'm happy to have any. They're very beautiful while they last. One of the previous owners planted lots of these little blue guys, which have happily naturalized and have now spread for some distance along the northern edge of the property. I'm fairly confident in calling one grape hyacinths, though they're on the small side. The other I believe to be Siberian squill or maybe striped squill, in the darker of its two colour schemes, though I'm open to correction on both. Some of you may remember me grumbling humorously that my garden's native soil might more accurately be described as "dirty gravel"? Well, this is what the surface of a bed looks like after a winter's precipitation. I reckon if I keep scooping this stuff from the top of my beds, eventually I'll have nice graveled paths between them. I've got most of my beds weeded now, with some help from our little grandson (age 7) who has learned that helping Papa means more time together kicking a soccer ball around. I've got a few early things planted over the past week: a row of peas, several of kale, and one of lettuces. Hoping to get other "as soon as the ground can be worked" seeds going, as soon as the bloody rain stops. My tomatoes, peppers and okra are doing fine in my closet, under a Sun Blaster tube, and should be ready to go in another couple of weeks when we get to "all danger of frost has passed." I don't recall if I'd mentioned it previously, but my daughter gifted me a pair of hardy magnolias as an early Father's Day present. They're the "Leonard Messel" hybrid, and I know for sure they'll survive and thrive in our climate because I've seen mature specimens in a few yards around our immediate vicinity. https://www.monrovia.com/leonard-messel-magnolia.html

I've run across the phrase "collegiate drones" in a novel, meaning young, idle college men loafing through their studies while trying to score with girls. For me it immediately brought to mind one specific prof I had, compared to whom Ben Stein's droning teacher from "Ferris Bueller" sounded like Robin Williams on a cocaine jag. Oddly he was very good 1-on-1, and I did end up learning a lot from him, but at the front of a lecture hall he was spectacularly dull.

1) Start list. 2) Misplace list. 3) Start new list, carefully attempting to remember as many things as possible from the original list. 4) Remember multiple things that hadn't made it onto the new list over the ensuing 2-3 days. Add them. 5) Find the original list. Add the items that I still hadn't remembered. 6) Go shopping. Remember there was a list as I'm halfway through the store (or realize I've mistakenly brought the original list, which by now contains just a fraction of the items on the current list). Attempt to recreate it again from memory. 7) Repeat. I've started using Google Keep on my phone for the shopping list(s) and to-do lists, which seems to be working reasonably well. I did try an actual shopping-list app several years ago, but it was so maddening to use that I abandoned it after just a couple of weeks.

We've been on the opposite side of that kind of confusion, in our way. The village I live in has a namesake just across the bay in Nova Scotia, and when we advertise our rabbits, quail, quail eggs etc for sale, we often have people responding to our ads in the mistaken belief that we're in the Nova Scotian town of the same name. Just a couple of weeks ago a sale for five young rabbits went south when the couple hopped into their car at 6:45 for our 7PM meeting, punched the address into their GPS, and said "Wait, what?" (It would be worse on FB Marketplace, because when we set a radius of 50 or 75km around our location, it shows us ads from across the bay in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley, and the reverse is also true.)

Organic Traditions brand jumbo pumpkin seeds are being recalled nationally due to salmonella. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/organic-traditions-brand-jumbo-pumpkin-seeds-recalled-due-salmonella?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

I've mentioned that new-hatched quail are pretty tiny, right? This little guy is a day old. He somehow managed to find a way out of the "newborns" cage mid-morning, and was pretty hypothermic when I found him. After a half-hour of fast warming in my fist he perked up, and I got a bit of water and food into him before putting him back under the brooder with his siblings.

Another one that's Alberta only, for now, also for salmonella. This one is for Hong Kong brand shredded coconut. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/hong-kong-brand-shredded-coconut-recalled-due-salmonella?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Nothing much to report, this past while. We've only sold a handful of rabbits so far this year, well down from last year's numbers, though we've moved some quail and quail eggs. But, since I don't believe I've made a point of posting anything like this in the past, here are two pics of a newborn kit (age roughly 12 hours). It's something you wouldn't ordinarily get to see, unless you're raising rabbits yourself. They're pretty wiggly, so I needed to take 8 shots in order to get two that weren't blurred (much).

This one is Alberta only, at least for now. Al Kanater brand tahini's being recalled for salmonella. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/al-kanater-brand-tahini-recalled-due-salmonella-0?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

As Douglas Adams put it, "Have you ever read the instructions on a pack of toothpicks?" Allergen-labeling law in the US (and Canada) boils down to "if it contains one of these major allergens,* it MUST be labeled accordingly." And sometimes you get these silly situations, like a jar of fish containing fish or Costco recalling butter because it's missing the "contains milk" statement. But there absolutely are people capable of not understanding that a "sprat" is a fish, or that anchovies in Worcestershire sauce or Caesar dressing mean you can't serve it to someone with a seafood allergy. It's not so much the people with allergies (because they'll usually know), it's the dim but well-meaning friends, neighbours, co-workers etc. Not to mention the idiots who think "I'm so tired of his 'allergy' bullshit, I'll feed him some deliberately so show him it's all in his head." And yes, sadly, that happens far too often (in my limited circle of acquaintance, I can think of three incidents just within the past few years). Similarly, some chains won't accept a food product for sale unless it has a freshness date printed on it, hence the various wags on social media joking about their salt being past its date. That one, I'll grant you, is pretty silly. *Eight in the US, ten in Canada

This isn't something I've gotten, I just saw it on FB, but... not gonna lie, I kinda want it.

I'll be heading down to Nova Scotia today, for my monthly visit, and taking along 5 rabbits to be delivered to 2 different buyers along the way, as well as 4 dozen quail eggs for a third buyer. It seems there may be some potential to generate a modest side income out of this, if we choose to pursue it. Before packing up to go I've had to take 20-odd minutes to pipe the filling into (cough) 8 dozen deviled quail eggs. My GF's cousin celebrates her 60th tomorrow, and those will go on the trays for the party. Now I have to go hard on the packing and a few last-minute tasks (refilling the hay, chicken feed and quail feed, loading firewood for the next several days, etc).

Shared on FB by my GF (and her sweet tooth...):

Yesterday my GF watched a video by someone who'd made wine from leftover Peeps (apparently it was from a previous Easter, and just got re-upped on a timeliness basis). Off the top of my head I'm hard-pressed to think of a topic where I'd describe myself as any kind of purist, but but there is a line where I don't think you get to call it "wine" anymore and I'm pretty sure that crosses said line.

Yup, good to see you! It's been too long. Easter dinner here was nothing out of the ordinary. Did a ham, scalloped potatoes, squash, veg, etc, and an apple crisp for dessert. My GF sadly can't eat pork anymore (especially cured pork) for medical reasons, but through cautious experimentation we've discovered that she can still eat foods infused with the ham's flavor. So I poached a chicken breast in the ham's drippings for her, and she got to have the (lightly) ham-infused chicken breast with the various side dishes and ham gravy. Then I popped the remainder of the ham into the Instant Pot the next day for 20 minutes, deboned it and put the bone back in for another 20 minutes, and made split pea soup. She can eat that as well, and had missed it sorely. I just dice up a bit of ham to go into my own bowl along with the soup, for the full experience. I also baked cookies and sent a box off to the grandkids in Alberta, since the postal strike had prevented me from sending their usual box at Christmas time.

I have the opposite problem with my range. The coil element periodically will have a "runaway" moment, when - no matter what setting the dial is turned to - it will suddenly go full blast, for no discernible reason. This appears to be a function of the wiring to that position, rather than the coil itself, because I've swapped them and it still recurs in the same spot (the much-used front large burner, of course...). I discovered this a couple of years ago when I left the room to rummage for something in the freezer, and came back to discover that the burner had actually melted a hole in the bottom of my multi-ply Paderno Dutch oven.* The burner itself had melted out in that spot, breaking the circuit and preventing any further damage. I haven't gotten around to looking this up online and doing some troubleshooting, so I use the less-convenient large burner in the back corner a lot more and only use the problematic one when I'll be in the room and giving it my full attention. *Some of you will remember that I'd watched the price on that specific set for several years before finally acquiring it at a blowout clearance price, so I was especially miffed.

I'm sure I've made a version of this post upthread somewhere, but... no matter what the news, or how stiff my back/joints happen to be, it's hard to not smile when I see these little faces greeting me in the morning. This is Ivy's litter (she's the sole survivor of "the incident," and our original bloodlines), and they're a remarkably inquisitive, cuddly little group, especially the light-brown at far right, closest to the camera. You'll note that the bowl behind them is full, they've already gotten their food and water. They're just looking for some petting. I may or may not have mentioned it in the past, but that strip of metal you see lining the door is a length of "corner bead," for making neat corners with drywall. Cutting a doorway in the mesh left small, sharp stumps of wire that I could never quite eliminate with my side cutters, and the stumps frequently sliced up my arm or my sleeves. So we hit on the idea of using these strips of thin, flexible metal to cover the cut ends of the wire and provide some small degree of reinforcement for the opening. I have since purchased a good, heavy file for putting an edge on my axe and hatchet, and now I'm using that to remove the burr from the cut edges. It's just as effective, and eliminates the need to purchase the strips of corner bead periodically as we upgrade and/or replace cages. As it turns out, our smaller-than-hoped litters haven't set us back as much as we'd feared, because we aren't selling as many bunnies this year as we had in the past. We sold a LOT more as pets and breeders last year, around Easter time. This year we've sold exactly two, so far, though we've had a few other sales fall through because the people who reached out to us thought we were in Kingston, Nova Scotia, rather than Kingston, New Brunswick. One couple literally didn't realize this until they'd hopped into their car, 15 minutes prior to their intended arrival, and punched the address into their GPS. So the upshot is that I'll be delivering bunnies to a couple of buyers in Nova Scotia when I run back down this weekend for my monthly visit. Two will go to someone in Truro (about an hour outside of Halifax, and an agricultural hub), and someone else will meet me in the parking lot at my mom's nursing home in Hammonds Plains (part of greater Halifax). We've sold several quail, though, and lots of quail eggs to people wanting to hatch their own flocks. Two of our egg-buyers turned out to be teachers, who will be hatching them out as a class activity (apparently teachers need to be creative to keep the kids focused, as the end of the school year looms). We also had an interesting visit from a home-schooling family: the mom brought her three kids to our place for a hands-on visit with the baby quail (we had adults, adolescents and day-old hatchlings, for a useful compare-and-contrast) and some bunny-cuddling time. They took home a dozen quail eggs to incubate, as well, but once they hatch she'll bring the hatchlings back to us to rear. She's kinda tempted to keep some, but hubby's not on board. So the quail have been our money-maker so far, but it's early enough in the season that we have time to sell a lot more bunnies to help defray our costs. As we build out our flock of chickens (they take a lot longer than quail, to become productive) we're hoping to establish a handful of "regulars" to buy fresh eggs from us and provide a small income, which will also help subsidize our costs. Currently there's nobody we know of in the Maritimes offering quail eggs for sale on a commercial basis, so my GF is thinking seriously that instead of our current mixed flock, we'll start keeping flocks of separate breeds and offering fertile eggs for sale. There seems to be at least a modest demand, and she's not able to work conventionally because of her illness(es), so it could be a useful little side income she could generate. It also opens the possibility of some tax breaks, if we can make even a small-scale business of our tiny acreage.

My GF just sent me this one:

I saw this four times in an hour this morning, which may say a great deal about the people I know.

I'll hazard a guess that it's a play on luosifen, with the springs, bolts and such in place of the snails... perhaps an etymological link based on the shared curliness of the ironmongery and the snails' shells?