Jerry Brown

"Bread prices will be getting high"...

I was lucky enough to find a used bread machine at the thrift store.  I little experimentation gave me a recipe I really like for whole wheat loaves. Ingredients cost pennies (I'll do a calc if anyone cares), but the machine bakes only one loaf at a time -- takes ~4 hours. About 10 minutes of my time to load the ingredients in the machine, then just remember to take the loaf out when done, so that it keeps its full size. I think my recipe makes about a 1.5 pound loaf.

Wow, I love it!

In a sci fi story where a human has been offered a free ride by a starfaring civilization, the human is shaving one morning and having a discussion with an alien, present only via microphone, and they get off on the subject of collective nouns for various fictional races on other planets ("A pride of Jovians, a dour of Saturnians,..."), and finally the alien offers up, "a gaggle of terrestrials"?  And the human admits, yes, there's some justice in that choice...

There's a really cool book from way back when, _An Exaltation of Larks_, that must contain at least a couple of hundred collective nouns. I think the official term is "terms of venery", venery being a word related to the Goddess Venus, because for some reason Her Loving Highness was also connected to the sport of hunting. (Because that's the 1st Love of True Hunters?? all thing are possible...)  I'm pretty sure that book is still in print -- when I just now did a search to make sure I had the title right, at least 4 or 5 different covers were shown in the pictures that were displayed!

About wooden cutting boards -- it seems to me that the Health Establishment has a bias against wooden ones, in favor of plastic (I believe this bias pushes restaurants toward using plastic ones.) So I Googled the topic, and immediately found a journal article by an MD researcher, whose study showed (1) it was impossible to culture a sample of bacteria residing on a wooden board, because there weren't any; (2) but there were lots of bacteria resident on the plastic board, especially in surface scratches.

But I doubt this result did any good, because all the people in the health industry knew better -- it couldn't possibly work as the experimenter found!

"But we don't care what Mama don't 'low, we'll play the trombone any-old-how!"

My own suspicion is, trees have existed for hundreds of millions of years, and during this time they learned how to protect themselves against the bacteria they encountered in the wild -- they developed very effective bacteriocides! (biocides, in general)

Here near Bonanza, all the used metal stuff is taken to the County's "transfer station", where there are many used (maybe reclaimable?) metal items, especially appliances. But the County is jealous of its bounty, no trash-picking is allowed. I believe they have a contract with a metals reclaiming company, that forbids scrounging.

...sigh...

Nancy Reading, what a beautiful photo of the yellow dragonfly!

THe ones I see here (south-western Oregon) I would characterize as mostly the "darning needle" type, at least that was what my Mom called them when we saw them skimming the air near our cabin at the Lake of the Ozarks. Here I seem to remember seeing them as mostly black or dark blue.

Last winter (I believe), Paul was selling a bundle of stuff, quite a lot, for as I recall $35.00. I bought one; but I've no idea what it contained!  Can someone check my account and confirm or deny that I've got --- Whatsit?

Thanks, Joylynn! That gives me confidence to go ahead. --Jerry Brown

Hey, I posted something yesterday (or the day before) in a thread about solar heating panels, and at the end I invited readers to contact me directly and pay me for information I've assembled about my project. And I was just now thinking, I'll bet this violates some of their rules or guidelines. So I just want to mention it directly, to let you decide what you want to tell me, hopefully before my post goes live.

I Assume this has happened before (how not?), and so you must have guidelines as to how I should have handled such a situation.

Yours in hopes for a world we can not screw up as badly as we have this one...Jerome Brown, geodejerry@gmail.com, Bonanza Oregon