Tereza Okava

This entire thread reminds me of my college experience in the snow belt of upstate New York, living in rented rooms in decrepit wooden buildings that had more drafts than a screen door.
Like M Pearson says above, the whole thing was a hot mess!! (and today most have been demolished, for good reason)
$100 was big money back then (cue that old timey music), and for two years I saved even more money by living in attic rooms that weren't connected to the heating system.

The first thing I did was always seal the windows with that plastic film business. Then put up something to cover them- curtains, blankets. Next, cover the walls- hippie tapestries were the in thing back then, but literally anything would work.
Next, appropriate clothing- a pair of long johns or even stockings, double socks, gloves, hat, scarf. Use all the time. Sleep in a hooded sweatshirt.
Last, pile on those blankets and/or whatever else you have. I had friends who lived in the [also unheated] basement of one of the rooming houses I was in, and during a blizzard one year I went to visit and they had all their coats and sweaters on their beds because it was that bad.

All of these things were great prep for living in other places with serious cold and big snow-- I remembered my friends in the basement one year as I was laying under about 25kg of heavy weighted blankets in an unheated, drafty straw-roof house in Northern Japan during an early blizzard!!

If you can, isolate a smaller space that you can heat up more easily. In my current house, that means closing all the doors and focusing on just one room, whether that is the living room, my office, the bedroom, etc.

jd hutton wrote:
Worst case, you could fill these with 500 Firecrackers each and re-route the DC-leads going to the internal Speaker - to a small 'e-Match', nestled into the first 'Crackers fuse, internally - That should take care of the Cats 're-education'. :)  

It would also save me the trouble of cleaning the turds off... in the same style of that town in Oregon that exploded the whale that beached there.... what could possibly go wrong?

(you don't sell new carports, do you?)

jd hutton wrote: solar-charged 'Robo-Owls',  

OMG these are absolutely marvelous!!! I want one just to freak out my neighbors (and possibly the dog). We've often talked about putting something on the roof to make the neighbors talk but usually we're talking green plastic alien. But they don't even have glowing eyes!!!

Yeardly Arthur wrote:adding more starter and an extra egg  to leftover pancake batter, plus whatever fruit was on hand.

That is enough for me to go on! This house basically runs on fruit muffins, and it looks like a great base for a savory muffin as well.

I don't have any family recipes (I'm the cook in the family) but I do love seeing what other people have passed down. Such a wealth of ideas! Thanks for sharing.

if you get hooked up with the library and homeschool crowd, this would be huge.

I am thinking about how many times we've been picking. A lot of orchards have the small trees, and it's lovely. That time of year there are often pumpkins or other products available. It's a good opportunity for pumpkin painting or picking squash (carving might get complicated).

So many places I went to as a kid had petting zoos, donuts, cider, things like that.

I do love the idea of fruit bingo. That's fabulous.
I guess if your focus is on kids and not on people picking volume (in my experience, the other major market group at U-pick operations) then charging per-head with a bag included, you can take home that much, seems easiest.

I think I'd be more concerned about adults being stupid than kids getting into trouble, although to be sure you'd need to be super careful about fencing off bodies of water, keeping kids away from animals, and even maybe things like wasps (maybe just cleaning up fallen apples often enough takes care of that).

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Two thoughts:

I wonder if a motion sensor under the roof could set off a loud stereo system aimed at the roof. Cats hate to be surprised.

A passive option is to strap a couple of layers of loose chicken wire across the roof, with some thin sticks between the layers. Makes a nasty place for cats to walk. You can always borrow and connect an electric fencer to the layers to break the behaviour.

The chicken wire is a good idea. I have used it in the garden to keep out cats, I know they don't like walking on it. Not sure about the electric fence, as the rain is coming back tomorrow...

The stereo would be hysterical, but my bedroom is right there under the carport and my neighbors' bedroom is right next to where we would have to put the whole mess. The cats running up there wakes me up (I'm a light sleeper) but I try to respect the neighbors since we are in an urban setting.

The good news, there has been less. Where I threw the laundry soap, the cats have stayed away.
The bad news, I was down for the count yesterday with something that felt viral, like out of my head fever. Today I am feeling slightly more human (it's only 9AM, so that is to be determined) but I'm not doing anything else with this situation without a respirator.

T. Woolf wrote:
Do you remember the early ones that when you removed the bread, the paddle stuck into it?.

So I hope this means the modern machines came up with some better solution? That stinking paddle....

keep on trying. i killed so many starters.... now i'm pretty good as starting them and keeping them alive. They can't be little princesses, they get fed rarely (sometimes it passes a month) and live in the fridge for most of the year as our temps are really high.

I find with sourdough, like with beermaking, it is possible to get hyperfocused on details until it stops being fun. You can calculate the heck out of temps and PH and salt and etc, but in the end the starter is a LIVING thing and just like any other living thing, there are limits to what you can make it do. I find that's one of its charms, actually.
Not everyone likes a super heavy whole grain and not everyone likes sour. You're allowed to like your own and go for it. You're also allowed to give it a timeout. Around pandemic time I was getting frustrated with it too, and decided to back off. You can always revive a starter later (or start a new one).

Personally, after trying all sorts of crazy things, my favorite sourdough is a half-whole-wheat tiny boule to make in the air fryer!! sometimes I screw it up (it gets baked in a 7 inch cake pan with a stainless steel bowl upturned over it, and often it ends up a bit too suntanned).... but it's always good.

(and one time I screwed up and used the wrong recipe-- doubled the flour quantity but not the starter. I said what the hell and made sourdough pretzels out of them, and let me tell you, that was the best mistake ever!!!)
Have fun, before all else.

Why not do both? An accountability-buddy as well as a place to document everything you do. We've watched some fabulous projects here at Permies.

I hope you find what you're looking for, Steve. I use peer accountability with work-related stuff (mainly marketing, ugh) and it's the only thing that can get my butt in gear.

We have TONS of birds of prey!! I often get visits by them when I'm out working in the garden (mourning doves like to sun themselves on my back garden wall, and I've had a hawk fly right past me to nail one). I leave some trees very tall in my yard for them and do everything I can to encourage their presence.
We have some nocturnal birds (nightjars) so maybe we have owls, but the ones I can set my clock by, a pair of carcarás (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crested_caracara ) come by every morning and every afternoon. They make their hunting call as they fly over and all the birds scatter. They do not, alas, hunt at night.

I talked to one neighbor yesterday, who said she hadn't noticed cats. But I did notice the lady on the other side has been washing her glass carport a lot more often. I'll see if I can catch her one of these days. The smell is probably affecting her even more than us, since her yard is higher and it just wafts right up there.

Jay, thanks a mil for the idea about connecting string to the traps, I never would have thought of that.