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It’s weird that I’m in my late forties, consider myself to be a good cook, and yet I’m just now learning basic cooking techniques. Like roasting. For the last few years, our Thanksgiving tradition has been to smoke a boneless turkey breast. This year, I got myself one of the fancy BBQ alarm temperature probes […]
In early 2020, I acquired a Stihl MS 362 C-M chainsaw for trail maintenance and got certified as a volunteer sawyer by the USFS. In early 2021, after getting some good experience working in the field, I picked up a lighter Stihl MS 261 C-M chainsaw. This isn’t so much a review of these saws […]
I have learned way more about saw chains today than I thought I ever wanted to know. It all started because I began looking into better ways to sharpen my chains. When I was a kid, I used a round file, with no guide. It was a bit time consuming, and certainly far from perfect, […]
Except for M*A*S*H reruns, Hulu cancelled all of the content I was watching a couple months ago. So I cancelled my Hulu subscription. I don’t miss it. (Okay, technically I did miss it today. I was going down a rabbit hole involving Tia Carrere, and I learned she was in an episode of Married… with […]
Today I learned that Bananarama and Nirvana ripped off Shocking Blue, not the other way around. I grew up in the 80s, so of course Bananarama’s version of “Venus” is the one I was familiar with. I didn’t know there was another version, and at that time I didn’t even know popular recording artists got […]
It used to be that I never abandoned books I had started. I always pushed through stubbornly, no matter how much I disliked the book. However, I have more particular taste now, and I am more acutely aware that the time I have left for reading is limited. Hence, I am now willing to make […]
I think I am about to throw out (or freecycle) my bread machine that I have had for more than two decades. I’ve decided I need better control over how bread dough is kneaded to develop gluten. When I go on long day hikes, which I often do for trail maintenance, I like to pack […]
The first audio recorder I used for film was the Zoom H4n. Then I upgraded to the Roland R-26, then the Zoom F4, and finally to the Sound Devices MixPre-10 II. Each time, I congratulated myself that I was stepping up to a recorder with better preamps, or so I believed, but I could never […]
I haven’t read enough film scripts. One I have read is the screenplay for Trumbo, written by John McNamara. I read it before having watched the film, and it moved me: to feel sadness, joy, and pride for the characters, and to shed actual tears. I’m no expert, but I would call that good writing. […]
The trail adopter’s manual for the Ozark Trail recommends the use of a hand weeder, which is a tool I’ve always called a sickle, though it really isn’t. It looks like this: It works well enough, once you get into the swing of it (pun intended), though there is definitely an upper limit to what […]
