The Ratrace Losers

Taking a Leak...

2013-05-24T12:05:00.000-04:00

...And Making it Worse

The Motorless Home has leaks. We've talked about them previously when I blogged about fixing the leak over the bathroom and the front cap. Well, the one at the rear cap raised its ugly head the other day.

Linda and I have been "testing" the RV for the last several days. We've actually spent most of our time in there. It has working air conditioning and running water, so we can actually prepare meals and sleep in there. Using the bathroom is a bit of a challenge, but we're close to the house.

The other night, it rained. Apparently the rear cap leaked and dripped water on Linda all night long. That does not make for a very happy wife! She was absolutely miserable, and the wet made her really cold. She didn't sleep too well.

So, last night, I decided to repair it like I did to the front cap, by applying a layer of sealant after removing the old, dead stuff.

"Official" Instructions

The stuff I'm using as a sealant isn't the usual self-leveling stuff that is recommended for RVs. That stuff is really expensive! Since it will be a while before the Motorless Home is mobile again, I'm not as worried about using a nonstandard sealant. The stuff I'm using is for roofs, but not specifically for RV roofs.

I've looked at the "proper" stuff, and when I read about how to apply it, I was appalled. The instructions say to clean up the existing surface with mineral spirits and make sure it is clean and dry. Then, just apply the new sealant over top of the old and let it cure. To me, this is just stupid. With the exception of this stuff, I've never seen a sealant's instructions tell you to skip the "completely remove all old sealant" step.

I just can't abide that. When I worked on the skylight and front cap, I used a utility knife to remove the old sealant. This time, I brought power tools. I brought an angle grinder with a wire wheel on it to grind off the old sealant. I put on my eye protection and ground away. That stuff made the most hellacious mess I've seen in a while. It was like sticky dust particles. It got everywhere. But, in the end, I was able to get the old sealant ground away to a point that I was happy. After cleaning all the sticky-dust away, I applied a generous coating of sealant to the entire seal. So far, so good. Or so I thought.

Mr. Murphy, You Can Just go Away, Thank You.

The sealant that I use takes 24 hours to cure completely, and several hours to cure enough to be water-tight. Since it seems that it's latex-based, it just rinses off with water until it cures. This makes cleanup really easy. It also means that you had better not try to apply this stuff when it's about to rain.

About ten minutes after I completed the "re-gooping," it started to rain. I was worried that there had not been enough time for it to cure, especially since it was overcast and rather cool outside. The curing takes longer when the temperature is lower. It rained for just a few minutes, and it didn't seem to rain that hard, so I thought I had dodged a bullet.

I was wrong.

I went back to the bedroom to check on something and felt a huge wet spot on the bed. Since my excursion to the roof was supposed to STOP leaks, I investigated. It was leaking, allright, and the water coming in had a milkiness to it that told me that it was dissolving the sealant. I hurried back up onto the roof to find a puddle washing over my freshly applied goop. Not good. I had to get that water off there and redistribute the sealant and protect it while it cured, in case it rained again.

So, I spent the next hour drying the roof and getting the water away from the sealant. I then applied a layer of plastic over the sealant to (hopefully) protect it long enough for it to finish curing. The duct tape didn't want to stick; the surface was irregular, cold and slightly damp. All of those are the enemy of good duct tape adhesion. I did the best I could and went inside.

Although there was no more rain and I was reasonably sure that the area was sealed up again, the ceiling continued to drip. I guess a lot more water got into the walls than I thought. I will just have to wait for that water to make its way out of there. Linda decided to sleep in the house since she didn't want to get dripped on again. I don't blame her.

Redo the Redo

Since water is the enemy of uncured latex, there is a good chance that I will have to completely remove the sealant that I just applied and redo it at a time that I know there will be no rain. Once I've given the existing stuff time to cure, I will reinspect. If I have any doubt about the seal, I will remove it and redo it.

Stalking My Prey

2013-05-19T20:15:00.001-04:00

Scoring Big on Little Money - The Annual Trenton Yard Sale

Linda and I got an unexpected check for $70 in the mail the other day. We were very grateful for that timing. It really made the difference for us, and it enabled us to take advantage of some awesome deals we were able to find this weekend.

Every year in May, the city of Trenton, Ohio holds a city-wide yard sale. It's quite an event, and often you're able to find just about anything since there are so many yard sales. We decided to drive around to see if we could find any deals on some items that we've been looking for.

Early on in our adventure, I spotted a small vacuum cleaner. I've been wanting one of these to use in the Motorless Home for cleanup while I work on the remodel. It's too small in there to haul a full-sized upright vacuum in there, let alone, the shop vac.

I spotted this little Dirt Devil model. The sticker on it said $5. I had already decided that I was not going to pay the sticker price for anything.

Don't get me wrong; $5 for a working vacuum cleaner is not bad. It's just one of my "yard sale" rules -- Never, ever, pay the asking price.

I started with an offer of $2. The lady considered it for a moment, but respectfully declined. She told me "There is a lady who said she would come back for it later today and pay me the full $5." I told her that I had $3 CA$H that I would give her "right now" for it, and she didn't know for sure that the other lady was coming back. She countered with $4.

Oddly, I had decided that I would pay the $4, but for some reason, I was taking a while digging in my wallet and hadn't yet agreed to her counteroffer. Suddenly, she said that she would accept $3! So, I pulled $3 out and handed it to her and absconded with my prize.

After I loaded the vacuum into the Jeep, Linda made an interesting observation: "It's interesting watching these people. It's like they're hunting. They're 'stalking their prey.' " I thought about it. She was right. In our society, most of us no longer have to hunt for our food. We just drive over to the grocery and pick it up. So, how does an animal that is genetically programmed as a predator express that behavior after they have become "civilized?" They shop.

We approach the item of our desire. Our pulse quickens. Our irises widen. If it's a particularly good find, our palms may sweat. We sneak up on the item. We don't want the seller to know that we're after that one. If they knew, they would jack up the price. Then, when we're ready, we move in for the "kill." We will make an offer to the seller and engage in "retail battle." Once the battle is over and we've "won," we will grab our "kill" and run off with it. You can take the animal away from the hunt, but you can't take the hunt away from the animal.

The next item I found was this multi-tool. We stopped at a yard sale that had a lot of tools visible. When I went up to the guy, he was busy selling a gun to another guy. I jumped into the conversation since the gun he was selling was very similar to one that I own. I was telling the buyer all about it and what to watch out for. I think I actually helped close the deal.

Once they were finished, I asked about the tool. The guy wanted $3 for this Winchester brand multitool. It's no Gerber or LeatherMan, but it was of reasonably good quality. So I offered him $2 and he accepted. I will probably keep this thing in the car or on my bike, since it's a handy tool to have around!

We stopped at another yard sale and picked up a replacement electric can opener, since ours died a couple months ago and we've been using a hand-cranked one that also needs to be pitched. They wanted $2 and I offered $1 and they accepted. Great!

So, by this point, we had spent $6. We still had yet to find our two greatest deals of the day.

We stopped by a parking lot where several people had set up. I walked around and checked out the booths and nothing really caught my eye until I saw this.

An older Sears Craftsman table saw!

The guy had no price listed on it, and he had some goofy metal cutting blade installed that didn't fit it right. Since new table saws cost hundreds of dollars, I didn't figure I'd have a chance to get this thing, given the extremely short budget we had for yardsaling.

"So, why you selling this?" I asked.

"It used to be my Dad's." he replied. "After he passed, I bought it from my Mom and I used it only once. I really don't want to take it back to the storage unit. Make me an offer."

Knowing how extremely short on cash we were, I didn't really want to make an offer, since anything I could afford to pay would have been an extreme lowball. "I'm serious," he said, "Make me an offer. I just don't want this thing anymore."

I just stood there looking at it and poking around. I even suggested that he might want to tighten up the blade on there since it was loose and wobbly. I was honestly giving him sales advice since I didn't think I could afford it -- so why not help him sell it, right?

"How about $40," He said, while fiddling with the blade. At least he was taking my advice!

Now, $40 for a table saw is a pretty darned good deal. The truth of the situation is that I really couldn't justify spending $40 on it. So, I told him. "Sir, I'm really short on cash, and I hadn't planned to buy something of this size. I mean no disrespect by this, but the most I could pay for this would be $20." He looked at me and seemed to consider it.

He countered, "Come back later. If I haven't sold it later today, we'll talk." I agreed to stop back in and I left, thinking that I had just pissed the guy off with my low-ball offer and he was just politely telling me to go pound sand.

We drove around a bit more, stopping here and there. We were also on the lookout for cheap scrap blue jeans for Linda to use for making rugs on the loom. However, the people were deluding themselves if they thought I was going to pay $2-$5 per pair for jeans, even if I was going to wear them, let alone have Linda cut them up to make rugs. We never did find any cheap jeans. What a bummer.

We were starting to get tired when Linda spotted this item.

"Ooh! An antique treadle sewing machine!" she exclaimed. Again, thinking that there was no way we would be able to get something like that, I decided to stop and take a look. I quickly discovered that it needed some maintenance, but mechanically, everything operated. It looked like it was complete. There was no price tag on it, either.

"What are you asking for the sewing machine?" I inquired.

"She's got that marked at $35," the lady in the lawn chair replied. I poked at it some more and decided I'd low ball her, just in case.

"Will she take $20?" That was close to half of the asking price. Again, I was concerned that I had insulted her. She went inside to ask the owner if they would accept it. While I waited, I noticed some rather humorous stickers that were on the door leading into the house. This was a fairly nice neighborhood, so they seemed really out of place. They read "Gone Fisting" (WARNING: LINK NOT WORK SAFE) and "Up the Butt." I had just enough time to chuckle about it and Lawn Chair Lady returned.

"Yeah, she'll take that." I was shocked. Not even a counter offer. I kicked myself. I should have offered $10. I gave her $20 and loaded it into the Jeep.

We were pretty much out of money in our budget at this point, having spent $26. However, Linda encouraged me to go check on the table saw anyway, since it was a really, really good deal. So, we made our way back over to the sale with the table saw.

I took $20 with me, just in case. I walked up to the guy and said, "So, are you ready to take $20 for this?" Figuring I would get shot down, and since we had already spent what we felt we could easily spend, I waited for the denial.

"Yeah, sure." He said. I quickly handed him the $20 bill I had in my hand to seal the deal before he had chance to reconsider. I told him that my car was full and that I'd have to run home and drop off the stuff and come back to pick up the saw. He agreed and we headed home.

After we dropped off our first load, we returned and picked up the table saw and brought it back to the house. That sucker is heavier than it looks! It needed a little work. Someone had gotten some kind of gunk in the threads that controls the blade angle, and you could not adjust it past about 38*. I took a screwdriver and scraped it out of the threads and lubricated them. I chucked the stupid metal-cutting blade that the guy had in there. It wasn't even the right kind for that saw! That explained why it was so poorly mounted when I saw it at his sale booth. I put a general purpose wood blade in it and made some test cuts. It worked fine!

The rip fence that came with it needs some more attention, since it has trouble staying square. That can cause the blade to bind. That's not a good thing! Considering that I only paid $20 for it, I figured it would have some flaws that needed to be worked out.

After that, I spent the rest of the evening cleaning and lubricating the sewing machine. I did some research on it, and it turns out that this unit (based on its serial number) is 120 years old! It's a Singer Model 27 and it was made in 1893...and it still works! Boy, I wish we had quality like that these days!

It's got some rust on it a few places, but since we're not terribly worried about its value as an antique, repairing the rust won't be too hard. We're far more concerned with making it functional.

Today, I decided to test the vacuum cleaner. The motor ran, but it didn't pick anything up and the beater brush didn't operate. It looked like it needed a belt. I looked at the bottom, and, as is typical of many vacuum cleaners, there was hair and string wound around the beater bar. So, I decided to take it out and clean it up. Once I had the bottom off, I discovered what had caused the belt the break.

This is one of the things that really disturbs me about today's society. We live in a society of "disposable technology." Rather than take the few minutes and few dollars to repair a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, we just junk it and go buy a new one. This is extremely wasteful, as well as just plain stupid from a financial perspective. That Dirt Devil vacuum probably cost $50 or $60 new. All it needs is a belt and a new HEPA filter, which should cost less than $15 total. Why do we dispose of things like that?

While cleaning it out, I discovered that the reason the belt had broken was because of a major clog. Someone had sucked up a wad of paper and it allowed dust and debris to accumulate until the hose was completely occluded. This caused the belt to overheat, and because of the string on the beater bar, the belt started to slip until it had burned through.

As for the clog, you can usually just use a long tool like a chop stick to fish the clog out. Unfortunately, this was so completely impacted that I had to remove the hose from the vacuum to clear it.

So, with about ten minutes of work and $15 in parts, plus the $3 I spent on this vacuum, It will cost a whopping $18 to have a $60 vacuum cleaner. That works for me! It totally fits into my goals for reusing and sustainability.

What comes out of this is what is most disturbing of all; our society's penchant for trashing items that need simple repairs is that the manufacturers no longer make items with as much quality. Since they know that they will be thrown away and replaced with a new one at the first sign of difficulty, they "don't make 'em like they used to." This leads to a spiral effect, since the item is more likely to break in the first place, and many items are not user-repairable anymore.

Luckily for us, I know how to take things apart and make them work again. That's a really useful skill when you're in the Zombie Apocalypse.

You Can't Compress a Liquid

2013-05-15T22:30:00.000-04:00

The Power of Hydraulics

I've been so busy working on the hydraulic leveling system on the Motorless Home that I forgot to take pictures!

Anyway, I'd been trying to think up ways that I could get the old blown motor out of the Motorless Home. When I discovered that the boom on my engine hoist wasn't long enough to reach, I got really discouraged, and that's part of the reason that I let the blog go for so long.

After getting started with repairs recently, I took another look. I realized that if I removed the front bumper, I might be just barely able to get the boom over the engine block to remove it. So, I got under there and started to take it off.

It was clear that someone had recently removed the bumper. Several of the bolts that hold on have been replaced with new stainless steel ones. I'm guessing that the previous owner had the engine out at some point, and had used this very method to reach into the engine bay. Once removed, I slid my engine hoist in for a test fit.

Son of a bitch. I could see that I had enough clearance to get the engine hoist into the engine bay, but now, the top of the engine bay opening was hitting the top of the hoist. I could not push it in any farther! Argh! I thought to myself that if the engine hoist were only a few inches shorter, I could get it in there. Then it hit me. If I raised the front of the Motorless Home up, it would have the same effect.

If only that hydraulic leveling system worked, I could use it to get the clearance I need. Since I was frustrated by the engine hoist problem, I decided to take a detour and explore why the hydraulics didn't work. When we first got the Motorless Home back to the house, we tried to make the hydraulics work. They didn't. We tried putting power right to the pump, but it would not move. We even smoked the solenoid trying to deliver enough power. We just concluded that the motor was toast and moved on to other things.

When I decided to explore the hydraulics, the first thing I did was to disassemble the electric motor that turns the hydraulic pump. It was clearly in poor shape. Water had pooled in it and rusted out some of the components. I cleaned everything up and reassembled it as best I could. To make sure that it worked properly, I bench tested the motor and it ran beautifully. However, after reconnecting it to the hydraulic pump, it would not turn -- just like the day that we got it home.

Well, it turns out that the reason that it would not turn was twofold; the hydraulic pump requires that the fluid that it is pumping go somewhere or the pump will lock up. It can either go into a hydraulic cylinder to expand it, or it can cycle through the system and return to the reservoir via the return line. I removed the supply and return lines from the pump, and when I gave it power, it shot a stream of hydraulic fluid several feet! Thank God. The pump actually works. Now, trace it to the next place.

I thought that the problem might be a blockage in a line, or perhaps in the control valve manifold. In order to troubleshoot it, I had to dismount the manifold. Guess what? Some genius spray-foamed the bejeesus out of it. I can understand why they might have wanted to apply spray-foam in that area. Some good reasons include:

There may have been water leaks, and getting sprayed by the driver side tire is no fun.
Soundproofing. You can get a lot of road noise from right there, and perhaps they were trying to make for a better driving experience.
Insulation. Maybe they didn't want their little tootsies to get cold while driving.

All of these are very good reasons to apply spray-foam to that area. But...

Hey Genius! How about you put a piece of plastic over that valve manifold before you spray? That way, you can still have the insulation you want, but you put a "bubble" around the unit so that it's not completely encrusted!

I spent 30 minutes lying on my back, working over my head with a screwdriver chipping that foam out of there until I could figure out how to remove the valve manifold. Even with safety glasses on, that stuff still got in my eyes. What a pain in the ass.

Once I got the manifold dismounted, I had to disconnect the hydraulic lines. There were six in total. One for each of the four jacks, a supply from the pump, and a return to the pump. They were all corroded and rusted. I hosed them down with SeaFoam Deep Creep, and started to remove them. It was quite an ordeal! While attempting to remove the line that feeds the right rear jack, the fitting broke. Son of a bitch! That is the longest line on the whole coach! GAH!

I also discovered one of the reasons that the pump would not turn. The return line was melted (from the fire, no doubt) and was completely sealed. After much cussing and finagling, I was able to get the valve manifold removed and into the garage to my workbench.

This thing was definitely in need of some cleaning and TLC. The levers would not operate smoothly, and there was loads of gunk.

I slowly dismantled the unit, making sure I kept track of where all the parts went. After I removed all four spring sets, I noticed that there was a single steel check ball laying on my disassembly towel.

This was troublesome. Since all four valves are identical, they should all have the same parts in them. Unfortunately, since I had taken apart the first one and it did not have a ball, I wasn't looking for one. After I found that ball, I checked out the work area. Nope. There were no more. They were missing from the manifold. Great. Someone's had this thing apart before and not put it all back together right.

I set the ball aside for later consideration. The only other complication during the disassembly was the pump switch. Apparently, the casing was cracked or I damaged it while disassembling something else, because It came apart in a few pieces. Luckily, by reassembling the switch, it worked fine -- I just had to figure out how to stick it back together again. Also, the screws holding the switch onto the bracket were so rusted out that I wound up breaking one of them. So, a trip to the hardware store was in order later.

Once it was fully disassembled, I cleaned it up really well using a wire brush. Got all the gunk off and reassembled it. I chose not to put that check ball back in since I only had one. I surmised that they would be needed, based on the design of the valve. However, since I wasn't sure, I left it out, and figured that the manifold would behave strangely if it needed them.

Wow! This thing cleaned up nicely! I had to stop for the night here since I had run out of time to hit a hardware store to get the screws for the switch and a 1/8NPT pipe plug to block off the port for the broken hydraulic line.

Today, I stopped at the hardware store and got what I needed. I reassembled the switch and screwed it into position. However, the switch did not want to stay assembled because of the pressure on it. So, I mixed up a blob of JBWeld Stick and used it to hold the switch in the right alignment. A bit of overkill, but hey, it worked, and I had the JBWeld Stick already!

My next challenge was to reconnect the hydraulic lines and the electrical stuff so that the manifold's switch could operate the power to the pump. In order to get the pump working properly, I had to drill out a broken bolt so I could secure the power cables, and I had to borrow a solenoid from another area under the hood since the one that went with this pump motor was cooked. I wired up the electrics and went to connect the valve manifold to the hydraulic lines.

Well, in the process, I bumped one of the levers. Since the electrical connections had already been made, the pump activated and I got a face full of hydraulic fluid. Thankfully, that stuff doesn't burn like gasoline would.

I also had to sort out the return line, since the one I had was completely melted shut. I found a section of air hose in the garage that already had the right fittings on the ends. It was a few feet too long, but when I go to remount everything, I'll make sure that's neatly tucked away.

Now, for the moment of truth: It worked! The three jacks that I had connected function!

However, it looks like I will need to get those check balls and reinstall them. When I would operate the lever for one of the jacks, the others would get some fluid too. This is because those balls need to be in there to completely seal off the other channels when one is getting fluid. I will also need to tighten the supply fittings, since they were seeping a little. My guess is that the previous owner tried to troubleshoot the hydraulics, and when he disassembled the valves, he wasn't careful and lost the check balls.

Because I don't have all four jacks working, I can't level the unit. Also, the rear jacks are over the grass, and they would just sink into the ground anyway. I'll have to put some blocks under them to spread out the load.

I did, however, manage to raise the body of the Motorless Home up just enough to get my engine hoist into the front all the way. It looks like I now have enough clearance to remove the blown motor!

So, what's next?

I need to get that broken hose fitting replaced. I will have to completely remove the hose from the vehicle and take it to a hydraulics shop to see if it can be repaired. I really hope so. Since this is the longest hydraulic line on the whole vehicle, it will be quite expensive to replace. The line this uses is $0.33 per inch. That's over $4 per foot, and it's probably close to 30 feet in length. So the hose will likely cost $150 to replace! Yikes! If I'm lucky, they will just put a new fitting on the end and I can get out of there for $30 or so. Thankfully, I still have one of check balls for the valve body. I can measure it with my digital caliper so that I can be sure to get the right sized replacements, probably at the same shop that I take the hose to.

Also, I can start working to remove the old engine block. That is a real sore spot for me, and having that thing out of there will really be a milestone on this project. Cross your fingers!

Out with the Old and in with the ... Water Damage!

2013-05-13T22:29:00.001-04:00

Making Space and Finding Faults

Linda and I decided that the large closet in the hallway of the Motorless Home had to go. A previous owner had tried to remodel it and did a piss-poor job of it. Also, since Linda and I don't own many articles of clothing that need to be hung up, it seemed like a colossal waste of space.

After removing the crap job that the previous owner did of moving the sliding doors to the bottom, I then ripped out all the crappy structural work that he did to try to make this modification work. You can see the huge pile of lumber and junk on the floor.

That's one upside to this -- I will have some extra lumber to use in the project for other things.

I then removed the paneling on the inside to expose the hidden factory wiring. I'm going to have to redo a lot of this wiring, since there are several feet of extra length that we won't need in the redesign.

In this image, you can see the wheel well for the tag axle on this RV. I can't remove or change that, except to remove that god-awful carpet. I'll have to incorporate this wheel well into the new design.

Both wheel wells are visible here. I was hoping to open up the area much wider than the closet that was in there, but that wheel well for the drive (dually) axle will determine width of this space.

Since I believe that the metal of this wheel well is rusted out, I may be able to replace the metal and tweak the width a little to make more space.

You can also see a little light coming in between the wall and the carpet. The sidewall of the RV has separated from the floor along this side, as well. Yay. More water damage.

The wiring running across the floor will also need to be moved. It appears that a main 12VDC supply line comes up through the floor here. I will have to move that, as well.

I spent the next little while removing the wiring from the walls and removing the walls themselves. You can see the 12VDC and 110VAC wires hanging from the cabinet here. I'll have to find a way to reroute those.

For now, I've left the vanity that is part of the bedroom intact. It will be removed eventually, but since there is plumbing involved, I need to have the supplies to cap the water and drain lines before I tear that out.

When I was removing the rearmost wall, I found more water damage in the ceiling. So, I cut away part of the ceiling covering to inspect. It's not as bad as some of the other areas, but it will need to be completely replaced.

I had planned on replacing this section of ceiling anyway, but it just goes to show you that water damage usually goes a lot farther than you think. I guess I need to get up on the roof tomorrow and apply a layer of temporary sealant to the other areas, just in case water is penetrating there, too.

A popular modification of RVs is to replace the dinette with a bartop and additional storage. Linda and I like this idea, since the bartop can do triple duty as a work desk, an eating area and a food prep counter. So, I decided to start removing our dinette, as well.

I figured that I'd remove the rearmost seat first, since that would free up more space, while leaving the forward one for a seating area while we conduct repairs.

These things are beefy! It's made of a welded steel frame that is securely bolted to the floor. I'm guessing that it was made this way so that it could be rated for use as a vehicle seat, and therefore could be occupied while the vehicle was in motion.

Sadly, the bolts just turned. The bottom end was far too rusted out. So, I removed the seat top from the pedestal and decided to use a sawzall to cut the bolts.

The seat top was easy to remove. Four nuts and washers, and I lifted it right off and carted it into the garage.

Then the fight started. I spent 45 minutes and killed four metal-cutting blades trying to cut through these !%@$# bolts. They must have been made of fsck!ng Unobtainium or something!

After much cussing and finagling, and a little "bonus" damage to the floor structure, I finally got the bolts removed and the pedestal frame carted off to the garage.

That's when I discovered even more water damage. This is a result of the separation of the wall from the floor. Right at the floor-wall joint between the two seats, the paneling was delaminated. I picked at it. It was dried out, but clearly water damaged. When I get this sidewall reattached to the floor, I'll have to replace part of this inner panel and make sure it's all watertight.

I reinstalled the tabletop from the dinette so that I'd have some usable space. I'm worn out and I am definitely done for today.

I picked up my tools (mostly) and will start tackling cleaning up some of the wiring and mess where the closet used to be tomorrow.

I'm going to bed. Good night.

The Spammers Keep Upping the Ante

2013-05-13T09:07:00.000-04:00

Increasing Security While also Increasing Anonymity

When I originally created this blog, I wanted it to be open to anyone to comment. I even liked the idea of allowing anonymous comments, since anonymity and privacy play a very large role in my politics and in the mission of this blog.

However, due to spam, I was forced to require that comments be posted by persons with a valid OpenID. I also disabled the "word verification" captcha that blogger uses, since many (including myself) struggle with them and find them very annoying.

Well, the spammers are now using OpenIDs. They will post a comment similar to this:

Posted by: Michael Johnston

I really liking your site. It's got lots of useful informations. Thanks again for a really great blog. Also, please to considering the visit of (INSERT LINK TO BARELY PERIPHERALLY RELATED SITE)

Yeah, like someone named Michael Johnston speaks English that poorly? I know that our schools are in a really sad state and that we routinely graduate morons, but this is clearly evidence that someone who does not speak English natively is masquerading as a person with a very native-English-sounding name. Judging by the specific kinds of butchery, I'm going to guess Chinese. Or at least, Asian.

Why not leave the comment and link, you ask? In order for you to really understand why, you need to know how Google (and many other search engines) decide how relevant a given search result is.

The short version is that Google doesn't just rank how often a web site's link appears or how often people click the link from Google's result page. One of the key factors are links on other pages. When other pages provide a link to a site, Google gives that target site a little more weight, since they figure that if OTHER people link to it, it must be more relevant.

If you want a lot more information about it, check out this page about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So, What Next?

I've had to increase the annoyance level (for the admins) for comments on this blog. Luckily for you, the reader, that annoyance is only minor. I have turned on comment moderation. So, any time someone posts a comment to this blog, one of the admins of this blog (there are three) must log in and approve the comment before it's visible.

What this means is that your comment won't immediately post. This will allow us to review comments and prevent spam. The good news about this is that because I've turned on comment moderation, I have also re-enabled anonymous postings.

To date, there are not a lot of active commenters on the blog, so I don't really see this as a big issue. If, however, I start being absolutely slammed with anonymous SPAM comments or even OpenID-authenticated SPAM, I will have to further increase the annoyance factor, probably in a a way that will annoy the users. I really hope that I don't have to take steps like that.

So, for now, enjoy the increased privacy that anonymous posting will give you. However, if you post anonymously, please don't expect me to know who you are. If I need to know who you are, please don't post anonymously, or at least include your first name in the post.

Enjoy!

Pluggin' the Holes

2013-05-12T21:26:00.000-04:00

Temporary Waterproofing Project

In order to repair the water damage to the Motorless Home, the first thing that has to be done is to stop the leaks. The proper way to stop these leaks is to use a product like EternaBond. This stuff is absolutely amazing. Here's a video that describes how to use this stuff for exactly the repairs that I need.

However, a 6"x50' roll of that stuff is close to $70! Since I don't have the money to spend on that right now, I decided to make some temporary repairs to stop the major leaks until I can repair the structure from the inside. I went over to Lowe's this morning and picked up caulk gun and some white elastomeric roof sealant. It's not a proper lap sealant that is normally used on RVs, but until this thing has an engine in it, the vehicle part of "Recreational Vehicle" doesn't really apply.

Since the roof over the shower area where the skylight mounts is where the worst structural damage is, I couldn't just climb up on top and walk over the area where the shower is. I weigh 300 lbs, and even though there is an aluminum sheet for the roof, I don't think I'd like to press my luck and rely on just that piece of metal to hold me up. So, I used my ladder next to the Motorless Home. I put some tools up on top, and then cut the old failing sealant on that side and removed the screws on that side.

Once the outboard side of the skylight was loose, I climbed up on top to finish the removal. I cut all the old sealant off and removed all the remaining screws. I pried the skylight off and discarded the defunct factory rubber gasket. It's clear that the previous owner of this RV didn't have a clue how to use sealants to make a true seal.

Resealing the Skylight

When they encountered the leak, the just spread sealant all over the outside and inside and didn't actually get any between the skylight and the roof. It was pretty easy to get the skylight off. What was a challenge was removing the old sealant goop that the previous owner had used. This stuff was so tough that I could not cut it off with a utility knife; I literally had to use pliers to break it off! Had this guy used this stuff between the skylight and the roof, it would have never leaked. What a dumb-ass.

I spent the next forty minutes breaking and scraping the old sealant off the top of the roof and the flange of the skylight. It was quite a bit of work to clean up those surfaces! I then sanded the surfaces of the metal and the skylight so that the adhesive would have more to bite. I also rotated the skylight 180* so that the screw holes in the skylight would not line up with the old holes in the metal. I put a liberal layer of adhesive down and placed the skylight onto it. I made sure I wiggled it around to get full contact with all the surfaces. Then, I used new self-tapping screws to fasten the skylight to the roof.

Once that was done, I smoothed the adhesive around the edge of the skylight and made sure that it overlapped onto the top surface. Although I was sure it was thoroughly sealed, I added a blob of sealant to the top of each of the screws to make sure that no water could penetrate. Sure, it looks really ugly. But keep in mind that this is a temporary waterproofing job, not meant to be permanent or pretty. It just needs to keep that water from coming in. Only time will tell, but I think it will work just fine for now.

The Front Cap

I still had a lot of daylight left and since I was already up there, I decided to tackle one of the other major leaks. This one is where the fiberglass nose cap meets the roof of the main body of the Motorless Home. The structural damage to this area is not as severe as in the bathroom area, but it will need to be rebuilt as well. So, I set out to create another temporary seal. By looking at this picture, it looks a whole lot worse than it really is. The original seal was black, and someone came along later and added a white sealant to the top. So, what looks like a huge gaping crack really isn't. In the center of the image, you can see where the seal has failed and the metal of the roof is visible. I decided to completely remove it and replace it with my sealant. The original seal (the black stuff) was some seriously gooey shit! I'm not sure what it was made of, but I had to cut it off with a utility knife and it was seriously slow-going! I cut and scraped and scraped and cut. I used a screwdriver to dig out the old sealant until I got all the way down to the metal on the roof and the fiberglass on the nose.

Here you can see both the condition of the seal and what it looked like partway through the removal. It was quite a bit of work to get all the goo out of there and to then sand the surface down to give the sealant something to bite on. I didn't scrub the surfaces completely clean; it doesn't need to be a seal that lasts 15 years. This seal needs to last long enough to repair the structural damage and once that's done, I'll really to a complete job on the entire roof, sealing everything up completely and using EternaBond on all the seams.

Once I had removed all the old sealant, I laid a heavy bead of sealant down and then used a piece of duct tape to cover it. I probably could have just left the sealant up there, but I wanted to have a little more physical structure there. After getting the duct tape and sealant all the way across the top, I decided to add more sealant on top of the duct tape and really "goop it in there good." Since this repair is only temporary and the Motorless Home won't be mobile for quite a while, its durability while the vehicle is in motion is not a factor. I just want to keep the water out.

Here's the completed patch. Again, it's not too pretty, but it should keep the water out while I fix the structure from the inside and get everything all dried out. This stuff needs to cure for 24 hours before it's fully set. Once that happens, I am actually hoping for some rain to test it out.

Conclusion

There are still plenty more places on this roof that need attention before I can say that it's waterproof; but these are the two biggest leaks. I still have a couple more tubes of sealant that I can use to cover up cracking in other areas. When I'm working on those, if I find anything that's particularly interesting, I'll grab some photos and write a quick post about it.

Mike Holmes Would Cringe at This

2013-05-11T15:14:00.000-04:00

Starting to tear into the Motorless Home

The biggest enemy of any RV is water. The sealants on the roofs of RVs deteriorate in time, and they eventually crack and allow water to penetrate. When we bought the Motorless Home (when it wasn't motor-less), we knew that it needed repairs due to water damage.

What I didn't know was the extent of the damage. It looked like the damage was confined to the area above the shower. With the recent rains in our area, the need to stop the leaks and repair the damage has become more urgent. I've also located leaks at the front and rear of the roof, where the fiberglass endcaps meet the main body of the motorhome.

So, I started tearing into the ceiling in the bathroom. The wood above the shower was so rotted that it was mush. The laminated plywood panels that form the top and bottom of the ceiling panels had completely delaminated. I removed the plastic surround from the skylight and from the vent over the toilet and started pulling off the rotted material.

That dark-colored material is actually water-soaked wood. It should be a very light color and quite rigid. It's not.

All the stuff I pulled out of the ceiling landed in the tub. It's quite a mess in there now! Aside from a razor knife, I did not need ANY tools to remove any of this. The wood was so rotted that the screws pulled right out.

Using just my hands, I was able to remove a section of the rotted wood all the way to the underside of the metal roof. Basically, in that part of the coach, there is no real ceiling support. It's a good thing that I stayed off that area when I was up on the roof!

Here you can see the pile of crap that came off the ceiling. I will be taking all that junk and putting it into contractor bags for disposal. The only salvageable items that came off the ceiling were the plastic trim panels for the skylight and the vent fan in the bathroom.

Further inspection revealed that the ceiling in the entire back end of the motorhome has significant water damage, requiring full replacement of the ceiling panels, and probably most of the structure, too.

It's going to be a lot of work. I have to empty the bedroom completely, and also figure out how to remove the cabinets, since they seem to have been screwed on from the outside before the endcap was installed.

Since only Linda and I will be living in this space, we will take the opportunity to redesign the space a bit. We both feel that the queen-size bed in there is too small for us. So, we plan to free up as much space as possible when we remove the interior to hopefully get a king-size bed in there.

I'll take pictures and post more as this goes along. This is bound to get "interesting." RVs have both 12VDC and 110VAC electrical systems. Making sure that I have the right kind of power routed to the right locations with the right kind of switches is something that I've never done before.

GAME ON!

Dude, Where's My Blog?

2013-05-08T14:28:00.000-04:00

A Long Overdue Update

Wow, it's been what? 8? 9? Months since my last post.

Well, we've had a few setbacks in our plans, and with my J.O.B. and classes, I just didn't have the energy to work on stuff, let alone post on the blog. I've been dealing with a few financial issues, personal issues, and medical issues. Hell, even my issues have issues.

So, a quick update is in order.

Soapmaking

When I left off the blog, I had just completed Part 3 of my series on soapmaking. I will be revamping that series soon, since I have changed the way I make soap. I now use a method I am calling the Warm Process method, that combines parts of Cold and Hot process soapmaking to make a quality bar in a shorter period of time. I won't be milling soap and rebatching. That's just too damn much work.

Firearms and the Second Amendment

Since my last post, there have been a number of tragedies in the US centering around firearms and terrorism. These actions have sparked national debate about Second Amendment issues. We're all familiar with what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary.

There are many evil, crazy whack-jobs out there. Restricting my right to have firearms won't stop crazy people from killing -- sure, it might lessen the impact slightly, but it's not going to prevent it. I don't think we should do nothing. I also don't think that just handing anyone with a pulse a gun is all that swift, either.

The way I see it, the real issue is not about firearms, knives, bows or pressure-cooker bombs. It's about figuring out how our society is manufacturing these crazy people and putting a stop to it.

I don't think that expanding background checks in a way that would violate HIPAA is a good idea. For the record, I generally think that HIPAA takes things too far; my own wife can't inquire about my medical status, for cripes sake! However, I think it's a violation of my privacy for someone to look at my medical records to determine if I should be allowed to possess a firearm.

If a qualified medical professional has a reasonable belief that someone is a danger to themselves or others, they are already required by law to report it. I think that reports of this nature should be revealed during gun purchase background checks. The fact that my second cousin's best friend's piano teacher's ex-husband once took antidepressants is not grounds to suspend my second amendment rights. There have already been cases where a man's rights were suspended by the State of New York, by mistake.

Concealed Carry Weapons / Concealed Handgun License

After the craziness in Sandy Hook, Linda and I decided that it was time that we were armed and trained. She and I took an accredited Concealed Carry class at Point Blank, and have purchased our carry weapons. We both applied for our licenses, and Linda's was approved. Mine was denied because there was a 20-year-old run-in with the law from when I was a teenager still on my juvenile record. Once I get that officially expunged (this Friday), I will be able to reapply and be granted my CCW.

The Motorless Home

Well, now that it's spring, I've been working inside the Motorless Home. I'm happy to say that last night, I was able to get the onboard refrigerator back to 99% fully functional status. The only reason it's not at 100%, is that I need to purchase a $3 IC to solder onto the control board. Right now, I've got the system manually controlled to run on house current.

Linda and I have gone back and forth on what we want to do with the Motorless Home. We've discussed just scrapping it. We've discussed converting it into a flat-towed trailer. We've even come full circle, back to the idea of putting a motor in it and driving it. I'm not sure where we are going with this. I can, however, keep working on its internal systems. Next up: fix the front AC unit, find and stop the roof leaks and repair the rear furnace.

Well, that's about it for now. I promise that I'll try to post a little more often, and I'll work on getting that soapmaking stuff completed.

Now, has anyone seen the Continuum Transfunctioner? It's a mysterious and powerful device, whose mystery is only exceeded by it's power.

I've Been Lyeing a Lot Lately, Part 3

2012-09-16T12:53:00.000-04:00

Making Soap from Butcher Shop Trash

This is part three in a five part series on making homemade soap for personal use or sale. If you want to view the earlier posts, use these links:

Part Three: Making and Casting the Soap

In this part, I will explain how to turn your purified tallow into soap, through a process called saponification. By combining a strong alkali with some water and the tallow, you create an exothermic reaction that chemically alters the fat molecules into detergent.

I'm not going to go into the specifics of the chemistry that is going on here; it's really out-of-scope for this series. If you want to know how saponification works, check out these links:

For my soapmaking, I use a two-step process.

First, I make a base soap that has no extra fat in it, no colorings or fragrances. I make two different base soaps: lathery and not-so-lathery. The only difference is the addition of some white sugar to the lye mixture to make the base soap lathery. Since this soap does not contain extra fat (superfatting), in its raw form, it may be slightly drying or irritating to the skin. The non-lathery formula of this base soap is excellent for use as a laundry detergent, or as the base soap in homemade liquid laundry detergent.

Once this soap has finished curing, I "re-batch" or "handmill" the soap. It is at this point that I add additional fats to make the soap more moisturizing, and add colors and fragrances. During the second step is when I will place the soap into its final molding for storage or sale.

So, let's get on with making the base soap. The next part in this series will deal with the handmilling process.

Tools you'll need:

100% sodium hydroxide (NaOH) lye, available at some farm supply stores or online
1 gallon of white vinegar, to neutralize the lye in case of spill
Rubber gloves
Safety goggles
Crockpot
Scale accurate to 0.1g for measuring lye and one accurate to 5g for oils (I use this one for oils, and this one for lye)
Non-reactive container to weigh the lye
Non-reactive container to mix lye
Non-reactive tool to stir lye mixture
pH test strips, either full range [0-14] or alkaline range [7-14], available at drug stores and aquarium stores
Stick blender, preferably with stainless steel shaft (I melted my plastic one!)
Heat-resistant container in which to cast the hot soap

WARNING:

Lye is extremely caustic. You don't want to get any of it on your skin or in your eyes, so make sure you've got your skin and face protected by gloves and goggles. If you get any lye on your skin, immediately flush the area with white vinegar, then with lots of water to neutralize the lye and remove the vinegar.

When mixing lye with water, the mixture will heat up quite a bit! Make sure you are using a non-reactive and heat-resistant container to mix in!

During the soapmaking process, there is risk of what is called "the volcano." This soapy, bubbly mixture is extremely hot and can cause second and possibly third degree burns if you get it on your skin. Make sure you watch your soap carefully while it's cooking to avoid the volcano, and have cold water nearby in case any gets on your skin!

Preparing Your Recipe

For simplicity, I use the metric system for all my measurements. It's just plain better when you're dealing with chemicals that can maim you. Feel free to use whatever units you want, but I will use metric measurements here.

I will be using the following amounts of materials to make a base "lathery" soap:

1000.0 g beef tallow
380.0 g COLD distilled water
142.6 g lye
10 g sugar (omit this if you don't want a lathery base soap)

If you want to use different amounts to make more or less soap, DO NOT just "scale" this recipe up or down. Use the Soap Lye Calculator at soapcalc.net to get an accurate recipe. The soap calculator does not have a field for the addition of sugar to improve lathering, so you can use 10g per kilogram of base oils.

Make the Soap

Weigh your ingredients. Be careful. Take your time to be precise. When working with the lye, make sure you are wearing gloves and eye protection!

Here's everything you'll need to have on-hand. Make sure all of this stuff is ready to go so that you don't have to go digging. There are parts of this process that happen quickly, so you may not have time to go looking for something later.

Add the sugar to the water and stir until dissolved. Then, slowly add the lye into the water. NEVER add water into the lye crystals! It can heat up and cause a steam explosion and spew highly concentrated lye into your face! Place the container that had your lye crystals in it into the sink and run lots and lots of water in it to dilute any remaning lye.

Pour the tallow into a cold crockpot. If its solid, warm it gently in a sinkful of hot water until it liquefies. Slowly add the lye mixture to the oil. You will see that it becomes cloudy. Place this container in the sink and also flush well with water.

Using the stick blender, blend the mixture until it reaches trace. With tallow, this can take some time. In this batch, it took about 10 minutes. Trace is the stage at which the lye/tallow solution thickens to the consistency of runny yogurt, and when you remove the blender from it you will see that the liquid piles up on itself for a few moments.

Once you're at trace, cover the crockpot and put it on low. While you're waiting for it all to heat up and cook, line your temporary mold with wax paper for easy removal later. This batch took about 30 minutes to get to the next stage.

This stage is when the soap begins to cook and turn over on itself. You can see the bubbles forming at the edge of the mixture. This region will grow and darken in color as the mixture turns in on itself. Once there is a ring of cooked soap about 1/4 to 1/2 inch all the way around, turn the crock pot up to high. Do not leave the crockpot unattended for very long!

Once the mixture has turned over, stir it down and allow it to cook for a few more minutes, then turn the crockpot off.

This stuff is extremely hot! Treat it like molten lava! It will burn the bejeesus out of you if you get it on your skin!

Now, test the pH. Take a small sample of your soap from the crockpot and wet it sightly with some water. Touch one of the pH strips to the wet soap and read the pH according to the package instructions. Your soap is safe if it's pH lies between 8 and 9. pH levels much higher than 9 can irritate the skin considerably. If the pH is too high, your soap is lye-heavy and either needs additional fat to react with, or it needs time to cure. If you follow this recipe precisely, you should wind up with a good soap.

Some people like to use the "zap test," but pH strips are more precise and you're not risking a chemical burn to your tongue. However, if you don't have access to pH strips, I suppose the "zap test" is better than nothing. If you do get zapped by a lye-heavy soap, I suggest swishing vinegar in your mouth to neutralize any lye that remains on your tongue to minimize any chemical burns.

Since this recipe is not superfatted, it will never reach the separation stage that you may see in other recipes. Once the soap has reached an "applesauce" or "mashed potato" consistency, you can put it into your prepared mold. Several times during the process, bang the mold on a hard surface to remove excess air.

Once you've transferred all the soap, set it aside to cool and harden.

Once the soap has cooled and solidified (several hours) remove it from the mold and cut it into bars. If you have trouble removing it from the mold, try placing it in the freezer for a few minutes to help the soap release.

Set your base soap aside to cure and harden for a few days, or until you're ready to begin making handmilled soap.

ALTERNATE ENDING: If you don't want to handmill and just want to use hot-process soap, before molding, add 30g of additioinal tallow to the mixture and stir it in completely. This will superfat the mixture and give it moisturizing properties. If you want to add colors and fragrances, allow the soap to cool to about 160F, then add your colorants and fragrance oils and stir them in completely. Then proceed with molding and cutting.

Now, clean up your mess so your spouse doesn't kill you for tearing the kitchen up!

Stay Tuned!

In Part Four of this series, I will show how I grate the base soap and recombine it in molds to make a final product.

I've Been Lyeing a Lot Lately, Part 2

2012-09-09T11:58:00.000-04:00

Making Soap from Butcher Shop Trash

This is part two in a five part series on making homemade soap for personal use or sale. If you want to view the first post, you can find it here.

Part Two: Rendering and Purifying the Tallow

In order to make homemade soap, you need to have oils. Many soapers use purchased oils in their soapmaking. I am going for a more sustainable approach, so I have chosen to render the trimmings from my local butcher shop. If you don't want to bother with this step, you can purchase lard, tallow and many other vegetable-based oils at your local grocery. If you choose not to make your own oils, you can move right on to Part Three.

Tools you'll need

large pressure cooker or stock pot
a second large pot to hold all the liquids
a sieve or strainer to catch the solids
thermometer with temperature probe
cheesecloth or fine sackcloth
fire extinguisher (hopefully you won't need this!)

Contact Your Local Butcher

If you're going to render your own fat for soapmaking, you'll need a source of meat trimmings. Large butchering operations usually have a specialized company come to pick up their waste. On a large scale, it's worth it for them to pick it up. So calling a large grocery or large meat packing operation may not help.

We called our local Mom-and-Pop butcher and asked them what they did with all the meat trimmings. They told me that they just put them in the garbage. So, we asked if we could pick them up. They told us the best days and times to stop by.

We swung by recently and picked up this bucket of meat trimmings. The butcher actually apologized for it only being half full, but told me that if we come back in a couple days, he will have a whole lot for us, since he's preparing a side of beef for a customer.

Sort the Mess, Load it Up, and Start Cooking

When our butcher is processing meat, they often toss little bits of paper or sections of plastic wrap into the bucket. I don't gripe about it since I'm getting all this stuff for free. You will find all manner of stuff in here. I recently found an entire knee joint! As long as it's not foreign matter, you can use it all; bones, meat, fat, whatever. Its usually mostly beef, but I've found a fair amount of pork meat and trimmings in there, as well. Since rendered pork fat (lard) and rendered beef fat (tallow) have very similar properties and saponification rates, it's OK that these are mixed at an unknown ratio.

I like to use my large 21-quart pressure canner to render the fat using a wet process. If you don't have a large pressure cooker/canner, you can use a large stock pot. It will just take longer to render the fat. Since there is a lot of bone and meat mixed in with the fat, I can get a couple other useful products out of the trimmings, namely a meat/bone mix that I use as food for my dogs, and lots and lots of yummy, healthy stock.

I fill my pot about 3/4 full with meat trimmings, and then cover them by about an inch of water.

I then put it on the stove and cook it at 10psi for about three hours. If you're using a pressure cooker, I don't recommend exceeding 10psi, which is what most pressure cookers are set to if you don't have selectable pressure. Pressure cooking this stuff at higher temperatures (and pressures) can lead to some discoloration of the fat. It will still be perfectly usable, but your soap may not be a pure, clean white color. If you are not using a pressure cooker, cover the pot at keep it at a low boil until the bones are soft and break easily. This will take quite a long time (perhaps as long as 12-24 hours), which is why I use the pressure cooker to speed the process.

Make Dog Food

Once you're done cooking, take the pot off the stove and allow it to cool. You can speed this process by placing the pot in the sink and filling the sink with cold water, stirring both the "soup" and the sink water occasionally. When the sink water gets hot, refill the sink.

Once the "soup" has cooled enough that you can put your finger into it without a trip to the Emergency Room, (150F-160F) pour it through a sieve into another pot that can hold all the liquid. Spray some hot water over the solids and allow it to drain into the pot with the liquid. This will get some additional fat off the solids. Put the pot with the liquid back into the sink to cool more. While it's cooling, you can make your dog food.

There still will be some fat left in the solids you just strained out. We've found that our dogs get "the runs" if there is too much fat in the dog food we make, so we sort through the solids, pulling out the large chunks of fat and bones that did not get soft enough. We usually hand those harder bones to the dogs to keep them occupied while we sort through the meat. Once this is done, we pack the meat/bone stuff into baggies and freeze it. Sometimes, we'll put some of it through the food processor with the softened bones to make a pâté-type dog food.

Once you're done making a sticky mess of your hands, check on your liquids. When they have cooled to around 130F, cover the liquids and place them in the refrigerator. They will need to stay there for a couple days to allow the fat to separate and harden. This cooling is extremely taxing on your refrigerator. Don't be surprised if some of the stuff in there isn't as cold as it should be for a while. Try to avoid opening the refrigerator as much as possible so the liquids can cool.

Now, clean up your mess so your spouse doesn't kill you for tearing the kitchen up!

Two Days Later...

Once the fat has solidified, it's time to complete the separation of the stock and the tallow. The fat should be bright white and hard to the touch. Take it out of the refrigerator and remove the fat from the stock. Put the pot with the stock in it back into the refrigerator for later use.

Place the fat in a large pot over medium heat. Make sure that pot is no more than 1/4 full of oil. Too much oil in the pot can result in boilover and possibly a grease fire. Place the thermometer probe into the oil. Slowly increase the temperature of the oil to about 300F, stirring regularly. You must to do this with the lid off so that the water vapor can escape, so watch the oil carefully!

IMPORTANT! If there is any water in with the fat, it will boil out during this process and can pop loudly and splash hot oil all over the place. This is why it is extremely important that you stir the oil regularly so that large pockets of water will not accumulate and flash to steam.

CAUTION! Please take great care when heating oil of any kind in your kitchen. Grease fires destroy many homes and kill many people every year. If you have a grease fire develop in a pot, put the lid on it to snuff the flames. Then take it off the heat until it cools down. If the fire has gotten out of the pot, use the fire extinguisher, or call 911.

Do NOT spray water on a grease fire or you will make it worse!

You will know when the oil is done when the gurgling sound it makes from the water boiling out stops and all you hear is the faint sizzle sound from the frying of the solids that are left in the oil. Then, take it off the heat and allow it to cool down to under 180F.

Line a suitable container with several layers of cheesecloth or sackcloth and pour the hot oil through it to remove any remaining solids. Make sure the container can take the heat! You don't want it to melt and spill hot tallow everywhere!

Gather up the corners of the sackcloth and slowly pull it out of the container, straining out the solids. Cover the container with a tight fitting lid or a layer of plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator for later use.

TIP: Some people will use a pressure canner to store their tallow in jars. This fat is useful not only for soap, but for cooking as well. It is a saturated fat, so be sure that you don't use a lot of it in your cooking! Canning the tallow allows you to make it shelf stable for a long period, so you can make your soap at a later time. I did some measurements, and it looks like 20 fluid ounces of beef tallow at about 100F measures out to just about 0.5kg. So, if you want to make your recipes by metrics and store tallow in jars, only fill them to the 20oz level. You will still need to weigh your oils before soaping, but at least you can get close.

Make Soup!

Now that you have your tallow, take the remaining stock and store it. I prefer to pressure can my stock so that it is shelf stable. If you don't have a pressure canner, you can freeze it. This stock will be very bland in flavor because it has no added salt. I always make my stock with no added salt. I figure you can always add salt later when you need it, and you sure can't take it out very easily!

Now, clean up your mess so your spouse doesn't kill you for tearing the kitchen up!

Stay Tuned!

In Part Three of this series, I will show how I make the soap and cast it into blocks for later use in the handmilling process.

I've Been Lyeing a Lot Lately, Part 1

2012-09-03T10:29:00.000-04:00

Making Soap from Butcher Shop Trash

You all know that I'm branching out and learning new skills that will help me when the Zombie Apocalypse comes. One of the things that will become hard to get if/when the economy completely collapses is soap.

I've decided to do a series of blog posts to talk about the soapmaking process. It's just too complicated and long a process to do it all in one monster post. I will divide this post into five parts:

A Brief History of Soapmaking (this post)
Rendering and Purifying the Tallow
Making and Casting the Soap
Handmilling, Molding and Cutting
Curing and Packaging

Part One: A Brief History of Soapmaking

For millenia, humans have been making soap from rendered animal fats and caustics. Many credit the Babylonians for being the first ones to discover the chemical process that turns fat into soap. Early recipies involved boiling meat trimmings in water with wood ash. Due to the imprecise nature of this process, early soaps were sometimes heavy or light on the lye, which could make the soap irritating or even prone to rancidity.

The Romans preferred to clean their bodies by rubbing down with oil and then scraping the oil off using a metal implement. In the first century A.D., the Romans began using soap for cleaning tasks, but it was not generally used for bathing, most likely because of the imprecision of the recipe that could often result in a lye heavy soap that was irritating to the skin.

Between the 5th and 15th centuries A.D., a period often referred to as the Middle Ages, the use of soap for bathing was extremely rare. In fact, personal hygiene was essentially non-existent during this period of 1000 years. This lack of hygiene is often cited as the primary reason that there were so many plagues and diseases that prevented humans from progressing.

It was common practice to have open sewers running through the streets, and people would often pour human waste into them from a window above. Clearly, sanitation and hygiene weren't a big concern.

It wasn't until the late 1700s that soapmaking began to evolve significantly. Between the 1790s and the 1820s, the French discovered the precise relationship between fats and alkali in soap, which brought soapmaking into the modern era. In the mid 1800s, soap diverged into separate products for bathing and laundry.

Since the bathing soaps were no longer as caustic as they once were, personal hygiene took great leaps forward. I find it really funny, however, that the French made these discoveries, and they still smell bad to this day.

In the 1930s, the development of synthetic detergents sounded the death knell for fat/lye soaps. Synthetic detergents could be made more cheaply, and in some cases could outperform fat/lye soaps of the time. Since then, almost all commercial personal and laundry cleaning products available in the U.S. have been made from these synthetic detergents.

We have been trained by the commercial interests that fat/lye soap is "bad." They often refer to the caustic nature of fat/lye soaps. That's true, but only if you're using a recipe from 1776. What they fail to tell us is that applying a little modern chemistry and by using accurate measurement devices, modern fat/lye soap is often superior to many of the synthetic soaps.

They don't want us to make our own; they want us to buy, buy, buy from them.

Why Make Soap?

I want to be more self-sufficient. I want to learn how to make things that I need in an everyday situation so that I am not dependent on the infrastructure of our country. I know this is a bunch of "doomsday prepper" talk, but I'd rather have the knowledge and not need it, than to need it and not have the knowledge.

Linda and I got a great deal on some pork roasts recently. I trimmed all the fat off and cut out the bone. we gave the bone to the dogs. I ran the meat through our meat grinder and froze the lean ground pork. At that point, I decided to render the fat and try to make soap with it.

After doing some research, I found a wonderful resource at soapcalc.net. On this web site is a tool that helps you calculate the proper amount of lye and water to safely make soap.

So, I obtained some lye and made soap. It was wonderful! It felt great! It cleans amazingly well! It didn't lather very well, but that was because it was made from 100% lard.

At that point, I was bitten. I was really excited about having been able to make use of 100% of those pork roasts. In the past, we always threw out the fat since we had no use for it. Now, I can make a useful product out of waste material!

Eww! Lard? Yuck!

Many people who have gotten into homemade soapmaking have decided that the use of animal oils is "yucky." Instead, they go out and purchase vegetable oils that can sometimes be very expensive so that they can claim that their soaps have these exotic ingredients. Shea butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil, and palm oils are some of the more common. I've looked in the store at these products, and the only one I'm willing to buy is coconut oil, since its price is more reasonable. It greatly contributes to the lathering capability when mixed 1:1 with tallow or lard.

Since I intend to use these products on my skin, I think that the use of an animal oil is more compatible with my biochemistry than that of a vegetable oil. I make soap from cows and pigs. Those are both mammals. I'm a mammal. I have a whole lot more in common biochemically with pigs and cows than I do a palm tree. So I choose to use animal oils. They make a wonderful soap that cleans well and conditions the skin.

I can get my raw materials for free; the butcher shop will give me their meat trimmings that they would have otherwise thrown into the garbage. So, not only am I making a soap that is more compatible with human physiology, I am making use of what would have otherwise gone to a landfill. That's a far more sustainable process than importing exotic oils from all over the world. I get mine about a mile from my house.

Stay Tuned!

In Part Two of this series, I will show how I render butcher shop waste into tallow, beef stock and dog food.

Aspiration and Inspiration

2012-08-22T14:26:00.001-04:00

Couple quick things I want to talk about today:

There's an off-gridder named Keith "Skeeter" Thompson who lives in the high desert of New Mexico. Check out this video that features him:

This guy is living the life that I want to live to such a level of accuracy, it's spooky. The only real differences are that he's in New Mexico and we'll be in Texas, and he drilled a well, and we will fetch water from a community well. I want to build a water tower to provide pressure. I want to have a battery bank that is solar and wind powered. I want to have a simple structure for a home and live quietly with my wife.

I aspire to be just like Skeeter. I wish I could find some contact information for him. He's featured all over the internet on off-grid blogs, but it's just this same video reposted and not much info.

Hey, Skeeter, if you're out there, hit me up! I'd love to pick your brain!

Additionally, Linda found a really good idea for our off-grid solar project that just makes good sense to me. Check out this guy's post about a home-built solar trailer. You can take your power generation with you! This has inspired me to start thinking again about how I will build our off-grid lifestyle. I like the idea of portable power. It means that we can just "go somewhere else" if we need to. Very convenient.

I'm Gonna Wash that Cost Right Outta my Budget!

2012-07-22T15:26:00.000-04:00

Home Made Laundry Detergent

One of the things that Linda and I must do in order to survive out in the desert is to keep our expenses to a minimum. One of the ways we can accomplish this is to find ways to make things for less expense and less effort than purchasing the completed product.

Our latest adventure is in home made detergents. We recently found several recipes on the Internet for making your own liquid laundry detergent. The basic components of these recipes were all the same:

Borax
Washing Soda (Sodium Carbonate)
Baking Soda (Sodium Bicarbonate)
Laundry soap (usually in bar form)
Water

These ingredients were combined in various ways and in different amounts to yield different volumes of detergents at different strengths. If you omit the water, you can make a powdered version, as well.

Linda prefers liquid detergent. I was wanting to make the powdered version because it's much more compact without all that water, and weighs less. To me, that's a step toward "living small" and frugality. However, since Linda is the one who handles the laundry chores in our marriage, she gets to pick the tools she works with. The liquid detergent will dissolve easily in cold water, which is another way to reduce cost.

Additionally, we have to use "free and clear" detergents since the regular ones irritate Linda's skin. The recipe we use doesn't add any artificial dyes or perfumes, so it's naturally "free and clear."

The recipe we wound up using only makes 2.5 gallons of detergent, but it is ULTRA-, MEGA-, ÜBER-concentrated. The recipe says to use 1/3 cup in each washload, but we've already reduced that to 1/4 cup and we're using 1/3 cup only when we're washing my grungy, garage "play clothes." Yeah, it's THAT concentrated. The super concentrated quality of this recipe satisfied my desire to do more in less space, so I'm cool with it.

Assembling the Ingredients and Tools

It seems that the availability of these raw ingredients varies from area to area and even store to store. My recipe uses the following components:

1 bar of Fels-Naptha laundry soap (or any other laundry bar, such as Zote)
1 16-oz box baking soda
1 c borax
1 c washing soda
9 quarts of water

Here are some links to Amazon.com if you just want to order online:

I was able to find these at my local Wal-Mart store for substantially less than what Amazon is selling it for. However, if your local stores don't carry these, you can get them. If you do order online, please use the links above since we get credit for the sales.

In addition to the ingredients above, you'll need:

an 8-quart (or larger) pot
a 3-gallon (or larger) bucket with a tight sealing lid
Plastic cooking spoon for stirring. Wooden spoons can absorb the detergent.
Cuisinart with grating attachment, box grater or sharp knife

Putting it all Together

1.	Grate the laundry soap. The finer the grate, the faster it will dissolve during the next step. If you don't have access to a box grater or a Cuisinart with a grater attachment, you can shave the soap with a sharp knife. It will look a little like shredded Cheddar cheese.
2.	In the large pot, add the grated soap and 1 gallon (4 quarts) of water. Dissolve the soap over medium heat. It is very important that you stir it with the spoon slowly. You don't want to create suds. Do not allow the mixture to boil at any time.
3.	Combine all the dry ingredients into one container. This will make it easier to add it in increments in the next step.
4.	Once the soap has fully dissolved, begin adding the other ingredients 1/2 c at a time, making sure they fully dissolve before adding the next component. Continue to stir slowly. Repeat until all the dry ingredients have been incorporated.
5.	Continue slowly stirring to be sure that all the dry ingredients have dissolved. Skim off any foam that that forms.
6.	Slowly pour the hot mixture into the bucket. Again, you want to avoid agitating it. You want to keep from creating suds if possible. Unfortunately, I was not successful and made suds.
7.	Slowly add the remaining water (5 qt) to the bucket, stirring slowly.
8.	Cover the bucket tightly with its lid and allow to cool overnight. The mixture will thicken to a gel-like consistency.
9.	If you have foam that settles to the top of your soap, you can mix it in several times while it cools. This will melt some of the foam into the detergent. Once it has cooled overnight, if there is still foam left, you can either mix it in and shake your detergent before you measure it, or skim off the foam for a nice, translucent-yellow detergent.

After it cooled, we transferred it from the bucket into old detergent bottles that we give a shake just before we measure it out. You can fit most of it into three of the 100-ounce Tide bottles.

The Cost Breakdown

Assuming a standard measure of 1/4c per load, this recipe will yield about 160 loads. At 1/3c for heavily soiled loads, it will yield about 120 loads.

Here's the breakdown of cost:

Item Name	Vol per Container	Cost per Container	Batches per Item	Vol per Batch	Cost per Batch
Borax	76 oz	$3.50	11.18	6.8 oz	$0.313
Washing Soda	55 oz	$4.25	4.91	11.2 oz	$0.865
Baking Soda	16 oz	$1.00	1	16 oz	$1.000
Fels-Naptha	5.5 oz	$1.00	1	5.5 oz	$1.000
Water	9 qt	$0.00	1	9 qt	$0.000

Added together, this comes to $3.178 per batch. If we divide by 160 loads, we come to an astonishing

1.9 CENTS PER LOAD!

Wow. Now, let's look at your average bottle of Tide.

On WalMart.com's web site, they sell a 100-oz bottle of Tide (64 loads) for $11.97. That comes out to

18.7 CENTS PER LOAD

So, by making your own you can

save 16.8 CENTS PER LOAD over Tide!

Yeah, it's cheaper, but how does it clean?

In our testing, this stuff cleans exceedingly well. We did a test wash of a load of whites. Our whites don't get really grungy. They're just underwear and undershirts. We were really surprised when the water turned gray/brown. It was far darker than when we use regular detergents. I would say that it cleans at least as well as Tide, if not better. When washing my "play clothes," it easily performs better than the other detergents. It not only cleans, but does a good job at removing the grease, too!

Conclusion

By making our own detergent, we can save quite a bit of money, and we have the peace of mind in knowing that there are no dyes or strong perfumes in it. Since there are many other uses for the raw materials, we can keep them on hand for other projects and take one more step toward being off the grid and being independent from "the system."

The Zombies are Coming

2012-07-20T15:14:00.000-04:00

I'm sure I'm not the only one who will blog about this today.

This morning, at a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises," this nut job pulls a gun and starts shooting the crowd. As of this writing, 12 are confirmed dead, and many more injured.

When captured by the police, he claimed that his car and apartment were booby trapped with explosives. It seems that he just made it look that way to make the police waste their time.

What happened to this guy to make him completely lose his mind?

Recently, a man in Florida chewed off half of a homeless man's face, and didn't stop even after being shot several times by the police. He apparently was high on some drug.

We have children and college students taking guns to school and going on shooting sprees, because they are depressed or are social outcasts.

What is this world coming to? I don't know, but this seems to be signs of the coming collapse of our society. I blame it on our government. We coddle our children. We allow aberrant behavior. We seem to value the "feelings" of the perpetrator more than those of the victim.

What do we do to fix it? I think the only way to fix this is revolution. I'm not talking about guns and armies and death, but simply the fact that we need to just junk the entire government and start over. Of course, this is a great threat to those who currently hold power, and they will certainly fight against that.

In the eloquent words of Thomas Jefferson:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."

I'd rather find a way to replace our faulty government peacefully. Unfortunately, history teaches us that revolutions like that are exceedingly rare. So, if guns and armies and death are what is required to fix it, so be it.

We need stronger and more "final" penalties. The media keeps referring to this guy as a "suspect" and "alleged shooter." For cripes sake! There are hundreds of eye-witnesses. There is absolutely 0.000000000000% chance that this guy is innocent. Honestly, I think for things like this, we need to bring back public hanging. "Cruel and unusual," you say? Well, I bet if we had more public hangings, people would think twice about doing this stuff if they were guaranteed to swing rather than guaranteed three squares and a college education that, since they are locked up for life, will be completely useless.

I don't have much else to say about this - I'm just saddened that our great country has declined this far, and am scared at the possibility that the end of our great nation could occur in my lifetime. So, it's time to get serious about learning to be self-sufficient and frugal, since it seems that those skills will be in demand in the coming years.

My heart goes out to all those who have lost friends and family to these......

ZOMBIES.

We are Google, We Don't Have To.

2012-07-12T10:18:00.003-04:00

How Small Fry Get the Shaft

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, AT&T was a national conglomerate phone company. They effectively had a monopoly on all long distance, and since local phone companies had no competition, there were often abuses done to their customers, and we just had to "take it."

Lily Tomlin created the character Ernestine for the TV Show Laugh In in the late 1960s. Over the years, she reprised her role several times, playing the snotty, nosy telephone operator that would make veiled threats to customers and was generally annoying.

One of her most famous lines that has stuck with me all these years is "We are the phone company, (snort, snort) we don't have to."

Well, after the big AT&T breakup in the 1980s and the addition of local competition from cable companies and cellular providers, the phone company is no longer the 800-pound gorilla that it once was. As we all know, nature abhors a vacuum, and Google has decided to be be an 800-pound gorilla on the Internet.

I'm sure all of you have seen the ads that are on this blog. One of my goals with this blog is to use it to earn extra income, and hopefully grow my readership to a large enough extent that I can use the income from this blog and my videos to support myself when we move to Texas.

This is a critical thing: I don't want to have to take a J.O.B. out there if I can avoid it. I want to be able to devote my time to learning about homesteading, setting up, and building my house. I want to be able to spend all my time with my wife; to essentially retire early, while at the same time, providing interesting or useful content to people on the Internet.

Well, the key do doing this is advertising. So, I signed up with Google AdSense. They have a very strict policy about fraudulent click activity. In fact, about a month after I created my account, I was told that it was disabled due to fraudulent activity. I later found out that a few friends were clicking on my ads to "help" me, but it really hurt.

Google won't tell me specifically what led to the disabling of the account, just that there was "invalid click activity." I did some research and basically, once Google disables an account, you're basically screwed. Sure, they have an appeal form, but many, many web site owners out there report that it's a bunch of BS, and that the initial disabling is almost always upheld, and that it's a de facto LIFETIME BAN from ever using Google AdSense again. So, I created a new account in Linda's name and set up the ads and posted a plea to NOT click on my ads.

All was going well, and I was looking forward to our first check issuance from Google. The biggest source of revenue was my YouTube channel. It had been steadily growing over the months. I'd get as much as $15/day some days from YouTube. However, you have to accrue $100 in ad revenue before Google will cut a check (or pay by Direct Deposit, as was our case). I had just crossed the threshold of $100 and would have expected payment in August. I was excited. I was gonna frame my first dollar. I was officially "in business!"

Until the morning of Saturday, July 7, 2012. I got an email from Google saying that my account had been disabled for "invalid click activity."

WTF! Right before they have to pay me? This seemed rather convenient. So, I dug into the Internet again. Well, it's possible that someone was still trying to "help" me, but I doubt it. Since most of the ad revenue I earned was from YouTube, and 99% of the viewers there do not know me personally, it's likely that Google is using one of their draconian rules to stick it to me.

You see, they have a policy that says that once an account is banned for invalid click activity, that they can subsequently ban any account that is related to it. Being related to a banned account is grounds for banning! It's like poison or something.

So, either there were people trying to "help" me again, I had a related account, or someone was click-bombing me. Google won't say. They refuse to tell me what activity got the account banned. Hell, they could have just decided that they didn't like the spelling of my name. Since they conceal their reasons, they could use any reason, and claim it was a "violation." All they have to say is that there was "a violation," and they can cancel my account.

Of course, this time, I filed an appeal. I filled out their form, and received this reply from their automated system:

Hello,

This message confirms that we've received your appeal submission.

We'll get to your appeal as soon as we can, though due to the high volume
of emails we receive, it may take us up to a week or more to process it.
If you've previously submitted an appeal for this account, you might not
receive a response to this or future appeals.

Also, please be aware that appealing the disabling of your AdSense account
does not guarantee that it will be reinstated.

If you have any questions or concerns about accounts disabled for invalid
activity, please visit
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Original Message Follows:
------------------------
From: theratracelosers@gmail.com
Subject: Invalid Activity Appeal
Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2012 15:53:26 +0000

01_Origin: helpcenter
02_FormType: appeal_form
03_Language: en
04_AdSenseLocale: en
05_IP: 174.101.253.183
06_ctx:
07_Name: Linda Douglas
08_CompanyName: The Rat Race Losers
09_AdSenseLogin: theratracelosers@gmail.com
10_PubId: ca-yt-pub-2071734717702928
11_ExampleUrl: http://youtube.com/user/TheRatRaceLosers,
http://www.theratracelosers.com/
12_13_14_date_day: 7
12_13_14_date_month: 7
12_13_14_date_year: 2012
15_AlreadyAppealed: no
16_OtherAccount: no
17_OtherAccountList:
18_WebAudience: People interested in off-grid technologies, or in
automotive mechanics and other DIY jobs
19_UserGeography: I've had hits from all over the world, but the vast
majority are in the US
20_UserAccessMode: home, mobile, and office
21_ScrapedContent: NO
22_ContentSources: I create all my content. Either videos on YouTube or

blog posts on the blog
23_NumAdmins: 2
24_UpdateFrequency: At least 2-3 times per month
25_BoughtTraffic: no
26_UsePayTo: no
27_TrafficSources: I promote my site on Facebook, as well as in all the
videos on YouTube
28_AdvertiserValue: Persons looking for off-the grid technologies are
often
interested in other products and services that help in that end -- DIY
tech, solar, wind, sites like Lehmans, etc.
29_UserIncentive: Some visitors know me personally. However, I have told

them EMPHATICALLY that they are NOT to click on ads unless they have a
real, genuine interest in the product or service being offered
30_ViolatedTerms: No. Never. We take the TOS for AdSense very seriously.
31_InvalidActivity: I don't know why you've disabled this account. You
won't tell me anything about why it was disabled, so I can't refute or
defend or explain whatever it is that your system has decided is
"suspect."

I can attest that I, nor any person involved in the administration or
content production of this site have **NEVER** clicked on any ads. We
understand the importance of making sure that clicks are all valid, and we
do everything we can to prevent invalid clicks.

Please reactivate my account.
32_SuspiciousData: I dont have access to my logs. My sites are both
google
properties (Blogger and YouTube), so you guys have more access to that
information than I do.
AutoDetectedBrowser: Internet Explorer 9
AutoDetectedOS: Windows 7
IIILanguage: en
IssueType: appeal_form
Language: en

While I waited for the appeal, I did some more research. I discovered that it can take up to 30 days for an appeal top be reviewed, and that the best way to make sure that your appeal is approved is to follow up every couple days with additional information or proof that your ad clicks were not invalid. So, I started looking at my traffic reports to see what I could glean.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to the web logs from YouTube. Besides that, the log information that shows that a click on an ad occurred will be on the server that served the ad..not my YouTube page. So, once again, Google has all the cards, and all the proof. I can't access it at all.

Well, it didn't take long for Google to get back to me. Early on the following Monday morning, I received this:

Hello,

Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you've
provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program.
However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your
feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we're
unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

Please know that, once we've reached a decision on your appeal, further
appeals may not be considered, and you might not receive any further
communication from us. Note that AdSense publishers whose accounts are
disabled for violations of our Terms and Conditions are not eligible for
further participation in AdSense. For this reason, you may not open new
accounts.

Also, accounts disabled for invalid click activity will receive no further
payment nor any reissue of previous payment. Your outstanding balance and
Google's share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the
affected advertisers. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

We understand that you may want more information about your account
activity. However, because we have a need to protect our proprietary
detection systems, we're unable to provide our publishers with any details
about their account activity.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

So, basically, Google just told me to stuff it. No supporting documentation, no logs, no phone call, NOTHING. They could have saved time by saying "We are Google, (snort, snort) we don't have to."

So, my dreams of making money with my videos and blog were dashed. Or were they?

I started searching for alternatives to Google AdSense. I found one called AdBrite Exchange. I signed up and put their ad code on this page. Unfortunately, the targeting of ads is not as sophisticated as AdSense, so I expect a lower click rate and crappier ads. Bummer. But the blog has not been the biggest source of revenue anyway. It's been YouTube.

Since YouTube is a Google property, small fry like me can only use AdSense for ads on YouTube. This means that I am effectively FOREVER BANNED from making money via YouTube. So, I started looking for alternatives. I found Blip.tv. They encourage regular content from their producers and will allow ads on the videos!

So, I am slowly transitioning all my YouTube videos over to blip.tv. Here's the link to my channel over there.

The Rat Race Losers

I'm still building the new video channel, and thanks to a good friend who is a graphic artist, I hope to have some awesome graphics on that new channel soon, as well as here on the blog. While chatting with him, he said, "Ah, but moving to this new ad system will make the victory over Google that much sweeter. One day, when your site is huge, Google will come to you offering their AdSense service."

On that day, I will be pleased to say "We are The Rat Race Losers, (snicker) we don't have to."

Rod Serling, Eat Your Heart Out!

2012-06-26T20:49:00.001-04:00

An Interesting Exploration of Memory

Submitted for your consideration...

Just this past Sunday, I got a panicked call from a dear friend.

"Help!" he exclaimed. "The emergency brake in my car is gone!"

"Gone? Meaning that it's not working?"

"No! It's gone! It's no longer even there! I went to go step on the emergency brake pedal while I was at the grocery and it was gone! So is the little handle you pull to release it! I was hoping that you'd tell me that you had removed it when you were working on my car recently and had forgotten to reinstall it."

"No, I didn't touch your e-brake." This is when something struck me. This friend drives a Honda. "Waitaminnit," I thought. "Hondas don't use foot-pedal e-brakes. They use handbrakes located between the seats near the shifter."

"I've had this car for 12 years and I use the e-brake all the time," he explained. "I know that it's supposed to be there! This is like some kind of Twilight Zone episode!"

I asked him to humor me. "Do me a favor and look next to the seat by the shifter. Check to see if there is a lever there."

"There's no lever," he said. "I know I'm not crazy! I've had this car for 12 years and I know where the e-brake is!"

During all this, I was using my phone to look up a picture of the interior of the same model and year of his Honda. I found one that was one year older and it showed a picture of the e-brake being located right where I thought it should be; between the seats and near the shifter. I was certain that Honda had not changed their design that radically in only one year.

Since he was convinced that it was supposed to be a foot pedal, I told him that I didn't know what to tell him and that my wife and I were on the way over to his house to check it out. Since I was 99.99999% certain that the e-brake was located between the seats on his car, Linda and I were a little bit worried about our friend since he had made such a significant error.

Lifting the fog

It took us about 25 minutes to get to his house from where we were. On the way over, I asked my wife to go talk to our friend when we got there and I'd check out the car. When we arrived, Linda proceeded up the steps to the living room, and I went down to the garage.

I opened the driver side door, and his interior looked exactly like the one in the picture. What was really interesting about it was that the parking brake was set! Yes, this means that he drove home from the grocery, thinking that his parking brake was physically gone, then when he parked the car, he subconsciously and automatically pulled the e-brake lever to set the brake!

I went back inside the house and asked my friend to come down to the car.

"Don't tell me it's there," he said, incredulously.

"Just come down to the car," I replied. We went back to the car, and I opened the driver door. I reached in and pointed to the set parking brake. "Dude," I said in my gentlest tone, "your parking brake is located here."

"But I remember the pedal! It can't have been more that two weeks ago that I used the pedal!"

"Dude, something has gone wrong in your memory. I think you're remembering the location of the e-brake from your last car. Your last car was a Dodge, and American-made cars still use the foot pedal design in some cars, and they were much more prevalent 12 years ago when you last drove that car."

"So I'm losing my mind," he said matter-of-factually.

"No, I think you just had a 'brain fart.' It happens to all of us from time to time."

"I'm going to have my doctor check my neurotransmitter levels," he said in a worried tone. "This is really troublesome." I could see him getting really worried about this.

"Let's go upstairs and talk about it," I suggested. He agreed and we went upstairs and joined Linda who was waiting there for us.

Delving into the issue

I explained to my friend that I think he just had a minor "rewriting" of some information in his brain, and that it happens to us all. Further, I told him that unless it happens again, to consider this a fluke.

I work in the IT industry. I regularly encounter computers that will do something strange and unexpected only once. I often explain to users that a computer is "allowed" to do something strange every now and then, but if the problem recurs, we need to look deeper. So, I quickly drew up an analogy to explain what I think happened.

NOTE: This is rather geeky content. If you have experience with computer programming, this will make perfect sense. Otherwise, it might not...Sorry.

See the following tables for how information about my car is stored in my brain:

TblJeepFacts

ItemName	Value	Extra Info
VehicleType	SUV	4x4
EngineType	I6	4.0L
EBrakeLocation	Center Console	NONFUNCTIONAL

TblMiataFacts

ItemName	Value	Extra Info
VehicleType	Passenger	Convertible, 2-seat
EngineType	I4	1.8L
EBrakeLocation	Center Console	FUNCTIONAL

TblChadTodaysCarInfo

ItemName	Pointer	Value
VehicleRecord	TblJeepFacts	N/A
EngineType	TblJeepFacts.EngineType	I6 (4.0L)
EBrakeLocation	TblJeepFacts.EBrakeLocation	Center Console (NONFUNCTIONAL)

TblChadTodaysSubconsciousCarInfo

ItemName	Pointer	Value
VehicleRecord	TblJeepFacts	N/A
EngineType	TblJeepFacts.EngineType	I6 (4.0L)
EBrakeLocation	TblJeepFacts.EBrakeLocation	Center Console (NONFUNCTIONAL)

In the table of information about today's car (I was driving the Jeep), you can see that all the details point to facts about the Jeep, and that everything is consistent, and in the information that is subconsciously stored also has the same, consistent data.

Here's what I believe was stored in my friend's brain:

TblHondaFacts

ItemName	Value	Extra Info
VehicleType	Passenger	FWD
EngineType	I4	2.0L
EBrakeLocation	Center Console	FUNCTIONAL

TblDodgeFacts

ItemName	Value	Extra Info
VehicleType	Passenger	FWD, 4-door
EngineType	V6	3.0L
EBrakeLocation	Driver Foot-well	FUNCTIONAL

TblFriendTodaysCarInfo

ItemName	Pointer	Value
VehicleRecord	TblHondaFacts	N/A
EngineType	TblHondaFacts.EngineType	I4 (2.0L)
EBrakeLocation	TblDodgeFacts.EBrakeLocation	D river Foot-well (FUNCTIONAL)

TblFriendTodaysSubconsciousCarInfo

ItemName	Pointer	Value
VehicleRecord	TblHondaFacts	N/A
EngineType	TblHondaFacts.EngineType	I4 (2.0L)
EBrakeLocation	TblHondaFacts.EBrakeLocation	Center Console (FUNCTIONAL)

As you can see, the pointer in TblFriendTodaysCarInfo.EBrakeLocation is not pointing to TblHondaFacts.EBrakeLocation, but rather to TblDodgeFacts.EBrakeLocation. So, when my friend attempted to retrieve the information about where the e-brake was located, he pulled up the wrong information.

Every time our brain looks up information, it does a consistency check to make sure it's not in error. If it finds an error, it will either correct it or alert our conscious minds to it and we will realize we were thinking about the wrong car. This usually occurs because there's something that is inconsistent about the information retrieved. Had his memory of the location of the e-brake pedal contained something impossible like "in the trunk," his brain would have tossed it out and either found the right information, or alerted his consciousness that there was a problem.

Since the information in TblFriendTodaysSubconsciousCarInfo.EBrakeLocation is correct, when my friend came into the garage and parked his car, he automatically grabbed the e-brake handle and pulled it, without ever realizing it.

This one little tiny change in a neuron somewhere in his brain is what created all this commotion.

My own experiences with memory and suggestibility

During the discussion of what happened and my supposition of what happened in his brain, I related a story to him that actually happened to me.

Back when I was 16 years old and still had my temporary driving permit, my friends Frank and Greg and I would go out in Frank's parents Datsun Maxima Wagon. Yeah, I said DATSUN. This car was old enough to be from before Datsun changed their name to Nissan. Anyway, I digress.

On one evening, late at night, we were out driving like a bunch of crazy assholes -- much like you'd expect any trio of 16-18 year-old males to be doing. We were on a road that had two 90-degree turns back-to-back. We were hot-dogging through those turns going WAY too fast for the handling characteristics of that car. In the middle of the second turn, we lost control, and slid off the road down an embankment into a guy's yard. I'm sure the guy was quite used to cars landing in his yard, based on the scarring in the earth there.

Once we came to rest, we quickly got out of the guy's yard. We drove down the road and the car was making a strange rubbing sound. We got out. We discovered that we had bent the front right fender far enough to contact the tire. I placed my foot on the crease that was sticking out and pressed it back in. This made the fender stop touching the tire, and made the car drivable.

Frank's parents were kinda strict and uptight. Frank was freaking out. He was positive that his parents would kill him. And, having met his parents, I was worried that they might actually do it. So, we decided to come up with a story to explain how we went off the road.

We concocted a story that somebody had been harassing us and we were trying to get away from them. We further embellished the story to say that they had cut us off in the middle of that turn by passing us, which caused Frank to swerve and lose control. We took the next 20 minutes to flesh out the story a bit more so that it was believable.

We were going south on State Route 4 (a four-lane highway). When we were getting close to Greg's house, Frank says to me, "Chad, take the wheel. I don't feel too good." I reached over from the passenger seat and the moment my hand touched the wheel, Frank passed out. His head hit the driver's window HARD, so I knew that he wasn't joking around. We were careening down this road with an unconscious driver, going 35-40MPH, and with me (a 16-year-old kid) holding the wheel and I only had my temporary driving permit.

Thankfully, I discovered at that time that I am one of those "calm in the face of danger" people. I calmly reached up, turned on the emergency blinkers, remembered that the e-brake in that car was non-functional and skipped trying to use it. I then put the automatic transmission into neutral, unclasped my seat belt and climbed over Frank's bulky frame so that I could reach the brake pedal. Once I got the car stopped, I reached over and put the car in park, and breathed a sigh of relief. I had managed to stop the car without wrecking.

Greg and I moved Frank to the passenger seat and I drove the car to Greg's house. His mother is a nurse, and we were only about 300 yards from his house at the time. We got Frank inside, and Greg's mom decided to call the EMS. By the time they got there, Frank was lucid and talking normally. He refused to be taken to the hospital and the squad guys said that he seemed OK. At that point, we decided that we needed to take Frank home.

Since I had my temporary permit, I drove Frank's car with him in the passenger seat, and Greg and his mother followed us to give me a ride home after taking Frank home. Frank was still kinda out of it, and was resting with his head against the window. I guess he was going in and out of consciousness, but I didn't realize it at the time.

All of a sudden, Frank sat up in the seat screaming and flailing his arms. He was clearly out of his mind. After about 15 seconds of this, he passed out cold and we decided to take him to the hospital that was only a few miles away. We called his parents and they came to the hospital. We told them the concocted story and they believed it. His parents took him home the next morning and that was the end of it. Greg and I continued to hang out with Frank, and we continued to drive around like crazy assholes.

After telling all this story to my friend, he looked at me like "OK, how does this factor in?"

I told him that about 6 months after the incident, Frank, Greg and I were sitting around a table chatting. Frank remembered back to that night and said "I can't believe that the guy ran us off the road like that."

Greg and I looked at each other. Could Frank be messing around? I told him that he was wrong, and related the real story to him. He swore up, down, side-to-side and on about 15 people's graves that a car had cut us off in that turn. He described the car. It was clear that he had actually stored the concocted story in his memory as though it were reality.

It took Greg and I quite a while to convince him that we were right and that he was remembering wrong. I surmised that in his stressed state because he was worried about how his parents would react, he became hyper suggestible and when we concocted the story, it got recorded as "real."

Conclusion

I explained to my friend that sometimes our brains do strange things. We talked about how it's possible that your brain can have a small error that is undetected because the error is consistent. We left soon after that, and I reassured him one last time saying "I tell users this all the time: you're allowed to have a fluke every now and then. If it happens again, we need to look deeper."

I'm sure he spent the rest of the evening waiting to see Rod Serling step out of the corner and say "A man drives his car to the grocery store, discovers that his car is missing it's emergency brake. On the way home he thinks that he has driven himself crazy, but instead, he has driven directly into.......The Twilight Zone."

Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!

2012-06-19T09:15:00.000-04:00

Patrick Henry is spinning in his grave

More and more, I hear stories of government entities encroaching on the rights of the citizen; the latest affront is Los Angeles County's "Nuisance Abatement Teams."

I was recently directed to an article about several off-the-grid residents who live in the Antelope Valley of L.A. County being forced to leave and destroy their property. These people are living off-the grid out in the middle of the desert. Some of these folks don't have neighbors for 10 miles in any direction, yet the Nuisance Abatement Teams are claiming that they are responding to code violations and "complaints from neighbors."

Unfortunately, these people chose to set up their structures in L.A. County. They should have expected that they could someday be subject to the building codes of that county, since there is a very major U.S. City there.

What makes this story especially interesting to me is that there is a planning commission that wants to "improve" the Antelope Valley, by adding things like an airport, highways and possibly high-speed rail. If the residents of the area were conveniently no longer living there, the land in question could be obtained very cheaply.

This is one of the reasons we chose Hudspeth County, TX. There really aren't any building codes out there. With the exception of some overly officious pricks in the local Electric CO-OP office, you're pretty much able to to whatever you want with your land. Since we don't plan to be on the grid out there, dealing with the CO-OP office isn't really on our radar at this point.

We plan to build a natural structure out there; probably an earth-bag-walled or strawbale-walled structure. We don't plan those walls to be load-bearing, so any potential "code violations" in the basic structure should be minimal. We call it "The HexHouse."

While I do think that the residents in Antelope Valley bear some responsibility and "should have expected" this at some time, I feel that the treatment they are getting from the local government is awful. Really? ARMED RAIDS? Guns and Riot Gear?

Our society is collapsing. It happened to Rome. Nobody wants to learn from history. It's still fixable, but will require the dedication and hard work of ALL Americans. The apathy needs to end. I know it sounds hypocritical to say that and then run off to the desert, but I think that we (as a society) need to become more individually self-sufficient first. This will give us the "base of operations" from which to make changes to the government.

If we are not dependent on the government structure, we will be better able to see (and fix) its flaws.

Reflections on a Made Up Holiday

2012-06-17T13:14:00.000-04:00

Why only appreciate Dad one day a year?

Back in the early 1900s, a lady in Spokane, WA began celebrating Father's Day. This day was established as a reaction to the creation of Mother's day a few years earlier. It's identified as being a commercial holliday, and history has bourne that out.

Our society has learned to be a very materialistic bunch. We have several holidays in the US that center around the idea of making purchases. Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Sweetest day (A repeat of Valentine's day?) Halloween, and Christmas. There are others, but these are the ones that stick out to me as having been thoroughly corrupted.

None of these holidays were originally intended to become commercial days, but leave it to Americans to turn a day that is meant to honor your mom & dad, tell your sweetie that you love them, to remember the dead, or to celebrate the coming of Jesus Christ into "if you don't go out and buy xxx or yyy, you're a bad person and should feel guilty about it."

I however, believe that we should honor our mothers and fathers daily. Why do I need to wait for the 3rd Sunday in June to tell my father that I love him and miss him? Why can't I call him up and remind him of how special he is to me in the middle of September?

My Dad

My father, Daniel Douglas, participated in my conception somewhere in mid- to late- November of 1973. Since that moment, I have had a father. I have very few memories of my early years while living in California. The most notable (and humorous) was the look on my father's face when he came upstairs into the nursery to find that I had removed my diaper and completey covered myself and the walls in its contents. I still remember the look of "oh, good GOD!" that was on his face. I could not have been more than two years old at the time.

My father and I didn't have that strong a relationship in my early years. We didn't do a lot of the traditional "Father-and-Son" activities, and there were other stressors in his life that kept us from connecting emotionally. I'm not saying that he was a dead-beat or anything of the sort. He was a guiding force in my life. He instilled my moral code (although mine has likely eroded some over the years.) He disciplined me when I screwed up, and sometimes that meant getting a whoopin'. (And, for the record, I am a firm believer in corporal punishment - I think our society suffers from a definite lack of butt-whoopins these days!)

However, once I became a teenager, my father began taking a much stronger interest in me as a person, rather than "his kid." I remember the day that the transformation began. He and I had an argument about something. It really wasn't that big a thing. I was in the right in the situation, and got so frustrated that I left the room to go do something else. The transformative moment was when he later came to me and apologized and admitted that he had been in the wrong.

In that one singular moment, my father became "Dad" to me.

Since that day, we have been able to lean on each other for support, learn from each other's experiences and generally become really good friends. Dad and I have spent many hours working on projects together. From automotive maintenance and computer repairs, to rebuilding my entire front porch roof and re-roofing my garage. My Dad and I have "been there" for each other ever since.

A couple years ago, Dad decided to move to Southern California. My step-sister lives out there and has two young children. My sister's kids were in their mid-teens and had benefited from the presence of their grandfather as a stabilizing and positive influence in their lives for several years. It was clear to me that my step-sister's young kids also deserved that stabilizing, positive force, as well.

I sat my Dad down and told him, "Dad, while I will miss you terribly when you move out there, and it will really suck to not have you around, I think that Emily's kids deserve to have their grandparents in their lives." I told him that I was okay with his plans to move, and that he had my blessing and support in this new chapter in his life.

When he recognized the fact that Emily and her kids needed the stabilizing force that he and my step-mother could bring to their lives, he risked drawing the ire of all his biological kids. To me, this exemplifies the qualities of "Dad." He made a choice to uproot his life here in Ohio and to set out on a new chapter in his life so that he could be a positive force in someone's life. He made a choice that, while somewhat unpopular, was clearly the right one.

Father's Day

So, why do we only celebrate our fathers and tell them what they mean to us only once a year? Why do we run out and buy BBQ Grills, technological toys and new shirts and ties? Do we really think that material posessions will relate our feelings better than a hug and an "I love you, Dad?"

Why not wait until BBQ grills are on clearance in the late fall and pick it up then? Then just show up and tell your Dad, "Hey, I know it's late November, but I got a smokin' deal on this BBQ that I knew you'd love." To me, that shows Dad that you learned about frugality as a kid. It shows him that you're thinking of him all year, and not only on one day that has some text in a little square marked "Sunday" on the June calendar page.

Why not pick up a new tie when you see that one of his old ones is getting a little ragged or out of style? This will show Dad that you care about how he looks and how he presents himself in public. It will show that you are thinking about him when you happen to be strolling through the Mens department at the local department store.

To me, every day should be Father's Day. Without the act of creation between he and my mother, I would not exist; I wouldn't be writing this blog post now. I wouldn't be planning a move to Texas. I would have only been unrealized potential. Thanks to my father, that potential is actual.

Every single one of us has a father. It's a biological certainty. Luckily for me, I not only have a father, but a Dad.

Sometimes, You Have to Go to the Top

2012-06-14T23:26:00.000-04:00

Getting Results from our Kroger Ordeal

After having made several attempts to contact Customer Service at Kroger about the issue I blogged about in "The Kroger Company Wants Me to Shop Elsewhere!" I decided that I'd send an email directly to the CEO of Kroger, Dave Dillon.

So, I fired up Outlook in the morning and sent the following to dave.dillon@kroger.com:

Mr. Dillon,

Let me first state that I realize that you are very busy and don't have a lot of time for the day-to-day operations of individual stores in the Kroger Company. However, I feel that I've run out of options.

On May 3, 2012, my wife was treated very poorly at our local Kroger store. We tried to escalate to the manager, but when his employees lied to him about what happened, he believed them instead of his long-time customers. I was very upset about it, and wrote about it in my blog. Please take a few minutes to read my blog post, since it tells the entire story of the interaction.

The Rat Race Losers: The Kroger Company Wants me to Shop Elsewhere!

In the intervening weeks since, I have tried to locate contact information for the District Office for the Cincinnati KMA. I have been unable to get a name, email address or phone number of anyone to contact in that office. When I was speaking to the manager at the store, he told me that he "didn't know" the number for the District Manager, which I can't believe is true.

I have also submitted a request to be contacted on the Kroger.com web site. I specifically asked that someone contact me. I did this on May 21. I have not heard anything from this contact, either.

So, this (if you count my attempts to locate the Cincinnati KMA's contact numbers) makes my fourth attempt to get resolution in this very serious matter. Since this occurred, I have not set foot in any Kroger store, nor have I purchased fuel or prescriptions from any Kroger location.

This is unfortunate; I have always enjoyed the selection and good prices I have seen at my local Kroger. However, I must stick to my principles here. Until someone at Kroger contacts me about this, I feel that the Kroger Company (as an entity) doesn't really have much interest in me as an individual customer. Because of this, I will continue to avoid Kroger stores, and I plan to continue reminding people how I was treated, and requesting that they, too, choose to shop elsewhere.

This is a black eye for Kroger. Please ask that someone from the Cincinnati KMA contact me. I would like to resolve this issue and once again feel good about spending my money with the Kroger Company.

I can be reached at:

Chad Douglas
XXX XXX Ave
Hamilton, OH 450XX

XXX@gmail.com
513-XXX-2XX3 (Cell)

Thank you for taking time to address this issue.

Sincerely,

Chad Douglas

Within a couple of hours I received the following response:

Chad,

I apologize for the poor treatment you ([and] your wife) experienced and for not being able to talk to someone outside of the store. I will be sure you are contacted.

Thanks for giving us that opportunity.,

Dave Dillon

About an hour after having received that email, I had a missed call on my phone. No voicemail. I recognized the number was coming from the area where the Cincinnati KMA (Kroger Marketing Area) is located. So I called it back. It was, in fact, the Cincinnati KMA. Apparently, when anyone calls out from that office it shows the same number on the Caller ID. Since there was no voicemail, I was unable to ask for a specific person. However, I did speak to one of the assistants for the district in which this Kroger store is located.

She assured me she'd ask around and tell whomever called me to call me again--I reminded her that if they don't get hold of me to please leave a voicemail.

Just after 3PM, my phone rang with an unfamiliar number. On the other end of the line was Mr. Steve Hils, the district manager in charge of that store. He apologized profusely for how my wife was treated. He told me that he had just spoken with the manager that handled the situation, and that it had been one of the most intense disciplinary discussions he had ever given in his entire career. This guy was almost groveling. I kinda felt bad for him, really.

He explained to me that Kroger empowers their managers to SOLVE problems, not to escalate them. He felt that the situation was handled improperly on a scale that was just amazing. He told me that it didn't matter whether Linda cursed at the pharm tech or not. He said, "Even if she DID, it's clear that something the store did got her that agitated, and that the manager should have resolved the issue."

Mr. Hils then asked me what he could do to make up for this horrible situation. I thought about it for a few moments.

I didn't want to irreparably harm the manager. After all, he's an assistant manager, and is likely in training to become a store manager at some future date. I also didn't want to seem vindictive. I decided against asking for his job, or some other heinous disciplinary action. I figure I'll leave that to them to work out.
I didn't want to come off as "greedy." So often, businesses feel that they need to compensate upset customers with freebies. I usually don't accept them. If I go to a restaurant and get horrible service but still eat my food, I pay for it, even if the manager tries to give it to me free. I tell the manager to train the employee better instead of giving me a freebie. So, I decided against asking for financial remuneration or store credits/gift cards.

After considering both of these positions, I decided that I wanted to give this district manager a training opportunity. I've worked in management in my life, and I can appreciate the value of a "teaching moment." So, instead of asking for him to be fired or asking for money, I asked that Mr. Hils have the manager write a letter of apology to my wife for the way he treated her.

Although it was inaudible, I believe Mr. Hils let out a sigh of relief. "It'll be in the mail today," he said. He then asked me if there was anything else I wanted. I said that the letter of apology would be sufficient, and to keep providing good products at good value to Kroger's customers.

I told Mr. Hils that I regretted having to contact Mr. Dillon. I shared that I've been in the position where someone has gone over my head in the past, and I didn't like it very much either, and that since I had not gotten any contact in a month, I felt my only remaining recourse was to go higher in the organization, and the only person whom I knew I could contact was Mr. Dillon himself.

He assured me that "this incident was entirely and completely our (Kroger's) fault. There is no excuse for this having gone as far as it did." He thanked me for bringing this matter to his attention, and then we ended the call.

I thought that was the end of it, until later that evening when I received another phone call. This time it was from the Pharmacy Management.

Ms. Colleen Lindholz explained that she had also received a message from Mr. Dillon asking that they contact me. We talked about what happened. She asked me if I knew the name of the pharm tech that had treated Linda so badly. I told her that I didn't know her name, but that the manager I spoke to that day certainly would. I related my conversation with Mr. Hils to her and that Mr. Hils would know the manager's name.

Ms. Lindholz agreed with me that it seemed preposterous that the pharmacy manager had "heard" Linda curse the pharm tech, since he could not have been on the phone listening. She also told me that around April of 2012, they had demoted the pharmacy manager at that store and installed a new one. Unfortunately, this issue occurred after the installation of the new manager, so that clearly wasn't related to this situation.

She asked if there was anything they could do to win back my business. I decided on a similar strategy as with the manager. I said, "If this pharm tech has a job after this settles, I'd like a letter of apology mailed to my wife for the way she was treated." Ms. Lindholz agreed that she would get a letter sent out right away. She then said that it looked like we had transferred our prescriptions away from Kroger and asked if there was anything she could do to get our business back.

I advised her that this incident was only one of many over the years, and that we have repeatedly had issues with the Kroger pharmacy. Because of this, we have decided not to use the Kroger Pharmacy for quite a while, if ever again. I told her that I had a close friend who used to work in the EasyFill Technical Support department at Kroger and who had told me of some of the technological failings in their system that had resulted in improperly filled scripts, data loss and mis-billings. Combining that with the attitude that we had experienced from other techs over the years meant that we needed to leave our prescriptions with CVS. We didn't feel that Kroger could serve us properly at this time. She disappointedly told me that she understood my reasons.

So, we are now waiting for two letters of apology from the manager and the pharm tech. I won't go back to Kroger until after I receive them. I feel it's important to make sure the agreements are kept.

This way, I don't feel "bought back" by a bunch of freebies. I feel that the persons involved have the opportunity to learn a valuable personal and professional lesson about customer service. I think the saddest thing here is that I had to go all the way to the CEO of the company to get the traction I needed to resolve this issue. This should have been handled much, much earlier.

I guess this just goes to show that when you're treated badly by a business, you need to persist until you are satisfied. Linda and I had planned to boycott Kroger indefinitely while continuing to remind people of the problem until it got resolved. I guess my tenacity in this paid off.

Which Came First - The Chicken or the Egg?

2012-06-12T13:31:00.000-04:00

A review of Fresh Eggs Daily

This blog review may end up being very short. I'm having way too much fun exploring the site and how many words does it take to say, "I love it" anyway? I haven't had this much fun exploring a blog for quite a while! I was blog-tunneling from another favorite of mine Frugally Sustainable when I spotted this blog. I have been avidly reading every page in the archive.

This blog's for you if you're

Curious about chickens
Thinking of raising some chickens
Interested in chicken or egg recipes
Planning to homestead

It's real, it's funny, it's interesting. I love all the bright photos of chickens from every breed and stage of life! The step-by-step recipes and instructions are great too. What I found a very pleasant surprise was the frequent correlation between herbs for people and herbs for chickens. I will definitely visit Fresh Eggs Daily again and soon!

The Ends Played Themselves Against the Middle

2012-06-06T21:47:00.004-04:00

How I got a better deal without even trying

In my last post, I told you all about dropping Time Warner Cable completely by getting an antenna for TV and Clear for my Internet.

Well, two days ago, I get a call out of the blue from Time Warner Cable. Apparently, I came to the attention of their "Customer Retention" department.

The rep on the phone asked me why I was cancelling my service with TWC. I told them that I didn't want TV service anymore, and since TWC was insisting on charging me $150 if I dropped TV (even if I kept RoadRunner at $53.95/mo for 10Mbps) I told them that I didn't want to do business with a company that wouldn't waive that fee for a long-time customer.

Then, just like in the GodFather, he made me a deal that I "couldn't refuse."

Well, technically, I could have refused, especially since I didn't own any prize racehorses, nor is there enough room in my bed for both me and a bloodied horse head. Anyway, I digress.

I was told by the rep that if I kept my RoadRunner, not only would they waive the $150 fee, but they would give me the 10Mbps service level for $29.99 for 12 months, after which it would increase by $5.

Since I was going to be paying Clear $49.99 for 3-6Mbps, it made a whole lot of sense to return to TWC. Saving $20/mo and getting faster service. Of course, this means that we're back "on the grid" a little more, but right now, saving money to build up our resources for the Texas move is more important than being "off the grid."

So, I went online to change my service level with Clear so that I would not be automatically billed at the end of the month since I would not be using their service anymore. That's when I discovered their 15-day guarantee!

Apparently, since I chose to cancel within 15 days, I get a complete, full refund for both the monthly fee and the Clear modem, as soon as I return it. I received the prepaid UPS label today. I'll get it off to UPS tomorrow evening.

So, without trying, or taking any deliberate steps, I got to try out Clear (which was adequate) and now I'm getting a better overall deal on my Internet service...all without losing any money!

Woot!

Mischief Managed

2012-06-02T21:23:00.000-04:00

A little further "off the grid."

Thursday, my Clear modem arrived. I took it up into the attic and set it up and got 4/5 lights for signal strength. Then I came back down and started to do some testing.

It's quite a bit slower than my RoadRunner. My RoadRunner was 10Mbps and the Clear is just barely 3Mbps. So it's 33% of the speed.

That's about the speed we will expect to get when we're out in Texas, so we are just going to learn to adapt to the slower speed. So, I called Time Warner to cancel my cable service. They tried all kinds of things to keep me as a customer, except for the one thing that would have worked.

You see, a few years ago, TWC was offering special packages that required that you enter into a 2-year agreement. Now, had I left my service options alone, I would have long ago gotten out of that 2 year agreement. However, every time I made a change to my service, they reset the clock on the 2 years. What a crock of poo.

So, when I told them I was cancelling, they informed me that there would be a $150 early cancellation fee. The rep I was speaking to even told me that I could drop the TV service and keep the RoadRunner at 10Mbps for $53.95/mo. My 3Mbps Clear service costs $50/mo. However, if I dropped the TV service I would be charged the $150 fee, regardless of whether I kept RoadRunner or not.

I reminded them that I had been a customer of theirs for 11 years, and that I wanted them to waive that fee. They refused. I told them that if they are going to insist on charging me a fee that I could not do business with them any further. I'm not going to pay it; I don't feel it's a fair charge, especially since TWC no longer does contracts for their service, but they grandfathered me when they stopped doing contracts. So no matter what I did, I was going to be stuck with some fee for early cancellation. If I had just called to make a change to my service, they would have wanted to reset the clock again, even though there is no more clock for "new" customers.

This new "spirit" of "customer service" is a bunch of crap. There is very little service being provided to the customer. Companies seem to have forgotten that without customers, they don't exist. They've discovered that an upset customer usually just whines for a while, but then usually returns. They now count on this. So they don't care if you get mad.

Anyway, Clear, despite being slower, will never have contracts. I can start and stop my Internet service at will. This gives me freedom of choice as well as flexibility.

I like choice. I'm willing to lose some speed to be free.

Cutting The Cable, Going Wireless

2012-05-23T20:52:00.000-04:00

Recently, Linda and I went over to H.H. Gregg and picked up an outdoor HDTV antenna. We've decided that we are going to tell Time Warner Cable to stuff it.

OMG! How will you ever survive without Cable TV?

To be honest, we don't watch a lot of TV Shows that are available on basic cable. Over the last few years, I've noticed that the cable channels have moved their "good" content over to their premium channels and have replaced the content on the standard channel with reality TV and all-day marathons. Because of this, we rarely actually watch these channels anymore, and we don't want the added complication of a cable box, since we use a Windows Media Center PC as our DVR.

Many of the TV shows that we did watch from cable TV are available online, either from somewhere like NetFlix or from the cable channel's web site directly.

OMG! What about the Internet? The World Didn't Exist Before the Internet!

While we will no longer have access to super high-speed internet, we can get a reasonably-priced alternative, Clear. For $50 per month, we get unlimited bandwidth and 3-6Mbps download and 1Mbps upload. This is actually about the same level of service we have from Warner Cable now.

The biggest advantages to Clear are:

Portability. Since Clear is based on WIMax cellular service, I can get my internet anywhere I can get a signal. So I'm no longer tied down to getting my high-speed internet at home. If I'm going to some function somewhere that requires Internet access, I can take it with me.
No Contract. Clear is completely without contracts. In fact, you can even buy internet access by the hour if you only need it for a short time. Time Warner has been doing this "guaranteed pricing" business for the last several years and requiring their customers to sign a 2-year agreement with them in order to get service. I don't like that. It restricts my options as a consumer.

Of course, there are some disadvantages, as well. Most notably coverage area. Right now, you'll only find WIMax coverage in limited markets in the US. So, when we get out to Texas, we will likely have to re-evaluate our internet choice, unless WIMax has nationwide coverage by then. However, it's unlikely that Cornudas will have coverage in the foreseeable future, since cell coverage of any kind out there is sketchy at best.

The Hardware

Television

Over the previous several days, I researched what would be the best antenna for our location and available stations. I headed over to AntennaWeb.org's tool to identify what antenna type I needed. To get all the stations in my area, I compromised on an external antenna for the "light gray" region. Since the stations I want to tune are located both north and south of me, using a directional antenna wasn't an option for me. I didn't want to have to futz with an antenna rotor.

Then, once I figured out what antenna "color" I needed, I started researching outdoor omnidirectional antennas. I wanted an outdoor model, since I planned to install it in my attic, and also plan to take it with us when we head to Texas. I'll put it up on one of the wind turbine masts, some 30-40 feet in the air. I might even be able to pick up stations from El Paso that way, and be able to skip satellite TV when we move out there. It was important to have omni-directionality so that I could get stations from both Dayton and Cincinnati.

I found several favorable reviews on the Terk FDTVO, and on H.H. Gregg's site, I even found some reviews from people in my area praising it. It seems that price point does have a bearing on quality for these things. The super-cheap ones usually aren't that great. If you live in a place that has really strong signals, you can often get by with one of those. However, since my walls are plaster (essentially ROCK), using antennae indoors is really an exercise in futility. So, we coughed up the $100 for the antenna, fully intending to return it if it wasn't any good.

We did pay a price premium to get it locally rather than online, but I wanted to get it installed right away, and I wanted a local store that I could return it to in the event that it didn't work.

First, I just assembled the antenna and stuck it on the floor in the attic an ran the 50' of RG-6 cable down the stairs to the TV. I was able to get quite a few local stations that way, but I knew I could do better. I went up into the attic to mount it in there, but decided that since there was a window in the attic that I would try to mount it outside. I just barely got it to mount and allow the window to close. After the remount, I was able to get almost all the local stations in my area with the exception of WCVN-PBS in Northern Kentucky. There is only one TV program from WCVN that we regularly watched, "Kentucky Afield." We will miss that show, but perhaps I can watch it online.

Internet

I've already tried Clear internet, so I just need to get the hardware I need. I plan to purchase a refurbished modem (without Wi-Fi) from Clear.com for $20, and sign up for the $50 per month plan. I don't want or need a modem that provides Wi-Fi because I already own an Apple AirPort Extreme that serves as my internet router, and it's been far more reliable than any other router I've ever used aside from a Linux-based one.

In order to get the best connection to the WiMax network, I plan to install the Clear modem in the attic near the window. I will then run along network cable along side of the RG-6 Antenna cable, and connect it to my AirPort Extreme in the living room.

I'm not totally sure what speeds I will see, but according to the Clear web site, there is a clear tower within about 1/8 mile of my house. This should mean that I will get the maximum speed possible.

If I do manage to get the full 6Mbps down and 1Mbps up, I will actually doing better than I am now on the Warner Cable connection. Even if I get closer to the minimum of 3Mbps down, I'll be quite happy, since I am still reducing my expense, and I'm able to cut the cord.

Once I get everything tested, I'll call Time Warner and give them the bad (for them) news.

Conclusion

I'm quite happy with the results from the antenna. There have been a couple small digital glitches in TV shows I've recorded, but it's quite tolerable. This will save us $30/mo and not impact our lifestyle very much. It will put us a little bit closer to "off the grid."

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FREE GASOLINE!

2012-05-17T13:05:00.000-04:00

How I have Become my own Gas Station

After the incident at MU, I took my Jeep home and repaired the leaking fuel tank. There was 20 gallons of fuel in that tank that I had to remove before I could lower the fuel tank and find the leak.

I used the Jeep's fuel pump to pump fuel from the tank into a five gallon fuel can. I then checked my other cars. I had just filled both the Subaru and the Miata so I could not store 20 gallons of fuel there.

Then it hit me: There is a huge fuel tank (75+ Gal) on the Motorless Home! So, I dumped the fuel into the tank five gallons at a time.

Well, now the time has come that I need to reclaim that fuel. It's halfway through the month and I've used up all my fuel money already. So, I'm going to use the electric fuel pump that is attached to the sick generator to pump fuel back into my five gallon fuel can and put that fuel into my cars.

Unfortunately, the fuel pump on the generator is a very low volume pump and it's going to take quite a while to fill may car. I'm going to be there a while.

Personal vs. Professional: Dividing the Waters

2012-05-16T10:02:00.002-04:00

Originally Posted on Facebook

Over the last few months, it's become clear to me that my personal life and professional life have certain incompatibilities.

Because of this, I've decided that I should separate my professional life from my personal one. In order to accomplish this, I've decided that I will use the two social media sites that I am a member of (Facebook and LinkedIn) for the purposes they were designed for.

Facebook was designed for people who have personal reasons to associate to connect and share stories about their personal lives.

LinkedIn was designed for people who have professional reasons to associate.

I have long held a rule about LinkedIn -- If I don't have a professional relationship with someone, I don't connect to them on LinkedIn. I've decided to apply the converse rule to Facebook. If I only have a professional relationship with someone, then I will not "friend" them on Facebook, and instead, will connect to that person via LinkedIn.

So, I will be trimming down my Facebook friends list. If I only have a professional relationship to you, I will be "unfriending" you on Facebook, and I encourage you to connect to me on LinkedIn.

There is nothing personal about this move; it's simply to better organize the separation between my personal and professional life.

You can find me on LinkedIn using my personal email address of 2twisty@gmail.com.