Ambergris

Depending on where you want to go?  You can rent a small three-bedroom house in a pretty good (but not close-in) neighborhood for $1500 a month or less in Tallahassee. If you want a one-bedroom apartment or cottage, your options expand a lot. The south side of Tallahassee is not the "good" side of town, but the northwest is the "cop" side, where police officers tend to live.  It's much cheaper than the east side and safer than the south side.

Here's a Zillow search for the zip code 32303, the northwest pie slice, with a filter having the maximum rent at $1600.  https://www.zillow.com/tallahassee-fl-32303/rentals/?searchQueryState={"pagination"%3A{}%2C"mapBounds"%3A{"north"%3A30.630298851197193%2C"south"%3A30.407888461533087%2C"east"%3A-84.1900540571289%2C"west"%3A-84.47501194287109}%2C"regionSelection"%3A[{"regionId"%3A71914%2C"regionType"%3A7}]%2C"isMapVisible"%3Atrue%2C"filterState"%3A{"fsba"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fsbo"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"nc"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"cmsn"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"auc"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fore"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fr"%3A{"value"%3Atrue}%2C"mf"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"land"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"manu"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"mp"%3A{"max"%3A1600}%2C"price"%3A{"max"%3A321219}}%2C"isListVisible"%3Atrue%2C"mapZoom"%3A12} You can see there are a number of options, most of them pretty nice-looking.  You can adjust the rent upward or downward if you like, or otherwise fiddle with those options.  Zillow lets you do this with any geographic area in the US.

The ones in Loja paid for themselves long ago and are going strong, generating roughly a quarter of the electricity used in the region.  Bear in mind, the area has a strong tradition of metal tinkerers and fixit people, so maintenance is different here.  Electric needs are different too, between the lack of need for (much) heating or air conditioning and the huge windows and skylights everywhere.

I had my teeth deep cleaned a week ago.  Not fun, but not as bad as getting a filling without anesthesia.  Some kinds don't work on me, so I know.

Today in town, I got a small bag of a new kind of cat food to see if the cats would eat it before investing in a big bag.  Investing, yeah.  The small one, roughly five pounds, was thirty bucks.  Cat food that is not utter garbage costs more than human food here.  I would get the cheaper ground meat the butcher sells for pets, but my old cat won't eat raw ground meat.  (The little cat eats raw meat very well.)  Also, I'm afraid I'd eat it by mistake, and I don't know what made the butcher set it aside as "for pets." 

I was supposed to have a PM video chat with a friend last night, and I forgot.  Ugh.

Only thing about the silicone is the white coating they grow after a while.  It seems harmless, but unsightly.  I like it, and left a deep drawer full of various kinds back in Florida.  I suggest keeping a baking sheet under it to control the flopping.  The baking sheet usually stays clean, and when it doesn't, it saves you a harder clean-up.

I never used any kind of release spray on mine.

I have spent a good chunk of today watching this channel:  

 I use a lot of this guy's tips, but he's in a warmer climate than you are.

I normally use five gallon buckets, but the potatoes that come out are pretty small.   I'm going to look for 30 liter (8 gallon) totes with lids.

I LOVE easter eggers and buff orps! 

Dentist visit checked off the list.  

Antidepressants were out of stock/sold out at the first four pharmacies, but the fifth pharmacy had two bottles.  I bought both.  The woman behind the counter asked what she was supposed to tell the next person who came in wanting them.  I said, "I'm sorry.  We ordered too few this week, but we will try to do better next week." 

She laughed.

Found and bought a replacement emergency whistle for my purse, since calling 9-1-1 doesn't do anything here.  You're supposed to phone the neighbors, but which one first?   If you don't luck out on the nearest one who's home with the first telephone call, you might be sorely out of luck.  A whistle works better.  Bought a second one for PM, who has been looking for one for quite a while.  These are referee whistles.  Mine is up to 120 decibels and hers is up to 115 decibels.

The store that was supposed to have the resistance bands didn't have them but had latex "scarves" that didn't look useless and cost less than five bucks each, so I got one of each of the two available stiffnesses.  Then I hit a few other sporting goods stores and finally found what looks like only one step down from what my exercise guy uses.  Got that too, and plan to show it to him tomorrow for instructions.  (Catch a hint of how I managed to luck into the referee whistles?)

The trip to the fruit tree nurseries got rained out.  

Non-routine dental appointment.  Hopefully, a little shopping expedition.

Pre-breakfast/post coffee weight is 190, down 20 pounds from mid-February and five pounds down from Mar 22.  It's not the rapid weight loss the doctor demands, but I'm okay with it.

Forty feet of row for three pounds of lima beans?  Is that normal?  We always got four or five pounds per ten feet of row.  Maybe it means 4 feet?

Yes, I subscribed to Mary's Test Kitchen yesterday after discovering her experiments in sunflower seed tofu, pumpkin seed tofu, lentil tofu, and so on.  This looks a lot better than what I used to do.

E. is here today to work on the (hopefully) chicken-deterrent cat door and to help me catch up on a week's worth of housekeeping and yardwork.  She cleans the critter poop, for example, and pre-washes the dishes.  After she leaves I will fill a sink with scalding clear water and a sink with scalding soapy water.  Things need a hot soapy dunk and a hot clear rinse, and maybe--maybe--a bit of a rub here or there.  I will spend far less than half the time and annoyance on them than I would if they were truly dirty, so I consider her service valuable.  She usually cooks, but today I have chicken marinating and plantains ready to cut.  I'll ask her to cut and cook the yuca because cutting them raw hurts my hands without a big, sharp knife.  (Guess what's on the list to get?)

This morning, we went to some hardware places and had to detour around a Palm Sunday procession.  It was led by a police car.  I counted sixteen across on the road the first time I counted them, and fifteen the second time.  I couldn't count how many rows there were because of the hill, but parades and processions normally have more than twice as many ranks as they do people in the first row, so call it thirty-two or so.  I'm approximating five hundred people in that procession, or roughly a tenth of the population of the valley.

I have had terrible luck reheating legume-based noodles.  Is there a trick to this?

6 hours ago, euphrasyne said:

 

I could easily rig a solar cooker out of cardboard boxes, aluminum foil, and a pane of glass.  I have all those on hand as well as enough tape/glue for an army. 

 

I'm not the sort of person who ever runs out of tape or glue.  When I get 'low'  (which is plenty by most people's standards,) I order another case.  

 

Well, now let me deliberately hijack the thread.  You generally need three solar cookers going at the same time, right?  One for fast-cooking items like rice, one for slow-cooking items like most of the rest of the things you'd want to eat (unless they're already canned) and one to pasteurize water.  

Who can make three solar cookers with materials on hand, not disassembling one to make the next?  Bonus:  who can make Three Different Kinds of solar cookers with materials on hand?  

I have the Fresnel lens to make either a solar frying pan or a solar Dutch oven.  The challenge with it is keeping it from breaking the pot/pan by applying too much heat.  

I don't have the windshield shades I had in the US to make windshield cookers, which were great for pasteurizing water, but I did bring two WAPIs to show when water has reached pasteurization.

I have a printout of the CooKit and keep big flat sheets of cardboard behind my armoire to make it with: https://solarcooking.fandom.com/wiki/CooKit 

https://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100430055234/solarcooking/images/7/7d/CooKit_Diagram_48_x_36_tiled.pdf

For the third kind, I would make a box cooker, but for the glass lid I would need to improvise with an oven bag stretched tight and rubber-banded in place.

Besides the two WAPIs, the framed Fresnel lens, and the cardboard sheets, I have a couple of packages of oven bags and a roll of foil on my bookshelf dedicated to making solar cookers, should the need arise.

(Speaking of hijacking a thread!)

I had a memorable trip to Nags Head when my eldest was a baby.  I traveled a lot for work in those years.  While eating fried pieces of something or other, I don't recall what, I idly drew a portrait with my ball point pen on the back of an envelope of an old man there who was looking out to sea.  Another old man at the next table was doing a water color, and we fell to talking.  I gave him my drawing because he asked for it, and he gave me the little painting he was working on.  He put my baby's name on the boat in his painting.  The painting was destroyed in the fire, of course, but I remember him fondly.

A lack of planning on his part does not constitute an emergency on your part.

Oh, okay.  Disregard my question.  I'll see if I can go get rid of it. 

Does your pineapple mint ever bloom outside of the fall months?

 Downloaded tax program at 7:30 a.m.  Found out after a good bit of digging that when I transferred tax records from older computer to this one, I did not include 2021.  Ran into some snags, including warnings that I couldn't complete a certain form until final instructions came in from the feds.  Finally found the error I'd made that got that form included, but correcting the error didn't remove the form or the warning.  Went online to find ways to delete form.  Tried them.  Swore some.  Ended up deleting my progress so far (down to the Review stage) and started over from scratch.  Got as far as trying to file a bit after 11 p.m. but could not find my driver's license.  I will deal with that today.

I had to charge my phone and use it, hang the cost, and found a batch of upset voice mails from my mother and some texts from my brother (they share a house) telling me to contact her.  She's been text messaging the house phone, which does not accept texts.  The email she gave me is not functioning or is misspelled, or something.

Got a little too much excitement around here too, but it all worked out well.

If my scale is correct, my weight is seven/eight pounds up from when the doctor told me to lose a third of my body weight, but I was sick (dehydrated) when I saw him.  I'm still down 15 pounds from mid-February and am stabilized.  Also, I think the doctor's scale runs a few pounds light of mine.  So maybe his scale would only show half that many pounds up.  Regardless, and regardless of my eye-rolling at his timeline for the weight loss project, I do want to lose more weight.

19 hours ago, euphrasyne said:

MS is on the Gulf coast also.  hehe.  I've been to FL to visit relatives during various seasons, and I'd take a FL summer over a MS summer any day.  I'd take either of them over VA because I'm freezing my tukus off.  

Been there (MS and FL).  Agree.

He might have a qigong video.  I hadn't thought about that.  I'll ask him Wednesday.

Got back from my exercise class with small-scale bad news.  The instructor is leaving the country in May, so my time with him is limited.  I'll take advantage of the weeks I have, though.