Ambergris

I used to have an old torn army blanket for this--my thinking was that wool would not scorch, and I was afraid of melting a polyester or nylon-filled quilt/blanket.  Now a days, the army blankets are "woobies" and you have to go vintage or foreign to get better than a 30 percent wool.  Sigh.  

Dog is a lot like goat.

Went to Publix the other night and gagged when I saw $28 a pound for regular (not prime or anything special) boneless rib eyes.  They were running half that a year ago.  Greenwise was cheaper.  I asked DS1 how he's been handling that.  He said, "not eating steak."  I'm not the only one exploring a different world, I guess. 

(DS2, on the other hand, never was into steak, which is to his advantage in times like this.)

DS1 spent a few months living out of the freezers and pantry.  There's still a ton of stuff to throw away because he didn't and won't touch it.

No, the kids almost all got sick, but for the babies, and adults stayed well except us.  One kid who got sick shared a huge plate of fried rice with her mom, who did not.

Luckily, it was a short-lived bug.  

I spread them out.

Yeah, someone at the Little Cousins' dinner on...23rd? must have been sick.  Yesterday H was in Loja taking care of godbaby's mother in the hospital (getting stabilized and rehydrated) while H's husband took care of godbaby while I spent my second straight day shuffling between bed and toilet.  

Garlic is a vegetable.  

Eat your vegetables, dear.

Send him a copy labeled "X in front of somebody else's presents."

Copied from a progressives' page, btw.

Well, we are hauling pig feed for the pig H's mother in law is fattening.  I had run the idea of a pair of pigs up the flagpole, but H, who would have to do the work, doesn't want to.  And I respect that.  Got my hopes up when I saw the bag of pig feed in the back of the truck earlier this week, but it's not mine, sigh.

Cuy the way I'm raising it is turning out to be a special occasion food, not a normal protein.  For one person or couple, it could be a normal protein, but we do everything en masse here.  One cuy feed was me, H, Mr H, their teenager, and their nephew (who apparently isn't a nephew, but I don't know what else to call him) who does heavy work for me.  Another was all the above minus the teenager (who had fish) and plus two other people.  The cuy are served at a quarter per person and most people got a second quarter after cleaning their plates.  

I floated the idea of raising meat chickens, but, again, that would be a lot more work for H, and she doesn't want it.  She pointed out that the big hens we get are big and convenient and clean, and a good income for the two ladies in town who furnish them.  I will broach the subject again when I have my own place and, I hope, more room.  More room means less work.

We are getting one to four eggs a day--or were, before the two silkies went broody--and might realistically expect five a day at the end of March or early April.  We have not bought any eggs except for one cooking project and to put under the broody hens in a few months.  Eggs are a large portion of my diet and H's, as she eats with me most of the time.

I would like to really expand on the quail population, but to do that they need much more room.  Quail eggs aren't much when you have hen eggs on tap, but then they start hatching and you have the prospect of roasted quail...doesn't that make your mouth water?  H's mother raises quail for food, but I'm not certain whether that means meat or eggs.  She also raises cuy.

Perfect way to end the year.  

I guess it's time for inventory:  

Silkies:  Two female, both setting, one strutting little old man.  All small, elderly, and very tame.

Quail:  three female, two male.  They need to be moved into a larger cuy cage when the cuy population is reduced for Christmas Dinner.

Currently laying hens: One giant, one normal size

Growing chickens:  8 of various sizes, two of them male

Cuy: Hard to count, as they keep moving around.  Five houlas, one with a pair of mothers and their small litters, the others with three to six apiece, most of those being grow-outs.  The buck is with a couple of young males for right now.   One of the other big mamas has been marked for dinner, as her babies tend to go "sad" and die. 

I was looking at a DVD player on Tiendamia today, and it was listed as Gift for Elderly Females.

On 12/11/2023 at 8:50 PM, Littlesister said:

Necie, I used to be that way. But I did get used to the Kindle with no issues. Though where my phone is concerned, I still can't do anything on it. Now my Bible is a different story. I have to have the actual book for that. Maybe because I like to highlight things I read sometimes. Though I can do that also on my kindle it just isn't the same.

https://www.hummingfluff.com/lovelypeoplecomic.html

Completed Spanish lessons online.

Making new cuy cage.

Planting plants bought yesterday, mostly in pots using compost bought in one of the trips to the Amazon mostly for that purpose.

On a related subject, here's part of an article I thought people might find interesting:

Opinion: Same hospital, same injury, same child, same day: Why did one ER visit cost thousands more?
Renee Y. Hsia Mon, December 11, 2023 at 6:30 AM GMT-5·5 min read

Two emergency room visits on the same day provided a dramatic example of the arbitrariness of medical billing in the United States. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported that the annual cost of family health insurance jumped to nearly $24,000 this year, the greatest increase in a decade. While insurance executives and employers may cite a plethora of reasons, one of the chief culprits is lack of oversight over the Wild West of healthcare prices.

My friend encountered a dramatic example of this last year after her 4-year-old daughter had the misfortune of suffering the same injury twice in the same day. The girl’s parents were getting her ready for school one morning when, as her hand was pulled through a shirt sleeve, she experienced severe pain. They took her to the children’s emergency department down the road from their home in the Bay Area, where she was diagnosed with “nursemaid’s elbow” or, more technically, a “radial head subluxation.” Common in young children, whose ligaments are looser than adults’, the partial dislocation is straightforward to diagnose and treat. A simple maneuver of the elbow put it back in place in seconds.

After coming home from school that afternoon, my friend’s daughter was playing with her babysitter when her elbow got out of place again. They went back to the same emergency department and went through the same steps with another doctor. My friend, who is fortunate enough to have good insurance and the means to pay her share, knew the bills wouldn’t be cheap. What she wasn’t expecting was such a stark illustration of the arbitrary nature of medical billing. While the bill for the first visit was $3,561, the second was $6,056. Same child, same hospital, same insurance, same diagnosis, same procedure, same day — and yet the price was different by not just a few dollars or even a few hundred dollars, but nearly double.

How do we make sense of this? How can a patient be charged such wildly different prices for the same treatment on the same day?

Emergency room billing consists of hospital fees and professional services fees. The hospital fees include a “facility fee” that is part of every emergency room visit and coded at one of five levels. Level 1 is the simplest — someone needing a prescription, for example — while Level 5 is the most complicated, for problems such as heart attacks and strokes that require significant hospital resources. And of course there can be additional hospital fees for X-rays, medications and the like, which weren’t necessary in the case of my friend’s daughter. The professional services fees are for the emergency physician and other providers such as radiologists. In this case, there were no fees for professionals other than the emergency room doctor. But the itemized charges showed the two visits were billed completely differently. The first was charged a Level 1 facility fee and a Level 3 professional fee. And the bill tacked on additional fees, including hospital and professional charges for taking care of the patient’s injured joint. The second visit, meanwhile, was charged a Level 2 facility fee and a Level 4 professional fee, both higher than that morning. But in contrast to the earlier visit, no other charges appeared.

Why was the same injury coded as more complex and expensive to treat the second time than the first? Why did the coding and billing company decide to charge for additional services for the first visit but not the second?

I know both of the physicians who treated my daughter’s friend; they work in the same group, use the same billing and coding company, and charge the same rates. So the different doctors don’t explain the discrepancy. In my practice, even treating physicians have no access to information about how billing for our services is determined.

My friend and I contacted the hospital’s billing department repeatedly, but they proved unable to provide any rational explanation.

Unfortunately, this isn’t new. About a decade ago, I published a series of studies showing how arbitrary medical billing can be. Hospitals charged fees ranging from $10 to $10,169 for a cholesterol test; $1,529 to $182,995 for an appendicitis hospitalization without complications; and $3,296 to $37,227 for a normal vaginal birth.

It goes on with more opinions...

Someone had a post a while back asking for books showing how people actually ate and survived in X times.  Here's one designed to answer that question, and it's currently free.

https://www.amazon.com/Prairie-Cookbook-Memories-Recipes-ebook/dp/B010ORBHQY/

I got the Paperwhite because a) it was a gift and b) I can read it in bright light.  Most of the time when I am trying to read outside the house, I am outdoors, and a tablet's screen is just not bright enough to do that without eating the battery fast.  But now it's been lost, and if I want a paperwhite I would have to buy a new or used one.  Meaning used, because the prices on new seem ridiculous.  The question is whether to replace it, or to load Kindle on this tablet.  I also don't know whether I would have to pay the $30 a month to hook the tablet to the internet to use Kindle, as I would to use Duolingo.

I pay my cell phone by the minute here, as there are no phone companies that reach into the mountains here.  Everyone uses Whatsapp for phone calls and, if the Internet is down, phones don't work.  When we go to the city, where my internet doesn't reach, I might buy $3 to $5 of minutes to use. 

Can you use Duolingo and Rosetta Stone on a Fire?

Yanking is a sign of impatience.

Okay, after watching a minute or two of this, I remembered binge-watching it with a bunch of her other videos.  So it's not new information.  It's information that got crowded out of my head when I needed it.  

I ran across a comment today that an Instant Pot Max (and only the Max) was tested by Rose Red and found safe for canning.  Instant Pots of various kinds are available here.  I have not specifically looked for the Max.  There's a service called Tiendamia that allows Amazon deliveries of a limited nature (as in, they track your lifetime dollar amounts and cut you off when they decide you've had enough) (as in, they allow in less than one percent of Amazon's variety).  Tiendamia right now is allowing orders of the Max.  I find this tempting, but I would like to see if I could buy it in cash locally (meaning in the city) first.

Edit:  Has anyone seen canning guidelines or instructions geared to the Instant Pot Max?

The risk of Amazon getting hacked and losing all these kindle books is very real.  Amazon has also been known to wipe out people's entire collections of Kindle books for one reason or another, such as an accusation of piracy, with no appeal, and ban them from Amazon.  There's a way to modify and then store Kindle books through the Calibre system, but I have not been able to make it work.  I have some thousands of Kindle books, mostly collected when offered for free, and thousands of non-Kindle books stored on my computer, which is sorely in need of a backup, along with uncounted hundreds on flash drives here and there. 

Somebody please explain tablets to me.  My Paperwhite is somewhere at the Florida house, unless it got packed and moved to my son's house, also in Florida.  If I can get the Calibre thing working, I hope to be able to read on a tablet I was convinced to buy for I think like fifty bucks when I bought my new phone in Florida some years ago...and have never really used.  It used to cost $30 a month for... I don't remember, and I couldn't do anything I wanted without paying the $30 a month, and I only even picked up the thing like once every three months, and can you imaging paying $90 for the privilege of one session of a free game or a free session of Duolingo that you could just as easily do on your laptop?  I had a great email address I thought I would lose if I stopped paying the $30, but no email address is worth $360 a year, year in year out.  So I stopped paying the $30.  And somehow I kept the email address?  I am not sure what changed when I stopped paying.  I liked reading on the Paperwhite, and the printed page is not as easy to read on actually any other screen.  But I can type on the tablet, since I bought a bluetooth keyboard that tucked into the cover of it.  This seems to make the tablet a mini laptop?  But there's no playing of something like Civ 6 on a tablet because I wouldn't be able to see what I was doing on that tiny screen.  I can go six or eight months without playing Civ, but when I get into it, I play for hours a day, days on end, and it's my favorite thing to do.  What ARE tablets really for, and what are they best at?  How are they supposed to augment the personal tech array, if you already have an eReader and a laptop?

Quince has a lot of pectin too.  I haven't found quince here yet, but I'm still looking.  

We used to make banana bread using persimmon instead of banana.  Such a lovely orange color, and nice to alternate slices on a platter.  Not something to do unless you have a tree-full of persimmons, of course.

I am laid up in bed with ice on my knee and arm from two fun little episodes with Bear this morning.  This afternoon we are taking H's itty bitty dog to a vet in Loja, the one she came from, because she was too quiet Sunday and has not eaten since early yesterday afternoon.  I also need to pay bills, meaning visiting the ATM in Loja, and buy canned cat food.

Oh, Miki, don't rush through the mourning.  I still tear up over my little Kismet, after all these years, and I only had him a few months.  Some become part of you.

Edit:  not suggesting you would rush...just don't let anyone tell you to brush it off