Ambergris

My kid went through two Vitamixes making chocolate shakes...

Oh, the $9 hen was a $7 hen this time.

Our standard gas, ecopais they call it, is up to $2.40 a gallon, having been down to $2.10 per gallon. Big difference. Diesel hovers between $1.70 and $1.75 per gallon. The trucks have to roll. I paid $3.80 at the market yesterday for a couple of pounds of small potatoes, half a dozen camote/sweet potatoes, half a head of small-garden broccoli, some plantains, a couple of soup carrots, a big zucchini for soup, and two bananas that we ate while waiting for the owner of the stall to come back from wherever she was. Yes, we go through a lot of soup vegetables here. Also paid $2 for a little over five pounds of market scrap beef for the puppy, some of which was human-grade but much of which was a little too interesting to be interesting. This morning, a $9 hen was delivered. Asked for it yesterday afternoon, but the meat-chicken lady in the village didn't have one ready and was in the middle of dealing with life, so she brought it right after 8 this morning. We could buy chicken more conveniently at the market, but I am advised the village lady's meat is likely cleaner/fresher. Also, I like to keep my dollars close to home. (The vegetable lady at the town's market is a village person.)

Puerto Rico declares flu epidemic as cases spike. 42 dead and more than 900 hospitalized since July Associated Press Thu, November 9, 2023 at 12:49 PM GMT-5 SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico health officials on Thursday declared an influenza epidemic . At least 25,900 cases have been reported since July, with 42 deaths and more than 900 hospitalizations on the island of 3.2 million people, Health Secretary Carlos Mellado said. Epidemiologist Melissa Marzán noted that officials have seen nearly six times more cases so far this year compared with the same period last year.Those who are 0 to 19 years old have been most affected, with more than 13,600 cases reported in that population, Mellado said. Health officials said there were plenty of vaccines, tests and treatments available on the island. A record 53,708 influenza cases were reported in 2015 in Puerto Rico.

I've been doing the closed captions for years. Being able to see what people are saying is really important.

Supper was sauteed chicken slice, camote (purple-skinned/orange-fleshed sweet potato, not candy-sweet), and vegetable soup with cheese in it. Lunch was fish, same sweet potato, cauliflower, avocado. Usually the soup is for lunch, but today was up-ended by fridge cleanout. Tea and coffee to drink. Snack was Greek yogurt with cocoa powder stirred in.

I'm sick.

Wow. Glad you got through that.

Welcome home! Getting ready for my god-child's baptism on Saturday!

I'm talking about the zucchini

They dehydrate better after you have frozen them, you know.

Hanging out to rest today. The new onions and herbs are in the ground and getting sprinklered. It's a good day to move the sprinkler around here and there. Yesterday scraped and cut (or watched H scrape and cut once she figured out what I was doing and decided the work was too taxing for me) and boiled a couple of pounds of ginger pieces for a couple of hours to tenderize them. Today will be adding sugar and cooking again to crystalize the pieces. Wish me luck. Last time this project turned out a gloppy, sticky mess. I pureed that candied ginger and still used it, but it was not what I had worked so hard to produce.

Disney is really aggressive about take-down notices for any video with its music.

We had someone send in a google maps photo of the chairman's house and a written demand names and addresses of all other employees. I was notified at a meeting that my name, address, home phone number, birth date, and other information had been provided pursuant to Chapter 160 as requested. The phone number is still technically mine, but is not used except for various records. I certainly don't answer it anymore. You'd think that violating the privacy of a person (especially a minor) in that manner, would be a violation of some law or other, and that such a violation would be actionable. The law enforcement officer who facilitated this violation should be retrained. Most likely, the persons providing the services in that office know about the privacy rules, ordinances, statutes, codes, and laws, and thus would be best able to articulate them in order to formulate an action. Something needs to be done. Otherwise you become a soft target. Doesn't the softest target become the repeated, favorite target? Also, do something about the jerks targeting you.

I have tried a few different pre-made dish and shop towels, and those are about the right size, all things considered. Some are much better touch-wise and absorbency-wise than others. How well does your flannel wash, bleach, and line-dry?

Most kidney and liver issues can be headed off or lessened by drinking more clean, unadulterated water. Except water poisoning. Even water in excess is bad for you.

Article: Transmission Nipah virus (NiV) can spread to people from: *Direct contact with infected animals, such as bats or pigs, or their body fluids (such as blood, urine or saliva) *Consuming food products that have been contaminated by body fluids of infected animals (such as palm sap or fruit contaminated by an infected bat) *Close contact with a person infected with NiV or their body fluids (including nasal or respiratory droplets, urine, or blood) In the first known NiV outbreak, people were probably infected through close contact with infected pigs. The NiV strain identified in that outbreak appeared to have been transmitted initially from bats to pigs, with subsequent spread within pig populations. Then people who worked closely with infected pigs began falling ill. No person-to-person transmission was reported in that outbreak. However, person-to-person spread of NiV is regularly reported in Bangladesh and India. This is most commonly seen in the families and caregivers of NiV-infected patients, and in healthcare settings. Transmission also occurs from exposure to food products that have been contaminated by infected animals, including consumption of raw date palm sap or fruit that has been contaminated with saliva or urine from infected bats. Some cases of NiV infection have also been reported among people who climb trees where bats often roost. +++++ So...if it comes here, wash your fruit, including dried fruit, even if you grew it yourself, watch out for palm sugar and the equivalent, whatever that turns out to be here, and be careful around animals and sick people. And hope the sick people are wearing masks so they don't sneeze nipah snot on you, on your groceries, on your kid's burger, or on the surface you are about to touch.

I know I am not the only person who got raised hair upon reading that headline. Nipah has a one in three kill ratio, but nobody knows much about dealing with it.

Indian authorities rush to contain a deadly Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala Rhea Mogul By Rhea Mogul, CNN / Stringer/Reuters — A state in southern India is taking measures to contain an outbreak of the Nipah virus after two people died from the rare and often deadly disease, shutting schools and testing hundreds to prevent its spread. Kerala’s chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the virus has been detected in the state’s Kozhikode district, urging residents to exercise caution and follow the health department’s safety guidelines. Two people have died from the virus, he said in a statement Wednesday, the state’s fourth outbreak since 2018. “We should not be afraid, but face this situation with caution,” Vijayan wrote on social media. Nipah is a zoonotic virus transmitted from animals to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). However, it can also be transmitted through contaminated food or directly between people. Infection with the virus can cause mild to severe disease, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Symptoms often begin with a headache and drowsiness but can quickly transform into a coma within a matter of days, the CDC says. It can also cause acute respiratory syndrome – where the lungs cannot get enough oxygen to the body – and fatal encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. There is no vaccine, and treatment is limited to supportive care. So far in Kerala, more than 700 people have been identified as close contacts and are being tested for the virus, the state’s health minister Veena George told reporters on Wednesday. Of those, 77 are considered “high risk,” she said, adding the group has been asked to remain at home and monitor their health. Authorities in Kozhikode have shut some schools in the district, its district collector said in a statement Wednesday. Meanwhile, seven villages have been declared “containment zones,” Reuters reported. Multiple outbreaks in Kerala Kerala experienced a deadly outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018, killing 17 people and causing widespread panic in the state. More than 230 people were tested during that time as authorities embarked on a rigid contact-tracing operation to contain its spread. Among the dead was a nurse who was treating patients at a hospital in Kozhikode. The following year, Kerala put more than 300 people under surveillance after a man was diagnosed with the virus. The state had another outbreak in 2021, claiming the life of a 12-year-old boy. Nipah virus was first identified during a 1998-1999 outbreak in Malaysia, where nearly 300 people were infected and more than 100 died, according to the CDC. More than a million pigs were euthanized to halt its spread. The virus was named after the village of Kampung Sungai Nipah in Malaysia, where pig farmers contracted the disease. During that outbreak, most human infections resulted from direct contact with sick pigs or their contaminated tissues, according to the WHO. There have been subsequent outbreaks in India and Bangladesh, with more than 600 reported human cases between 1998 and 2015, it added. Human-to-human transmission of the Nipah virus has also been reported. According to the WHO, between 2001 and 2008, around half of reported cases in Bangladesh were due to human-to-human transmission resulting from workers providing care to infected patients. The virus is on the WHO’s list of epidemic threats in need of urgent research and development.

Well made and vacuum sealed, it's good for at least three months, or until a week after you open it, assuming any lasts that long. If any does, I'd question whether it was well made. Most of the time, for us vacuum sealed meant in a ziplock bag, because that's what we had. Here's a riddle I never figured out. Fat with no meat in it can stay good. Meat without fat can stay good. Pemmican is completely lean meat mixed with a ton of purified fat, and it stays good (or as "good" as something as essentially nasty as pemmican ever gets). But fatty meat goes rancid. I'm sure someone has figured this out but, as I said, I never did.

You are going to find all kinds of opinions as to whether dehydrating ground meat is safe. It's called "gravel" if you want to look it up. Dehydrating shrimp is safe, but the best result I had was dehydrating the tiny canned shrimp. As much as good fresh or frozen shrimp costs, the stuff you get out of dehydrating it is really disappointing. Dehydrated, the little ones can add a lot to a camp meal. Dehydrating venison and beef is easy, and I have always done it with normally a lot of success. With venison, a little goes a long way, and cut it against the grain or you will be chewing forever. I tried a lot of marinades, since I try to minimize soy, and ended up with a dry pack of salt with some sugar and spices, which the meat juices liquefy pretty quickly. Massaging this in gets it distributed pretty well, but not as uniformly as a liquid marinade, and it's more intense than a liquid marinade. I compensate by cutting the beef a bit thicker, twice the thickness of a saltine cracker instead of one saltine thick, and along the grain, and by drying it to a harder stage. The result can have like a corned beef flavor, but doesn't have to. Most US store-bought pork has so much fat in the muscle that it goes rancid no matter how you try to dry it. Getting turkey at the holiday sales and drying that very lean breast meat while eating the dark meat fresh (or canning it) is a great move. You dry (slow-cook) poultry at a high salt level and/or high dryer temp, of course. Also, given the state of poultry packing houses, smell it constantly to check for off odors unless grew and slaughtered it yourself and are sure of the health and cleanliness of the meat. It's best to put an oven thermometer in your drying chamber, so you know you are keeping your food out of the "danger zone" of bacterial growth until you are sure your salt/sugar concentration and/or dryness is sufficient to block bacterial growth. If stuff is too salty to enjoy at the other end, you can simmer it to draw the salt out, and use the salty water to cook other things in. However, if you're hiking and camping, your taste will probably run to enjoying more salt than you like at the house because you're sweating out more.

I miss you, Arby

I never knew they didn't develop acidity on the counter, but it kind of makes sense. That is a treasure trove of recipe links.

I have a puppy. I have an angry cat. Neither can be allowed out at night. I have puddles EVERYWHERE.

Sourdough seems to have a mind of its own. Different colonies have different tastes, different temperature preferences, everything. Have you tried starting over?