Ambergris

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?

Note my emphasis--this is unrelated Malaria. A case of locally acquired malaria has been confirmed in Maryland, the state Department of Health said Friday. The person was briefly hospitalized and is recovering at home. The agency declined to give more details about the person except to say they live in the Washington, D.C., area. They did not have a history of recent travel outside the US or to other states where locally acquired malaria has been reported. Nine cases have been reported this summer in Florida and Texas, the first in the US in 20 years, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. David Blythe, director of the Maryland Department of Health’s Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Outbreak Response Bureau, said at a briefing Friday that the new case involves the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which can cause more severe illness than the strain in the Florida and Texas cases, P. vivax. EMPHASIS ADDED Marylanders who have unexplained fever or other malaria symptoms such as muscle aches, nausea, vomiting or diarrhea should check in with their health care provider, Blythe said. Malaria spreads through bites from the Anopheles mosquito. Most Americans who catch it do so overseas in areas where the disease is more common, such as in Africa. In the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, about 2,000 cases were reported annually in the US, mostly travel-related, the CDC says. Maryland has about 200 travel-related cases each year. “We have not seen a case in Maryland that was not related to travel in over 40 years,” Maryland Department of Health Secretary Laura Herrera Scott said in a news release. “We are taking this very seriously and will work with local and federal health officials to investigate this case.”

Maybe this will be the impetus for them (and you) to move together somewhere. Although maybe not to Central Asia.

In some places, feeding them is legally the same as owning them, and you can be held liable for what they do. Also for hoarding, if you have more than the local limit. I'm trying to work up a new budget. My plans are all on hold right now.

Nail polish remover removes superglue. Soak like it was Madge's Palmolive.

PM and I are going to an Italian restaurant with a reputation for lovely desserts to have a mutual "not exactly our birthdays" lunch with the big puppy. Little puppy might go with us or might stay with H's son. I always ate summer trombo when it was summer-squash sized.

Thank you. The day doesn't matter. Nobody actually knows what day I was born.

There are a lot of videos out now, including one by a youtube guy with a lot of videos I quite like, arguing that MSG is wholly harmless. People have quoted --not him, but people saying exactly the same thing, often in exactly the same words-- after making me dog-sick by sneaking it into my food to prove I would not react. I also get horrible stomach-aches from cherries, one of my favorite foods, and from other completely natural things that are generally regarded as safe. When I hear people argue that people like me are either reacting psychosomatically or have a political agenda, I want to put poison ivy in their salad and see how they like it. Because, like millions of other people, I would find it completely harmless, so I don't see why anyone in the world should be whining about getting to eat it without warning that it's in the food.

He might want to get better, and he might be ready to move on to what's next. I have a friend whose wife moved into hospice yesterday. Even if you've been on the outs with someone, and they've had some pretty rough times, and even when you've been expecting it, this is gut-twisting news. My heart aches for them, as I know your heart aches for your neighbors. Remember to take pictures of things like that before you clean them, so GS can see the results of his actions. Otherwise your statements could sound like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon: wahwah...wawahwawahh.

Thank you

I've had a really quiet day, which is what I wanted. No puddles all day, either (knock on wood). Both cats are giving me extra affection, of the "are we forgetting something, Mommy?" sort, but joke's on them...we are out of cat food and out of the kind of tuna that seems safe for the older cat, and the shopping trip was postponed to tomorrow.

I fought for two years and then wrote off over $40k just in personal property...not counting the roof, which was another story. And you wouldn't believe the shortcuts they started taking with the construction there at the end. I sincerely regret not getting a lawyer.

Caught puppy trotting by with something...peculiarly unmangled. Yay!

That part of the hill is too steep and rough and overgrown for me. Part of it is maybe a seventy degree angle. Or maybe it's just close to sixty degrees, because those angles would be all the same to me. The street below is a good three stories down, maybe more. What goes down is just gone. Housekeeper has tied some of his chew toys to trees to keep them in reach, but only one has not been removed (or destroyed) already. The tennis ball was destroyed (skinned and torn in half) in a few days.

I'm using a magnifying glass with my distance glasses and typing one-handed. My reading glasses, which are what--two months old? a month and a half? have disappeared. They were the last thing I took off before bed. I know because I went to bed early with my phone in my hand, talking to a friend, and put them on the chair/table beside the bed, then had to take my shoes away from the puppy and put those on the same bed, then put the phone on top of the shoes and worried about the glasses getting knocked off in the shuffle. Well, the shoes and phone were there this morning. Glasses, not. Housekeeper spent an hour and a half combing the house from one end to the other, including moving every item of furniture in the living room and emptying my purse and both backpacks, but --nada. Current theory is that the puppy took them, and they went down the hill like her toys tend to do. She's a baby, after all.

In older times, leprosy was an umbrella term for several things, including hidradenitis suppurativa (do NOT look this up--you will regret it) which to this day is only partly and/or barely controlled with the most complex medical regimens. It's hereditary, but at least isn't contagious. However, if it's uncontrolled, the victim carries any number of secondary infections that are contagious.

Speaking of which: Leprosy cases in central Florida account for nearly 20% of national cases. What to know Brandon Girod, Pensacola News Journal Updated Fri, July 28, 2023 at 9:10 AM GMT-5 Rising evidence is pointing to the possibility that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern U.S. with Florida being named among the top reported states. In a recently published research letter regarding emerging infectious diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that Florida is witnessing an increase in leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors and recommending that travel to Florida be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state. Leprosy, which is scientifically known as Hansen's disease, is a chronic infectious disease that primarily affects the skin and peripheral nervous system. Malaria in Florida: Though malaria cases are waning, you should still take precautions, Sarasota County says The number of reported leprosy cases across the country has doubled over the past decade, according to the CDC. Citing data from the National Hansen’s Disease Program, the CDC says there were 159 new cases reported in the U.S. in 2020. Nearly 70% of these new cases were reported in Florida, California, Louisiana, Hawaii, New York and Texas. Florida stands out in the report for two reasons: Central Florida alone accounted for nearly 20% of the total number of cases reported nationally and several new-case patients in central Florida demonstrated no clear evidence of zoonotic exposure or traditionally known risk factors.

Pulled a half a pot of soup out of the fridge and a couple of plates of leftovers out of the freezer, cut things up, combined them all, and put them to simmer. Now I'm watching the puppy and escorting her out the door to walk on the rain-wet ground...often. Today has been basically devoted to that. She has still puddled the ceramic twice. So long as she stays off the unsealed wooden floorboards in the bedrooms, we'll be ahead of the game. (Don't want to shut off the bedrooms because cats nap and hide in them.) I had thought this would be a flea-bath day, but it's a little chilly so far.

The Canadian Press Tue, July 18, 2023 at 7:13 p.m. ECT SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — A southwest Florida county has document a seventh case of malaria, state authorities said. The Florida Department of Health reported a new locally acquired case of malaria in Sarasota County during the week of July 9-15. That's in addition to five cases last month and one case in May. Sarasota County and Manatee County directly to the north have been under a mosquito-borne illness alert for nearly a month. The area is located on the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Tampa Bay.

If the material is particle board, no. That stuff is not durable and begins crumbling shortly after being moved.