I don’t know what happened there.
Vermont Winter
Crazy driving
Power outages
No water? No problem with all the snow
Out of this world
Pretty decent breakfast view
Not all trees can take it 
All this untainted snow to play in
Do you want to build a snowmaaaaaaan?
Yup, same one
Not just majestic; Maple majestic
Can't catch a fucking break from all the buying.
Marketing: lining your pockets while contributing nothing to the world. A weird mix of hedonism and nihilism.
Leveled & given its cap
It’s been attracting coyotes despite my cleaning it pretty well.
Setting stuff on fire
bringing humans together since 1,600,000 B.C.
Vaccum Duplo Domino Actuator
4 words you never thought you’d see together.
I unfortunately did not capture it in motion.
Chicken coop moved to our land
First the snow, then the mud, then we’re building a house. The chicken coop needed to be moved before all this. It’s weird to see it there.
It took only 1:30 hours to move it 6 miles, flatbed trailers and good friends are awesome.
240lbs of Apples
I’ve learned about another great imperial measure: the bushel!
You know you’re having fun when you use a pan as a spoon
The house smells so good
Canning
Nothing is wasted, the chickens looooove the by-product which is still full of yum-yums.
Cemetery
Ever since I saw it on the survey map, I’ve been curious to find this cemetery. It’s not on our land but right next to it.
It’s tricky to find as it doesn’t stand out much from the rest of the forest. Lots of graves from the early 1800s, cool stuff!
Soap boxes & soap
Soapmaking is Nicole’s project but she doesn’t post anything about it. As this settles into an acquired skill, it’s time to build some proper boxes.
A few two-bys
Watch your fingers, arms; pretty much any protuberance
Assembly required
Reminiscent of Breaking Bad
Curing
8 weeks curing time, I’ll post the soaps when they are done. We’ve been using them for a while now and they are my absolute favorite. They are made with our wax & honey, tallow from friends’ animals and sometimes goat milk. They last forever unlike the shit you buy in stores. Nicole is experimenting with a recipe that does not include coconut oil or olive oil, this way we’ll be able to source all ingredients locally.
Fun fact: soap is thought to have originated on sacrificial altars when rain mixed with ashes and fat made a suspicious substance someone decided to take a shower with. Sacrifices & dumb luck created one of the biggest advancement in chemistry. Maybe we could sacrifice our way to Mars?
Hunting
And the unusual places & times it takes you to.
This is the main field of our land at dusk, a great reward after hiking through rough terrain. I still find many new and interesting places in the forest.
Honey
All in all this has been a pretty weird bee season. Between the swarms, the bear attacks, the drone baby-boom and the lack of reserves; I lamented that no sweetness would be gained from the hard work.
To my good surprise however, the bees finally adjusted to all this and got in a decent amount of honey. It probably helps that they already kicked out all these freeloader males.
Lot of activity but they remained super friendly throughout my extraction of a few frames
I only pulled 6 frames, I want to leave enough food behind for the cold days ahead
The cells are packed!
The frames gotten from the Top Bar Hive are all used, the wax is saved for soap & lip balm making.
Sticky business
While the frams of the Langstroth Hive are spun in an extractor in an effort to save the wax (saving bees the costly work of making more wax if you’re only interested in the honey).
As I said, not a great year but happy to have gotten some loot
Looks great, tastes great
If the public school would stop sending scammy crap through my kid that'd be lovely
Nothing says “fuck you” like the use of the imperative to imply the inability to opt-out.
Whore out your friend & family’s information in exchange for garbage!
Hurray! More plastic for your trash!
Win a playground that’ll make you want to stab your eyes to replace the one the school already has.
Use kids to guilt trip friends & family into buying shit they don’t need to make a company profit; a side-effect of which will be raising pennies on the dollar for the school (but who knows that information is nowhere to be found).
Make sure to read the “Tips for successful selling” so you can be a great sales drone, this is how you do fundraising in la la land.
Grab the deluxe package & teeth whitening from a company in Minnesota, that’s the school picture spirit!
Asking concerned parents to chip in, hiring a local photographer to take pictures of all the kids. Nah.
The marketing dickweeds in action
Making every effort to not lie while leaving enough ambiguity for your brain to read what it wants to read. But maybe what irritates me more is their implying that healthy food doesn’t taste delicious initially.
DID YOU KNOW? When combined with actual healthy food, Skippy can help it not taste like shit while associating itself with its health benefits.
Cool Duplo Project #16 – Frame of reference swapping
Gotta mess with their minds early.
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Mysqldump only certain fields of a table
The trick here is to not use mysqldump
[code]mysql -u root -p -e “SELECT `field_01` AS ‘new_name_01`,`field_02` as `new_name_02` FROM database.schema” -X > /tmp/output.xml[/code]
And to load it back into the new table which exists and has the fields new_name_01 & new_name_02:
[code]mysql -u root -p –local-infile -e “LOAD XML LOCAL INFILE ‘/tmp/output.xml’ INTO TABLE database.new_schema ROWS IDENTIFIED BY ‘<row>’;”[/code]
Doomsday Preppers caters to opposing audiences
X-Factor: your ability to pack explosives into dead racoons will be a valuable asset when the city folks come steal your shit.