Bring on the Styrofoam Containers

Last night I was in prayer, and I spent some time thinking about the negative effects popular culture has on me. I thought about the things I still need to clean out of my life.

I thought about the nazirites. I don’t know much about the concept, but in the Old Testament, a nazirite was a person who was dedicated to God. They had to obey conditions going beyond the Jewish law. Samson was a nazirite from birth. He was not allowed to drink wine, let a razor touch his head, or touch a dead body.

It seems like Spirit-led Christians have to be a lot like nazirites. You can’t listen to rock or let your kids have a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD like everyone else, but on the other hand, you get to know God personally, and he gives you things like the ability to heal, prophecy, and the ability to work miracles. He warns you about things that take other people by surprise.

I thought about the verse in the 91st psalm, which says, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.”

When I think about this verse, I am glad to know I’m protected, but I also think about the other people–the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants–who are not.

In God’s eyes, “the wicked” can be defined this way: “those who have rejected Jesus Christ.” That’s all it takes. You can feed the sick. You can give a stranger a kidney. You can give to the poor. That’s not what God looks at. It doesn’t help. What matters is whether you accepted the sacrifice. It’s not about what you’ve done, because the evil you do is expunged from your record when you receive salvation.

There are reformed pedophiles in heaven, but Mother Teresa, who spoke against faith, may be in hell.

I am not a mushy person who cries at movies, but last night it disturbed me to think of the problems unbelievers are headed for. I felt the sorrow of the Holy Spirit. For a minute, I held my head in my hands and thought about the future of those who won’t listen.

It can’t be repeated often enough: hell is not for “bad” people. It’s for people who don’t listen.

Heaven is for bad people. Jesus was crucified for bad people. If people had been good, he would have had no reason to be crucified, so he would not have done it.

Heaven is for bad people because there is no other kind of person.

If it weren’t for bad people, heaven would be empty except for God, the angels, and people who either died before they could sin or had some issue that made it unreasonable to require them to accept Jesus. It would be full of aborted children, the retarded, and people who lived on secluded islands or in rain forests.

There are a lot of Christians out there who are in danger of hell. I’ve known plenty of Christians who lived in fornication even while serving at church. They thought it was okay to live with people they weren’t married to. I’ve known Christians who used drugs. The world is full of Christians who participate in other religions, such as astrology, fortune-telling, and yoga. I wonder what will happen to them.

I saw a testimony from a Christian who claimed she had visited hell. She said God had told her she was going there because she lived with her boyfriend. How many Christians would believe that today?

There was a young lady who used to sing at my last church. She was single. She had a baby. Okay; I could accept that. People who choose to fornicate repent, as I did. Sometimes people have children in marriage, and then they end up single. No problem. And it was good that she didn’t have her baby killed.

Then another baby popped up. I thought maybe she had slipped. Then she came in with a third one. I was only there for three years, so she was maintaining a high level of production. I can’t even guess how many kids she has now.

The pastor had no problem with putting her on the stage as a corrupting example, because he liked her voice. She must have thought she was doing fine, but she was continuing in a major sin, knowingly and without coercion, without repentance.

God forgives just about anything, but you’re supposed to repent. You can’t go to Jesus and say, “I plan to visit a prostitute this evening, so could you go ahead and forgive me now?”

We’re so terrified of “judging” that many of us have decided anything goes. That’s not how it works. For example, you can be a homosexual and be forgiven, but you can’t get saved, marry another homosexual, and then expect God to tolerate it.

Wrong is still wrong.

I keep seeing people on Youtube, talking about their recent rapture dreams. It’s shocking how many people are dreaming of the rapture. It happened to me in 2016, and now there is a wave of others who have had the same experience.

When I think of the way technology is destroying free will, the astounding filthiness of modern culture, and the tide of rapture dreams, I feel that time is very, very short, and only a small percentage of Christians are ready.

Missing the rapture is a big deal. You will have to live on a planet that isn’t protected by the prayers and presence of God’s children. The terrible things God keeps away from the world today will be released. Plagues that used to go away will rage without hindrance. Meteors that used to miss the earth will land here. Storms that would have missed major cities will strike them and rest over them. And if you profess faith in God, you will be executed.

This is all bad, but there is more to think about. If you’re not fit for the rapture, how can you think you’re fit to be saved when you die? It doesn’t make sense.

Many preachers teach people that all you have to do to be saved is to raise your hand and ask, and Christians like to believe it, because it means they can go on enjoying sin. It’s a very dangerous teaching. You’re supposed to change. The word says you’re supposed to become the righteousness of God. Should you really expect God to reach down into your bedroom and lift you off the earth while you’re lying in bed with your girlfriend, smoking a joint, and playing a violent video game?

We should be looking for ways to do a lot for God, but instead, we keep trying to find out how little we can do and still avoid hell.

Jesus said very clearly that we would not see him coming. He said he would return at a time when we did not expect it. That means we will not know when it’s coming. Any human being who tries to pin down the date will be wrong. But he did tell us there would be signs to tell us when the end was near. We keep seeing those signs.

What does “near” mean to God? To me, it would mean a year or less, but I’m just a man. For all I know, to God, “near” means a century from now. But with the end of free will approaching quickly, it’s hard to believe we will be waiting that long.

We shouldn’t be trying to guess the date so we can sin until the previous week. We should live as though he were coming this afternoon. Living for God is always the right thing to do. You shouldn’t have to be motivated by a crisis.

It’s a weird time to be alive. One way or the other, it will be a relief to see things reach a resolution.

I have to go get a turkey and a ham now. Friends are coming for Thanksgiving. I don’t want to cook at all, but I can’t stand the thought of a lame turkey with bones in it, so I’m going to bone and stuff a bird. My friends have agreed to supply the rest of the food. They’re planning to go to Cracker Barrel for it. I’m all for that.

There was a time when I would have rebelled at the thought of eating restaurant food on a holiday, but those days are done. I am somewhat tempted to abandon the turkey project, if the truth be told. Even without side dishes, the turkey will be a two-day effort.

I’m so tired of cooking and cleaning, I don’t look forward to the food.

I think we make too much of holidays. I know I’ve written about that before. People go into debt on Christmas. That’s ridiculous. We celebrate the birth of the one who told us not to borrow…by borrowing. Holiday meals are also over the top.

When my dad was alive, I had to cook a ton of stuff. He insisted on cranberry sauce, which is sad and inferior compared to relish, and he demanded oyster dressing, which is, quite simply, disgusting. I always made sauce, relish, oyster dressing, and normal dressing. Then there were the other dishes. Yams, potatoes, beans, two kinds of pie…it’s just too much.

I can’t understand why anyone would put nasty canned oysters in dressing. Why not toss a few slugs in there while you’re at it?

Maybe it tastes great, but I can’t get past the smell.

I have been asked to fix a sweet potato pie. I have no idea how to do that. I figure it’s a pumpkin pie made with yams. I think I’ll just crank out two pecan pies instead. They’re much better, and the preparation time is only a few minutes.

Someone asked me to make a sweet potato pie a few years back. They had invited me and my dad to Thanksgiving dinner, so I was happy to do it. I told them I didn’t know how to do it, but they were okay with that. I substituted yams in a pumpkin pie recipe, and everyone was happy.

Here’s something you need to know, if you can’t cook. When you know a good cook, and you want them to fix something for you, you do NOT ask for something they’ve never cooked. They’ll just open a cookbook and use someone else’s bad recipe. Being a good cook doesn’t mean you can cook anything anyone wants, on demand. It means you can cook certain things you’re familiar with.

I knew a professional chef who collected cookbooks. She was willing to cook anything on a one-off basis. It generally did not work well. It all depended on which recipe she used. She didn’t write recipes, so when she needed a dish, she just cracked a book. Most cookbooks are bad. When she happened, by chance, to find a good recipe, she did okay, but she couldn’t hit the gong consistently.

Make me work out of cookbooks, and you will get similar results.

The sweet potato pie I made was not good. It was sort of okay.

A good cook isn’t someone who can take a cookbook, follow it precisely, and make good food. A good cook writes or improves recipes. You can also fake being a good cook by collecting proven recipes.

I look forward to seeing my friends. That will be great. The food, I could not care less about. When I think of big meals, I think of dirty dishes and trips to the dump. I picture myself in the kitchen, alone, at 10 p.m., with a pot in one hand and a brush in the other.

The best holiday meal, to avoid hard work, is prime rib. You only use two things: a roasting pan and a serving platter. You salt and season the meat, roast it at 200° until it’s around 95° inside, remove the foil, crank the heat to 500°, and brown it. Done. Cleaning up after prime rib is easy. Of course, many people I know will not eat properly cooked beef, so prime rib can be a problem.

Women, especially, tend to reject beef unless you ruin it by serving it well done. When I used to give my dad prime rib, I had to put his perfectly prepared serving in the microwave and ruin it first. If you only eat beef well done, you might as well buy the cheap stuff, because you have the palate of a terrier.

I don’t care much about food any more. I don’t know anyone who can cook well enough to make me happy. I don’t know of any restaurant that prepares food that compares to my own. I am tired of doing dishes and cleaning the stove. It’s hard to get excited about a turkey.

Today I’m roasting a chicken because I could not think of anything else I wanted badly enough to work on. Throw it in the oven with seasonings and vegetables, take it out three hours later…done. Good enough.

We should really abolish mandatory holiday meals. It’s so much better when you can share a meal whenever you want, just because you want to. Making giant holiday meals and splurging on Christmas gifts is like going to homeless shelters to feed people on Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you’ve been a jerk all year, go ahead and ruin your holiday, because you deserve it, but we should be charitable all year long.

I wonder how people who run homeless shelters feel about folks who drop by to hand out food on holidays. I can guess. They resent them for not showing up the other 364 days of the year. It’s like going to church on Easter and Christmas to make up for backsliding. You just make the volunteers mad and jam up the parking lot. And those awful hats. No one can see around them.

Okay, okay. I will be grateful. I have wonderful friends. I have a beautiful house in which to host the meal. I can afford good food. I will work on my attitude. I really will.

I have to get up. The turkey and ham aren’t going to buy themselves.

Coercion Results in Welding Table Purchase

It seems like the exciting news never stops. I have made a decision regarding buying a welding table.

Why am I buying a table at all? I still haven’t finished painting the grinder pedestal I welded together. A fine fabricator I turned out to be. I keep putting things off.

The finish on the top is going to have to be sanded and repainted at least one more time. I also need to enlarge or replace a couple of holes for the bolts that hold the grinder on. I put them in the wrong places.

I really will finish the pedestal. I could use it right now (after using the drill twice). I just want it to look a little better.

Anyway, I had a couple of table ideas in mind. One was to build my own table, which would be somewhat challenging…without a welding table. Another was to buy a Fabblock table from Weldtables.com and assemble it myself. The Fabblock I wanted, plus legs, runs $800 plus shipping. Ow.

There was a third alternative, but my opportunity to try it was temporary, and I let it slip by. Now I have another opportunity, so I’m pouncing.

Northern Tool sells Klutch tools. I think it’s their house brand. They have a welding table that usually sells for almost $400. For some inexplicable reason, they put it on sale for $179. I noticed it a while back. Then, while I was fighting temptation, they took it away! Fiends!

This is a very nice table. The top is 4mm thick, which means it’s around 1/6 of an inch. It has 16mm holes all over it. It comes with a bunch of clamps and fixturing tools. You can open the box, put it together, and start welding without buying a single clamp.

People say the top is generally very flat, but you may get a lemon with a 1/16″ crown or dip. I think it’s worth the risk. It might be possible to improve a warped table, and in any case, it shouldn’t be hard to shim workpieces and get them flat. A 1/16″ bend is not hard to compensate for.

Is it the table of my dreams? No, but it’s very cheap and very good, and if I move to Tennessee, it will be a lot easier to move than a Fabblock. If Northern Tool kills the sale price again, I should actually be able to sell it locally for more than I paid. Then I can buy a Fabblock when I’m firmly situated.

I can use this table to build a bigger table, if I want. That may actually be the best move. My milling machine is about to be returned to me, so preparing slats for a shopmade table will be easy.

Northern Tool made it impossible to say no. They brought the low price back, and then they sent me an email saying they would give me a $10 gift card for ordering online (code 268178). That brings the price to $169 plus tax. The other day I spent $180 on a lame restaurant meal. How can I say no to a welding table that costs $11 less?

Strong Hand Tools makes wonderful [Chinese] stuff, and their version of the Klutch table costs about $430. Strong Hand is actually kind of disturbing, because it’s one of those companies that show us the future. Their products are Chinese, but the quality is really good. I have their version of the famous Bessey clamp, and it looks like an improvement to me.

I can’t wait to abandon my Harbor Freight table. For the money, it is a stellar tool, but when you consider what they cost, that’s faint praise. It’s wobbly, it’s not flat, and it’s small. I may keep it for use as a portable, which is the purpose it’s made for. I do not plan to weld on it in my shop unless I have no choice.

Now I need to get wheels for the new table. Once that’s done, I’ll be sitting pretty.

Speaking of Chinese, I finally have a good source of Chinese food. The only local place I have tried was a disaster. It was hot and dirty, and the proprietress kept screaming at the cook in Chinese. Their kung pao chicken was pretty bad, and instead of cooking the peanuts in sauce, they just dumped dry raw peanuts on top of the food.

Small towns are known for terrible Chinese, as is Miami. My area had only one decent place, and they tore it down to build something or other.

I know good Chinese food. When I was a student at Columbia University, I had access to very good Szechuan places. For example, I used to eat at the Hunan Balcony on upper Broadway. I also know bad Chinese food. The oil smells rancid. The meat always seems to be nearly spoiled. The smell when the kitchen door opens is scary. All the sauce is basically duck sauce. The seasonings are off.

I found myself a recipe for kung pao chicken, over at Epicurious. It’s from a book by a lady named Kuan. I used Epicurious because I’m not a Cook’s Illustrated subscriber any more, and I hate Cooks.com and the Food Network’s revolting recipes. When I think about the Food Network, I always think about Bobby Flay’s inept 325° prime rib recipe. Don’t buy a rib roast and cook it at 325°. Just buy some liquid rubber, pour it in a roast-shaped mold, and let it cure for several days. Same result.

The recipe called for a couple of weird items. It called for black vinegar and hoisin sauce. I went to an Asian grocery to pick up the vinegar. I told the girl there the local Chinese food was heinous. She said it wasn’t Americanized. I can understand why she would stand up for her pals, but no, it has nothing to do with being Americanized. Bad food which is authentic is still bad food.

I can’t tell you what authentic Chinese food tastes like, and I’m not sure I want to find out, because authentic Mexican food is garbage compared to American Mexican food. I can tell when a person is a bad cook, however, regardless of the cuisine.

She sold me a big bottle of black vinegar for $4. I would say it tastes like malt vinegar that has been strained through dirt. I don’t like it. I suspect her brand is really cheap.

I got my hoisin sauce at a supermarket. They had several brands. I don’t like buying prepackaged sauces, but in order to make hoisin sauce, you have to ferment soybeans. Not going to happen. Also, let’s face it: Chinese cuisine standards are pretty weak. I have zero doubt that I have never had a Chinese meal that wasn’t made with stuff from bottles and cans.

Making the dish was not easy. It did not require skill, but there were a lot of ingredients, and the recipe was confusing. Basically, you marinate chicken, prepare sauce ingredients in another bowl, fry the chicken, throw the sauce in, throw in a few more ingredients, and call it good.

The recipe said to put corn starch in the chicken marinade. I am not a Chinese chef, but I’m not an idiot, either, and I don’t see how this can work. If you put starch on meat and then throw it in a hot pan, what happens? The starch burns instantly and sticks to the pan. This is what happened to me, and it was not a surprise. I ended up with a layer of burned stuff on my skillet.

I don’t have a wok. I don’t even have a burner that will work with a wok. I used a 14″ stainless skillet. I don’t think the food really fried all that much, because I don’t have a way to provide that much heat, but here’s the thing: the texture and so on were exactly like what I’ve experienced at good Chinese restaurants, so if I’m doing it wrong with my skillet, they’re also doing it wrong with their fancy woks, and it doesn’t matter at all.

The recipe had virtually no vegetables in it, so I added diced bell peppers, both red and green. So much for authenticity.

I also tripled the sauce recipe. People who commented over at Epicurious said the recipe was extremely dry, so I took their advice and multiplied by three.

The result was very nice, but there was a dirt aftertaste I did not like. I considered the hoisin sauce and the dirt-tasting black vinegar, and I chose the most likely culprit.

Yesterday I made the dish again. I made a lot of changes. No corn starch in the marinade. I halved the black vinegar and made up the difference with balsamic. I cut the number of chiles in half. I also added a can of baby corn, because I like baby corn.

I figure I can add whatever I want to the dish. Here’s a known fact: all spice Chinese chicken dishes taste nearly alike. Kung pao has peanuts. Ta chien has baby corn. Orange chicken has citrus peels. Other than little differences like these, they’re pretty similar. I like baby corn, and I think it belongs in kung pao chicken, along with tasty bell peppers. So there. I would have put little Asian mushrooms in it if I had been able to find them. I think water chestnuts would also be good.

How was the food? Amazing. Best “Chinese” food I’ve ever had, hands-down. There was still a slight dirt taste from the awful black vinegar, which I plan to eliminate next time by blending malt and cider vinegars, but other than that, it could not have been better. I especially liked the way the tiny bits of fresh ginger exploded in citrusy flavors when I bit down on them.

There was too much starch in the sauce. The recipe called for an obscene amount, which I knew was wrong, but I gave the author the benefit of the doubt. The sauce was clumpy and didn’t flow well. Next time, I’ll use half as much, if that.

The recipe calls for one pound of chicken and supposedly feeds 4 people. I am totally serious. I used two pounds, and I plan to get a total of three dinners out of it.

Here is what I learned: professional Chinese chefs are not very good. They must not be putting their hearts into what they do. No surprise. Anyone who has smelled the rear of a typical Chinese joint knows they’re not doing everything they should.

I can’t cook any Chinese dish except this one, and I’ve only cooked it twice, and my recipe still needs work, yet my version blows the real thing away. That’s a scathing indictment of restaurant chefs.

If I decide to learn how to cook anything else, it will be pan-fried dumplings. I can’t think of any other Chinese dishes I like enough to learn how to cook.

I can’t understand why professional cooks are so bad. It’s not just Chinese cooks. It’s nearly universal. It’s like cooking school fundamentally does not work.

I don’t feel like buying a wok or a propane burner, because my food comes out nearly the same as wok-cooked food. I don’t know if stir-frying is really frying, except when there are only a few little things in the wok. Adding a lot of food pretty much moves you into the simmering arena.

What a beautiful future I see stretching out before me. Myself, seated at a wonderful welding table, consuming the best Chinese food in North America. It’s hard to imagine how things could get better, unless I moved a couch into the shop.

Now there’s an idea.

More

I went and got the table. The box was very difficult to get in the car. The weight is only 73 pounds, but it hangs way out there when you’re trying to wrestle with it, and the Northern Tool cart kept trying to scoot around the parking lot while I maneuvered the box.

I thought I felt something going funny in my back, so I slowed down and tried to use common sense. I hate that. Prayed in the car on the way home, and my back seems okay.

I can’t tell you whether it’s a good table until I use it, but things look okay right now.

The top is not far from 3/16″ steel, which is very good for a cheap table. It’s also nearly flat. It looks like it has a 1/32″ crown in the middle. It’s hard to get upset about that. I doubt I’ve ever welded anything that warped less than 1/32″.

The legs have a funny rectangular brace that goes around them. It’s held on by friction, which is not good. The frame has little hooks which fit in holes on the legs and pinch them. I figure I can stabilize it by drilling holes and adding some screws.

The legs have M10x1.5 threaded holes for the feet. I am looking around for casters that will screw into those holes. The table is light enough to pick up and move, but casters would be better.

I can tell it’s going to fit well in my shop, because I’m already using it to hold things I should put away instead.

The square inchage is 864, which is considerably better than the Harbor Freight table, which comes in at just under 600. Also, because the table has round holes instead of long slots, I should not have any problems with objects falling through it. That was always a concern with the other table.

If you follow the directions, the table takes an hour to assemble. If you just guess, you can do it in about 15 minutes.

I have not tried the clamps yet, but they must work, because people are not howling about them all over the web.

I sprayed it down with lanolin and mineral spirits. I want to keep the top shiny and silvery for as long as I can.

Not much to complain about here. I finally have enough tools to weld relatively well. Now all I need is skill.

This is Why People Move to Tennessee

The Cone of Certain Death is narrowing, and I am sorry to say it’s narrowing around me.

Originally, Dorian was forecast to hit the coast to my east and then move toward me. Then the forecast path took a huge veer to the south, putting the center of the cone over Boca Raton, more or less. This was great news for me, because it gave the storm a long time to poop out over dry land before getting to me. Now they’ve decided it will still travel a long way over dry land, but they insist it will still have 75-mph maximum winds when it’s maybe 30 miles to my east. That’s just barely a hurricane, but it counts.

Wunderground.com is predicting maximum sustained winds of 40 to 60 mph here, for a few hours. I disagree, for reasons I will put forth below.

In prayer, I get very strong faith for no tropical-storm-force winds at either of my residential properties, but just in case, I have pulled out the big guns: Hillshire Farms smoked beef sausage.

I didn’t want to resort to this, but my hand was forced.

I have a lot of propane and butane, and I expect to have refrigeration no matter what happens. That means I’ll be able to grill. The truth is that I grill most hot meals now; I’m very spoiled by the lack of kitchen cleaning. I prefer the grill to the appliances. If I lose power and can’t rely on my electric stove and oven, I’ll go on with life as it is now, blasting everything with propane.

A couple of days ago, there was very little bottled water available around here. I just went to Publix (major grocery chain) and found pallets of purified water, so I got three cases. That brings me up to 5+, and I’m also going to fill a cooler with clean water on Tuesday night, if the forecast doesn’t look cheery.

They had the smoked sausages on sale for half price, so I snapped those up. It was probably a stupid thing to do, since grocery stores will be open next week no matter what, but it made me feel proactive and manly.

I’ve soured on hot dogs. They’re very small, and they don’t taste that great. Smoked sausages and brats are a lot better.

I got myself a wire for the generator, along with a plug and receptacle. The little 30-amp stuff sold out 15 minutes after Dorian was named, but I am a smart guy with a lot of stuff in his garage, so I didn’t need any of that. I can use one of my welder adapters to hook the generator up to a homemade 50-amp cord, and that will allow me to put the generator outside the workshop.

I’m not assembling the cord yet. I don’t think I’m going to need it, and I would like to return the parts to Lowe’s. I’m stuck with the wire, because they don’t accept wire returns. Maybe I’ll use it for something in the workshop. I still need to set up one more 20-amp socket.

I got myself 6 gallons of socialist ethanol gasoline. The station that sells real gas was out, of course, so I couldn’t buy it for my outdoor power tools. I could have gotten 11 gallons of toxic commie gas, but I didn’t want the hassle of trying to put it in my car’s tank after the storm misses us. I figure I can grab some more if things start to look bad.

While I was at Lowe’s, I met the realtor who sold my dad this house. He was buying romex, so I figured he was rigging up a generator. No, he is building a new workshop. His wife took over his existing shop. He talked about how great my property is and how he hadn’t seen anything else like it. He says the value is going up. I hope so.

He isn’t worried at all about the storm. He thinks Irma wiped out most of the loose trees, and like me, he lacks confidence in Dorian’s ability to stay strong after 200 miles of travel over land.

One nice thing about Dorian is that it’s very small. It may look big on satellite photos, but almost all of what you’re seeing is peripheral clouds that don’t amount to squat. The actual hurricane appears to be less than 10 miles wide. That means that if the eye is over 5 miles away, your winds are below 75 mph. Move out to 20 miles, and they’re much lower.

They say the storm will get bigger, but it’s not going to be a large storm. If it doubles in size, it will still only be 20 miles across, so you will have to be within maybe 25 miles of the eye to get whacked. This means most people in the dreaded cone aren’t going to have any problems at all.

If you watch the computer animations, you will see that Dorian isn’t expected to grow. Journalists say it is, but they always get it wrong. It may well be that the pack of weak, irrelevant clouds around it will grow in diameter, but that stuff is all horse manure. There is very little wind in it.

Journalists say the storm will grow. Guess where their information comes from? The same computer models I’m looking at, and those models say it’s going to stay small.

A storm under 20 miles across has to be pretty accurate to hit you with any real power.

Andrew was a murderous storm with winds not far below 200 mph, but it barely covered the lower half of Dade County. It was not big at all. People in Hollywood, a few miles north of the county line, just got a stiff breeze. Dorian is small and also much weaker than Andrew.

The GFS and ECMWF models are predicting something like 25 knots at my house. Even the places where it is expected to be strongest at this latitude are predicted to get 29 and 33 knots, tops.

Things are looking good. I believe God has told me my properties will be fine, and even if I’m wrong, this is a tiny, weak storm which is expected to miss me.

And I have smoked sausages.

If it quits raining, I will probably go out and confirm that my generator is working. That will be my 15 minutes of work for the day.

I see I forgot to write about my generator’s reanimation.

This generator had more than one problem, and that, coupled with my lack of knowledge, made it hard to diagnose. At first, it had a carb clogged by socialist gasoline full of environment-damaging ethanol. It also had gas in the crankcase. This was caused by the design of the machine, or, rather, by my failure to take heed of it. It has a fuel tank situated above the carb, and gravity is always pushing the gas down toward the engine. There is a valve that allows you to shut off the fuel supply, and if you don’t use it, gas can push past the carb’s float needle and into the crankcase.

I am used to modern engines that don’t flood their crankcases with oil, so I didn’t shut off the fuel petcock. Now I know better.

The original carb was also badly cast and machined, so it was hard to seal.

While I was working on the machine, and before I knew there was gas in the oil, I flooded everything by cranking the engine for long periods with a drill. That made the engine less likely to start.

On top of all this, I worked on the engine with the air filter removed. It would be torture to install and remove it 50 times during a repair job. Removing the air filter won’t keep the engine from starting, but I found out it will make it run lean so you can’t operate it with the choke off. If you do this for long periods, the excess fuel can thin the oil so much you get internal damage.

The first carb was a lemon and also full of ethanol crud. The second carb was probably fine until I worked on it. The third carb had no problems, but by the time I understood what was happening, there was gas and fuel in places where they were not supposed to be.

I finally got the engine running last night, and after it died a few times, I learned that I needed to put the air filter on it in order to make it run correctly. As far as I know, it’s fine now.

Using the drill to crank the engine was a stroke of genius. I plan to modify the generator so I can do this without removing the pull cord apparatus. I may just drill a hole in the apparatus cover, large enough to admit a socket and an extension, which would be attached to the drill.

Here is help for people with Honda-clone engines like mine.

1. Do not use ethanol gas.

2. If you use ethanol gas, use Biobor EB to treat it. Sta-bil does not really work.

3. Do not leave any gas in the generator if you’re going to let it sit for more than three weeks. Run it dry, but don’t stop there. Run a little pure Sea Foam through it, or take it apart and clean it with carb cleaner, including inside all the tiny fuel passages, or do whatever else you have to do to keep it clear. Running it dry, all by itself, will not necessarily prevent varnish from forming. I kid you not.

4. If your engine gets clogged, buy a Chinese carb on Ebay and replace it. They’re very cheap, and they’re generally exactly the same as OEM carbs.

5. If you have a gravity-feed generator, put a fuel filter in the fuel line. It’s very simple. It’s amazing that the manufacturers don’t do this.

6. If you have to work on the engine, remove the cover for the pull cord and crank the engine with a drill and socket.

7. If everything looks good, but the engine won’t start, pull the low-oil sensor wire. It’s on the side of the engine near the oil cap. These sensors screw up and give false readings.

8. If you leave your fuel valve open by mistake, check your oil. If it has gas in it, you need to change it before running the engine.

9. Your local car parts store won’t take oil with gas in it, so buy a galvanized bucket and use it to burn the oil outdoors. I didn’t tell you this.

10. Once you get the engine running, install the air filter before evaluating the speed and mixture and so on. The filter affects these things.

You now owe me more than you can ever repay. Good luck.

My Help Cometh from the Lord, Which Made Heaven and Earth

It looks like my guests for this weekend are postponing. They have some work to do around the house, and they have a guy coming over. I can’t complain. Having overnight guests three weeks in a row throws off my routine.

Sensing that things are slowing down, I spent the morning looking at Tennessee properties on the web.

It looks like buying in Tennessee will be more complicated than buying in Ocala. The population density is lower, so there are fewer properties and sales. That means it’s harder to put a value on a piece of land before you buy it.

I’ve been using real estate websites, obviously. Some of them assign value estimates to properties. It’s alarming when a property I like has a price of x and an estimated value of x/4.

Nobody wants to end up like Mr. Douglas. Remember him? He and his wife bought a farm in Hooterville, which is a town in a state bordering Tennessee. Their realtor, Mr. Haney, assured them they were getting a great deal on what turned out to be the old Haney place. Then they found out they were getting a lot less than they bargained for.

One of my favorite Youtube evangelists, Tom Fischer, made a sudden move from South Florida to Tennessee. One month, he was talking about his arrival in South Florida, and it seemed like he would stay there. I thought he had made a huge mistake. The next month, he was wandering around eastern Tennessee. While he was there, someone gave him a piece of hillside property, and he said he was planning to build on it.

The other day, I saw a new video in which Tom said his lot had turned out to be unsuitable for construction (hence the gift, one surmises). That’s not surprising, but I was startled when he said the property was in Townsend, Tennessee. That’s the area I’m excited about.

Coincidence? Probably not. God is moving Christians to that area.

Sometimes I start to worry that I’ve waited too long to look for a place. Property values are going up in eastern Tennessee. God is on my side, though, and if he told me I’m going to have a nice Tennessee home, then I’ll have it. No one can call him a liar and get away with it around me.

This week I have gained a deeper sense of the importance of knowing God. This is something Christians don’t emphasize enough. Jews and Muslims don’t emphasize it at all. They consider God very distant. I know God isn’t distant. I communicate with the Holy Spirit every day, and Jesus visited me twice. Distance is for limited people. God can treat every Christian like an only child. He isn’t busy.

Christians are taught that God is their father, and we are told to ask him for things, but what kind of child asks his father for things yet doesn’t socialize with him? The purpose of creation was reproduction; God wanted children. If you have children, obviously, you want to spend time with them so you can enjoy each other’s company. If your relationship with your parents consists of obeying rules and asking for support, you have a very sick family. God must want more than that from us.

Many times, I’ve cooked for friends, and more than once, people have left my house right after they finished eating. It’s one of the reasons I got tired of cooking. I was being used. I don’t want to treat God that way. I want to spend time with him without asking for anything. I want to love him for his personality, not just the things he does for me. I believe this is where favor comes from.

If God wants to show his favor by leading me to a nice property in Tennessee, I’m all for it. I hate relying on my own guesswork.

I may visit Tennessee very soon. I have no strings on me. I want to look around before the leaves fall.

Slouching Towards Bugtussle

Today I surprised myself. I contacted a realtor about a property in Blount County, Tennessee.

One of the problems I’ve had since my dad died is a reluctance to take ownership of things. For example, sometimes I say “we” when I’m talking about things we used to own together. “We have two wells.” “We have a pool.” Things like that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just managing things for my dad. I have even been reluctant to change the bad landscaping at my house, just because I feel like the previous owners knew something I didn’t and would disapprove.

I can tell you something that has helped me. Sometimes I say, “My dad moved to a far-away country and gave me everything he owns here.” This is true. He owns nothing in this world.

The idea of selling properties and moving to another state by myself is slightly intimidating. I wouldn’t be asking anyone’s permission. I would just go. I didn’t think I’d start looking for a new place so soon.

I was waiting for God to give me ideas about where to go. The older I get, the more I realize we screw up our lives by putting ourselves in traps God had nothing to do with. We choose horrible husbands, wives, careers, and homes. Then things go badly, and we’re stuck. You can’t just drop a spouse like a bruised peach at the supermarket. You can’t make a better career appear instantaneously. If you’re in the wrong home and the wrong area, you probably have a mortgage, and that means you’re stuck like a coyote with its paw in a trap. I don’t want to “follow my heart” or “go with my gut.” I don’t want to trust my ridiculous judgment. The world tells us to do those things, but worldly people live in defeat and regret. I want to get guidance from God.

I felt he was telling me to move to Tennessee, but I couldn’t figure out where to go. I knew I didn’t want to be in a flat area or a city. I wanted to know I was in Appalachia. I didn’t want to be in a county where they still had Klan meetings. I didn’t want to be close to Gatlinburg or the other tourist traps.

This morning I started to think he wanted me to move to Blount County.

I read up on it after I got this impression. It seems like a nice place. Good climate, nice hills, and real stores within a reasonable drive. Land prices are cheaper than they are here. I could set myself up on hundreds of acres of woods.

This week the nightly lows will be in the sixties in Blount County. That would be nice. I love Ocala, but it’s up around 95 degrees every day right now, and it’s only going down into the upper seventies at night. Working outdoors during the day is nearly impossible. You can put a couple of hours in, pausing frequently, and then you have to quit.

The human body is funny. When you overheat, you get tired, even if you’re not working hard. Your body will refuse to give you full performance, and it will make you breathe hard as if you were exerting yourself. It’s not helpful when I’m trying to cut downed trees or dig up a boulder.

I contacted a couple of real estate brokerages online about a property, and in my messages, I said, “No calls, please.” Both called within seconds. They apparently refuse to deal with me over the web like normal people. I sent the calls to voicemail.

Real estate agents are really annoying. When you call about a property, they don’t see you as a person who wants to buy that property. They see you as a lead. They want to turn you into “their” customer. Then they get 3% of the sale price of any property they tell you about.

I wanted to see what the property was shaped like. A lot of big properties are long and skinny, and I’m not having that. It doesn’t do you much good to have 300 acres if your neighbors are 100 yards away in both directions. I found the property on a government website, and it’s shaped like a lizard. No good. Oh, well.

I see where the term “gerrymander” comes from.

I got tempted to stray from Tennessee, and I looked at a place in North Carolina. It’s remarkable. It has two well-kept, very livable buildings. One is the main house, and the other is a sort of shop with its own kitchen. Really nice. It only has 40 acres, though. The number 300 keeps rolling around in my head. I really like big pieces of land. I always have. My favorite of all my grandfather’s farms was around 300 acres.

I am sorely tempted to spend a few days in Tennessee, just looking around.

In other news, I made real progress with my grilling. I went to Home Depot and got me a Bernzomatic TS8000 torch. I already have a Turbotorch, but it’s for the workshop. The Turbotorch was recommended to me as the best torch of the type, but it has been balky ever since I bought it, and it doesn’t seem to burn any hotter than the one I just got.

Today I made two 6.5-ounce burgers (because I had exactly 13 ounces of meat) and put them on the grill at its highest post-modification setting. As I grilled, I applied the torch to scorch the outsides of the burgers. It worked very well. I got some deep browning as well as a little crunch, and the insides of the burgers were hot and juicy. One had very little pink in it, and I always shoot for medium, but burgers are not steak, and medium-well is still very good. Medium can actually be a little mushy.

I have a Searzall tool on the way. I think I wrote about it. It’s a torch attachment for searing food evenly. Once it arrives, I should be all set. Regardless of the appalling shortcomings of propane grills, I’ll be able to put a good sear on the outside of every piece of beef I cook.

It’s amazing that the grill industry makes such feeble products.

I sound like I’m knocking my new grill. I think it’s an excellent product, as propane grills go. I believe it cooks as well as a $2000 grill. I should know; I had one. I just think the entire industry should be doing better. A $2000 grill should make amazing steaks, and when you buy a $100 grill that cooks as well as a $2000 grill, it should produce the same result. I have a $100 grill that, as delivered, cooked steaks just as well as an industry-leading, yet disappointing, $2000 grill.

It would be nice to have an electric salamander some day. That would put an end to the striving.

I still plan to get a square cast iron griddle for the butane stove. Frying puts a magnificent crust on a steak. I guess I could fry and then touch up with the Searzall! That would be interesting.

The feeling I get is that grilled burgers need to be at least an inch thick before cooking. Otherwise, the insides cook too fast. It’s just physics. I think the torch allows me to do a better job with thinner burgers.

I wonder how a propane knife forge would do. Someone needs to try that. It sounds stupendous. I guess the melting fat would be a problem, because it would run into the insulation and burn.

There’s a Youtube video of a lady cooking a steak using a forge. She’s not much to look at, she has a whisker problem, and her miniskirt is too short for a woman of her years, but she may be onto something.

Poor thing. It must be hard landing a man when you look like that. You have to give her credit, though. She’s in there punching. Takes good care of herself. Look at those toned legs.

I’m sure I’ll report on the Searzall when it arrives. Try to contain yourselves.

Modern Grills Better at Preventing Lawsuits Than Cooking Food?

I am trying to develop skills with my new propane grill. Today I tried something easy: burgers.

There are a lot of fancy burger recipes. I’ll tell you what I like. Mix salt, fresh garlic, and a little pepper into ground chuck. If you’re not afraid to eat nipples and tonsils, go with ground beef. You want beef with some fat in it. Ground sirloin makes terrible burgers.

My grill is a Pit Boss portable. I removed the wimpy gas regulator and replaced it with an adjustable model made by Loco. I adjusted the air shutters on the gas valves to give me much higher flames.

I decided to grill my 1/3-pound burgers on [what is now] medium heat. I didn’t think I wanted a raging inferno on the first trial, so I used the Loco regulator to keep the flames from getting really high. I would say they were higher than they would have been without my modifications, but I didn’t go for the gusto. The burgers came out pretty good, but they were well done. I wanted medium. It appears the Pit Boss will not give you medium burgers unless you modify it and crank the flames way up. Next time I’ll know better.

Here is how gas-cooked burgers should be: pink in the middle, with a dark brown crust which is caramelized but not crunchy. Dissenters will be ignored. It appears that the Pit Boss ships set up to cook burgers very poorly. If you took a Pit Boss out of the box, hooked it up, and cooked 1/3-pound burgers on the highest setting, you would get light brown burgers with grey insides. You really need to change the regulator and let it rip.

You can’t make a factory-adjusted Pit Boss cook decent burgers. Simply not possible.

My burgers were about 3/4″ thick, which means they cooked more slowly on the inside than all-too-typical skinny burgers. It should be easy to get a nice, charred exterior on a thick burger. The Pit Boss, as delivered, will not even come close, and if you grill tiny, disgraceful, thin burgers on it, you can pretty much count on eating well-done (ruined) meat.

I plan to burger again tomorrow. I’ll increase the heat and see what happens.

I don’t understand the modern phobia of properly cooked beef. Restaurants all over the US serve steaks with pink and red insides, and everyone is fine with it, but burger chains generally fry the life out of meat, and the grills most of us buy generate very little heat, assuring that all beef cooked on them will be unfit to eat.

You can get better performance with lump charcoal, but who needs the aggravation? I have acres of land, but I am not willing to dedicate any of it to a giant pile of charcoal ashes. Propane has been with us for decades. Grill manufacturers should have figured out how to make their products work correctly by now.

Maybe lawyers have advised grill makers to detune their products. When drunken idiots burn themselves and sue, the lawyers can say, “Your honor! Lab tests show our products won’t burn ANYTHING!”

It doesn’t matter for me. By replacing parts and adjusting my grill, I have created a machine that will do what it’s supposed to. But what percentage of consumers will do what I did? Less than 1%, I would think. The rest are stuck with grey beef or the horrors of charcoal.

I’m very happy with the grill. I love not having the clean the stove. I love the added flavor grilling gives meat and vegetables. I don’t have to worry about the smoke alarms. Maybe this is how cooking should be: an outdoor pursuit. Maybe kitchens should be set up so we can prepare food for cooking indoors and then whisk it outside to be subjected to heat.

Women have messed up the American kitchen. It’s all about quaintness and homeyness. A kitchen is really just a workshop for making food, and it should be set up accordingly. It should be easy to clean and hard to damage. Like a real kitchen in a restaurant.

I figured out how to grill chicken without toughness or a 1-hour wait. Yesterday I marinated chicken in orange juice, garlic, salt, and tarragon. I baked it in a Pyrex dish at 300 for two hours. When it was finished, I put it on the grill with vegetables. It was very tender. It worked, and I didn’t have to sit by the grill for an hour.

Next time, I’m going to bake it for an hour and 45 minutes. The chicken I cooked yesterday was good, but it was so tender when it got to the grill, it started to fall apart. It will work better if I bake it less.

I could save myself work by baking it in the oven and omitting the grill, but finishing it on the grill adds a lot of flavor.

I will continue reporting on my propane adventures until I feel I know how to use the grill correctly. I’m very glad I got the grill. It’s liberating to know I don’t have to clean a stove.

On the Grill, Beef is King

I am continuing to work on my cheap grilling station.

I bought myself a Pit Boss portable stainless two-burner propane grill. It was fantastic, especially for the price. I put a Loco adjustable regulator on it and adjusted the grill’s air shutters to turn it into a high-horsepower steak-grilling machine. No problems. I also bought a one-burner Coleman butane stove, which works very well for steaks and doesn’t grease up my kitchen.

Obviously, I needed a platform. I had these items on the bricks on my porch, and it made for poor ergonomics.

I decided to buy a $39 folding table from Home Depot. These tables are great. They’re pretty light, you can adjust the height, and they don’t seem to have any glaring defects. Today I put the grill on one side of the table, and I put the stove next to it. Perfect.

I ate a bunch of steaks right after I bought the stove, and I was looking for something other than fat cuts of beef, so I decided to try chicken leg quarters. They were surprisingly hard to find. I guess they’re not trending well with hipsters.

If you like grilling chicken, you’re living in a bad time. Most of chicken’s flavor is in the skin, and it’s getting hard to find good cuts with the skin still on. It’s like castrating your dog. It used to be optional, but now people get self-righteous and freak out if you don’t fall in with the rest of the sheep. They get really angry, as if it’s somehow wrong to not castrate your dog. It’s as if testicles were birth defects or bombs that went off and killed children. You can amputate a dog’s healthy tail and ears, and no one will try to stop you, but if you try to leave your dog alone, people bunch up their faces, cross their arms, and throw tantrums, as if it’s somehow their business. You have to castrate your dog, and you have to eat chicken with the delicious skin removed.

There are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids, which is a major health threat to the rest of humanity, and I don’t bother them. Whatever happened to minding your own business?

I know I’m digressing, but now I’m thinking of sailfish. They are very common. I’ve caught a bunch of them. It’s customary to release them, but it’s not mandatory. You’re allowed to eat them, and they’re delicious. Still, if someone in South Florida catches you steaking a sailfish, you can expect a torrent of verbal abuse, even though what you’re doing is legal and ethical. It’s really annoying, dealing with self-righteous herd creatures.

Skinless chicken cutlets are everywhere. They dry out fast, and they lack fat, so they’re not that great. You have to add fat to them if you want them to taste good. It’s kind of stupid. You throw fat out in order to be healthy, and then you add new fat to correct your mistake.

I got lucky and found 4 big leg quarters locally for under $5. I grilled one last night and one today.

I have decided I am not excited about grilling chicken. The results have not been good.

I can prepare a steak in under 15 minutes on the grill. When I grilled my first chicken quarter, it took about an hour. I had to use a thermometer, because rare chicken, unlike rare beef, can send you to the ER. When I finally finished, I found the chicken tasty but tough.

Today I came up with a plan. I nuked the chicken for 6 minutes prior to grilling it. When that was over, the chicken was cooked and safe to eat. It just needed some grilling to fix the skin and add flavor.

It was better than the chicken I ate last night, but still not great. It was not tender enough. Maybe I need quarters from a different type of chicken. Maybe I have roaster quarters and I need fryer quarters. I don’t know.

I have a new plan. If I bake the chicken for three hours at 300 degrees and then grill it, it should be tender. I think it will work, but it’s a royal pain.

My feeling is that I should forget chicken and stick with beef and fish. Chicken is harder to cook than other meats.

The vegetables are working out much better than the chicken. I had forgotten how great grilled vegetables are. I’ve been slicing onions, peppers, and zucchini and grilling them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. They’re not as good as steak, but they’re definitely better than chicken. The grill brings out flavors you wouldn’t think could be found in vegetables.

I think this may not be true for people who don’t like vegetables as much as I do. I’m not sure. Many people–Cubans and Puerto Ricans come to mind–have a bizarre aversion to vegetables.

I need to try grilling eggplant and squash. Maybe I’ll have grilled pineapple for dessert.

I learned something new about my grill. I thought it couldn’t hurt whatever it was sitting on, because the heat didn’t project downward very well. Turns out this is wrong. Since I souped it up, it can project a lot of heat toward the table. I plan to get something to put under it, like a couple of quarry tiles. Glad I figured this out before melting my table.

I’m very happy with my setup. I’m somewhere around $200 in the hole, and I have an excellent grill plus a very convenient stove burner. The whole rig is light and portable, and there is nothing I can’t replace for $120. I can put the whole thing in the car and grill at a friend’s house if I want. I would rather have this than a big, overrated “professional” grill that starts to cough up ruined parts in two years.

I still need a second propane tank. That’s how you deal with propane. You don’t buy one tank and wait for it to die during a cookout. You buy two, and when one dies, you attach the other one.

I wish someone made a portable propane broiler or “salamander.” That would be wonderful for steak. Broiling will char a steak without fat flareups. Maybe there is one out there, if I look.

I have a MAPP gas torch, and I’m considering using it to sear steaks. More than one way to skin a cat.

It’s very sad how the grill industry has convinced people it’s okay to eat grey and brown steaks. Completely wrong. A waste of meat.

I highly recommend this grill and the Loco regulator. Just be careful. Once you take the brakes off the grill, anything can happen.

Grey Steaks are for Prisoners and Old Women

Today I adjusted my new Pit Boss portable propane grill so it was fit for a MAN to use, and I already have the results of the experiment.

I hit Walmart today because I needed a tackle box for my leathercraft stuff, and while I was there, I found a fat rib eye on sale. They were dumping it because it was too old. A sticker on the package said it should be cooked no later than tomorrow.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

If you know anything about steak, you know that aging only makes it better. Walmart aged a steak for me and then charged me LESS for it. Unbelievable.

Steaks are aged in two ways: dry and wet. A dry-aged steak is allowed to age while exposed to the dry air of a refrigerator. It loses water, concentrating the flavor, and supposedly, enzymes naturally present in beef tenderize it. I don’t know if that last part is true. Of course, bacteria will work on it while it’s aging, and my opinion is that as long as they’re friendly bacteria, they will improve the flavor.

Wet-aging is the same process, except you wrap the steak so water can’t evaporate. It produces a juicier steak which is not quite as tasty. Women have pushed the market toward wet-aging, because they have bad taste in food and like things that are soft and juicy.

Walmart wet-aged my steak for me. If you want to wet-age a steak, here’s how you do it: leave it in the refrigerator. That’s all there is to it. Leave the plastic on it, and check it from time to time to make sure it’s not turning green.

I’ve been eating frozen broccoli with cheese sauce with my steaks lately, because I have a bizarre fondness for the dish, but today I decided to man up and prepare something better. I bought a big red pepper and a white onion. I cut the pepper in half. I cut the onion in thick slices. I smeared both with cheap (not extra-virgin) olive oil, and I salted and peppered them. Extra-virgin olive oil is not for cooked foods. Heat ruins its flavor.

I salted the rib eye heavily, added a touch of pepper, fired up my souped-up grill, and made myself dinner. I’ll post some photos.

Here, you can see flames curling around the heat diffusers in the grill. Yesterday, there was no way to make that happen. The grill had polite little flames just barely big enough to cook a steak. When I adjusted the grill today, it was hard to tell how much of a difference it made, but now that I see the grill in action, I can tell it’s much, much better. It turned the heat diffusers red hot. I love it.

Actually, maybe you can’t see the flames from the burner all that well, because they’re much smaller than the flames from burning fat. Anyway, the flames are way higher than they were yesterday.

Here, you can see the steak after I turned it. There are some issues that need to be dealt with. The employee who cut the steak for packaging made the disgraceful error of trimming the fat off of most of it. That left it with a pointy end that had more fat than the main part of the steak. The pointy end dripped a lot of fat on the heat diffuser, and the resulting flames burned the pointy end too much. I need to work around things like that in the future.

Mind you, the pointy bit still tasted wonderful, but it would have been better with a bit less carbon.

Here is the steak on my plate. I charred it as much as possible without going all the way to medium. It was not perfect, but it was very good. There was nothing at all wrong with it, but there could have been more that was right.

The steak had a medium-rare appearance, but because it was cooked on high heat, it was surprisingly hot inside. That’s much, much better than hot outside, cool inside.

Resting steaks is very stupid, so I don’t do it. I eat herd creatures; I do not behave like one. I dug into this steak as fast as I could. The outside of a steak should be very hot. If you really wanted a perfect steak, you would have to eat it right beside the grill, when the outside is hottest. This steak, although consumed a few minutes after coming off the flames, was nice and hot outside. Just as it should have been.

Steak chillers…I mean “resters”…complain that failing to rest a steak makes the juice run out of it. When I was done eating, there was probably less than a teaspoon of beef juice on the plate. I know, because I kept staring at it. I wanted to drink it. It was beautiful.

The whole resting nonsense is a ludicrous myth that claims millions of victims every day.

The vegetables were magnificent. That’s the thing about grilling. Everything is good when you grill it. I took a ferocious, sharp-tasting white onion and threw it on the flames for a few minutes, and it came off the grill sweet and juicy. The pepper was equally tasty. They really complimented the taste of the meat.

The increased heat didn’t hurt the grill at all. Nothing melted. Nothing that should have been cool got hot. The grill can take it. I got a winner here.

Now that I’ve conquered the grill problem, I can quit eating steak every day. Maybe I won’t even grill tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll grill something small and tame, like a chicken quarter. I can get some more vegetables. Maybe squash sliced lengthwise. I don’t know if it would hold together, but I can find out.

Very nice. Outstanding.

Don’t let the grilling nannies hold you back. Don’t rest until your grill will burn the outside of a steak while leaving the inside a glorious, intense pink or even red. Life is too short to eat lame food foisted on you by a food industry comprised mostly of people who cook very poorly.

Grill Hack Plus Powerful Testimony

I have been a very, very bad boy.

I got myself a stainless portable grill from Pit Boss. Very nice grill. It will make a credible rib eye, IF you let the fat burn off the heat deflectors and add additional heat to the meat. Otherwise, it’s not quite optimal. You have to play around a little to make it do an acceptable job using the racks, and it’s definitely too weak to heat a cast iron griddle for steaks. The propane flames are not very high when you use the grill as adjusted by the factory.

I got myself a Loco-brand high-pressure regulator to increase the flow, but when I tried to use it, the burners wouldn’t accept the additional gas. The flames blew out. I figured it was time to take the regulator back to Lowe’s.

Today I Googled, and I learned something great: gas grills have carburetors.

A carburetor mixes air and fuel in the right proportions. You can’t just pump propane through a burner and hope for good results. You have to have the carburetor (“air shutter”) adjusted correctly.

Guess what I did?

An air shutter is just a metal sleeve that’s open on one side. Air flows through the open space. You rotate the sleeve to get the right size space. Sometimes grills need adjusting, and you’re supposed to adjust the air shutter to fix them. You’re supposed to do this while the grill is on low heat.

Right. Low.

Again, guess what I did?

I got me a Philips screwdriver, LIBERATED the air shutter on my right burner, turned on the gas, and adjusted it until the burner would support a really decent flame. When I saw that this worked, I did the other side.

Will my grill still work on low heat? Who cares? Why would you want a grill to work on low heat? What possible benefit is there in that? Are you planning to heat baby food on the grill? Grills are for charring meat and other food, period. If you’re cooking things on moderate heat in a grill, you made a mistake. What you really wanted was a toaster oven.

This is exciting. I may be able to produce correctly cooked steaks on the grill now, both with the rack and with the griddle.

I hate the way hippies and lawyers ruin grilling. I know they’re behind the pathetic limitations on gas grills. They’re behind everything that ruins fun.

A grill that doesn’t heat up enough is like a Mustang with a 4-cylinder engine. What is the purpose? There is none.

I was going to try to have something other than steak for dinner tonight, but you can probably guess what I’m going to do. I’m off to the store shortly.

I’m not one of those people who think all meat has to have a black, crunchy layer of carbon on it, but grey steaks or brown steaks with a few wimpy black grill marks are just wrong. Burgers should also have some charring.

I admit, I like fried burgers from Wendy’s and Five Guys, even though they’re not really cooked correctly. Somehow, these chains make grey, well-done burgers work. But a good grilled burger with some charring is a whole lot better.

I am really pinning the Smug-O-Meter today.

Will the excess heat destroy the grill? I don’t care. The experiment is too important to drop for the sake of a grill. This is for science, people.

In other news, I have a testimony. My friend Travis got released from probation, unexpectedly. I have his permission to tell about it.

I can never remember whether I’ve revealed his name here before. Often, I use fake names for people, and I can’t keep track. Anyway, he is house-sitting in my dad’s old house while I sell it.

A few years back, he did something that wasn’t very clever. He tried to move a car across town with an expired tag. These days, cops have scanning machines that look at license plates, and when a scanner sees a bad tag, it lets the cops know. Travis got pulled over, and because he had some license issues already, he panicked. He took off. That’s a felony. The cop claimed he tried to hit him, which is a great way to pump up the charges. That’s also a felony.

Travis got five years of probation, and it has been very hard. He can’t travel without permission. He had to do miserable manual labor at a park. He had to meet with his P.O. over and over. His P.O. and the other people with oversight kept screwing up and causing problems for him. For example, the people at the park failed to record a bunch of his hours.

His P.O. violated his probation because he failed to meet with him. Travis had gone to his office and called him many times, but the P.O. wasn’t there when he was supposed to be, and he didn’t return calls. Travis had to go to a hearing today. The big danger was that they would revoke his probation, give him a felony conviction, and put him away.

Of course, I have been advising him all along. I don’t give him legal advice, per se, but I tell him obvious things. Never complain. Never look angry. Always sound grateful. Be polite. When you have to go to court or to see your P.O., be on time. Keep records of everything. Take responsibility for what you did. Do everything they tell you to do. I also gave him all sorts of spiritual advice.

We have been praying about his hearing. Today he called me while I was planting dwarf podocarpus shrubs, and he gave me the amazing news. The judge terminated his probation instead of revoking it. He is done. No conviction. No more meetings. No more working at the park.

He said he was nervous because the judge was crabby. She had been laying the smackdown on people before his turn came. When he was called, he had all his papers. He was polite. He didn’t interrupt. She told him his probation was terminated as of today.

Sounds good, right? It gets much better.

His dad has MS. He is in a bad nursing home. He has been steeped in bitterness, pride, and anger for years. When his son got a scholarship to the University of Miami, he did virtually nothing to help. Sometimes he told Travis he wanted him out of his life.

We have been praying for his dad ever since I can remember. Travis was afraid he would die before he turned back to Jesus. This week, his dad was hospitalized for an infection caused by a catheter, and he was intubated. It looked bad.

I asked God about it, and he seemed to say Travis’s dad would repent.

We prayed and spoke blessings and curses, and yesterday, unexpectedly, Travis’s dad repented and gave his life back to Jesus. Now they pray together. You can’t imagine Travis’s relief, but I can. My dad finally gave in this year at the age of 87, a few weeks before he died.

Pretty good week, wouldn’t you agree?

As Travis said on the phone today, this stuff really works.

I’m amazed that God has been able to make good use of me. I think of myself as a selfish and solitary person with few human interactions, but somehow I have found myself at the center of a small group of people who listen to me, and when I tell them about the things God has used to change my life, he changes theirs, too. God used me to help Travis, and he used Travis to reach his dad. Travis has a lot of friends he’s influencing, too.

The Bible says people will know God’s children by their fruit, and people misinterpret this and say it means their works or their personalities. In reality, it refers to other human beings they reach. Jesus said he was the true vine, and we were the branches. He said any branch that didn’t bear fruit would be cut off and burned. What is the purpose of a branch? To bear fruit. What is fruit? It’s a means of reproduction. God uses us to reproduce his nature in human beings.

This is a good day.

I’m off to Winn-Dixie. Hope they have some nice cheap rib eyes.

Quit Whining About Enemies You Feed and Arm

I’m enjoying my adventures with the propane grill and my new Coleman propane burner.

The first rib eye I prepared using the grill was very good, but I felt it needed more heat, and I also wanted to see if I could fry with the grill. I have been experimenting.

I bought myself a cast iron griddle from Walmart. I have cast iron skillets, but I prefer to have a dedicated piece of cookware for frying steaks, because they leave residue behind. I figured I would lay the griddle on the grill, turn the grill up, and see what happened.

The short version is this: the grill will not get hot enough to fry a steak. When you fry steak in butter, you need to be on the verge of burning the meat. When you get the heat right, it puts a dark brown crust on the steak, without ruining the inside. By “ruining,” I mean medium-well or better. Anything past medium is a catastrophe. The griddle I bought fits the grill like it was made for it, and it would do a bang-up job on a huge mess of eggs, but for meat, it won’t work, even when you remove the heat deflectors from above the burners.

It may be possible to lower the griddle farther if I remove the rack, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I also tried making the burners hotter.

My grill came with a propane regulator that’s not adjustable. You get the pressure you get. I looked around on the web, and I learned that there are adjustable regulators that improve grill performance in some cases. I went to Lowe’s and bought one. It’s a Loco-brand regulator, and you have to admit, that sounds promising. It’s for a turkey fryer. When I tried to use it on the grill, I found that the flames went out when I turned it up. I don’t know if leftists have somehow managed to rig grills up so they can’t be hacked, or what. It’s the kind of thing they love to do. Anyway, I haven’t managed to get more heat yet.

I also got a Coleman butane stove. This is a single burner the size of a phone book. You insert a tiny can of butane in it, and you get 7200 BTU’s. It’s very light. Maybe they realize people will put them in backpacks.

I had a hard time getting fuel. For some reason, Walmarts run out. I got around this by ordering it for pickup at a local Walmart. That way, they had to hold it for me. Today I tried it on a porterhouse. I couldn’t find a good deal on a rib eye.

Summary: it’s fantastic. It’s more than hot enough to put a good crust on a steak. Zero complaints. I need a small griddle so I can stop using my Griswold skillet, but other than that, I’m ready to go. The stove is a blast to use. You can carry it (and its fuel) in one hand. You can put it on any flat surface while you cook, because it won’t heat anything under it. It’s stupendous. Now I can fix steaks without cleaning the kitchen.

If you love frying meat on the stove, but you hate the mess, check the Coleman stove out. You won’t be sorry.

For under $150, I can barbecue as well as anyone, and I will never have to touch charcoal.

In other news, I threw some books out today. Nice segue, I know. God keeps showing me that I have opened doors for Satan, and one way I do this is by holding onto objects Satan likes. I threw out my blues CD’s a while back. I have since thrown out most of my jazz. Today I got rid of books that were unsavory.

Satan has a really neat way of getting us to approve filth. He tells us it’s culture. Example: the incredible obsession with nudity during the Renaissance. Most parents would have a problem with a son who put photographs of naked men on the wall in his room, but how many would complain about a picture of Michelangelo’s David? Right now, you can walk into a chapel in the Vatican–a Christian church–and see a vast array of naked figures on the walls and ceiling. Imagine going in there and trying to hold up a Playboy centerfold. They’d throw you in the street. Imagine trying to go in naked. The cognitive dissonance is thunderous, but no one seems to notice.

The word “renaissance” means “rebirth.” Europeans idolized the ancient Greeks, and they copied them slavishly. The Greeks loved dirty art, and Europeans revived their trashy passion. While rediscovering science and math, Europeans gave a new birth to some things that were better left dead.

Europeans revered Plato and Socrates, even though they were, by any reasonable standard, perverts and sexual predators. They revered Homer even though his work glorified paganism and kept its false gods before the public eye.

A couple of years ago, I decided to go back over some books I avoided reading in college. I took a course called Literature Humanities at Columbia University, and I didn’t do much of the reading. My professor thought I was an eccentric genius, so he didn’t fail me, but I did very little work, and I didn’t go to class. Another reason I didn’t fail: along with a huge percentage of my peers, I cheated on the final exam. Some of the instructors released the questions in advance, and naturally, people got together in groups and worked on the answers before taking the test.

I used to feel bad about cheating. I only recall one definite instance of cheating on tests in my life. I may also have cheated somewhat on Columbia’s Contemporary Civilazation final. I can’t recall. Through the irresponsibility of the instructors, many people had the test questions, so things happened.

I never cheated in order to do better than other people. I only cheated to avoid failing a course. Maybe that’s not as bad.

Anyway, I bought horrible books by people like Homer and Aeschylus, and I forced myself to read them. I bought Plato’s Symposium, which is about a bunch of homosexual predators getting together to see who can be the most pedantic. I bought a number of things. I bought Vergil.

God has been telling me not to expose myself to occult materials. He even told me to quit watching Marvel movies, because–let’s face it–characters that defy physics are using occult power, even if Stan Lee blamed gamma rays. I shouldn’t watch movies about occult phenomena. I should stay away from entertainment involving witchcraft, curses, and so on. A day or two ago, God asked me something: how are works by pantheists any different from movies about witches and vampires? They’re not. They celebrate false gods and magic.

I decided to get rid of Homer, Vergil, Aeschylus, Ovid, Euripides, and whatever else seemed problematic.

I have my dad’s old Great Books of the Western World set. This is a bunch of classic works, in a collection like an encyclopedia. I hated to pull Homer and Vergil out of it and put them in a trash bag and ruin the set, which had been preserved for 50 years, but I did it.

I felt some small twinges of misgiving about discarding the works themselves. It seemed strange for an educated, cultured person to throw out Homer and Plato. Satan had part of me convinced that it was somehow wrong for a person with a proper respect for humanity’s accumulated knowledge to throw out ancient books. I was right to throw them out, though. The fact that trash is thousands of years old doesn’t turn it into treasure.

Plato and his pals used to adopt kids and sodomize them repeatedly until they got too old to be attractive. The compensation was tutoring. This was considered okay in ancient Greece. I’m sure parents were ecstatic when they learned that great men wanted to use their sons like women. It must have been a tremendous honor. How can centuries of tradition turn such perverted, Satanic notions into things we should keep on our bookshelves in Christian homes in 2019?

It’s all at the dump now. No going back.

It’s very strange that we’re so comfortable with nude art. I’ll tell you something that may amaze you: it’s possible to create great art without nudity. It’s okay to paint a woman with her clothes on. It doesn’t make you less of an artist.

I’ve taken a number of figure-drawing classes. We used naked models. It wasn’t actually helpful for people to be naked before us. It’s not like clothing on a model will prevent you from learning. The body is very simple. Clothing is complex. We would have learned more from drawing clothed models. Drawing clothing takes skill. Leonardo used to do studies of fabrics so he would be prepared to paint clothed people. This type of art is called “drapery.” You can look it up.

Arty people sometimes claim nude art is somehow pure, and that it’s abnormal to be stimulated by it. Yeah, okay. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

I recall reading Chuck Jones’s autobiography. He told a huge lie in it. He wrote about going to art school. He said he was very excited when he accidentally saw part of a girl’s upper leg outside of class, but he didn’t feel anything when he saw totally nude models. What a crock! Regardless of what men who have taken art classes may have told you, a naked woman is just as exciting to look at in a class as she would be in a bedroom. I’m pretty sure I was never late to a figure-drawing class, and it wasn’t because I was naturally punctual. I wanted to see who was going to show up naked for us. Whenever the model turned out to be a man, I was very unhappy.

The earth is a dirty place, and we are very used to uncleanness. Much of the time, we don’t even notice it until someone points it out to us.

Yesterday, I found a new Youtube creator. He’s a guy who was homeless for a long time. He was addicted to cough syrup, of all things. The active ingredient, dextromethorphan, causes hallucinations. That’s kind of sad, because it was supposed to be a harmless alternative to codeine. Anyway, he had a very, very hard time getting free, even though demons were cast out of him more than once.

He mentioned a problem he had with a poster. He was living in a Christian shelter by choice, to avoid temptation. One day he bought a Beatles poster in order to decorate his wall. He said his peace disappeared. He had to get rid of the poster.

He talked about a famous exorcist named Bob Larson. You can see this man on Youtube. I don’t endorse him, because he’s a showman and he makes money from exorcism, but he may still know a few things. According to the former cough syrup addict, Larson says demons draw power from objects. He says a man who was being exorcised kept looking at an object, and the demon told Larson it was because the object gave him power.

Whether Larson is generally sound or not, I can’t tell you, but he is probably right much of the time. Even the worst preachers are mostly right.

The man who made the video says you need to do an inventory of your house and get rid of anything that isn’t godly. How about that?

I had never thought of objects giving demons power. I think of them as things that stink and draw flies (as in “lord of the flies”), or as signs that advertise openings to demons, or as doors. I suppose it makes sense to see evil objects as sources of power for demons. A lease gives a tenant power to stay in an apartment, so if an object gives a demon the right to stay in you, it gives him a kind of power. Authority is power.

The Beatles, in case you didn’t know, were very evil. They promoted drugs and heathen religions while fighting Christianity and Christian morality. Rock and roll really is the devil’s music. It’s not just something ignorant people say.

You can’t have it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Not unless you’re okay with very serious problems God refuses to solve for you. Grow up and get rid of it. Stop holding onto a dead lifestyle that won’t even exist in heaven. You’re never going to hear a Beatles song up there, so why hold onto them now?

I don’t want demons in my life. I don’t even like roaches, and roaches are much nicer than demons.

I expect to see an improvement in my life now that I’ve discarded the writings of perverts and pantheists. There has always been a conflict between Hellenism and Christianity. Christians are supposed to be holy, and “holy” means “belonging to God.” We can’t have everything defeated and lost people have. They can watch TV shows we can’t watch. They can smoke things we can’t smoke. They can go places we can’t go. That’s just how it is. They get to do these things because they’re going to hell.

To keep one foot in the world is to give your enemies power over you. We do this, and then we cry to God when things go wrong. “I’m a good person. Why did this happen to me?” Often, it happened because you invited it.

You may wonder why God doesn’t tell us about the dangers of forbidden objects, explicitly and repeatedly. That’s simple. We were supposed to be full of the Holy Spirit. Two thousand years ago, people knew this. They were supposed to pass it on. Each generation of Christians was supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues every day, and God was supposed to teach every one of us through tongues and other gifts of the Spirit. Our forebears gave the Holy Spirit up, so we weren’t taught. This is why we’re ignorant. God held up his end of the bargain. He gave us the Holy Spirit, and he promised–look it up–that he would teach us all things. Human beings are the reason it didn’t pan out.

God doesn’t automatically fix everything we ruin. He has done enough for us already. He is 0% responsible for our problems. That’s something we really need to learn. No one is even a tiny bit responsible for what other beings choose to do. God is not obligated to run around behind us, saying, “You dropped this.” He already allowed himself to be tortured to death for us. That ought to be enough. It’s a wonder he does anything at all for us.

Look how most American Christians live. They listen to evil music. They fornicate. They watch filthy entertainment. They get drunk and high. They participate in astrology. They worship athletes and entertainers. They celebrate Halloween, which is tantamount to begging Satan to hurt your children. We put idols in our houses because we think they’re art. We carry good luck charms. We amass big collections of recordings by musicians who belong to Satan. Then we wonder why we get cancer. We wonder why our kids become addicts.

My sister is a drug addict, and she is as full of hate as anyone I have ever known. She has no impulse control. She is sadistic. She abuses other people. She is the worst liar I have ever known. Being around her is torture. Nonetheless, when bad things happen to her, such as losing her home or winding up in a homeless shelter, she feels like a victim and tries to find someone else to blame. Here’s what I say: “What’s happening is normal and right and to be expected. This is exactly what’s supposed to happen when you do these things.”

The other day I realized I would much rather see her die than be subjected to her abuse ever again. That’s really something. The family is unanimous. My mother, who was very kind, asked God to take my sister if she wouldn’t change, and my dad said it would be better for her to die than to go on as she was.

To some extent, virtually everyone is like my sister. We cause our own problems, and then we tell everyone we’re victims.

I am not a victim. I’m a bad person who has done stupid things, and I have suffered the natural and correct repercussions. I may have been a victim when I was very young, but that was a very long time ago, and it has no bearing on my guilt or innocence today.

Even if other beings have sinned against me, and they will be judged for those sins, I still deserved what they did. It doesn’t mean they didn’t sin. It just means I should have expected to be sinned against.

I should not say, “Why me?”, when things go wrong. I say it when things go well.

Anyhow, the Greek rapists of boys are no longer featured prominently in my library.

Maybe this will be helpful to you. If you have a curse you can’t get rid of, maybe you’re the one doing the cursing.

After ranting about the horrible state of the pool hardware industry, I’m glad I have something positive to write about. My Pit Boss portable grill arrived today, and it’s a keeper.

I’ve been frying steaks in a cast iron skillet on the stove, and while they taste fantastic, it’s a bad method. Wife-designed kitchens like mine don’t stand up well to heavy doses of greasy smoke, and cooking a decent steak without making smoke is not possible. You have to burn the meat a little, or else you’ll ruin it.

I decided to get a gas grill, but when I started looking around, I remembered something: there are no good gas grills. It doesn’t matter what you pay. They all fall apart in a relatively short time. Spend $5000 on a grill if you want. It will have problems just like the ones from Home Depot.

I considered getting a grill from Home Depot or Lowe’s for maybe $200, figuring I would take it to the dump when it started to fail, but then I saw the Pit Boss grill on Amazon. For a hundred bucks, you get enough room to cook 6 big steaks at once, which is plenty, if you’re honest with yourself. The grill is about the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter, and it has a handle, so you can close it up and take it wherever you want. It’s all stainless, so it won’t rust enough to matter. How could you not want a grill like this?

I was so excited when the grill arrived, I drove to Tractor Supply and got a propane tank. Their propane system was not available, so I had to go to a hardware store for gas. I took the tank home, fired up the Pit Boss, and threw a cheap rib eye on it.

The grill has some kind of battery-free ignition system on it. It has two burners, and each burner has a knob. You turn the knobs to open up the gas and light the burners. Very easy.

The grill part of the grill is very nice. It’s 1/4″ stainless rod. If you buy a Home Depot grill, you get porcelain over something that rusts, at best. No comparison. The rack on the Pit Boss reminds me of the rack on the $2200 DCS I used to have.

The instructions say to run the grill for 30 minutes before putting food on it. I don’t quite understand that. I probably ran it for 5 minutes before adding the meat. It looked hot to me, and the built-in thermometer said it was hot, so I didn’t see any point in wasting time and gas.

Here’s how the grill works. It has two oval burners. Over each one there is a bent sheet of stainless. The burners heat the stainless, and the stainless radiates heat to the meat. I didn’t want to use the sheets. I like some charring on my steak, and I was afraid the metal wouldn’t radiate enough heat. I decided to try the sheets anyway, to see what would happen.

I have no doubt that the meat would have failed to char enough, but for the fact that fat dripped on the stainless sheets and caught fire. The fire charred the steak pretty well. Some people don’t like it when fire hits their beef. I don’t get that. If you don’t want a charred taste, why would you use fire to cook your meat? You can just bake it, have a grey steak, and save yourself the trouble.

The steak had a good charred flavor, and it was nice and hot under the charring. That’s how it should be. I hate a rested steak. Resting is a myth that won’t die. A steak should be very hot on the outside, and you lose that when you rest a steak. People claim a steak won’t be as juicy if you don’t rest it, but that’s ridiculous. First of all, it will only lose a teaspoon or so of fat, and second, you don’t really lose it. It stays on the plate where you can dip your steak in it.

You know what you’re really doing when you rest a steak? People claim there are secret channels inside the meat, and the juice runs around through them and redistributes itself. Laughable. Cut a steak open some day and look for the secret channels. What you’re really doing is letting the fat get cold so it’s thicker and less runny. Hot fat tastes much better than cool fat. This should be obvious.

The other day I saw something posted online by Ruth’s Chris. They claimed resting was great for steaks, but guess what? They don’t rest theirs. They come out fast, on super-hot plates, still sizzling from the salamander. They actually brag about their hot, sizzling plates.

A plate removed from a salamander will not be sizzling-hot after 5 minutes of resting. Physically impossible.

The nonsense they posted about resting was clearly written by an ad copywriter who had no idea what Ruth’s actually does. It’s a lie.

I’ll post a photo of the food. For some reason, I really like frozen broccoli with cheese sauce with steak, so that’s what you’re seeing. I wouldn’t eat it if it were a special occasion, but for a Monday night with no one else around, it’s fine, and it’s a lot easier on my stomach than a big potato. I’m convinced potatoes are poisonous. Not that I plan to quit eating them. But when I eat a big dose of potato, I feel like I swallowed a beach towel.

I plan to try two other methods of cooking. First, I’ll try it without the stainless sheets in the way. After that, I’ll try it with the sheets removed and a cast iron griddle on the rack. I love a steak fried on cast iron.

I found a very nice cast iron griddle at Walmart. The brand name is Ozark Trail. Lodge quit making the griddle I like, so I had to switch.

The grill is terrific. It makes me wonder if anyone needs a big grill. You could feed 10 people with this thing, no problem. If the size worried you, you could spend a grand total of $200 and use two grills. It sure beats spending a fortune on a large grill that’s a pain to use, doesn’t work any better, takes up more room, and doesn’t last any longer.

The grill doesn’t heat whatever it’s sitting on, so you could set it up on a plastic table or a cooler if you wanted. The legs fold up, and it has latches to keep it closed while you’re traveling.

I highly recommend this grill, but I can’t promise it will last. I’m assuming I can get at least two years out of any grill. When it finally dies, I fully intend to keep the rack. It’s way too nice to throw out.

It’s going to be so nice to be freed from the chore of cleaning beef fat off the stove and hood.

I should use this grill and my little butane stove as much as possible for messy cooking. They’ll be lifesavers until I get a glass-topped stove.

An Entire Industry That Manufactures Nothing but Junk

I feel like it’s time to buy a grill and a propane burner.

My kitchen is very nice. It has a stove with 4 burners and a grill, and it also has a fume hood. Still, the sad truth is that heating meat until it smokes doesn’t work out well in any home kitchen. Amateur kitchens are not built for cooking. They’re built for women, and most women have very unrealistic cooking priorities. Women want kitchens that look cute and quaint, so there are always a lot of things that look great new yet end up nasty because they’re so hard to clean.

There is a reason why so many real kitchens have stainless or tile walls.

Long ago, I decided the best way to get a great steak, in a home kitchen, was to fry it in butter on cast iron. This sends a lot of smoke into the air, and much of that smoke is really grease droplets. Over time, they accumulate on things. If you fry meat in your kitchen regularly, you will end up with a brown film of grease on your cabinets, walls, ceiling, and vent hood.

My kitchen has painted walls, a painted ceiling, and some kind of paint or plastic coating on the cabinets. The ceiling is very high. I don’t want to have to clean all that over and over. The vent hood lets a lot of the smoke from frying blow right by it, so it’s not that helpful.

I need to get me a propane burner and put it on the patio for frying steaks. It will look bad, but I will never have to clean anything but the skillet. Actually, I should get a rectangular griddle. That’s what I used to use back in Miami, and it was wonderful.

A grill would also be helpful. Burgers also mess up the kitchen, and sometimes you want one that’s grilled, not fried. I like to mix salt and garlic into ground chuck and grill it.

I said my stove had a grill, but here I am saying I want a new grill. Why? Because the stove’s built-in grill is totally worthless. It doesn’t get hot enough to grill anything. Also, it makes a mess.

I’ve been looking around online, trying to decide what kind of grill to get. Part of me says I should blow a lot of money and get a top-notch “professional” stainless grill that will last forever. The problem with that plan is that I tried it once, and it didn’t work. I have some wisdom to share.

1. There is no such thing as a “professional” barbecue grill. Using the word “professional” in a grill ad is fraud. They are all sold to home cooks. You have never gone to a big restaurant and eaten a steak that came off a “professional” propane grill. Restaurants use things like electric salamanders.

2. “Professional” grills aren’t worth the money. I bought a $1200 DCS grill. It was only a 30″-wide built-in, and it was a long time ago, so don’t be deceived by the somewhat low price. DCS is one of the top “professional” grill makers. The same grill costs $2200 today. It worked fine for a while. Then the plastic on one of the knobs melted, and the manifold started leaking. Getting it fixed was impossible. I could probably have found parts had I searched long enough, but I gave up on it.

There were some nice things about the DCS. It had very heavy stainless racks, and there were few if any parts that could rust. Still, it gave up the ghost after very little use. Goodbye, $1200. And the food wasn’t any better than it would have been had I bought a gas grill from Home Depot.

I’m thinking I should get a $179 dollar Home Depot propane grill. If I take care of it, which is not hard, it should last several years.

Let’s say it lasts 4 years, which is a completely reasonable expectation. The DCS grill I bought costs $2200 now. That means I can get over 49 years of trouble-free grilling for the cost of a DCS, which might last 3 years before needing difficult repairs.

Another nice thing about a cheap grill is that if I move, I can leave it here instead of taking it with me.

I may get a small propane grill that sits on a table. Cuisinart makes one, and people love it. They work very well, but sometimes the knobs go bad. There are a million sources for knobs, so I don’t care about that issue. You don’t have to buy the Cuisinart version. There are lesser-known brands that sell for maybe a third less. For a little over $100, you can get a grill that does a great job and doesn’t break your heart if you have to take it to the dump in two years.

The main problem with a tabletop grill is the need for a table. And I suppose plastic is not the smartest material for that purpose, and plastic is what I have.

Anyway, it looks like a good move to consider.

To sum up, it appears that there is no such thing as a quality gas grill, so you might as well go cheap and save money.

To get back to cooking steaks outdoors, I have a pretty good Lodge griddle, which I left in Miami. Of course, they have discontinued it, so I can either drive to Miami (no) or look for something else. Walmart has an Ozark Trail griddle which looks good and costs very little.

I should run up there. I can get a griddle there, and I can pick up a new propane burner and a tank at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Right now, there are two rib eyes in my fridge. The local Winn-Dixie turns them loose cheap once in a while. When I first noticed them in 2017, I didn’t think to look for the words “choice” or “prime” on the packages, because it didn’t occur to me that any mainstream grocer would go below choice. Once I decided to check, I found that the packaging didn’t say “choice” anywhere on it, so I guess the steaks are select or something worse. That’s not a big deal. The rib eye is such a superior cut, a sub-choice example will still probably be an excellent steak, and if you get it for five or six bucks per pound, you have nothing to complain about.

I prepared a standing rib roast from this stuff once, and it was excellent. Prime would have been better, but it was very good. If I had read the packaging more carefully, I would have passed it by.

A choice New York strip is not much better than leather, so I wouldn’t take a chance on going below choice. A rib eye is different. Also, you can look at the meat through the plastic and see if they let a cut with unusually good marbling slip by.

But Wait…There’s More

I just found out Coleman makes a 7200-BTU butane burner. It’s very small, it’s very cheap, and you can set it right down on a table. I think I’ll grab one and wait to make a final and more expensive decision.

Now if I can Just Get it to Cast Itself into the Sea

God has given me another productive day. The trick is to pray, curse your problems, and bless your efforts, in the name of Jesus Christ, BEFORE the problems pop up.

I’ve been working on three stubborn stumps in my front yard. I got one out this weekend, and then yesterday, I went after another one, and I got a bonus. I located a huge rock near a stump, and I managed to get it out of the ground and move it out of the area. I also succeeded in removing the second stump.

Today I went after the third stump. I prayed for help. I spoke the Lord’s opposition to the difficulty of removing it, and I spoke his help to me. After maybe 90 minutes’ work with the subsoiler, drill, sawzall, and Root Assassin, the stump surprised me by surrendering suddenly. It popped out of the ground for no obvious reason.

Here it is. I may have it bronzed.

I bent the tabs that connect the subsoiler to my hitch. I don’t know how I did that. My tractor is not big, so you would think it wouldn’t be able to bend what appears to be 7/16″ plate. I don’t care, however, because the subsoiler still works, and even if it didn’t, the amount I paid for it is a lot lower than the cost of having people come in and remove stumps and rocks. I don’t care if I break three of these a year.

Now there are no stumps in the area where I was working, and a big rock which would have caused problems is gone. I have three little blackberry plants ready to go in the ground. I just have to get more soil. When I began this project, I didn’t know I’d have four huge holes to fill.

I’m wondering if I should put clay or some kind of waterproof material in the bottoms of the holes, to retain water. The dirt here drains way too fast.

The Internet, which never lies, says blackberry roots don’t go deeper than 10″. I could put pieces of tarp down about 15″ and then put soil and plants over them. I wonder if anyone has tried this.

I also finished sewing my second knife sheath. I bought a Lionsteel M4 with olive wood handles, and the sheath that came with it wasn’t right for my jeans. This sheath was harder to sew than the first one. I don’t know why. Anyway, here’s a photo.

I still have to finish up the edges. Right now, the sheath is drying. I wet it down and molded it around the knife’s handle so it would hold the knife in place without a strap. I may have to add a strap later, though. That’s okay. The stitching is not great, and I may redo it. If I do that, I’ll have a good opportunity to add a strap with a snap.

I sharpened several knives. I bought a Cold Steel Swift with CTS-XHP steel. Cold Steel doesn’t use CTS-XHP any more because they can’t get a reliable supply, so it’s getting hard to find these knives. I found one on Ebay for something like $20 below the street price, so I had to buy it. Yesterday, I used it to trim a piece of leather, and it went dull right away. I had to do something.

My understanding is that manufacturers supply defective edges on knives. They sharpen them with belts, and they do it too quickly, softening the steel on the edges. This gives you a very sharp knife which gets dull fast. I think this is what happened to the Swift. Cutting the leather shouldn’t have affected it at all.

I got out my diamond hones and a weird ceramic hone, and I touched it up. Did I get rid of the soft steel? I don’t know. I’ll keep using it. If it gets dull fast, I’ll know the answer.

It’s so sharp now, it’s creepy. The fact that it sharpened up so fast may indicate that the edge is still soft.

The Swift is a very, very nice knife, but it’s an assisted-opening design. You open it part of the way with a little button on the blade, and then a spring slams it open the rest of the way. I don’t like that. I can open a knife just fine by flicking my wrist. Using a spring seems dangerous.

The whole point of buying a steel like CTS-XHP is to avoid frequent sharpening, so I hope the knife isn’t a dud. I have a Gerber Gator II with cheap steel, and it’s a great knife, but for the fast dulling. I paid $15 for it. If I’m going to get cheap-steel performance, I might as well pay cheap-steel prices. The Gator II is indestructible, and it has a very comfortable handle.

I also sharpened my Entrek sheath knife. I have seen the way Ray Ennis sharpens these knives when he makes them, and I don’t think it’s their best feature. Apart from the heating issue, the knife, as it came from the factory, didn’t seem to want to bite into things.

I have DMT diamond stones, but I didn’t use them. I like kitchen-style hones. I have them in two diamond grits, plus the ceramic one and two steels. They seem to work just as well as stones, and they’re easier to use. Also, you don’t have to use liquid.

On top of all this, got a lot of business done. Leases for rental properties and so on. And I stocked up on groceries. Breakfast was sub-optimal this morning because I was running low on things. I had three fried eggs with cheddar cheese, plus whole wheat toast. I had been planning to eat fresh vegetables, boiled eggs, pita, and so on.

Tomorrow, the sheath for the Lion Steel knife should be dry, and after a little finishing, I should be able to use it. I want to get used to going out in public with a sheath knife. I feel conspicuous, but open carry is 100% legal, and I prefer sheath knives to folding knives.

Time to shower up and spend time with the birds. Hope your day was as good as mine.

Disks of Decadence

I don’t know if this is good news or not, but I have finally come up with a recipe for perfect pancakes.

Today I looked in the fridge, and I realized I was missing one of the ingredients for a healthy breakfast. I’ve been eating a kibbutz-style breakfast for a while: raw vegetables, pita, hummus, and so on. I used to eat homemade vegetable stew, but I got tired of making it.

One of my vegetables was nowhere to be found, so I figured I had a good excuse to make pancakes.

First, a word about syrup. I will eat two types of syrup: pure maple syrup and syrups that don’t pretend to be maple syrup. I will eat syrup made from blueberries, sugar, and starch, but I won’t eat Aunt Jemima or Log Cabin fake syrup.

I like a strong maple flavor. There are some very weak maple syrups out there, and I don’t think they’re worth the money. Good syrup costs as much as decent wine, so you might as well get something you can taste.

I have been a fan of grade B syrup for years. Grade B is darker than Grade A, and it has a stronger flavor. Supposedly, it’s intended for baking, but I put it on pancakes and waffles.

Back when I was checking out different brands of grade B, I came across Anderson’s syrup, from Wisconsin. As I recall, it was cheaper than Vermont syrup, and I figured it had to be about the same, so I tried it. It turned out to be a top-notch product.

A few weeks back, I saw I was running low on Anderson’s, so I went to Amazon and looked for it. I saw a Vermont brand–Butternut Farms–at a lower price. I thought I should give it a try. MISTAKE! It ruined my waffles. It was watery and bland. It gets great reviews on Amazon, but it’s worthless.

Even though I still had most of a jug of it, I bought more Anderson’s. Now I use the Butternut syrup for things like oatmeal, just to get rid of it.

On a whim, I tried a “dark” maple syrup I found at the local grocery. It was better than Butternut Farms, but not good enough for me. I’m sticking with Anderson’s, which I refrigerate to discourage mold.

That’s the syrup story.

As for pancakes, I had tried a bunch of recipes, and some were okay, but on the whole, they were not nearly as good as my waffles, which were absolutely perfect. Today I realized the obvious: I needed to make pancakes with waffle batter. Duh.

The pancakes were fluffy and delicious. No leathery texture. No heaviness. I might as well give you the recipe. You can decide whether you want to make pancakes or waffles. It makes 3 pancakes or two big waffles.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup biscuit flour (not self-rising)
3/4 cup milk (maybe buttermilk?)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
3 tablespoons fat
1 egg

For fat, I like to use two tablespoons of melted bacon grease and one tablespoon of melted butter.

Melt the fat and add the milk. Warm the milk so the fat stays melted. Not too hot, because you’re going to add an egg yolk.

Separate the egg. Beat the white until it’s stiff. Add the yolk to the milk and beat until foamy.

Combine the dry ingredients. Mix the wet ingredients in. Adjust the consistency by adding milk or flour, if needed.

That’s all there is to it.

I like to put the syrup in a Pyrex cup with butter and nuke it so it’s hot when it hits the food.

I cook my pancakes on medium-low heat, on a cast iron griddle. Turn them after they fill up with bubbles in the middle and the edges start to look dry.

I put my plate under a heat lamp while I cook. I put the pancakes on the plate as they come off the stove, and they don’t get cold.

Making this recipe is not much harder than dumping mix into a bowl and adding eggs and milk, so you don’t have a good excuse for buying a big box of chemicals instead of cooking from scratch.

If you try it, let me know how it works out.

Plus Ham

Today has been a very good day.

Yesterday, I finally gave in. Rib roasts have been on sale for about two weeks, and I was tired of passing them by. I grabbed a small one, and this morning before breakfast, I seasoned it and coated it with butter and garlic. It sat at room temperature until not long ago, and now it’s cooking at 250 degrees.

After I prepared the roast for cooking, my cousin called, and we had a long conversation about God. I helped her out with some information and Youtube links. Very productive. I think she, her mother, and her son are going to get a lot closer to God.

We also discussed other things. For one, my grandmother’s country ham recipe. My aunt had it. My cousin sent me photos of the cards my grandmother wrote it on. I am in business. The nearest grocery has already confirmed that they will sell me an uncured ham.

While I was on the phone with my cousin, my neighbors invited me to Easter lunch. I enjoyed free food and good conversation. Among other things, those assembled discussed our shared hatred of squirrels. I said I never lifted my foot off the accelerator when I saw one on the road. My neighbor’s wife said she always tried to hit them.

Nice.

After lunch, her husband took their grandchildren out in their front yard for some healthy childhood activities: shooting a compound bow and a BB gun. He put some clay pigeons on a cardboard target and let his grandson and granddaughter do their worst. I took a photo.

Naturally, like any red-blooded American male, I sensed a challenge. I talked some smack and said I could do better. Then I pulled my Glock, put the laser dot on the upper clay pigeon, and graced my hosts with a mag dump.

The kids protested that they were only 7 and 9, but I wasn’t having any of their excuses. Then I told them the Easter Bunny wasn’t real.

Actually, I stood back quietly and told them they were doing great. They did pretty well with the bow.

In any case, I was inspired. I got out my VZ.58 and giant Chinese laser and shot 60 rounds in my pasture.

People have a lot of different strategies for home protection. Many choose pistols, which seems ridiculous. It’s easy to miss, or shoot yourself, with a pistol, and they don’t hold much ammo. And the ammo is weak. My current solution is a folding semiauto rifle with a laser, shot from the folded position.

Everyone says you shouldn’t shoot from the hip, but with a laser, you don’t really need to see the sights. That’s my theory.

I took the gun to the pasture in bright sunlight, and I found I could shoot a pretty tight pattern at 30 feet with very little effort. I’ll put up a couple of targets. The third target, which I shot first, isn’t quite as good (because I wasn’t trying at all), but the rounds still landed within a five-inch circle.

I feel like my theory makes sense. Keep electronic hearing protectors by the bed with your rifle. Put them on when you realize you have guests. Use the laser to pop them from 30 or 50 feet away. Your average criminal would be lucky to hit a cruise ship at 30 feet, so even if they shoot back, you have a huge advantage.

I don’t know if I would actually choose to shoot another person in a situation like that, but I feel I should have the choice.

The laser is easy to see in bright sunlight at 30 feet, so it’s impossible to miss inside a house. Even if you manage to find 100 feet of open space, you will still have no problem seeing a green laser.

I like it. I think it’s a great idea. My guess is that 0.01% of the shooting world will agree with me, but then they love dumb ideas that defy common sense. They tell women to carry crummy little revolvers instead of compact Glocks, for example, as if women are just too stupid to work semiautos. They take pistols seriously as home defense weapons, when there is no conceivable reason to forgo the superior performance of long guns in the home.

Pistols are for carry, period. That’s the whole reason they exist. A pistol should only be used when you can’t have a long gun. When you’re in your own house, you can carry a bazooka if you want, so there is no reason to settle for tiny guns that fire small numbers of weak rounds with poor accuracy.

In a famous 1998 shooting, a war veteran with an M1 carbine shot a deputy with a pistol 10 times, and he shot from the hip part of the time. The deputy emptied at least one magazine and only hit him once. Using a long gun, the criminal disabled the deputy with accurate shots to his limbs, and then he was able to approach him and execute him with a shot to the right eye. It was a complete mismatch.

If you want to see why I don’t like pistols, check out the video below. Two trained cops armed with pistols take on a nut armed with a pistol, at close range. Many bullets fly. Not one hits a human being. What else can I say?

Tell me that would have happened if one particpant had had a long gun.

I guess you could say I have an opinion.

People have told me you can’t fire a shotgun from the hip. Well, I’ve done it, and it works just fine. I fired a Saiga-12 at 50 feet using a laser, and I didn’t shoulder it. No problems at all. I don’t know where people get their weird ideas.

They say you can’t reacquire a target with a shotgun if you fire from the hip. Like it’s easy when you fire from the shoulder! And if you have a laser dot telling you where to shoot, reacquiring targets is not hard no matter what you’re shooting.

I like lasers and rifles for home protection. What can I tell you?

I hope your day is going as well as mine.