Paint, Yeast and Forest Fires

Greetings! How are things where you are?  We're good, we're on hiatus from the massive painting project.  Tomorrow we'll be getting a tub of wood filler, for the bathroom door frame.  We think the divots in the door frames are from wheel chair hubs, but who really knows.  We're also getting the Jeep washed at the same car wash place.  Sunday it might snow, but the car really needs to be de-dirted and de-salted.

That's Jim standing in front of the mantel.  The object to his right is an orbital sander.  The last painters in the house not only spilled paint on the mantel (and did not clean it up), but they left brush marks deep enough that they had to be sanded as well.  That's all behind us now, we're moving on to other things.

The stand mixer arrived. Yay!  I love how they shipped this, they just slapped a label on it and put it in the mail.  It was well packed, and arrived intact.

It's good, it has 500 watts and can handle stiff dough.  We've made one batch with it;  I'm not sure what we did differently, but it was able to hold its shape coming off the dough hook.  The hand mixer definitely would have over heated.

This time we used bread flour, which I think I like better.

The sun was out today, it was glorious.

A forester came to the neighborhood today to talk about our fire load.  Fire generally flows uphill.  We're about midway up a big hill.  There is a road way down below us, and a vertical bluff behind us.  We, and the people on the bluff, are at risk from fires starting below us.  The biggest danger comes from the embers.  They float and as the fire grows hotter, the air rises faster, carrying embers which will land on roofs.  We also learned that the paths up the hill are on property owned by the HOA.  There are trees all over it.  Many are stressed, some are dead.  Dead trees are actually not as big as a hazard as live ones are.  The dead tree will catch faster, but the live tree will burn longer and hotter due to the oils in it.  The woods need to be thinned, primarily the immature trees.  They're never going to grow because there are too many trees and not enough water.  Some tall trees will have to go to keep fire from jumping from tree crown to crown.  So, the HOA is going to have to do something about this.  There are grants available, as well as money from the Infrastructure Bill, so hopefully it will not be too expensive.  Such is the downside of a small neighborhood. 

This is a dead tree.  It's not too much of a problem because the needles are off of it.

Here we are at the top of the hill. 

Now, from the department of you can't fix stupid.  Remember Sherri Tenpenny?  Previously she testified that the vaccines were magnetizing people.  Now she has an even more convoluted, more stupid theory on the subject.  The link to her speaking is here.  I don't understand how people come to these conclusions.

Play the video!  It's astounding.