Wanderings

Anything you dream is fiction,
and anything you accomplish is science,
the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
- Ray Bradbury
October 31st, 2013

First Egg from the Fuzzy Feet

One of our Copper Marans Chickens, Veronica or Betty, I don’t know which, has given us a deep purple-brown egg.

That’s it on the right. On the left as a normal medium sized egg. These are very valuable eggs ($30 a dozen) and are supposed to be the best tasting eggs in the world. (The character James Bond (from the Ian Fleming books) demanded that his omelets were made only with Marans eggs, all other varieties considered to be of lesser quality.) We won’t get enough to sell them separately, so the eggs we sell from the driveway may have a Marans egg from time to time. The Marans are not great layers so we might get 6 a week.

Here is a recent picture of the Marans. They have feathers on their feet and since we can’t tell them apart, we call them the “Fuzzy Feet”.

Eggs James Bond Recipe (Requires Copper Marans Eggs)

For four individualists:
12 fresh eggs
Salt and pepper
5-6 oz. of fresh butter.

Break the eggs into a bowl. Beat thoroughly with a fork and season well. In a small copper (or heavy bottomed saucepan) melt four oz. of the butter. When melted, pour in the eggs and cook over a very low heat, whisking continuously with a small egg whisk.

While the eggs are slightly more moist than you would wish for eating, remove the pan from heat, add rest of butter and continue whisking for half a minute, adding the while finely chopped chives or fines herbes. Serve on hot buttered toast in individual copper dishes (for appearance only) with pink champagne (Taittinger) and low music.






October 21st, 2013

Kenny Barnett

Kenny died last week. He was a sweet guy and will be missed.

Kenny was a few years younger than me or Larry. I remember him as a skinny kid who followed me around as I delivered papers. He has been my friend and my brother’s friend for 50 years. He played pretty good bass guitar and it was always fun to jam with him. He was good at working on cars and fixed my old heaps more than once.

Kenny has been sick and unable to work. He had a stroke, but the he was denied disability. He had an implanted pacemaker in his heart since he was a small child. The doctors told his mother that he would never live to adulthood. He fooled them all, but it was his heart that got him in then end, anyway.

For the last few months he has been homeless and only the kindness of strangers has kept him from having to sleep in the woods.

Kenny had a hard and unhappy life, but he always seemed to have a sense of humor, and even when he was the most depressed, he never had a unkind word to say about anyone.

I miss you, Kenny.






October 21st, 2013

Garden Gate

This is our Garden Gate. The String Beans went crazy.

Some of this is Morning Glory vine. I have to remember to bring my camera out in the morning when they are blooming. They are all gone by the time I get home at night.






October 21st, 2013

October Fungi

Cleaning out the camera…

Here are some very nice pictures of some fungi growing on logs in the back yard.







October 21st, 2013

Working on the new Heat

My old boiler is gone and I ordered a new one which arrived in the driveway last week. It weighs 480 pounds and is more that I could handle. Larry came over and brought a neighborhood kid named Brian to help.

Larry and I guided the unit into the cellar while we let Brian do the hard part. He had what is called “The Irishman’s Lift” which is to say he was below it and had to control the heavy part of the thing while we lowered it down the stairs from the top. It went without a hitch. I gave Brian the contents of my wallet ($5) and they left.

I then had to move the boiler from the bottom of the cellar stairs to the back room. I had to then unpack it and place it on some bricks in the right position and level it. 480 pounds is quite a bit to handle alone, but I got it done.

This weekend I got the water, gas and chimney done. I got 90% of the electrical done and all that is left is to hook it to the thermostats.

I will hook up the downstairs zone tonight, and if I have time, the east bedroom. It should not be too much of a problem.

 






October 3rd, 2013

TSO

Yesterday I logged into TSO for the first time in more than 30 years. It is hard to believe but this was cutting edge tech in the 1970s. TSO stands for Time Sharing Option and it was a way for programmers to work on mainframe programs. This mainframes cost millions of dollars and had as much computing power as my wristwatch does today. We talk about Gigs of memory today but in 1980 I worked on a big machine that had 5 partitions, each with about 64K of memory. The thing had two processors and a total of 512k memory and it served hundreds of people on old fashioned terminals.

tso

In another 30 years we will think that PC’s and Tablets are quaint devices used by a few nostalgic hobbyists who are living a slow and boring past. What will replace them? I am a little frightened to think about it.

My job now is to replace the old green screen COBOL programs with Java. It is not trivial. It gives me a certain nostalgia for these dinosaurs. Things were simpler in those days, if not easier.