Scaling down in the kitchen

I resent the power company.

I do. It’s not that having electricity is a bad thing– indeed. Having electricity is a wonderful thing, it’s just that the power company represents exactly everything that is wrong with the way large corporations do business. Wasteful, bureaucratic, thoughtless, and just generally not nice at all.

Therefore, I do not wish to give them any more of my money than I have to.

Also, the customer service is very rude. In fact, so far at our power company the only nice people we’ve met are the service technicians. The service technicians are pretty good people overall, at least for our current company.

Anyway this has lead to a reassessment of what we really need plugged in and turned on. Do we really need a ginormous refrigerator with so many cubic feet of storage? Not really. It’s old and the fan turns on way too much, also I tend to walk to the store every other day or so for fresh goods since the crisper drawer collects too much moisture and would be more accurately labeled the “moulder” and the meats drawer gets way too cold and freezes meats solid. Also the freezer portion is really inconvenient, I have a small kitchen that is long and narrow– so opening the freezer when the stove burners are on just doesn’t happen.

Now the large fridge is awaiting disposal on the back porch and we’re awaiting delivery of a compact fridge. Benefits: save money, more space and stickin’ it to the man.

The water heater is next. It is another old appliance that just sucks juice, new electric water heaters are better insulated, so there’s less loss of standby heat. Also, we don’t need a large water heater, so the plan is to scale it down to a 28 gallon water heater and if it proves to be too little we’ll place an on demand water heater at one of the far points (such as the tub or washing machine.) Benefits: save money, more space and stickin’ it to the man.

Eventually we’ll do a built in convection oven and stove, but for now those are our big changes. It’s hardly going off the grid, still– deep down in the cockles of my heart there’s a little warm glow just from knowing that I’m going to give the electric company less money (and that I’m stickin’ it to the man.)

I’ll keep you updated as things progress and on how much electricity/money we save by scaling down.

Cheap Home Improvements

Here’s a quick list things that you can do around the house to make it look a little nicer, and new, especially if you’ve lived there a while and things are starting to look run down. Some items on this list are rental friendly, some aren’t– when in doubt ask the landlord.

• Paint a wall, a single wall
• Replace caulking around tub
• Wash the front door and trim, inside and out
• Clean light fixtures
• Clean appliances

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Happy Easter!

I will be spending the day with my family to celebrate. So tonight, I will leave you the warning not to leave unrefrigerated eggs out if you intend on eating them and my favorite egg salad recipe.

You’ll need:

• 6 hard boiled eggs*
• 2 tsp 7-Up (or generic version) soft drink
• 1/8 tsp dry ground mustard
• 1/8 cup diced mild pickled peppers
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise*
• paprika to garnish

It takes about 10 minutes to prep this salad and about 40 minutes to chill in the refrigerator.

Peel egg whites and set aside. Blend yolks, 7-Up, dry mustard, and mayonnaise thoroughly by hand. Crush egg whites, blend with peppers. Pour yolk mixure over the eggwhites and diced peppers and mix until evenly covered. Chill for 40 minutes. Prior to serving garnish with paprika. Serve as a dip or on fresh toast with tomatoes and lettuce.

*Vegans can replace the egg whites with firm tofu, the yolks with soft tofu, and mayonnaise with vegan sandwich dressing.

Please note that increasing the recipe will increase the time needed to chill in the refrigerator; adjust your recipe accordingly.

eat your heart out

Leapfish.com offers free domain name appraisals. So of course I had to feed a few of my domain names into it.

Omnilead.com (yes this site) is estimated to be worth: $15,846.00

I just had to take a screenshot.

Sweet clickity thing for the day

What is the clickity thing? It’s a Multi PageRank Checker. Google ranks websites according to incoming and outgoing links, relevance and content, this site lets you check upto 25 urls at the same time to see how Google thinks your site measures up.

DIY blogs and websites using blogs

Drool on our site Quantumspindles.com, we (by “we”– which I imply Matt and I, but I really mean “I”) rebuilt it using wordpress (the same platform that this blog uses) an open source platform with lots of support and many cool thingies (called plugins) that make blogs perform great tricks (like making a super-sweet shopping cart, changing the appearance of the site, generating cool font graphics for titles, anti-comment-spam measures, creating picture galleries and automatically managing ads.)

The more I use wordpress, the more I like it. The support forums are excellent and there are lots of free tutorials, plugins, themes, and advice about using wordpress. Use the free hosting for non-commercial sites or install on any TLD that has mysql and apache (if you have hosting that provides cpanel with fantastico odds are that you can install WP.)

I have to admit that I was using the blogger.com/blogspot.com combination quite happily for quite a while. And while I like the interface and the ease of use (free is an awesome price), I too had problems with losing posts for various reasons, visitors experiencing slow loads, and sundry other small issues.

Warning, philosophical waxing ahead

As much as I try to keep my personal politics and philosophy away from my DIY ethics, I find that the two are intrinsically bound together. It warms the cockles of my heart every time I walk past the strawberry starts that we put in the ground two days ago. I feel the brisk purr of excitement when I can salvage an old motor. I am giddy with anticipation when I find a box of old keys or a forgotten package of polymer clay or a stash of vintage fabrics in the back of a closet.

There’s something thoroughly okay with the world when I can stick it to the man with a pair of hand knit socks and a dozen homemade doughnuts.

Back to the point: I’d rather not waste time protesting consumerism and commercialism and slave wages. My time and resources are better spent supporting graciousness and independence, and I don’t think I want to curb that impulse. So I’m going to go with it.

Ah-ha! And fried ice cream.

If you’ve ever had fried ice cream, real fried ice cream, you know that it really doesn’t make sense as a party dessert; it’s time consuming to make, it’s ugly, it’s so lack-luster unimpressive and unassuming. You scoop, freeze, roll, freeze, dip, freeze, roll, freeze, dip, freeze, roll, freeze ad infinitum– and all for a glorious 15 seconds in hot oil and sprint to the table for an ephemeral treat.

Websites are like fried ice-cream, at least at the moment that’s my best analogy. You can tinker with the guts, you can dress up the exterior, you can arrange it all nicely on the plate with a drizzle of caramel, but all too soon it’ll look dated, it becomes burdensome, the edges will sprawl out just a little too much and your guests will question your sanity in serving it up.

I think trying to cover up the melting with whipped cream and cherries is a bit excessive. On second thought– maybe it’s not excessive, just not my style. Instead, I’ll make fried ice-cream again and work on serving it faster the next time, and I take the same approach to websites, the changes are drastic, but I think if it improves the flavor and experience that it’s worth the extra work.