Cold, colder, and turkey derricks

(A photo of Alton Brown and his turkey. For more detail on Alton and his turkey derrick see the bottom of the post.)











I appreciate the flood of emails that I received regarding the folks who live next to our workshop. Yesterday was unexpectedly warm and so we thought that they were getting a reprieve. After dark I was finishing up some work at the shop (thank you Buddy for dropping by and changing motorcycle tires for me!) and noticed that they had candles. So we went to bed thinking that all was well.

This morning, however, Jacksonville was greeted by record cold temperatures as the Canadian weather did indeed finally get here. For those of you who live Up North 32 degree temps don't sound like much but Down Here many people don't even own winter coats.

So I'm going to try and drop in on them tonight and see how they are doing. If they haven't already moved out, that is. The city is opening shelters and I know that they have relatives across the St. John's River but as I mentioned in my previous post, when you don't have transportation and you don't have a phone (we had been letting them use our cell phones) and you don't have a radio nor a TV then any services that the City is offering might as well be on Mars.

A couple of folks have said - rightfully so - that my neighbors need to help themselves. And I am not going to disagree with that position at all. I don't think they live a particularly stellar lifestyle yet I don't see them as being crackheads or alkys either. My read is that they are just some poor black folks who are really down on their luck and between jobs.

But even the worst alky or crackhead doesn't deserve to freeze to death in my book.

In this case I simply don't want to judge. Freezing to death or starving to death is an awfully high penalty to pay for the crime of being slack. *IF* they are slack, and I don't see that at all. Just old and worn out.

Anywho, I have been very touched by the concern shown by several readers of this blog.

~~~

We had our own little electrical trauma this morning. We moved the Wanderlodge to another park last night. Everything was going well until this morning. As I was packing the silver motorcycle to ride to work (yes, I am still riding in 35 degree weather!) I heard the frickin' irritating sounds of my 'puter uninterruptible power supplies going off inside the motorcoach. Which could only mean one thing. Our electrical power had died.

The Bluebird has gas heat but ... duh ... we've never used it. Never had to. It just simply doesn't get that cold in Florida and in the scheme of priorities refurbishing the A/C for our tropical travels comes up first on list. We had agreed to soldier through this winter with small auxillary heaters for now.

And we have discovered that one of the joys of RV living is knowing what you can - and cannot - run off of a 30amp or a 50amp circuit. Or, for that matter, a 30amp line and a Pirated add'l 30amp line at the vacant space next to you. Not like I'd ever try something like that or anything.

For instance, our RV will run 3 air conditioning units on a 50amp circuit but that 4th unit will pop a breaker.

And 2 electric space heaters plus the factory electric heater in the bathroom plus the hot water heater are about all that you can get out of 50amps before something goes out.

One 30amp line will only run half the electical stuff inside the coach so you either need to choose between your refrigerator or your hot water heater, because they are on separate circuits. And from what I have heard you might as well forget about running the bus A/C units.

With a pair of 30amp lines we have almost the same power as you do with a single 50amp circuit. Even though it's not supposed to work that way. (Our coach was one of the first built on this plan and had the bedroom remodeled once so it's not quite the spec as printed in the original typewritten manuals).

Never mind the "old RV park with old wiring" factor. At our last park we shorted out half of the 50amp circuit and wound up using - with the permission of the management, believe it or not - the 50amp hookup at the space next to us.

Exciting stuff, right?

And just for the record (and for those three gearheads that have actually read this far) we carry a ton of extra cables and extension cords and poo tank fittings because we are geared up for disaster relief and Mexican travels. If it can be humanly connected, we'll find a way to do it.

So no electrical power in this weather means ... frosty housecats, let's put it that way. I guess the upside to freezing the cats to death is that would eliminate their fleas, but somehow that seems to be a bit drastic.

Anyway, the Ace Maintenance Man and Yours Truly pretty quickly determined that the problem wasn't in the yards and yards of wiring, switches, circuit breakers, and relays inside the bus but rather the RV park's power pedestal had gone kaput. Running on the diesel generator we had power (and heat!) but while the blasted thing puts out enough electricity to run a small ship, it's of that vintage where it's noisy and smokes like a cigar afficianado's convention. So we likely didn't make any new friends with the neighbors this morning as we ran the old Perkins diesel generator.

At least they shouldn't have any mosquitos for awhile.

(As an aside, if you want to know why the Brits lost their auto industry, just ask me about a Perkins diesel. Every other diesel that I know of has simple screw-on fuel filters that are disposable. On a Perkins you have about 9 parts and washers and gaskets that need to be aligned to get the disposable filter element to fit properly. And then bleeding the fuel lines is about a 2 day job whereas on a CAT diesel the job is done with a simple plunger mechanism that you pump by hand. I am always reminded that some British tanks used a 12 cylinder Perkins diesel. I suspect that the concept of a civilized tea break comes into play because they need to take a pause to repair and tune those monsters in the middle of a battle every so often.)

As I sit here in my WARM office writing this the RV park is supposed to have an electrician on the way to look at things. Wish us luck.

~~~

I wish that I had found this in time for Turkey Day and Christmas. Still, as it says (in Latin) on the bottom of my business checks, "better late than never."

Have you ever eaten fried turkey? Mmmmmm good! But the process isn't for the faint of heart. In fact, it can be downright dangerous.

Check out Alton Brown's website at http://www.altonbrown.com/ for Alton's .PDF download showing you how to construct his "turkey derrick." Basically using simple household materials and a ladder, the turkey derrick allows you to SAFELY manage your turkey in a pot of boiling oil. Ingenious!

And Brown, besides being an avid motorcyclist and a regular on the Food Channel, is downright funny. So I encourage y'all to check out his stuff.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


--PirateJohn--


http://pyratejohn.blogspot.com/ (the *NEW* blog)


http://www.piratejohn.com/ (my website)


http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HumourList/ (the infamous joke list)





Enjoy!

Happy 2008!

Greetings!

I trust that everyone had a safe and happy Christmas and New Year's celebration.

Kick back, and fix yourself a Bloody Mary. 2008 may well be the best year of our lives. So let's chat a bit.

We are camped out at the workshop, testing out new 'puters and new audiovisual stuff in the RV, and admiring the hardwood floor that we have finally (almost) gotten finished. We've been working on this frickin' floor since the Thanksgiving holidays and it's finally time to kick back and admire the handiwork.

Cats are well behaved {har, har, har} and healthy, and we hit two parties last night wherein you could just feel the good vibes and tell that everyone was genuinely your pal.

Right now I have more writing projects going on than I can shake the proverbial stick at, and myself and other partners are discussing some really interesting collaborative ventures in a couple of fields. The reality of being an entrepreneur is two-fold: 1) for every idea that gells into something that makes money you will sift through hundreds of ideas that don't go anywhere, and that's just the nature of the beast, and 2) as my Momma always said, "Don't give up the day job!"

The RV lifestyle is suiting us well. This is something that I wished that I had done maybe 5-10 years earlier, but the reality is that if I had purchased an RV back then I wouldn't have experienced my Third Perfect House. And the Third Perfect House was the one that finally convinced me that, as wonderful as it was (plenty of garage and workshop space, swimming pool, private offices, fancy vaulted ceiling, and a kitchen to kill for), that it was keeping me from doing what I always wanted to do. Which was to cut some ties to The Perfect City and my Perfect Circle of Friends and to travel.

Things sound awfully good, don't they?

I'm worried.

Here in Jacksonville, Florida the nighttime temps are supposed to get into the 25 degree range for a few days.

And here at our workshop on the Southside we have discovered that the couple in the little concrete block house just outside our fenced in workshop compound doesn't have any utilities. No heat, and no water. Not having any money available for deposits will do that to ya.

A few days ago the lady that lived there asked me if I could spare 50 cents so that she could buy a small bag of potato chips for dinner. I gave her $1 and saw her the next morning eating a bag of chips so I assume that she wasn't joking.

I'm not quite sure what we can do. I did ask the landlord if we could run an extension cord over to them for a few days and the response was ... well ... unprintable here. And I'll print quite a bit on this blog, trust me. So you get the picture.

Now, I have seen plenty of houses in rural Mexico that didn't have glass in the window openings because the owners hadn't saved enough to buy glass.

And I have seen similar things in Appalachia as I was growing up as a kid in Kentucky.

But in an era when we have billionaires competing to see who can build the largest yacht on the planet (think in terms of 450 feet, incidentally), and when the wealth of this planet has spread to the point where the wealthiest man is a Mexican gent (Carlos Slim, who controls the phone system down there) and reportedly there are as many families with middle class incomes in China as there are in the USA, I find it hard to imagine what it must be like to not have heat. Or food, for that matter, here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Did you realize that the Iraqi Constitution provides for health care to all Iraqi citizens? "Article 31: "Every citizen has the right to health care. The state takes care of public health and provide the means of prevention and treatment by building different types of hospitals and medical institutions."

You tax dollars are paying for that m'friend. And I don't want to take that away from the Iraqis, because, after all, what they have is more of the international norm than what we have, which is basically zero health care if you are uninsured.

Did you realize that an employer in Mexico has to provide health care to their employees? In fact, generally speaking, the employer is responsible for the employee from pretty much the time that the employee leaves the house to the time that he or she returns. In an article that I was reading in one of my truckin' periodicals the Hyundai plant in Tijuana, which is producing trailers for, among others, FedEx, is providing shuttle bus services and a full-time physician for their employees.

Contrast that to the negotiations that the UAW have going on with the auto makers which will inevitably require the UAW to give back many of their members' health and retirement benefits.

What's the point, you ask?

Here in the USA we have gotten so wrapped up in cutting services to the poorest of our people that we have lost perspective. Other nations are taking care of their citizens. We are basically the only industrialized nation without any form of health care for our poorest. And to my way of thinking nothing is a more fundamental human right than to avoid freezing to death. Or to avoid starving to death for that matter. Particularly in a nation such as ours that prides itself on our wealth and our humanity.

Something is seriously out of whack here.

As our #1 resolution for 2008 we need to consider our weakest. Those folks without basic necessities. Those folks in frail health. Those folks who could benefit from a helping hand.

Let's all count our blessings. If we have heat and a 'puter in front of us, then we literally may be doing better than the family down the road. Or across town.

The next time that some panhandler asks for money look them in the eye. Don't shy away from them. You can quickly tell the genuinely down and out from the shiftless. But no matter how you slice things, these people are someone's son and daughter. And they are our neighbors.

But for the grace of God go you and I.

Here's to hoping for the very best for you and yours - and your neighbors for that matter - in 2008.