Everything old is new again....
Oct. 20th, 2012 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogAs Eleanor mentioned the other day, we kinda got veggied out from the farm share we signed up for. Eight or so weeks in, she felt it was turning into a Sisyphus-like task to cook/freeze/whatever the bags that were showing up here every weekend.
Bags, plural, because the friend we were sharing a share with was turning her nose up at almost all of her half. She'd take a pepper here, a pack of tomatoes there, but mostly kicked the exotic stuff back to us. So I told the church people last week that we wouldn't be picking up our order any more. We'd paid for the whole shebang in advance, so no harm, no foul; they were welcome to split it into the other nine families' bags, raffle it off, donate it to the food bank, whatev.
Except I wound up picking up the other nine families' bags this morning, since our assistant who usually does it was running a major outreach/ fundraising project at the church all day. I left our own bag at the pickup point, where dozens of others also come through and will hopefully find some use for them, but when I got the other bags to our own distribution site, lo! there was our bag from last weekend, which hadn't been split, raffled, donated, whatev.
Fortunately, it's been cool enough this past week, so there was relatively little spoilage- only one orange pepper really went over to the Dark Side. So I brought it home to compost, except almost all of it seemed interesting and salvageable enough for Eleanor to wash and prepare to cook/freeze/whatever.
Maybe I'll just commit to doing the pickup the final four weekends of the share, so ours won't come Zombie Walking over to our house whether we want it or not.
----
On the higher tech end of things, I similarly made new use of old vegetable matter.
When the kids were assembling their housekeeping back in August, Cameron's dad stuck an odd item into the truck: a desktop computer tower of unknown lineage. It sat in our garage for the past two months, until another odd inheritance conspired to place it into service.
Also back in August, I closed a real estate deal for my computer guru. The closing was a late-afternoon clusterfudge, and while everything worked out okay from my client's standpoint, I knew perfectly well that he hadn't signed some papers necessary for the closing agent to generate the 1099s for the closing.
It took until the middle of this past week for them to figure that out, and I agreed to get him to sign them when I was in Rochester on Thursday. After he did so, he asked a favor of me: could I bring back a 15-ish-inch flat screen TV to his sister, who lives near us?
Of course I could. (Except I haven't gotten it to her yet; neither she nor their dad, who I absolutely adore, has picked it up from us yet.) As a thank you for my trouble, he threw in a duplicate of the same television so I could "have one for the kitchen."
In this respect, he don't know me/us very well. We are not the TV Always On types. But. Damned if the thing wouldn't make a perfectly 21st century monitor for that possibly late 20th century tower. So I moved both of them into Emily's room and spent a few hours this afternoon playing Victor Frankenstein with this new jerry-rigging of hardware.
Ultimately? More-or-less success. It booted, it displayed. A ratty old keyboard from the cellar (probably designed for Windows 3.0, possibly '95) didn't fit the female plug, but I suspect there's an adapter for that. I ultimately found a ratty old mouse, from four years ago when I last regularly used a desktop, and it was as slow and quirky as it ever was, but it answered the prompts when it had to. The tower had no wireless, and there's no ethernet connection in that room (or anywhere we might put it), but we have an old Linksys USB wireless adapter to do the job.
Which needed drivers, which the tower couldn't find in its own brain, and could only find through an internet connection. Oxymorons for 200, Alex.
Yet, several hours after starting and after burning some Cisco drivers off my own laptop onto a CD, I got the router adapter to work. It now needs our secured WiFi passcode, which, finally, requires the actual use of the keyboard.
So. Tomorrow (you're only a day away). A keyboard adapter. A wireless mouse. Hopefully no more unwanted vegables, and we'll be totally rockin' and rollin' in there:)
Bags, plural, because the friend we were sharing a share with was turning her nose up at almost all of her half. She'd take a pepper here, a pack of tomatoes there, but mostly kicked the exotic stuff back to us. So I told the church people last week that we wouldn't be picking up our order any more. We'd paid for the whole shebang in advance, so no harm, no foul; they were welcome to split it into the other nine families' bags, raffle it off, donate it to the food bank, whatev.
Except I wound up picking up the other nine families' bags this morning, since our assistant who usually does it was running a major outreach/ fundraising project at the church all day. I left our own bag at the pickup point, where dozens of others also come through and will hopefully find some use for them, but when I got the other bags to our own distribution site, lo! there was our bag from last weekend, which hadn't been split, raffled, donated, whatev.
Fortunately, it's been cool enough this past week, so there was relatively little spoilage- only one orange pepper really went over to the Dark Side. So I brought it home to compost, except almost all of it seemed interesting and salvageable enough for Eleanor to wash and prepare to cook/freeze/whatever.
Maybe I'll just commit to doing the pickup the final four weekends of the share, so ours won't come Zombie Walking over to our house whether we want it or not.
----
On the higher tech end of things, I similarly made new use of old vegetable matter.
When the kids were assembling their housekeeping back in August, Cameron's dad stuck an odd item into the truck: a desktop computer tower of unknown lineage. It sat in our garage for the past two months, until another odd inheritance conspired to place it into service.
Also back in August, I closed a real estate deal for my computer guru. The closing was a late-afternoon clusterfudge, and while everything worked out okay from my client's standpoint, I knew perfectly well that he hadn't signed some papers necessary for the closing agent to generate the 1099s for the closing.
It took until the middle of this past week for them to figure that out, and I agreed to get him to sign them when I was in Rochester on Thursday. After he did so, he asked a favor of me: could I bring back a 15-ish-inch flat screen TV to his sister, who lives near us?
Of course I could. (Except I haven't gotten it to her yet; neither she nor their dad, who I absolutely adore, has picked it up from us yet.) As a thank you for my trouble, he threw in a duplicate of the same television so I could "have one for the kitchen."
In this respect, he don't know me/us very well. We are not the TV Always On types. But. Damned if the thing wouldn't make a perfectly 21st century monitor for that possibly late 20th century tower. So I moved both of them into Emily's room and spent a few hours this afternoon playing Victor Frankenstein with this new jerry-rigging of hardware.
Ultimately? More-or-less success. It booted, it displayed. A ratty old keyboard from the cellar (probably designed for Windows 3.0, possibly '95) didn't fit the female plug, but I suspect there's an adapter for that. I ultimately found a ratty old mouse, from four years ago when I last regularly used a desktop, and it was as slow and quirky as it ever was, but it answered the prompts when it had to. The tower had no wireless, and there's no ethernet connection in that room (or anywhere we might put it), but we have an old Linksys USB wireless adapter to do the job.
Which needed drivers, which the tower couldn't find in its own brain, and could only find through an internet connection. Oxymorons for 200, Alex.
Yet, several hours after starting and after burning some Cisco drivers off my own laptop onto a CD, I got the router adapter to work. It now needs our secured WiFi passcode, which, finally, requires the actual use of the keyboard.
So. Tomorrow (you're only a day away). A keyboard adapter. A wireless mouse. Hopefully no more unwanted vegables, and we'll be totally rockin' and rollin' in there:)
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no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 01:23 am (UTC)I've got both if you need either.
I don't believe do can do a wireless mouse - the radio adapter module is usually USB.
I've got Ethernet boards I can send you, but what is the bus? ISA? EISA? MCA? PCI? Mid-nineties would have probably been PCI, but might have been EISA. PCI looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI EISA looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Architecture
What's the CPU? How fast? How much memory?
Making old computers run again is a kick (I do it for a hobby), but you'd be surprised how little those old machines could do. In 1995, we only just had the Internet. The browsers were Mosaic and Netscape. A huge amount of RAM was 16 MB. A huge hard drive was 1 GB.
Your phone is more capable.
Shout if you need any parts!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 01:35 am (UTC)The XP-era tower so far doesn't seem much faster than the leftover XP-era laptop that we use for only a couple of (slightly sketchy) applications, so we'll see if this is Much Ado About 0.0.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 01:00 pm (UTC)Kevin and I have had farm shares, summer and winter, for several years. I wrote a blog post on how to make the best of your (summer) farm share last summer. It's mportant to process much of it early, especially greens, because they take up valuable refrigerator real estate and will wilt. Just about anything can be blanched and frozen, and will be appreciated in March.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-21 05:19 pm (UTC)Gets two for one results. :-)
If you wanted to figure out how, contact local community centers/social services-outreach groups. They would work with the creation and promotion of such initiatives. You'd also need to keep in mind that for many of them, they may not have appropriate kitchen utensils and you may have to start from the very basics for cooking. A survey of the class before you start to show level of proficiency in cooking might be useful so you don't pitch things too high, or too low, and maybe seeing if the local Salvation Army might be willing to donate some of the required kitchen utensils from their thrift store to make sure that everyone has the needed stuff at home.
One thing to do that would be helpful is to do a "task analysis" of each cooking step. In order to know how to boil potatoes you need to know how to choose the right size pot, how much water to fill it with, which knob goes to which burner, which mark to turn it to, that it boils faster if you put a lid on it, how to peel potatoes, how to slice them safely, what size to make the pieces, how to put potatoes in without splashing, how long to cook them, how to check to see if they are done... etc.
We forget just how complicated a skill basic cooking is if you haven't had the chance to be taught the basics.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-24 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-02 02:58 pm (UTC)