PYO

Pick your own.

Start by driving out of town. Find a PYO farm. Follow the rules, pick what you want. Weigh your harvest. Pay some fraction of the price that it would normally cost you to acquire that amount of vegetable matter.

12 lbs of cucumbers. 6 dollars.
5 1-quart jars of dill pickles.5 1-quart jars of bread and butter pickles.

Not shown: 6 pints of pickled beans

6 pints of pickled beans.

All fresh produce, hand picked, locally.

Arizona - More than just Iced Tea

And this is just the one that I bought. A multitude of flavours and sizes are available. I do love the 1 gallon jug of iced tea. Really hits the spot. That and the Arnold Palmer endorsed half and half (lemonade and iced tea). Why an aging golf icon is shilling iced tea, we'll never know.

Yuri... eat your candy bar

Didn't you know that Snickers was original a russian candy bar?

Me neither. But I guess it is now.

New Snacks and Bright Lights

Okay. Spicy Guacamole Pringles. Not exactly bursting with avacado flavour, but they do have a certain charm. Would buy again. Now for the kicker. All Pringles, regular price at the Piggly Wiggly: $1.09. For that price, why wouldn't you? In the background, beautiful Sun Prairie.

From the very same balcony, electrons. Lots! Most of wisconsin is having a real hard time dealing with the rain. I just take pictures of it. 18mm f/22 15 second exposure.

I thought this only happened in trailer parks?

Just one of the shots from Saturday. It ping ponged between this, torrential rains, wind, and sun. The local televisions do nothing but broadcast a continuous feed from the weather room where they track all of the funnel clouds, flash floods and other crazy crap that happens here. They also take calls from viewers who are live on location as well as solicit photos of severe weather.

Needless to say, we learned the subtle difference between 'Tornado Watch' and 'Tornado Warning'

Modelmaker modelmaker, make me some shelves

Now that you have a bored Canadian kid hanging around in the shop, what do you get him to do?

Everything apparently. We want some shelves upfront right behind the receptionist so we can display our trophies and show how awesome we are. Shelves. Awesome. I went to school for that. Just not made out of plastic and metal.

Oh well. With enough MDF and paint you can make your own fake 2" square metal tubing.

Kiss and Make Up

Score: http://www.zero-trance.com/typezero/index.html

Listen.

New Beverage Technology

What with the doritos in my last post tasting like mountain dew, they're going to have to work a lot harder to keep up. New sneak peek from the Johnsonville: World's Largest Bratwurst Festival:

Three new kinds of Mountain Dew hitting the shelves some time next week.

It tastes like a mystery

gf and I sat down with the weirdo bag of doritos and got to work. At first taste, they definitely have a citrus bite to them. I said lemon, she said lime. Which made sense to me, because tostitos has their 'Hint of Lime' flavour so I figured doritos was jumping on the band wagon. But the more I tasted, the more creamy of an aftertaste I got. Eventually all I could taste was lemon meringue pie.

Great. Lemon meringue pie flavoured doritos. Isn't that a coup.

So I go and dig into this big mysterious website they have set up. After it all finally loads, it wants you to enter the flavour. Hmmm.. Not enough letters for Lemon Meringue. However, above the entry box is a hint: _0_n_a_n _e_

Uh..

Mountain Dew

Sure enough it lets me in. Apparently these doritos are supposed to taste like mountain dew. And of course now when you taste one, if you use your imagination, mountain dew.

I guess if I'm ever stuck at the vending machine with only enough money for a bag of doritos or a bottle of mountain dew, I now have a solution.

New Snack Technology

This is like some sort of Da Vinci Code in snack form. Details to follow as I attempt to figure out what I'm being poisoned with.

I want to sweep with my boss...

So the gf has a dentist appointment on the other side of the earth at small hours in the morning, which means I got dropped off at work early today. Brought along a book so I could get some reading done before I started the day. Currently I'm working on "We" by Zamyatin. It's a spiritual precursor to 1984. Distopian. Anyways, so I'm at work early and the head of the shop is there oddly enough. So I sit down and start reading.

Out of the corner of my eye I see him pick up a broom and start sweeping. Immediately I start feeling guilty because it was pretty dead yesterday and I was reeeeeally stretching on keeping myself busy, I even swept some of the shop. So I figure that maybe I did a piss poor job (not unreasonable) and I start looking around for problem areas.

That's when I notice all this red stuff on the floor of the shop. It's as though somebody has taken a big salt shaker of cayenne pepper and left a big dose every 10 feet or so. I didn't remember seeing that yesterday. So I have to ask what's the deal with the red stuff.

"It's sweeping compound."

I mean... how many jokes could I possibly make about this?

• I thought the goal of sweeping was to get the dust off the floor
• I could keep myself busy cleaning too if I also made the mess first
• It's good that we're doing the important tasks first
• Etc.

At first glance this concept seems totally ridiculous. Upon closer inspection, it's a waxy/oily sawdust that dust (other dust) sticks to. You're only supposed to slap some down in front of your broom before you start and it basically just makes all the other stuff you sweep up stay put instead of billowing up in a cloud. Dropping a bunch of it all over the shop seems a little over eager.

During lunch I'm telling gf about this wacky product and she's like.. oh yeah, sweeping compound, it works really good. It's over in the cardboard box by the band saw.

Wait a minute. That box is full of sweeping compound?

All this time, I've been throwing scraps and offcuts from the bandsaw into this box that looked like it was full of....sawdust. It's right beside the bandsaw! Who knew it was special sawdust. The funnier part is the image of the head of the shop going over for a big dose of sweeping compound this morning and finding a huge pile of bullshit on top. Oops. Later in the day I noticed that the box was moved to a different part of the shop. Probably a good idea.

Best of all, the company that distributes this stuff, no word of a lie "Messner"

http://www.messnerinc.com/webapp/catalog/product/list.asp?line=A0077

New Snack Technology

Ingredients: 1 pouch of Old El Paso Taco Seasoning
1 bag of nacho cheese doritos

Combine ingredients and shake.

Eventually everything that comes in a powder format will end up on doritos. I'm waiting for koolaid flavours.

the walls are closing in on me

Alright, so here is the spray booth at work. Spray towards the back wall and a large exhaust fan handles all of your over spray. Well. Most of it. Those big pieces of paper used to be taped to the walls. They catch the over spray that hits the walls to avoid some nasty build-up from forming. Well what did they do before they put the paper up? Nothing. Which is why I spent a few hours on May 13 getting personal with a razor blade and a brillo pad. Luckily for me, over spray doesn't stick exceptionally well to galvanized steel, you just need enough elbow grease.

Now that the booth is nice and clean what do you do? Well you put up another over spray barrier to make sure that next summer's intern doesn't have to do the same thing you did. Enter: a very big roll of saran wrap. It's special stuff for this purpose specifically, but that's essentially what it is. A very large roll 36" wide of plastic cling wrap. So you pull off enough to get it to stick to the wall, wipe it down with a squeegee to make sure it sticks, then unroll enough to run the length of the wall, then trim it off. But what would you use to trim this off? Surely not the razor blade you've been using the whole day. Only a fool and a communist would do that. There is a specially branded tool for this job, and this job alone.

http://www.tangiblesltd.com/Images/snippitarray.gif

But here is the interesting part. This 'tool' is completely unheard of here. Nobody has seen this before. Due to a declining birthrate, the average Canadian household probably has more of these than they have children. But in Wisconsin, all their milk comes in HDPE jugs. The idea of milk in a bag seems absurd. The ubiquity of this little gadget in Canada is akin to the vegetable peeler, or the ice cream scoop. To have it relegated to such obscure applications as the spray booth saran wrap trimmer seems almost criminal.

I'm so hard for you

Durometer is a word they keep bouncing around at work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durometer

It's a measurement of hardness, usually applied to plastics and foams and junk like that. A higher measure means the material is harder. Yellow signage foam has a higher durometer than pink insulation foam.

ass, cash or grass - nobody rides for free

If you're looking for a good used bike, or any bicycle accessories, I recommend Budget Bicycle Center (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=Madison+Budget+Bicycle&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF8&cd=1&ll=43.068606,-89.400001&spn=0.015017,0.039997&z=15)

I found myself there on sunday to get a good used bike for the summer. $250 USD for a steed of steel and rubber. Onto the visa that one goes. gf asks if the exchange rate is going to be okay on the visa. I explain that I don't care much because we're so close to parity.

The clerk, helpful chap that he was, says "Pardon my ignorance, what kind of money do you guys have up there? Do you have the Euro?"