2 Remove old thermostat faceplate and leave wires connected.2a Take a picture of the wire connections for later reference.
In the Men’s Fraternity video shown at our meeting this morning, the topic was “What Every Dad Needs to Know”. A music video was included at the end that featured Rick & Dick Hoyt, a father/son team that has competed in marathons and triathalons across the country. Yes, it’s a team effort, and a very unique team in that Rick is unable to walk or talk; Dick, his dad, pushes him in a cart, pulls him in a rubber raft, and carries him in a seat on the front of his bike in every race.
The video can be seen on YouTube; it’s very inspiring and touching. In our Men’s Frat group there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. You have got to watch the video, and read the story of Team Hoyt. You will be touched. Guaranteed.
UPDATE: I first posted this on November 9, 2007; a few moments ago I learned that Dick Hoyt passed away on November 2, 2022. Rest in Peace, sir.
Here’s something you don’t see very often anymore; an inline eight-cylinder engine.
This rod is the brainchild & creation of Brian Thomas (here’s a Hot Rod Magazine article on the car); it’s a 1930 Model A. Model A rods are pretty common, but what makes this one noteworthy is the supercharged straight-eight engine from a 1948 Packard. It’s interesting to read what went into that engine though; lots of custom work, lots of parts borrowed from other engines… But built like a real hot rod, without a lot of money spent on off-the-shelf parts. It’d be really interesting to find out how much money was spent on it!
Here are a couple of videos of the car from the 2017 Hot Rod Hill Climb in Central City, Colorado; the first one, of the car starting the hill climb, is pretty short, but gives a good idea of what it sounds like. The second one is longer and from inside the cockpit/cab. Pretty awesome!
Once again, the reading from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost For His Highest was an eye-opener.
I found a 30-day reading plan in the You Version Bible app that pulls various readings from Chambers’ devotional, and today’s reading talked about the passage from Luke where the blind man yells out to Jesus to get his attention, ignoring those who try to quiet him. Jesus stops and asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” His reply was simply, “Lord, I want to see.”
Chambers writes: “Is there something in your life that not only disturbs you, but makes you a disturbance to others? If so, it is always something you cannot handle yourself. “Then those who went before warned him that he should be quiet; but he cried out all the more…” (Luke 18:39). Be persistent with your disturbance until you get face to face with the Lord Himself. Don’t deify common sense. To sit calmly by, instead of creating a disturbance, serves only to deify our common sense. When Jesus asks what we want Him to do for us about the incredible problem that is confronting us, remember that He doesn’t work in commonsense ways, but only in supernatural ways.“
Too often I look at the situation I’m in, assess my abilities or our bank account balance, then decide if it’s possible. There are times I don’t do that too — like when we took the position at BFA — and suffer through the strange looks from others who don’t quite get why people would leave relatively successful careers to go off to a foreign country for two years…
Many times God pushes us into things that just don’t make sense to the world, but then again, God doesn’t always make sense to to the world. He doesn’t promise that we’ll be comfortable and respected, just that he’ll take care of us through whatever comes our way. Common sense doesn’t explain how he does what he does, nor does it help when explaining to others why we do what we do when being obedient to his call. He doesn’t promise to give us answers to others’ questions about what we do either, but a truthful answer to those questions is what he expects of us, of me, and that can be a seed of faith planted in someone, or water to a seed planted before.
Right now I find myself “in between jobs”. It’s not a great place to be. I love the flexibility of being able to work on stuff at home and doing things on my own schedule and not having to work around the 8 to 5 thing, but I get pressure from others who expect me to be doing something about it. I’m even getting that from my wife; common sense tells her that I ought to be looking for another job in IT, but after being dismissed from the help desk job at Marco, I’m just not feeling like that’s something I want to jump back into right now. Yes, common sense tells me that I have greater earning potential doing something that I’ve done for a long time, but common sense also makes potential employers shy away from a guy who’s pushing 60 and content with an entry-level job in IT; the career track just doesn’t make sense. Common sense also says that it’s safest to be employed by someone else, but what about trusting God to carve out a new career being self-employed?
I’m not sure what to do at this point because nothing really makes sense… Show me what you would have me to do, Lord.
This ad is just what I was looking for… Same model as my car, an M535i, and the same exterior paint & interior that mine was originally built with, Diamant Schwarz over Anthracite cloth. At some point the interior on mine was swapped for black leather, which I like just fine, but this is marvelous reference material in case I want to replace the worn leather that’s in it with something closer to the original Anthracite cloth upholstery. Given the cost of a leather interior refresh these days, refreshing things as it was originally built might be the less expensive option!
But the ad by itself is gold just to see the photos of this car; it’s a beauty! Only 28,000 kilometers on the clock, and everything looks factory fresh. I’d love to have my car look this good, but given that I’m already slightly afraid to drive it without it looking perfect, it might never come out of its cocoon.
I’ve been to some pretty distant places, and had the opportunity to get a decent look at the stars from some of them, but here’s a map that will show pretty definitively where the darkest places are. And some of the darkest places in the US are just a short drive from home-sweet-home! I made some late-night stops in the middle of nowhere South Dakota while driving for the casket company; on a clear moonless night outside of Buffalo, SD, you can see a lot. My only regret was that it was mid-winter when I did that!
Most of the bright spots on the map are pretty easy to figure out because they coincide with metropolitan areas. The bigger the bright spot, the bigger the city. But one in our neighborhood stands out, and doesn’t make much sense; there are no cities anywhere near a large bright spot in the north-west corner of North Dakota. Ditto with the northern edge of Alaska. Oil wells? That would be my guess.
This weekend is supposed to be the peak time for viewing the Perseid meteor shower. Ordinarily I might be up for a drive for the show, but smoke from the fires out west is making the skies not as clear as they ought to be. That probably wouldn’t make a huge difference in seeing meteors burning up as they enter the atmosphere, but that’s only part of the draw for me. Next time…
I tried another few recipes for homemade yogurt, including this one, and wasn’t particularly thrilled with the results. The best results I got, or rather the results that were the easiest and resulted in the best taste, came pretty simply; I’d heat a half-gallon of 2% milk to 180 degrees F, let it cool to 110 degrees, mix some of that milk with a cup or so of store-bought yogurt, mix that with the rest of the milk, then cover the pot, put it inside the oven with the light on overnight, and the next morning, wake up to some creamy yogurt. Pretty easy, and very repeatable. Easy enough that I can still recall the steps and ingredients, even though it’s been months since I last did it.
Lots of reasons I haven’t made any recently, but chief among them is the fact that I can buy a huge 64oz. tub of yogurt at Costco for less than four bucks. For that, it’s hardly worth the trouble. Sure, the milk at Costco is under $2 for a gallon, but my time is worth something too, because making this stuff does consume some time.
And time is the other consideration; I was, um, between jobs when I started this set of experiments, and had plenty of time on my hands. Now though I’m gainfully employed, and don’t have the luxury of putzing around like I once did. And I did do a fair amount of putzing with the yogurt business, and didn’t get around to posting much about it. Like with that first yogurt experiment that I posted about in February… That was a real bomb. The texture of that stuff was all wrong, and the flavor wasn’t anything to write home about. And I made a whole gallon of that crap. I ate a few helpings, but just couldn’t stomach it. I should’ve just thrown it out, but was hesitant to do that too. Yvonne ate some, but in the end (a couple weeks later) I threw it out. Nope.
I made a few more attempts before settling on the simple recipe above… The details escape me now. But yogurt making isn’t really very difficult. Making Greek yogurt is though, and I think that’s what I was kinda shooting for. Maybe next time I have some time being unemployed!
I eat yogurt. Seems like a lot of it. In Europe, it wasn’t such a big deal because you could buy a decent sized container pretty inexpensively – 1kg (a little more than a 32oz US container) for about 1.50€. Here though, yogurt is $4.00 and up for a 32oz container. I’m too cheap to buy that for long.
So I thought I’d experiment with making my own yogurt. Yvonne has done it before, pretty successfully, and her sister living in The Netherlands makes it regularly; it’s pretty good, and her recipe is really simple. The yogurt I’ve really come to like though is a non-fat Greek yogurt; Oikos. Smooth, creamy, rich… You’d hardly guess there’s no fat in it. And the vanilla flavor is my fave. That’s what I’d like to make.
I did some digging around online a couple of nights ago, and found a bunch of recipes that might work, and focused in on two in particular. This one appealed to me because once it’s done setting up, it’s ready to eat; no fussing around straining the whey out of it. One of the ingredients is powdered milk, which I suppose helps it to firm up. But the whole business of using a heat source to keep it warm overnight is a bit much. This one also appealed to me; it uses a Crock Pot for cooking the yogurt. The post-processing, straining out the whey with cheesecloth and all, was a bit too much. So, I took the positive features of both for my first experiment.
I mixed together the following ingredients:
I poured the gallon of milk into the Crock Pot, added the sugar & dry powdered milk, stirred it up well, then turned it on high until the mixture reached 180 degrees F. That took a couple of hours; using the slow cooker is genius for that because there’s no fussing over it and no worries that it’ll scald. Once it reached 180, I unplugged the cooker and waited for the temp to drop to 110 degrees F. That took a while; I waited up until 1 am for it to get there! Once it got to the proper temp, I stirred in the cup of yogurt (the culture that gets the whole batch going) then wrapped the crock in towels, and left it on the counter overnight.
The instructions say it should sit for for 14-15 hours. For best flavor they say to wait 14 hours, and 15 is best, but when I checked it at about 8 am (after just ~7 hours), it was thick and firm, and had a good taste to it. I decided to hold back though and waited until about 4 in the afternoon before really digging in, and I’m not sure if there was a lot of difference between that and what I tasted in the morning. The instructions also said the best flavor comes after chilling it for 2-4 days; I think it might be gone before then!
The consistency is a lot like what I’d expect from a Greek yogurt; thick, almost gel-like. Very smooth texture. I used whole milk, so it’s not the fat-free yogurt that is my ultimate goal. Yvonne says that the body needs some fat, but it seems like I don’t have a problem getting fat from other sources through the day, so I think it’s less important to have it in the yogurt. One of these next times I’ll try using some 2% or skim milk to get a low-fat/fat-free variant.
This first experiment was a success, but I’m not sure if it was a big cost savings. My investment into it is as follows:
So the total is $11 and some change, which isn’t bad considering I yielded about a gallon of yogurt from it. The killer, cost-wise, was the powdered milk; next time I’m going to try one that doesn’t use the powdered milk and see how that goes. Stay tuned!
I got bored with podcasts on today’s route, so I fired up Music on my iPhone, browsed the Artists list a bit, and bumped into Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The recording on my phone came from a dusty old album I’ve had for decades; I digitized it about 15 years ago, and probably haven’t listened to it for five years or more. Listening to it again brought back some great memories…
If anybody knows the music, it’s most likely because the intro on Side 1 was used on the soundtrack for The Exorcist, but there is much more to the album than that. I was introduced to it back in the ’70’s when one of my older siblings bought the album; I’d lay on the floor in the living room with headphones on, plugged into the old SoundDesign stereo, reading and listening… Over and over again. It wasn’t until years later that I learned of the connection between the album and the movie, but that didn’t make me love the music any more or less; it’s a fantastic piece with or without the acclaim it received through the popularity of the movie.
One of the coolest facts about Tubular Bells is that Mike Oldfield played nearly every instrument that was used in the album. He was 19 years old when it was recorded. Which means he must’ve been 16 or 17 when he wrote the piece. Pretty amazing.
If you haven’t heard Tubular Bells, have a listen; it’s worth your time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXvtDm820zI
Another Random Observation About Germany… It took a while to figure out a few things about German naming conventions, and street names are kind of interesting. Our dorm is located in Kandern, on Feuerbacherstraße. Straße, or strasse, translates to street, so when you’re in Kandern, Feuerbacherstraße is the street that leads to Feuerbach. Likewise, when you’re at the other end of that same street in Feuerbach, it’s called Kandernerstraße. Cool, right?
But the street naming convention goes a little bit deeper; when Germans refer to an individual from a certain town, they will add “er” to the end of the name of that town; someone who is from Feuerbach is a Feuerbacher, someone from Kandern is a Kanderner, someone from Freiburg is a Freiburger… So Feuerbacherstraße is the street that a Feuerbacher will walk when he goes home to Feuerbach. Makes perfect sense!
We walked over the hill and ended up in Feuerbach a couple of weeks ago; such a cute little town. Here are a few photos. First one is a sign over a bench that was built to wrap around a tree.
Here is the text from the sign translated to English:
The Resting Bench
She now stands where the place is great
For hikers a true treasure,
The human being is grateful,
The limbs rejoice.
The bank, it is for all here
And therefore we wish,
That all be careful,
Therefore,
So that the next one may rejoice
At the bank, every day.
To you, to us, not to us
That wishes everyone
Family Wakaluk
Basically an invitation for hikers to stop and rest their feet. Very cool, and very typical of people in this area. Now that we’re back in Sioux Falls, I have a mind to build something similar in our front yard for human being passers by to rest and let their limbs rejoice.
The day we made that hike to Feuerbach was a beautiful day, and the clouds were spectacular! This was taken from the top of the hill called Schornerbuck between Kandern and Feuerbach, near the Feuerbacher Höhe.
“Höhe” translates to “height”; usually when you see that word on signs around the Schwartzwald, it refers to the top of a pass or high point with a scenic overlook. It’s not easy to pronounce; I’ve been told that pronouncing the o with the umlaut is like vocalizing a long e sound with your lips pursed like you’re saying “oooo”. Lots of times I’ll see it spelled in English verbiage as “oe” instead of just an o with the umlaut.