Homemaking

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A Redneck Kind of Day

The day’s weather kept improving as the morning marched on, so I headed over to C&C’s around noon to get as much water as I could lug in my buggy so that I could do a couple of loads of laundry. I can’t wait to have a proper clotheslines, never mind running water, but this worked just fine.

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Yes, I could take my laundry over to Laura’s anytime, but I really prefer to do laundry this way. It’s like when someone says they prefer to hand wash dishes rather than use a dishwasher.

Then, it was time to scavenge next door to find something with which to elevate my high gain antenna. Am I glad I didn’t glue anything to the roof of my RV. I wish I had bought the antenna model that doesn’t need a ground plane.

Anyway, several failed experiments later, I came up with the best solution based on what I what I found. I used two brooms, the lid from my soup pot, and lots of duct tape.

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First step, join the two brooms together.

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Next step, remove the handle from the pot lid exposing the screw.

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Then, make a hole in the top of the broom and screw the lid into it (I know, I’m a genius).

After, scramble up the ladder and attach the antenna to the pot lid and then the brooms to the ladder, all with one hand while the other holds the ladder. This exercise needs to be repeated a few times since the lid is not exactly flat, so the magnet doesn’t stick as well as it could.

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Final step, advise your blog readers that those electrical wires are nowhere near your crazy contraption and even if said crazy contraption were to blow over, there is zero risk of it catching in the wires.

Unfortunately, this exercise was for naught as my signal strength hasn’t changed (currently -111). I am going to try to find a perfectly flat and larger ‘ground plane’ and see if that helps. The trick is to find something light enough to not make the whole thing too top heavy (why my earlier prototypes failed).

This is as high as I can get the antenna with the amount of cable I have. I imagine that the signal degradation I’d get from extending the cable length to get the antenna higher would negate the value of the extended height.

I think the biggest frustration with my internet connection is that the numbers really mean squat. Sometimes, I can stream and do whatever at -111 and other times like right now, I have to wait 20 minutes for the internet to decide to start working at again at -103 and I’m glad I’m learning to copy and paste my posts to a text editor as I write them.

Bah, the internet’s not coming back. I have climbed back up on the roof, taken the antenna down, and put it back on the soup pot closer to the roof. Back to the drawing board I go. Not that bring the antenna back down helped at all. Nope, this internet connection is definitely sentient (as all internet connections are, btw, as per more than a decade’s worth of experience with crappy connections).

Some time later…

Now, I’ve got the pot duct-taped to the lid to provide a better ground plane and the pot is resting on the top of the ladder by way of its handles. I am averaging about -100 this way and have seen as high as -90, but no lower than -104 (currently -96). But before anybody (ie. me) gets excited, clouds rolled in and then rolled out. Clouds are determining the quality of my internet connection. *sighs*

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Saturday Morning Sundries

My Social Life

Yesterday evening, I headed over to Laura’s for Friday night canasta, not sure that it would happen since Charles and Caroline have a house full of guests. Well, the guests (two of Caroline’s sisters) came to learn how to play (so I was no longer the newbie) and another frequent attendee also materialized, as well as Charles. So we were seven around the table and we played in pairs. Caroline brought wine, Laura pulled out some sweets, and we played to just past midnight. It was a lot of fun!

The Weather

It was June first when I walked home last night. The walk was about a block. I was frozen solid when I came in and went to bed wearing flannel jammies, a sweatshirt, and heavy socks and I still woke up in the middle of the night to add another blanket.

Twenty Cents Well Spent

I hate when I think I need something, buy it, and realise that the need arose from a one-time occasion. That doesn’t happen much anymore, but when you have a kitchen full of cooking implements, it’s easy to think you can get by without certain things. Well, I have used my slotted spoon and splash guard several times since I bought them last week, so they were worth taking home!

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The splash guard is the exact size I need to cover my cast iron pan!

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Internet

It is very mercurial. I got up this morning and it was fine, not blazing fast but steady, and then it just… stopped. But I couldn’t even connect to the Mifi, so I figured I was having Mifi problems and rebooted it. But that didn’t help the connection. It came back when it wanted to. And it dropped out in the middle of this part of the post. No rhyme or reason at all.

Readers Mark and Jack sent me some helpful information over night about cable length and signal strength respectively. Jack said to go through all my menus and sub-menus until I found a numerical value for signal strength. I Googled something along the lines of “how to find signal strength MiFi 5792” and found instructions for an older model of Verizon Jetpack that gave me enough breadcrumbs to find the answer. It’s About –> Diagnostics and then you have to look for RSSI:

signal strength

The RSSI this morning has varied between -108 and the current -103 since I added an extra foot of height below the antenna. But even those that -103 is technically better than -108, I’m still experiencing the same unstable internet connection. I still have a couple of feet of cable, so I am going to try to get the antenna even higher and see if that helps.

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Soup Weather

The weather today was YUCKY. Very cold and dark and humid and it’s now been raining for hours and hours. I just wanted to make a big pot of soup and go to sleep in it. Even though I ended up working a 14 hour day (I am so exhausted), I still had time to make a delicious pot of chicken soup by working at it during my five to ten minute breaks. Working from home is awesome!

Late morning, I started by making the stock. I used about four cups water, half of a chopped onion, one chopped carrot, and one chopped celery stalk, plus lots of salt and pepper and several cloves of garlic. And of course, the entire carcass of the roasted chicken I bought yesterday, minus the rest of the breast meat.

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Once I had a bit of hot water in the pot, I added some to the chicken container to get all the tasty bits on the bottom.

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I had quite a bit of breast meat left. I don’t like dark meat, so I just let that go in the stock for flavour.

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Several hours of olfactory torture later, the stock was ready. It was sooooo delicious.

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I strained out all the solids and then let the stock cool down a bit before transferring it to a smaller pot and putting it in the freezer to get the fat to congeal.

An hour before I wanted to eat, I took the pot out of the freezer, skimmed off the fat, and then transferred the stock back to the bigger pot. The stock was very rich and strong, so I diluted it with two cups of water, then added the rest of the onion (chopped) as well as carrots, celery, and a half cup of parboiled rice. I don’t really like pasta in soup as it gets mushy, so I’ll take chicken and rice over chicken noodle any day.

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I let that start simmering while I diced up the meat and then I went back to work for about 20 minutes. I added the meat very near the end (about 10 minutes left of cooking), otherwise it would have gone all icky on me.

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And here’s a bowl of the finished soup!

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This stuff was GOOD. I’m not just saying that because I made it, it just was wonderful! Very savoury with a rich broth and the right ratio of liquid to ‘stuff’ that wasn’t over cooked. Yum!

Lesson learned this week; a $10 pre-roasted bird is VERY good value for me and it’s worth my buying a whole bird even though I don’t eat dark meat. I’ll get about four meals out of this one bird. Maybe five if I make biscuits to go with lunch tomorrow.

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Water Filter Matters

Getting good drinking water on the road is always a challenge. Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to live somewhere like Campbell River with really good tap water that I can just drink straight up. Sometimes, I’m somewhere that the water is safe but tastes yucky and a simple charcoal filter like Brita makes it good.

But I usually find myself buying water. I don’t buy packages of the little bottles but rather gallon-size or larger containers. If I’m somewhere for a while, like when I was in Lethbridge, I buy a refillable water jug. Water is the only thing I drink, so I don’t think that paying for good tasting water is frivolous.

For some time now, I’ve debated getting a whole-house water filtering system, but the more boondocking I do, the more I end up with no water in the holding tank, so an undercounter or inline filter wouldn’t work for me. I also wanted more than just a charcoal filter, but rather something that would filter out bacteria and particulates.

Being here where buying water is getting to be cost-prohibitive, it was time to buy something to make the tap water here drinkable.

I did some research and came to the conclusion that the only countertop unit that would work for me is an Aqua Rain, which we used at the campground in Dawson. Great filter, but massive and super pricey.

But that memory did nudge me in another direction and reminded me of something I’ve wanted to buy since I first saw it, but couldn’t justify for the little I would use it. Dang, why did I only now realise it was the solution for my at home water consumption?

When I hiked the Chilkoot trail, we had unlimited quantities of delicious water thanks to an MSR microfilter.

This is the perfect solution for me as it will make just about all water sources safe and tasty and the filter is super long-lasting (2,000 litres/500 gallons, which should last me at least a year). I’ll also be able to take it along with me on hikes.

The filter fits over wide-mouth Nalgene bottles. I have a very worn one, so I splurged on a new one that will better match my house decor. 🙂

I was actually going to go with a competitor filter because it was Amazon Global Shipping eligible, but for whatever reason, they won’t ship here. So I went with my first choice, the MSR, and had it shipped to my best friend’s in Virginia. She’ll forward me the package and I’ll reimburse her for shipping via PayPal. I expect to have to pay tax and perhaps duty on the package whenever it gets here. A pain, but my only out of pocket costs will be the shipping and border fees thanks to some wonderful sponsors who shop on Amazon through my links. Thank you again SO MUCH!

And since I was sending an order to VA to be shipped back to SK, I added the adapter I need to plug my Macbook Pro into a TV L gave me (because the tuner went out and it’s only good to use as a computer monitor). I’ll soon be able to watch movies on a 19″ rather than 17″ screen! 🙂

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Town Day

I’m crazy busy, but today was the one to go into town as I needed gas, propane, drinking water, groceries, and to send and receive some massive digital files.

Propane in Assiniboia can be had at the Co-Op gas station, which is next to the Co-Op hardware store. I stopped at the latter also to get prices and options for cement pavers on which to park Miranda.

I then stopped to check out The Bargain Shop!, a discount retailer, to see what they have. I found better prices for paper products than at the Co-Op grocery store, so I stocked up.

Next, got my groceries, including a pre-roasted chicken and everything I need to turn its carcass into soup. Meat is otherwise too expensive in town and I’ve been eating pretty much vegetarian since I got here. The chicken and a loaf of fresh baked bread will be a real treat tonight!

I almost forgot about my files, so now I’m parked at the top of the hill waiting for the download to finish. I can’t wait to get home; the smell of that chicken is about to send me over the edge!

I really need to come up with a better solution for drinking water. In the US, I could buy a gallon for $0.70. The same gallon here is $4.00!!!!!!! Now, I don’t drink anything else, so I don’t mind buying water, but this is getting to be expensive. The tap water in the village isn’t potable without using a ceramic filter, so I need to find one of those. I was going to go with the undercounter kind, but that makes no sense for when my fresh water tank is empty. So I need to find a countertop or pitcher unit.

I’m surprised that I wasn’t itching to go to town today and would have gladly waited if I didn’t have such pressing needs. I think that once I come back in July with a truck full of supplies, I could easily not go into town for weeks. I’m simply not having any trouble at all filling my days and I have enough social engagements to keep me from going stir crazy.

Yay, my download is just about done. Back to work I go.