I am making Sweet & Sour Porcupine Meatballs for a party at a friends house today.
I don’t know why I don’t like rice, but I love porcupine meatballs – you know meatballs with rice in them.
I made up 6 pounds of them today. That’s a lot of meatballs. I hope I don’t have too many left over. I figured out I can roll 2 meatballs at a time. Squish Squish Squish – one in each hand, then roll one in my palm and the other in my figures. If the fingers one doesn’t quite get round enough, a quick switch and they are both perfectly shaped. It takes a while to fry up that many meatballs. I remembered a middle school teacher say he would boil his burgers to reduce the fat in the burger. Well, I thought I would give it a try. So, I boiled some meatballs. They turned out ok. So, into the fry pan to finish off being browned. Perfect! I think I will make all my meatballs this way in the future. I was done boiling my meatballs, and turned this pot off. I was looking at it, thinking, I already have a good start to a beef stock right there, lots of onions fell off the meatballs, they are starting to cook down already. So, I chopped up a carrot and a celery stock, and in they went. I turned the heat back on and will let it cook till I am ready to leave. Then into the fridge to seperate all that oil off the top, and into the freezer with it. Darn good Ramen Noodle Soup there! It looks like I will need to make a half batch more of sauce. I don’t have enough to cover this up. I will make that in a few minutes. I gotta do dishes first.
Well, I worked on a project I have been talking about and gathering parts for a really long time now. I have had the pumps for over a year. I got the pumps on sale at Harbor Freight in Florida. I picked up the irrigation kit on sale at Walmart this fall. I eventually work on my DIY projects. Eventually. This is the homemade irrigation system for the planter stand in the apartment. I am really bad about taking care of my stuff. Unless it meows or otherwise can get my attention it’s gotta be basically 0 maintenance if it’s to survive. I have been working on a planter stand for a few months now. I finally have enough light, I just forget to water it for a few weeks at a time. I took a series of YouTube videos of my putting this together. It changed a few times as I put it all together. The videos are much darker then I thought they would be, so my apologies.
Here I cut the tube, and make up an adapter to get the smaller tube hooked up to the pump. It took a while for the pump to prime.
Gotta love my mumbling. The first pump I tried wasn’t powerful enough, so I had to make a 2nd adapter to the bigger pump.
I finally get to where I set up some irrigation using some soaker hose.
All set up and working. SCORE!
The water pump running in the tub of water. You can see the hose adapter I made to connect the small hose to the larger pump outlet.
The soaker hose put into the windowsill planter box. I used the little nails that the irrigation kit came with to nail the tubes down to the trellises or whatever. I don’t think that this is enough soaker hose to adequately water this box with the size of the drippers on the small pots. I think the next one I put together will have a horseshoe shaped loop so I have twice the amount of watering.
It’s amazing how much extra light a ‘real’ light fixture puts out compared to the cheap grow light tube fixture. You can also see the net I made to keep the cats out of the plants.
A close up of the plants. You can see where I alternated the curve of the hose so in the end, I had a straight run of irrigation hose. I planted Paris Island Cos (romaine lettuce), Grand Rapids (green leaf lettuce) and Arugala (rocket salad) in the planter. I figured I needed to get that all started now if I was to have fresh salads by the time Katie moves up. I really don’t know how the salad greens will grow in this homemade indoor greenhouse thingy I got going on, but I shall find out! Now I just have to either find a timer that will work, set up my X10 firecracker and use that as a timer, or what I really want to do, is build a timer out of a rabbitcore so i can hook it up to the internet.
I have had Packet8 VOIP for many years now. It predates my cellphone by a year, easy. I haven’t had any trouble with service. I do have a problem with getting spam from the email address I gave them. Actually, I am a tad pissed about it.
My cell phone company called me the beginning of the week trying to ‘give me a free phone’. Yeah, I don’t want to finance a phone for 2 years people. I bought this phone cash money. I would prefer to buy my equipment and pay a fair price for service rather then finance a phone for 2 years. Then, they called me again yesterday, same thing. Well I asked this 2nd dude about the Sprint Femtocell, AIRAVE. He couldn’t tell me anything about it.
Well, I started running the numbers. Katie (whom I shall not blog about) will be moving here in a couple of a months. Her whole family is in Florida, so lots of long distance calls is expected. I can spend $10 less a month and get the same unlimited free long distance out of my house using the AIRAVE instead of the Packet8. We can both use the femtocell at the same time.
A no brainer.
So, I went to pick one up. I drove to the local Sprint store. I waited for 45 minutes in line so people can pay their bills, and ask if they can use the insurance they bought to replace the phone because of a minor scratch on the face (really people, a !@#$%^ scratch?). No AirRave.
Ok. Chris, the salesman, started calling around. Next Closest store, nothing. Closest store after that, not answering the phone (don’t ask me how a phone store doesn’t answer the phone…). Well, anyway, 5 stores away, all the way in Schaumberg, they have one.
I am on my way!
Driving down the road, chatting with CVS trying to get a super bowl party going. He asks what did you just hit? That’s right, I picked up some road debris, and the noise was loud enough that he can hear it over the phone. This is the damage to my trucklet. I just can’t have nice things.
I talk to the guy there. They had 5 of them. From what I heard, all the stores got one months ago, and they all sold them, and never got a restock on the AIRAVEs. This store got 5 restocks, and hadn’t sold a one of them. Odd, eh?
Set up was easy, but they couldn’t do it in the store. The guy had to call in, and tell THAT person how to set this thing up. I guess they don’t sell many of these things.
Total time from walking into a store, to walking out of a store with my new toy. 2 Hours. Sprint, it shouldn’t take this long for me to pay you every month for the privilege of providing your customers with better cell phone signal in my apartment building using my internet bandwidth. Really. 2 hours is ridiculous.
Well, I get it home, take it out of the box. I set it up in a spot where Brother, my cat, won’t mess with it. Plug it into my network, hook up the GPS antenna and stick that in the window, plug it into the wall.
Blinken’ lights. I hate red blinken lights!
It took about half an hour, 45 minutes for the whole thing to turn on to where I can make a call on it after I plugged it in.
I have had it a few days, and I kinda like it. Ok, I really like it.
Signal has improved for most of the apartment. I think I can put the box in a less retarded spot – like not tucked in amongst a bunch of metal and another antenna and improve signal.
I am such a geek, I did a pre & post signal survey. Room Location | Regular cell strength | Femto Cell Strength Front Door | 2 | 2-5 — signal strength bounces wildly in this spot. Dining Room | 2-3 | 3 Kitchen | 2 | 3-4 Living Room | 2 | 3-4 Sliding Glass Door | 4 | 4 Hall | 3 | 5-6 Bathroom | 2 | 4-5 Computer Room | 3 | 6 Bedroom | 3-4 | 5-6
Did you know that cell phones have 6 bars and not 5? No really, my cell phone gets 6 bars of signal in the apartment.
I still have to figure out the quirks yet. It likes to switch over to regular cell service when I stand in front of the garbage can in the kitchen.
I can make a call out, or receive a call in while in range and I get a beep-beep tone to let me know I am using my Femtocell. The phone can automatically switch over to normal cell phone service without any problems. I have yet to have it switch over to the Femtocell during a call.
My mother LOVES it, she says it’s loud and clear. The best phone connection I have had since I quit using real land-lines 5-6 years ago.
So, so far, this Sprint Airave Femtocell is a big win for me.
NOTE this post was finally published on Feb 1st at 12:21AM. It just took me this long to write it all up and get the Youtube video published.
