peejman

  Because other critters eat the corn and/or the poisoned carcasses and die too.      Trapping followed by high speed lead poisoning works well enough. 

  I've been eating them like cheese puffs.  According to google, a reasonable way to freeze cherry tomatoes is to simply line them up on a cookie sheet and put the whole thing in the freezer.  Once they're frozen, repackage in whatever container suits you.  We did two full cookie sheets worth the other day.  We'll see how they do.  We've done the blanching, skinning, and freezing routine on regular tomatoes (and will again) but having to skin eleventygillion cherry tomatoes seems a bit too tedious for me.      Wifey also made a big batch of salsa.  The food processor made it a bit foamy, but hopefully the bubbles will work their way out.  The bubbles make the texture a little odd, but it still tasted really good.  Need get some beans to make black bean and corn salsa next.    :yum:   

    heh... I still do.  No other way to listen in the car.  If you buy a CD from Amazon, you usually get to download the mp3's free.  Not that making them from the disc requires any real effort. 

Cost not much of an object... A Sharps rifle in .45-70, specifically a Quigley. Doesn't get much cooler than that. :)

Cool.  Dig me some PF and Gilmour is a fantastic player, nobody else can make a strat sound that big.  "Shine on" from Live in Gdansk gives me chills.

    We've also got LOTS of cherry tomatoes.  Gonna try freezing them and see how that works.   Slice of bread, slice of tomato, slice of cheese, topped with a little Italian seasoning and red pepper, couple minutes in the broiler = :yum:   Used to eat those all the time as a snack during the summer when I was a kid.  Gonna have to do that again...

So many choices....   I think I've "liked" at least half a dozen posts so far.  I'll put one in the mix that hasn't been mentioned yet.  Liar Liar.  Jim Carrey's wacko opinions aside, it's a freakin' hilarious movie.  As TrickyNicky said in the OP, it's a movie I watch when I need to laugh and I usually laugh until I cry.    Another one is Office Space.  "Hey Peter man, breast exam on channel 9.  Wooo!" 

Time for some high speed lead poisoning. My parents have regular trouble with raccoons. They're smart critters.

Bummer, hope your critters find their way home. We couldn't get our dog out of the house. We had family over and we all were out watching the neighbors shoot fireworks, letting the little kids play with sparklers, and shooting a few bottle rockets and such. I think the dog spent the evening hiding under the bed.

I've never rented out a house I own, and I never will. A handful of friends and coworkers have tried and the best case has been one that almost broke even. The others have lost piles of money in repairs and even attorney's fees. I do know of a friend of a friend who basically pulled the "slum dog millionaire" deal. He bought old apartment buildings, lived in them while he renovated them himself, then rented them. By the 3rd or 4th building he had quite the pile of cash. That's the only success story I personally know of.

Welcome!

Yet again, awesome work!

Not make money selling stuff to the government? Now that's funny! :D

I thought I'd bring this thread back to life with a little report...   I built a new semi-raised bed garden this spring, it's about 2 ft wide x 30 ft long. I wanted more garden space and after a very poor yield last year, I got the impression that our other garden space needed a break. Due to nearly non stop spring rains keeping the area too wet to till, I got a late start getting things planted. I was finally able to use a lot of the compost from my compost barrel (see the first page of this thread). The compost came out black as diesel oil and seems to have helped noticeably.   :up:    We planted 4-5 varieties of tomatoes and it looks like we'll have a great harvest, they're only just now getting ripe. The cherry tomatoes have come in first and I've got more of them than I know what to do with. I'm expecting plenty to freeze this year. :yum:   Next is okra and it's growing fine but it's got a couple more weeks yet before we'll get any.   We planted broccoli much later than recommended, but we had the seeds so we planted them anyway. While they've come up and grown fine, it seems all they really did was provide food for the caterpillers. The leaves look like swiss cheese and out of 6-8 plants we got one solitary head of broccoli smaller than a coke can. I pulled them up yesterday and tossed them in the compost. I may try one more time, but so far I'm 0 for 3 with broccoli.  :shrug:   We planted some lettuce also much later than recommended, but it's done great. We got more lettuce than we knew what to do with and it continued to produce through the heat up until a week or two ago. Actually it's still there and growing but the lettuce is bitter now. Guess I'll pull it up too.   The snap peas didn't do anything. The plants started growing fine, then turned brown and died after about a month. I don't know what happened, they did fine last year.  :shrug:   The green beans didn't do well either, though I think that's our fault. I think we got pole beans instead of bush beans and since we didn't put up anything for them to climb they got completely overrun by the zuchinni right next to them. I got one handful of beans the other day after digging them out from under the zuchini.   And speaking of zuchini.... while the plants have grown about 3x bigger than we expected, we've only gotten a handful of zuchini. Hopefully they'll continue to produce for a while yet.   The cucumbers have produced more than we can eat but the plants have turned brown over the last week or so. I expected the plants to last longer than this. That's it for the new garden bed.   In the old garden bed we planted some pumpkin seeds saved from last year's Halloween pumpkins at my 6 yr old's request. Surprisingly (to me anyway) they've grown into a rather large pumpkin plant. No baby pumpkins yet so we'll see what happens. We also planted a green bell pepper and chili pepper there because we ran out of room in the new bed. They're doing fine and I'm impatiently waiting for some home-made salsa.  :yum:    How's everyone else's garden doing this year... ?

Sounds a lot like the doorbell training we went through with our dog.  It did eventually reduce the reaction to just barking instead of utter mayhem.  While not necessarily the end result we had in mind, we considered it a moral victory. 

I said stone but it's really a coarse diamond sharpener. The only "stone" I have is a fine Arkansas stone. It does take rather a while to reprofile one. I'd guess upwards of 100 passes per side, but it's worth it as the next time only takes a few passes with the fine diamond, stone, then strop.

    When I sharpen a knife for the first time with my Smith's system, I have to start with the coarse stone functionally re-profile it and work my way up.  The angle on the blade almost never exactly matches my sharpener.  Subsequent sharpenings don't require the coarse stone unless I've buggered it.    Just by the appearance of the blade, it looks like steel that's been tempered.  Normally you only temper the back/spine of the blade so has some flexibility while leaving the edge hard so it'll get real sharp and stay that way.  It's possible it may have been over tempered and the edge isn't particularly hard. 

I'm no expert but I'd call that a camp knife in the style of chef's knife with a drop point.  The offset between the handle and the edge allows you to slice through stuff without mashing your knuckles, which is really handy when cutting stuff up in the kitchen. 

Stealth knife.  Just don't lose it. 

:rock:     :rofl:     :up:

    I agree with this to the extent that there should be some personal responsibility when things go sideways.    I'm an engineer who fixes aircraft engine parts.  If I make a bad decision that results in someone getting hurt, the FAA won't let me hide behind my employer, they'll haul my arse to jail.  Why is that not the case for the above?  It can be argued that the officers on the raid are merely the minions following orders, and I'm ok with that, but why aren't the guys who gave the orders personally responsible?  If I am, they should be too. 

    I'm a bit on the fence with that suggestion.  If you suspect she might be recoil sensitive, then yes I'd start with a .22.  If you don't think she'd care, I think starting with a .22 can induce some recoil sensitivity.  They get used to the .22 which has no recoil, no muzzle blast, and no noise.... then you put a bigger gun in their hand that has all 3 (even a sissy gun like a 9mm  ;) ) and suddenly they're afraid of it.  It's a matter of developing their expectation of what's "normal".   I'm not saying to start with a .357 snubbie, but if a full size 9mm is "normal", that makes everything a lot easier.  You just have to know the person and have some expectation as to how they'll respond. 

    Heh... not my dog.  She destroyed two "indestructible" crates. 

Anywhere in the black counts and if you can't do that, you don't really need to be carrying a gun IMHO.    I will add a couple things...   if you have romantic interest, tread lightly and be very patient.  If she gets frustrated, stop immediately.    Instead of mindlessly making perforated paper, make up some games to keep it interesting.    If her hands get tired and she can't hold the gun still, take a break.    Try dry fire practice... set a piece of empty brass on the slide (if a semi-auto) and have her practice trigger pull until it doesn't fall off. 

    Indeed you have.  Effective July 1, all restrictions on knife carry were removed.  Any type, any length, with the exception of places like schools and such.    And to address the above... I'm not aware of age restrictions either, though that may be buried somewhere in the TCA.