Educational – Page 9 – Random Thoughts

Mountain Man May Mower Maintenance

Lawnmower_Walkbehind Here in East Tennessee late April or early May is when we drag the dormant mowing equipment out of the shed and get it ready to serve for another summer. Many GRIT readers will be old hands at this annual task, but for the newbie property owners, this little video tour will show you how easy it is to prepare your walk-behind mower for another season of use.

Let’s recap briefly.

– Check your manual to see what you will need and where critical parts are.

– Start the mower and warm it up so the oil flows better.

– Disconnect the spark plug wire.

– Be careful to tip the mower the right way so gasoline does not run out.

– Drain the used oil completely.

Also, if the oil drain plug is under the deck, you will need to set the mower back on its wheels over a drain pan to remove the used oil. If the plug is in the side of the crank case, you will probably need a plastic tube to pipe the oil over the deck to a drain pan.

Now, let’s move on with the blade removal and servicing.

How to Defuse the Stress Time Bomb

Everyone knows that stress is a bad thing. Too much stress leads to many health problems and can be a major contributor to a seriously shortened life span. Stress also tends to take the joy out of our lives. Attempting to eliminate stress is a fruitless task because stress is a natural by-product of our modern lives. If we are attempting to make a living, pay our bills, feed our family, keep up with all the goings-ons of our family and friends, stress will result. Even if we become mega-millionaires and retire to a beach in Maui to sip margaritas for the rest of our lives, stress will search us out. So, if we can not avoid it, we must learn to manage it. Fortunately, that is not as hard as we might think. We may still have deadlines to meet, and writer’s block to climb over, and writing to do, but if we can get the anxiety under control, all that will be easier to deal with too. Here are come of my favorite ways to defuse the time-bomb of stress. Continue reading “How to Defuse the Stress Time Bomb”

SEO for Blogs, Love It, Hate It, Use It.

I’ve been writing professionally, at least part time, for a very long time: around 3 decades. More recently I started blogging. Needless to say, I’ve been writing longer than I’ve been blogging. In fact I’ve been writing longer than blogs have existed. Therefore I learned to write according to the old school conventions, which placed making a written work entertaining to the reader above making it popular with a search engine.

Of course search engines have not always been as persnickety as they are now. Early on, search engines actually rewarded writers for using natural language and allowed them to include in the header of an article a whole string of keywords that related to the content of the article. A keyword string for this article would have included, search engine, search, seo, blog, blogging, article, post, web, internet, optimize, optimization, keywords, and writing. Search engines trusted writers to include a spectrum of words that were directly related to the article, even if not all of them appeared in the article. But then the spammers came in and discovered that they could insert totally unrelated, hot topic keywords to give their page a boost. If I were to include Miley Cyrus, twerking, and Justin Bieber, this page would become robot candy even though those words have nothing to do with what I’m writing about. And so, the search engine strangulation began. Continue reading “SEO for Blogs, Love It, Hate It, Use It.”

Winding Down Winter

Chipping Brush 140308 Over the weekend I harvested more of our winter turnips and some green onions. These bunching onions don’t produce bulbs, just the greens which I snip off for use in cooking as we need them. They survived the winter well. My turnips and spinach did well also. Most everything else did not survive the bitter cold snap (temps down to minus 1°).

Marie used the turnips and some of the onions this evening in a stir-fry dish that used cubed ham, diced turnips (pre boiled), some coleslaw mix (shredded cabbage, and carrots) and sliced apple all cooked together. Then the chopped green onion was sprinkled over the top at serving time. She served that with cheddar cheese biscuits. It was quite delicious!

We’ve enjoyed warm days (high 60s) for the past several days so I’ve gotten out into the yard and garden to get started preparing for planting the summer garden.

I use raised bed garden boxes because of the steep slope of our yard. Crop rotation requires some reconfiguring these boxes as I move crops around. Potatoes need deep soil, so I add a riser for added depth. Planting potatoes in a different box each year means removing a lot of the soil from last year’s box and moving the riser to the potato box for this year. I can’t use the soil I removed (that would defeat rotation) so I must move the soil from a non-nightshade box last year to the potato box and put the excess potato soil from last year into the now empty non-nightshade box. It’s sort of like a big slider puzzle. Fortunately I’ve always been really good at slider puzzles!

Why Foster Care?

Animal shelters and rescue programs desperately need the help of people who will provide in-home foster care for some of their animals.

What Is Animal Foster Care?

Foster Care saves lives — Belle – July 3013

Animal foster care is similar to human foster care in that you provide a loving, safe, temporary environment for animals in need. Programs vary from facility to facility, but generally The Shelter/Rescue provides the food and medications; you supply the place and the love.

Why Animal Foster Care?

Shelters and rescues need foster homes for several reasons:

Continue reading “Why Foster Care?”

Advantages of Recycling Aluminum

We see aluminum cans by the thousands. We may come to think that with so many aluminum cans around, why bother recycling? But it is this abundance that is a prime reason TO recycle. We may ask, “Is it worth the bother?” It is if you have any concern for your surroundings.

Recycling aluminum is so easy that the time needed for an empty beverage can to be recycled, refilled and be back on the store shelf is as little as 60 days!

Because aluminum does not degrade or burn off during recycling, aluminum is infinitely recyclable. Recycling aluminum saves 90-95 percent of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore. Aluminum smelting also produces sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide, two toxic gases that are key elements in smog and acid rain.

It doesn’t matter if you’re making aluminum cans, roof gutters or cookware, it is simply much more energy-efficient to recycle existing aluminum to create the aluminum needed for new products than it is to make aluminum from virgin natural resources.

Reducing Runaway Consumer Buying

Advertising is everywhere. Its purpose is mostly to increase consumer buying. Some advertising purports to educate you, but in the end the purpose is to induce you to buy their brand, support their cause, or think their way.

How much advertising we are exposed to depends on the person. Estimates published on the Internet vary from 247 to 5,000 advertisements per day. If you watch television, approximately 25 minutes of each hour will be advertisements. Radio is similar. Then there are billboards and signs on stores, busses, cars, trucks, food packaging and clothing that advertise someone’s product to others. “We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency.

The net result of pervasive advertising is that we begin to think of things like cell phones as fashion accessories and feel that we must always have the latest and greatest of anything we own…as well as owning a great many things that we don’t really use.

This is a vastly different mindset from that of America a few generations ago. During the Great Depression Americans were experts and reusing and repurposing everything they had. Before that: when people began settling the Appalachian region, people made most of what they had. Getting supplies from the East into these mountains before there were roads and railways was difficult and dangerous. Settlers brought the bare essentials with them, then used what was on hand to make what they needed. By trading amongst themselves they could have what they needed without having to make everything themselves.

Some of us still treasure generations-old cast iron cookware or power tools from the 50s and 60s that were built to last – and did. Today too many products are designed and manufactured to be disposable. The manufacturers want them to wear out so you will buy them again and again.

Some will argue that consumer buying is the driving force behind our economy and to keep the economy strong we must all do our part by continually buying as many consumer goods as we possibly can.

Excuse me?

camel, straw, load, stress — Like it? Buy a print from www.Art.com

You’ve heard the saying “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” and you probably recognize that it refers to a slowly increasing load or burden that eventually crushes the one carrying it, but have you ever given the saying much thought? Have you ever considered whether it applies to you? Or perhaps you’ve been through an experience that could be described by this prophetic witticism. Our modern society is very good at pushing the idea that if you’re not flitting around like a hummingbird, involved in everything, and severely stressed by it all; you’re not normal. I say if that’s normal, strive for abnormality!

Continue reading “The Camel, the Straw, and Stress”

De-Fanging the Credit Monster

credit, debt, economics, living debt free, simplifying After the economic crunch we have been through in recent years I don’t need to tell you, Dear Reader, that living eyebrow deep in credit card debt is a bad idea. At one time it was considered the norm – almost a status symbol. Now more and more people are seeing that reducing this debt is beneficial. Some time ago I wrote about how to slay the credit card dragons in The Economics of Simple Living.

Today I want to briefly reiterate the benefits of living credit free. You will note that I did not say credit CARD free – for indeed we do still have a couple of credit cards. If one plans to live in this modern society, having at least one active credit card is a necessity unless you go into “survivalist” mode. Continue reading “De-Fanging the Credit Monster”

Recycling Glass: A Clear Advantage

Humans did not invent glass making: long before humans learned the secret, nature was making glass. When lightning struck sand it melted it into long, thin tubes of glass. Erupting volcanoes melted rocks and sand into glass. Humans found this naturally made glass and improved the process. The earliest glass made by humans was probably a glaze on ceramic pottery made somewhere around 3,000 B.C.

Today sand, soda ash, lime, and sometimes gypsum or dolomite are melted together in large furnaces to over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit until the mixture becomes a syrupy mass. While malleable it can be shaped by blowing to make hollow vessels, drawing into sheets or tubes, pressing into a mold, or sculpting things with globs of hot glass.

Colored glass is produced by adding small amounts of natural elements to the molten glass. For instance, brown glass is made by adding iron, sulfur and carbon to the mix.

Producing virgin glass takes less energy than does producing metal or plastic and glass recycles endlessly without losing any of its strength. Also, glass containers are far more stable than plastic or metal containers so they do not leech or out-gas anything into the food they contain and glass containers can be safely reused over and over.

Crushed recycled glass is called ‘cullet’. The proportion of cullet in new glass can be as high as 90%. Cullet melts at a lower temperature so for every 10% of cullet in the glass mix, the factory can use 2% less energy to produce the same quality of glass.

While glass is made from all naturally occurring materials, nature cannot recover glass through decomposition as it will with some other products. If dumped into a landfill, glass will remain there, taking up space, forever – OK, a million years or so: pretty much forever. Because it does not contain or release any toxins, it is safe to dispose of glass this way, but trashing glass removes a valuable resource from the materials chain.