Turkey Smoking

In our continuing efforts to engage in culinary experimentation and grill during the winter, we are trying to smoke a turkey today. Here's how it looked when we got started at 9:45am:

Smoking packet of hickory and apple chips on the left (yet to really start smoking) and the bird over a drip pan on the right. Only the burners on the left are lit so the heat will be entirely indirect. We're expecting it to take 8 hrs or so; stayed tuned for updated throughout the day.

UPDATE: Its 6:45pm (so much for updates throughout the day) and we've finished our smoked turkey dinner. Due to a later than expected start and emptying one of my propane tanks part-way through, we decided to finish the bird in the oven. It cooked there another 45 minutes; we were pretty close to being done on the grill. Outcome: the meat is drier but more flavorful. We're thinking next time only smoking for part of the day and finishing in the oven, hoping to preserve more of the moisture. I for one really enjoyed the smoked dark drumstick meat.

Richland Home Temperature Measurement:

In what is likely to be a moment of nerd weakness, I have started on the Richland version of the home temperature measurement system I had up and running in Wichita. (This is ignoring many, many other things that I have on my to-do list such as:

• Update/repair the digital picture frame (video driver is dead and I'm probably going to update to a Raspberry Pi 3)
• Finish the retaining wall in the back yard
• Debug the Lorenz project so I can take it into work with self-respect
• ...)

Due to the layout of this house, I'm not able to very easily implement this as a wired system and have been hunting around for good wireless options. I decided on using Low Power Lab's Moteino which uses the RFM69 radio. The radio has range should be more than sufficient to cover the range of my house and the Moteino can come with the radio installed and associated libraries make it easy to get the system up and running.

As I found out today: in less than fifteen minutes I had the sample system up and running with one node sending packets and the other receiving them (and acknowledging back to the sender the reception). With another thirty minutes of work I had the remote programming also working. This will be important as I plan on putting some of these nodes in hard-to-reach places and having the ability to wirelessly update their code will be important.

This was the hard part made easy. Now the hard part for me: start thinking through how this system is going to work and get my head around wireless communication paradigms.

Alternative Christmas Story

Katie: Do you remember from the Christmas story we read who Jesus' mother was?

2-year old Avery: Mary!

Katie: Very good! And who was Jesus' daddy? [Setting aside important theological distinctions.]

Avery: Joseph!

Katie: That's right! And where were Mary and Joseph going when Mary was pregnant with Jesus?

Avery: RED ROBIN!

If you're going to run for office....

... and you want people to take you seriously, I recommend that you get a dedicated email address instead of using the one that implies you don't plan to show up to your new job because you're too busy golfing.

Eclipse in Brief

I don't have the time right now the write more (story of my blog this calendar year) but I thought I'd at least post this. Hopefully I be able to write the whole story in the next week or so.

Backyard Textile Work

I like to think the do-it-yourself attitude I enjoy is rubbing off on my wife. She desired her bathrobe, a light pink be a different color and rather than paying $80 to send it off and have it dyed, she decided to do it on her own.

She purchased a bottle of dye from the craft store and the instructions made it very clear we were going to have to boil the robe in dye for half an hour. A bathrobe is not a small item of clothing and not having a pot large enough she decided we would need to do this outside over a fire in some kind of kettle. 

So she hunted down a kettle. Which is to say a metal garbage can.

We were all out of firewood for the season so she found somebody with some downed limbs that needed cleaning up and picked those up.

She had me build a fire-pit/kettle-stand out of some red bricks we've had laying around and grabbed the grill off our BBQ to help hold the trash can up over the flames. The BBQ lid became the lid for the trash can.

We partially filled the trash can with water to confirm no major leaks, set it up on the grill, and lit the fire.

Once the water was boiling (about half and hour later), we added the dye.

This caused come concern in our son.

After boiling the robe for half an hour, the work of the dye was done and we took the trash can off the fire to cool. Not wanting those hot coals to go to waste, we decided to have smores. This improved our son's outlook on the whole project.