I got the full eight quarts down yesterday, and my temp this morning was 97.0 — higher than it’s been since I started checking it.  I’ll have to give it a few days to see if it’s really climbing, though.  I also remembered to weigh myself, so I’ve got a baseline weight of 254.

I may not get through a full eight quarts today, because I wasn’t hungry when I woke up, so I got a later start. That’s okay; it’s not like two gallons is a magic number.  That’s just what I figured a guy my size should shoot for.  The idea is to overfeed yourself, so it’s better to drink too much than too little.  I may end up averaging more like closer to 7 quarts a day; I’ll just have to see.

A little on how it’s done:  You don’t drink it in three big batches, like meals.  You sip at it gradually throughout the day.  That way your body always has a ready source of energy, and you don’t feel like you’re sloshing when you move.  So I keep a glass of milk on my desk and try to take a sip pretty often.  The other key is to drink it warm, as close to room temperature as possible.  I figured lukewarm milk would be nasty, but it’s actually pretty good.  (Of course, this is raw, pastured Jersey milk with plenty of cream; maybe store-bought stuff would be nasty warm.) Drinking a big slug of cold milk can cause some stomach cramping or discomfort, but warm it goes down easy.  I pour a quart at a time, so by the time I finish it, it’s getting fairly warm.

Off to refill my glass….

Here’s a picture of everything I’ll be eating and drinking today:

Two gallons of raw milk

Yes, that’s two gallons of raw milk.  I’m starting the milk diet, which is exactly what it sounds like.  No other food, just as much raw milk as you can drink.  I expect to stay on it for 3-4 weeks, so I’ll write more about the whys and hows as I go.  This is just an introductory post to kick it off and establish some baselines. Read more »

We did our third big pulled-pork event this weekend.  Actually, it was our third and fourth: we did a whole hog — a big one, about 330 pounds live-weight — and took half of it to a birthday party in Angel’s family and the other half to my niece’s wedding reception.  I guess we’re getting the hang of it, because it went more smoothly than before, even though we cooked more meat.  People at both parties raved about it — even people who didn’t know we’d cooked it, so I assume they were being honest — so I thought I’d share a few things we’ve learned. Read more »

I still don’t watch videos on the net very often. I had dialup for so long — bad dialup, that rarely ran better than 19.2Kbps — that watching videos was just out of the question.  Even once I got a high-speed connection, Adobe’s closed-source policy meant that their Flash player was usually somewhere between broken and flaky on FreeBSD, so it was hard to watch videos in a browser.  If there was something I had to see, I downloaded it overnight (or over multiple nights) and watched it later.  So even today, when I’m looking for instructions on something, it rarely occurs to me to look for a video.

That’s a mistake, because some things are a lot easier to show than to tell.  A one-minute video of someone showing how to fillet a fish is probably more informative than a whole book trying to explain it in words.  Plus, all the internet marketing gurus say video is growing in importance, and a lot of people out there are just the opposite of me — they’ll look for a video first before searching other ways — and the search engines are trying to respond to that by featuring videos.  So for a while now, I’ve been wanting to make some screencast videos.  I think they’ve got a lot of potential for tutorials and demos, and I want to do some as teaching aids for my Latin lessons.

I thought I’d get some practice by doing one with my garden pictures.  It took a while to get all the technical details figured out, but I think once I know what I’m doing, this could be a lot faster than annotating a bunch of pictures and typing up descriptions of them all.  I hope you enjoy it.  If you have trouble viewing or hearing it, or have suggestions, please let me know.  More technical details below.

I captured the video and audio with Gtk-RecordMyDesktop.  My microphone is the crummy free one that came with a sound card or something, so if I speak very loudly at all, it pops.  So once I had the video file, I stripped the audio out into a separate WAV file, and used Audacity to boost the volume, and also to suppress some of the popping.  (If I decide to keep doing these, I think I’ll have to get a decent microphone.)  Then I muxed the audio back into the video, and cropped it to a standard size and recompressed it, all with mencoder.

The spinning red circle I used for pointing things out is from the Show Mouse plugin for Compiz, my window manager.  To display and zoom the images, I used GQview.  I’m hosting the video on blip.tv, which is like YouTube except that it’s more restricted to actual shows and documentaries, and not wide open to everything under the sun.

People in my family are pretty private, so I doubt I could ever get any of them to make a video promoting their farm.  But if you wonder what the farm where we get our pork and milk and a lot of other food from is like, here’s a family farm that’s a lot like it.  Same breed of cows, and even the Oliver tractor looks familiar.  Same problem, too, of trying to make a living when the farmer’s share of the consumer’s dollar keeps shrinking.  We’ve even talked about making cheese, but as you can probably tell by the video, that’s not a simple or cheap endeavor, especially with all the regulations these days.

They’ve got a really nice website too: Laurel Valley Creamery.

From Grass to Cheese: The Nolan Family Farm from Milk Products on Vimeo.

Here are the latest pictures from our backyard garden beds. Read more »

It's not one of these; maybe a descendant

It’s been a busy week, as we’re  getting ready to sell pulled-pork sandwiches at Trade Days at Stone’s Prairie Market in Plainville again this year.  The hog is being processed right now—can’t get much fresher than that!—and we’ll be slow-cooking it tomorrow.  We got a lot of compliments on the pork last year; and if I may so so myself, you won’t get better pulled pork anywhere.  We’ll have it in salt and pepper (my favorite) and BBQ flavors, and we’ll have chips and soda as well.

We’ll be starting at 9am and going until 3 or so, or until we run out.  There will also be music by the Ragtag Irish Band and others; demonstrations of flint knapping, rope making, and other historical crafts; a farmers’ market; and more.  It even looks like the weather is going to be nice. So come on out to Plainville on Saturday, May 22, and have a sandwich and say hi!

These pictures are from Saturday; just getting them posted now. Read more »

It’s been about two weeks, so it’s time for an update.  Most things are growing pretty well.  I discovered that tacks aren’t enough for holding the floating row cover in place; they tore through in the high winds yesterday.  So now I’ve got it wrapped around a 1×2 on each side.  That’ll actually be handier anyway, since now it’s not attached to the bed at all, so I can move the whole thing if I want.  On to the pictures! Read more »