Some Knowledge

I watched the Weather Channel for about fifteen minutes this morning after I woke up.  There is a winter storm warning for this area and they are predicting a lot of snow.  I could see on the radar image that the stuff was getting near.  I knew what I had to do to get ready.

I got my coat and hat and work gloves on and went out to the barn.  I got the old tractor going and drove it out back by the garden to hook up the snow plow.  At least I would not have to shovel the driveway.  I got the plow hitched up and spun around in the right direction and parked the old tractor back in the barn.

The wood pile out front was almost empty, so I had more chores to do before the snow hit.  I got a bucket full of small sticks for starting fires, then loaded up the wheelbarrow and began running wood out to the rack.  It only took two trips this time to fill the wood rack.  When I was finished hauling wood I searched around in the barn for the snow shovel.  It took some looking, but I finally found the thing.  After closing the barn I was all ready for the snowstorm that is on the way.

I do not like winter.  It is a cold, dreary, annoying season.  Maybe if I dug out the cross country skis I would feel better about snow, but I doubt it.  The only positive thing I can say is that with all the snow I will be getting some regular exercise, which I probably need.  With any luck, and Murphy’s Law, now that I have prepared for the snow it might not come.  I should be so lucky.

I read a lot.  I just read a long blog post on how I shouldn’t be obsessed with my blog stats but should be creating interesting content.  After I read this post on Problogger I went and checked this blog’s stats.  My page views are down.  How interesting.  For some reason most people are reading the post I wrote about some silly spark plugs.  Why are spark plugs so interesting?  Perhaps people want to save money on gas by buying magic expensive spark plugs that make exorbitant claims.

I was reading a book about Chinese Herbal Medicine last night because there was nothing interesting on TV.  I skipped over the long encyclopedic section on all kinds of different herbs.  I read about chi and yin and yang.  What an interesting theory.  Nevermind it has little relation to reality.  It’s interesting to read ancient philosophical theories.

I am in the middle of reading a long book on abstract expressionism.  What I can get from this book is that these artists drank a lot and were inspired by various previous artists.  It makes no sense to be telling me all the names of the people who these artists talked to in the 50’s and 60’s because I know none of these people.  I guess the book is interesting, in a way.  You wouldn’t think somebody could come up with so many words about such bad art that sells for so much money.

I have been trying to get interested in fiction again.  I have a fantasy novel, a horror novel, and a few sci-fi novels that I am in the middle of reading.  I lose interest in characters when they do dumb things.  One character in one book I was reading got all drunk and started a fight for no reason.  So, I lost interest in that book because the main character was so dumb.  Is this the kind of thing that entertains people?  Dumb people doing dumb things?

So, these days I look around for interesting stuff to read on the net.  There is so much more writing on the Internet than there is in books these days.  I have a huge collection of books that I hardly ever read.  I should go into business selling books before they are made obsolete by the net.  Perhaps I could attract more page views if I just wrote glowing reviews for dumb books.  What a huckster I’d have to become.

I think I will go browse through some of the other WordPress blogs and see what other people are writing about.  The election is over so maybe there won’t be so much political nonsense to wade through.  Maybe somebody has posted a review of something interesting they have read.  It’s something to look for anyway.

The kinds of baked beans you get in a can are not very good.  There is a way to make good baked beans, and the process has been handed down in my family for many years.  It is not particularly hard to make homemade baked beans, but it does require some attention and a bit of time.

Start with dry great northern beans.  For a good large pan of beans you will need two pounds of beans.  The night before you want to bake your beans sort through the dry beans a scant handful at a time and seperate out any shriveled, black, or otherwise defective beans.  Pay careful attention that there are no stones in your beans.  Stones sometimes occur in dry beans and can cause nasty things like broken teeth if they are not removed.  Once you have gone through the beans a few at a time place then in a pot with a lot of extra room then fill the pot with cold water.  You will want to soak the beans overnight, for at least 12 hours.

The next morning pour out the soaking water that is left in your now swollen beans and rinse the soaked beans in more cold water.  Now cover the beans in a lot of cold water but do not come too close to the rim of the pot so the beans do not boil over.  Mix two tablespoons of ground ginger in with the cooking water.  This is important, as ginger is carminative and will prevent the beans from causing excess gas.  Mix the ginger into the water well to distribute it so there are no lumps, then put the pot on the stove.  Boil the beans for approximately an hour and a half at a slow simmer.  You will need to check the beans to find out when they are ready to bake.  The beans should boil until they are tender and have no graininess when you taste one.  Do not boil the beans too long or they will go to pieces, but if you don’t boil them long enough they will not be tender.

When the beans are done boiling use a slotted ladle to transfer them to a shallow hotel pan or a large glass baking pan.  You want to spread them out about an inch and a half thick on the bottom of the pan.  Do not handle the beans too much so they do not fall apart.  Now, strain the cooking liquid to get any bean skins out of it and put it back on the stove to boil.  Add one cup brown sugar, one half cup molasses, and one tablespoon salt to the bean water.  Bring the liquid back to a boil and stir to make sure everything is dissolved.

You will need either bacon or salt pork to top the baked beans.  Salt pork is not that commonly available these days, but if you find it, slice it into quarter inch thick pieces and boil it for a few minutes in a pot of water to remove some of the fat.  Bacon is easier to find and perhaps tastes better.  Take a one pound package of sliced bacon and cut it into four smaller slabs evenly.  You will now have a lot of two inch pieces of bacon.  You can cook some of the fat out of the bacon in the microwave or oven, or use it as it comes from the package.  Pour some of the bean liquid over the beans in the pan until they are covered.  Place the strips of bacon or salt pork over the top of the beans.  Now bake the beans in a 350 degree oven.

It generally takes from three to five hours to bake the beans.  You will need to remove them from the oven every hour or so and add more bean liquid so they do not dry out.  As the beans bake the liquid will thicken into a creamy sauce and the bacon or salt pork will crisp to a golden brown.  Half way through the baking you may want to flip over the pieces of pork or bacon so they do not burn, but this is generally not necessary.

These baked beans taste nothing like what comes in any can.  They are rich and creamy and are full of fat and calories.  This is a good side dish to make for the holidays and can be stored in the refrigerator for a few days if you plan ahead and make them in advance.  It is not particularly hard to make good baked beans, but it takes some time and effort.  If you have never had real homemade baked beans you might want to give this recipe a try just to find out what you are missing.

Wow, it’s Thanksgiving again.  Time for the great American feast of gluttony.  There are parades on TV in the morning, classic movies all day, people making all kinds of fattening foods.  It is time to visit relatives and sit around the table gorging on way too much.  What a great idea for a holiday.

The good thing about Thanksgiving is that a lot of people get the day off from work.  The problem with the holidays is that there is a lot of extra work.  Every year as I am helping prepare food I can’t help thinking about all the people on this planet who don’t have enough to eat.  It’s not that there is not enough food.  America alone grows enough food to feed the entire world, if we didn’t waste it by using grain to fatten up animals.  Still, it’s nice to know that the farmers have produced an abundance of food with their farm machinery and agrichemicals.

I suppose it’s nice to set aside a day to celebrate how well-off we are.  A person should be grateful for what they get out of life.  Even with the stock market in a death spiral and companies going out of business right and left, there is still a lot we get from society and the world.  Maybe if people were more thankful for what they have they would not go out and do violent terrorist deeds or participate in political wars.  It will take a long time, but when the world is finally at peace and everyone has what they need to survive, I will be a lot more thankful.  For today, I’m just going to help out as much as possible and take it easy on the food.

I had a busy day installing some tools on my Blogspot blog.  The problem with Blogger is that it doesn’t tell you if you are getting any page views.  You can’t tell if what you post is being read.  So, I hooked up with Google Analytics and Webmaster tools.  I had to copy and paste some code into the html of the blog, but it turned out to be fairly simple to do this.  Now I know for sure that nobody has read my new blog in the last two hours.  How encouraging.

I kinda like the idea of fooling around with the code for a blog, even though I only know minimal things about html.  I used to do some programming, so I am not a computer illiterate.  I found out the Google bot has been visiting my blog and indexing pages, so that’s cool.  Now, all I have to do is write some interesting stuff that people want to read.

Seriously, what is a post worth?  There are places that pay you to post stuff in your blog.  The words must be worth something.  Most of these pay per post sites want articles about some product or service.  I don’t have a lot of those kinds of posts on this site, and certainly nothing anybody paid me to write, but still, the concept is interesting.

I read a book a while back about freelance writing.  It was that author’s opinion that words were worth a certain amount of money each, or that your time was worth something like seventy dollars an hour.  It would be nice to make $70 an hour just to write things.  Those things you would be writing would have to make money for your customers to be worth their cost.  That is the power of words.  People use words to sell stuff.

It’s certainly nice to find some article somebody has posted on a blog that answers some question you have.  It is extremely annoying to find some long sales letter that answers nothing except how you can spend money.  Personally, I don’t spend much money on the net.  In the past I have ordered books that the stores just do not stock, but that’s about it.  In every case where I have bought something, it was a thing I was looking for explicitly.  I knew what I wanted before I even searched the net for a source.  All I needed was a supplier and a page that told me how to order.

Salesmen annoy me.  I went to a furniture store to find a chair some years ago.  I looked around and found a comfy chair that was on sale.  Then I had to find a salesman to purchase the thing.  The salesman immediately tried to talk me into getting a more expensive chair.  That was his job.  I told him, look, this is the chair I want, sell it to me.  If he was an efficient sales person he would have known that I had already decided what I wanted and done his best to close the sale and move on to another customer.  I have no patience with hucksters.

The point of this long-winded story is this:  If you want to make money from what you write you will have to find somebody to sell your work to.  If you write a novel you have to sell it to a publisher.  If you write advertisements you will have to sell them to businesses.  If you write blog posts, good luck, because last time I checked there were something like a billion of these online.  Right now, this post is worth nothing to me.  If I wrote something for Helium.com I might make a few cents on the advertising they sell.  One of these days I have to sign up with PayPal so I can get my earnings from those people.  In any case, what you write has value to somebody who reads it if they get useful information from it.  Giving away information is all well and good, but it doesn’t put food on the table.  Maybe a blog post is worth exactly nothing.

The key to selling what you write is to be entertaining.  If people actually like to read what you have written, they will be more inclined to hire you to work for them.  It helps if you can say what you mean without wasting endless time spinning empty webs of words.  Tell me about something I might like to own or use or that may be useful in some way to me and I will read what you write.  Bore me with stories about the lousy weather and I will point and click away from your blog asap.

It was cloudy and gloomy and wet and cold and snowy all day long.  What a dreary, dismal day.  That’s winter in Michigan.  It is never sunny, unless it is 20 below, and there is nothing but the color gray everywhere you look, unless it’s night, and then everything is black.

It’s no wonder people get depressed in winter.  There are no flowers.  The trees are not green.  It is too cold to do anything fun outside like have a barbecue.  Winter is for hibernation.  I don’t want to hibernate.  I want to go to the beach and lie in the sun.

Then there is the topic of making money from a blog.  How is this possible?  You need thousands of people to visit your blog and read stuff and click on advertisements.  This blog does not even host advertisements.  I don’t try to sell products with my posts.  I have another blog that I am going to go commercial on, if I ever figure out what I want to try to sell.  Then there is the question of how to get traffic.  I suppose if I already had money I could buy traffic.  You have to spend money to make money.

I get tired of reading all these websites where people supposedly try to show other people how to make money online.  Most of these sites are nothing but scams.  They make money by selling information products on how to make money.  Very interesting.  If they knew how to make money online, why are they selling information on how to make money online?  Because they actually have no idea how to make money online aside from selling people bogus information.

Running a successful blog and making money online all boils down to one thing.  You have to get really popular.  This means you have to say something interesting enough to get people to read it and then tell their friends.  You have to be pretty damned interesting to get me to tell anybody about your site.  Then again, I do a lot of web surfing.  I think I’ve seen some of the same sites a few times.  It’s like deja vu when read something and then in the middle of it remember reading the same thing a month ago.

I’m just ranting here today.  I looked at a lot of fitness and bodybuilding sites this week.  I found a lot of conflicting information on how to lose weight and put on muscle.  It seems if you want to lose weight you have to eat more and do a lot of annoying exercises.  Very interesting.  I’ve seen a hundred articles that all say the same thing.  There must be a lot of money in weight loss information somewhere.

It’s night now and I don’t have to look at clouds every time I look out a window.  There is supposed to be more snow tomorrow, but as far as today goes we did not get enough to bother with.  I haven’t been keeping this blog up very well lately, which is partly because my fingers were sore from typing the 474 other articles I have posted here.  Maybe I should do some research and find a topic.  Maybe I should learn how to tell a joke.  Maybe this whole blog is a joke.  In any case, writing so much has been a learning experience.  I’ve learned that I am just not interested in a lot of things, like politics, that are really popular.

It is evening.  It is late in November.  It is cold and dark outside.  I don’t know why I’m writing this in my blog, aside from the fact that I can.

I guess it’s the time of year to stay inside with the lights on.  I would rather be laying out in the sun on some beach.  The stars are nice, when it isn’t cloudy, but it is usually cloudy.  I will continue to use the Internet to divert my attention from the season.

I haven’t played any computer games in ages.  Maybe I should hook up to the old MUD and see if anything interesting is happening.  That used to keep me occupied.  It would beat trying to come up with something interesting to read.  Maybe I will just search for random things on Google.  Maybe I will go watch TV.

It’s cold outside and the sun is shining.  Winter hasn’t even started and already I’m sick of it.  I just stopped by the old blog to see how traffic is doing.  There seem to be 84 page views for my various posts already today.  I guess this is pretty good.  I picked up a few random links over the evening that seem to have nothing to do with anything I’ve written.  Very strange.

One of these days I will think up a consistent theme for this blog.  For now I’m just going to post the occasional random thought and leave it at that.  I’ve been reading about exercise and nutrition on various websites about bodybuilding.  Maybe that could be my theme.  I could just write various articles about nutritional supplements and exercises and get in on some of the traffic this generates for other sites.  Maybe I will just go dormant for a while.  I don’t know.  One thing is for sure, this post has no topic.

That’s all for now.  Just thought I’d check in and post something to make this blog even longer.

I’ve just been wasting time today reading things on the net.  It’s been cold and windy outside today, though I did take a drive to the park this afternoon.  There was a bit of snow, but nothing that would pile up.  Once again we had the fire going in the wood stove all day.  A wood stove is a good place to warm up when the cold of winter starts to get to you.

That’s all I feel like writing today.  It is not a good day for generating text.  Maybe tomorrow I will feel more motivated to dig up something interesting to write about.