Sunday, December 19, 2010

Weigh in #21 - Faith in Humanity and Crazy Americans

Hello, final weigh in of the year since we're off to Blighty later this afternoon, weather permitting.





A massive 9oz for the last week. So a total of 417oz which is the equivalent of 26lbs and 1oz.

Obviously the blog will be on a bit of a hiatus whilst we're in the UK. Will try our best to reduce, reuse and recycle whilst we're home. Although it is so cold we'll probably have to burn everything to keep warm.

Finally got round to printing out some wedding pictures, and then I stupidly sent them over to my old house! I dashed over their at about 10pm one evening. Since it's been foreclosed on I didn't want the packages left lying out in the rain.

To my surprise the place is actually occupied now, so someone must have bought it. I was very shocked. Despite lights being on in the house I could not raise anyone, despite knocking and ringing many, many times.

In the end I left a note and posted it through the door, my faith in getting the pictures back at an all time low. However, my faith in humanity was restored as by the time I drove back home the lady had called me and we arranged to pick them up the next evening. Hurrah!

Sometimes I don't understand America and American politics. Everyone is up in arms about the ballooning national deficit, but no-one has the balls to do anything about it. That's because of the endless rounds of elections they have here. It seems to me you get voted to office and then spend the next four years raising money to try and get voted in again, so you obviously don't have more than a 2-3 year plan.

Take this week for example. They voted to extend the Bush era tax cuts for another two years. So that's one avenue of revenue they just closed off. As part of that same bill they extend un-employment benefit which I agree with, but it doesn't take a genius to see that that is going to put them more in the red.

Did they discuss how they would pay for this extra benefits? No. Maybe if they had increased taxes they might have had some money to help pay for the benefits.

So who's going to pay for this then? Well I found out part of the answer the next day at work. Uncle Sam just imposed another two years pay freeze for federal employees, including yours truly.

Maybe I should become an investment banker, and that way no matter how royally I fuck up and fuck over the country I'll still get a massive bonus, and hey if I get the sack a massive golden handshake. (Gay, sorry for the F words.)

Can't wait to see the next round of Wikileaks cables - rumoured to contain stuff about Bank of America!

Of course, not allowed to read them at work since we've been warned not to use Federal computers to view them.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Weigh in #17-20, McDonalds revisited.

Hi everyone.

Well the last month has flown by. Been very, very busy and maybe a little stressed at work. Working from 7am to 1am tends to have that effect on me. Still the beam-line is up and running AND on time this year so feel very happy about that. The madness should be over for another year!

Okay, in quick order then......

First on is 7.5oz




Second one is 9oz






Third one is 10oz






Fourth one is 22.5oz.





That brings our grand total to 408oz which is 25.5lbs in 31 weeks. Pretty damned good I say!

We've recently received new recycling bins from San Mateo County and from Jan 3rd we can start to add food scraps to the green yard waste bins. That's excellent news, but most of our food waste is still going to be going into the compost bin and the worms lunch menu!

Talking of compost, yesterday I dug around in out compost tumbler to find the new biodegradable chip packet, you know the loud ones that claim to be biodegradable. Well we popped that noisy bugger into the drum on the 2nd October and two months later still looks like we just bought it off the shelf. Very little degrading.

Was not able to find the biodegradable wine cups we used at the wedding. Not that I looked that hard as it started to rain......



You may remember in my last blog that I was going to do the "why does a burger not go mouldy experiment" but I've been beaten to it. My good friend Bruce found a link to someone who carried out a pretty good set of experiments. They experiments and the conclusions can be read here. I won't spoil the ending by telling you what he found... no pun intended!

We had out last harvest from our tomato plants at the end of November....



it was a very strange summer indeed.

Summer is over, especially so for my poor family back in the UK, struggling through a couple feet of snow. Not to be out done we built our own snowman.... by built I mean bought one from Home Depot and then assembled it at home. "Frosty" as we named him (original huh?) is now proudly stood out on our front lawn.