Vegetable Stand

Mr. and Mrs. Barnett have a vegetable stand (bottom picture below) so far out in the country that Google Street View doesn't have it.  They have tomatoes, corn, beans, onions, peppers, watermelons, and more and it's best to go mid-week for the best selection.  It's a cash honor system, so bring enough fives and ones to make the proper deposit.  It's also good to bring your own large shopping bag(s).

The top picture below was our takeaway, with six large tomatoes, ten huge yellow peppers, and a basket of who-knows-how-many jalapenos, which cost us a total of $7.  That's a bargain!

This Google Maps link will pinpoint the address and when you get there you will turn on a gravel driveway and the stand is immediately on your left.  

https://www.google.com/maps/place/4060+Middle+Run+Rd,+Spring+Valley,+OH+45370

Limoncello Spritz

We began a recent Dorothy Lane Culinary Center class with the Limoncello Spritz shown below.  A single serving has 3 ounces of Prosecco (or another sparkling wine), 2 ounces of Limoncello, and one ounce of soda water.  You can party-size that by replacing the ounces with cups.  Serve on ice with a lemon slice and mint leaves. It's the mint that really makes this stand out.  

Rear Wiper Replacement

I've often used the phrase "It's not hard, but it's not obvious" and my recent replacement of the rear wiper blade on our Infiniti QX60 is a perfect example.  I could not figure out how to get the old wiper blade off and I've learned from experience that applying too much force is not a good idea.  So I headed over to the Perplexity AI chatbot and asked "Find me a video of someone replacing the rear wiper on a 2018 Infiniti qx60" and it returned a perfect link to the YouTube video below.  After viewing it, I understood how the blade was attached and that removing it would require a fair amount of force.  Armed with this knowledge, I replaced it in under a minute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7oLuUksZq4

At Least We Made It

The picture below was all we saw for 2 1/2 hours on westbound I-70 back in February as we began our trip to Fort Lauderdale for a week-long cruise on the Celebrity Ascent.  The two-page blog post at the link below details the four crises we went through over the two-day journey.  The short story is we almost hit a semi, we might not have had a hotel room in Indianapolis, our flight was delayed five hours, and we thought all our luggage would end up missing.  Why when it comes to catching a cruise ship we have nothing but bad luck and stress?

https://lifeexperiences.paulishing.com/2024/08/at-least-we-made-it.html

Wobble Shims

We all have a four-legged table or chair that wobbles and we all find something to use to cram under the leg to make it stable.  In our case, it was our patio table with 4-5 paper coasters and it looked so hillbilly.  I noodled for a while and came up with several ideas, but I chucked them all when I found a 6-pack of wobble shims for $3.39 at Amazon.  Each shim is about 1" wide, 2" long, and tapers down from a 3/16" height, and is made with a rubbery, variegated surface.  I needed four shims to level the table and as you can see from the picture below, they are not hillbilly at all.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EALUQWW

Roast Beef And Swiss

Gourmet Chef Elaine made the most delicious sandwich using our Griddler panini press.  She lightly spread the outside of the ciabatta bread with oil and the inside with a bit of her homemade pesto.  Boarshead roast beef and Swiss cheese were layered inside and the sandwich was placed on the preheated panini press.  The top closed, my job was to apply light pressure to the lid for one minute to flatten them a bit and get the nice char marks you see below.  It was so good we repeated the recipe a few days later.

2G Station Spoofing

It's amazing how creative technologies' crooked side can be and the Google Security blog at the link below goes deep into how crooks are using False Base Stations (FBS) to send you SMS messages trying to get you to fall for their schemes.  The FBS broadcasts itself as an LTE/5G cellular station, gets your phone to back down to its 2G (early 1990s cellular) connection, and then uses 2G's weaknesses to inject the messages.  All this bypasses the protections included with your wireless carrier.

Android 12 (~ 3 years ago) introduced the ability to turn off 2G completely, as seen in the screenshot of my Pixel 7 below.  I did that because I could, not that I'm the type that clicks on things just to see what would happen.  Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a similar turn-off switch for iPhones.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/08/keeping-your-android-device-safe-from.html

Recuva

I was asked recently if photos inadvertently deleted from a large-capacity SD card could be recovered.  If you didn't know, deleting files normally does not wipe them out, you just don't see them anymore.  If the data isn't overwritten, it's usually possible to get them back.  

There are many recovery tools on the market with Disk Drill being the best that I tried, but for $80 that was a bit much for a (hopefully) single-time use.  In the end, I used Recuva, free (I love free) Windows-only software that could recover all the files and put them on my hard drive.  It's impossible to know if it recovered every single file, but Recuva's and Disk Drill's file counts matched, so it likely snagged them all.

You can find Recuva at the link below.

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Moses

It's been eighteen years since Moses, "my little buddy in the purring business", passed away. Still, until recently I never realized he was a "rescue" cat, but since I got him at SICSA (Society for the Improvement of Conditions for Stray Animals) that makes him one.  I just knew they had cats and Moses was the only one who was not a kitten (he was a year old) and let me pet him immediately and purred.  There are several Moses stories over on my Life Experiences blog at the link below.

https://lifeexperiences.paulishing.com/2016/05/remembering-moses.html

Arborvitae

The bottom picture below was taken two years ago when our arborvitae were planted.  The top picture was taken recently and shows how much they have gotten taller and thicker.  The purpose of these trees is to provide a little more privacy in our backyard and they are certainly doing that.  I can't wait to see what another couple of years of growth will do.