Into the Woods – Page 168 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Buttermilk

One of my disappointments when I moved back to North Carolina from California was the poor quality of dairy products in this region of the country. I very rarely drink milk, but I do use butter and a bit of cheese, and I like having buttermilk in the refrigerator. It was almost impossible to find buttermilk that wasn’t somehow adulterated — thickened with tapioca or emulsified with diglycerides. Not only that, but finding milk here from cows that are not given hormones is almost impossible, unless you go to Whole Foods, which is a 50-mile roundtrip for me. In San Francisco, there were fantastic boutique dairies nearby, such as the Strauss Family Creamery in Marin County, north of San Francisco.

But last week, at the Ingle’s grocery store at Walnut Cove, I stopped at the dairy case (I usually speed by) and found proper buttermilk. It has the no-hormones label, and it contains nothing but milk, salt, vitamin A and vitamin D.

My favorite way to use buttermilk is to just drink it. The bacteria that is used to culture buttermilk is different from the bacteria used to culture yogurt, but, like yogurt, buttermilk is good for the digestive system. Buttermilk also is easier to digest than regular milk, because the bacteria break down the lactose and turn it into lactic acid.

The label on this milk even says where it came from — Asheville, North Carolina. That’s good cow country.

The last rose of summer

“Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.”

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

On how to wash eggs

I wish I had known a year ago that there are guides from the experts on how to wash eggs from backyard chickens. I had been doing it wrong. For one, I had assumed that cold water was better, to avoid heating the egg. Wrong.

If you Google for egg-washing, you’ll find lots of often contradictory opinions. There are many people who say that you shouldn’t wash eggs at all. However, I think I’ll go with the university people on this. The University of Nebraska has published a guide meant particularly for people with backyard chickens. There’s also a PDF version of the guide.

Hot water (90F to 120F) is best because eggs are porous (that’s how the chicks get air before they hatch). Cold water causes the contents of the egg to contract, potentially pulling in microbes through the pores. Hot water causes the contents of the egg to expand, pushing microbes out of the pores. The eggs should not be soaked. They should be kept in the water only for the time it takes to wash them. And yes, it’s OK to use a weak bleach solution to sanitize the egg, as I had been doing.

Another brilliant idea that I learned from Googling: Use a pencil to write the date on each egg. Though I’ve always rotated my eggs, it’s a very good thing to have dates on the eggs.

Blum's Almanac

Recently, while talking with a neighbor who has been gardening in this area for a long time, I asked him how he decides when to plant particular things. His response: “I use the almanac.” I didn’t even ask him which almanac, because I just assumed that he meant Blum’s Almanac.

Blum’s Almanac is published in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (about 25 miles from here), and the 2011 edition is its 183rd year. My grandparents always had this almanac, and I believe they planted by it. Though the almanac was an icon of my childhood, as an adult I’ve never used an almanac. My first question (and I don’t know the answer) is how an almanac can give planting dates without reference to the planter’s latitude and altitude. So I have a lot to learn about how an almanac works and how to use it.

But I intent to start. I ordered a three-year subscription.

Facebook is sending your info to snoopers

Facebook claims that it’s a mistake that they are working to “dramatically limit” (yeah, sure). But, for some time, they’ve been giving your ID to the companies that make a business of collecting data about you on the Internet, then selling it. Reporters for the Wall Street Journal caught them at it.

Says the Wall Street Journal: “The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.”

Everyone needs to be aware of these new companies that are collecting and selling information about you. We also need to be aware of who their partners are. To start: Facebook, Abobe Flash, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and who knows who else. The only way to defeat them is by scrupulous management of your browser “cookies” and by being aware of how these companies work and how sneaky and dishonest they are. When they have your ID, they can track what you do on the web, tie it all together with your name, and sell it.

I am considering leaving Facebook altogether. But for some time I have signed into Facebook using a separate browser, and in that browser I don’t go anywhere but to Facebook. This may be the last straw, though, that leads me to close my Facebook account.

New blooms

Some new blooms appeared today. Above are the fall-blooming camellias, planted a few months ago on the eastern side of the house. Below is a toad lily, which was sent to me by a friend in Hawaii. The toad lily lives in the double windows behind the kitchen sink.

Shepherd's pie

James-Michael, who returns to California tomorrow after a 10-day visit to the abbey, cooked tonight’s supper. It’s shepherd’s pie. This kind of all-in-one dish makes great sense for working people like James-Michael. Make the dish on the weekend, and the leftovers will help get you through the week.

A nice home for some lucky chickens

Here’s a good sign that backyard chickens are going mainstream: Leonard, a maker of prefabricated outbuildings, is making chicken houses. I saw this chicken house in a shopping center parking lot in Winston-Salem. This building is particularly stylish and is a very practical design. The front lid covers six nests. You lift the lid to take the eggs.

Ahh … cool weather

I rarely post photos of myself, but today I’ll make an exception. James-Michael, a friend visiting from California, took this photo of me mowing beside the driveway.

It’s amazing how weather makes all the difference. Mowing the grass in the heat of summer is a miserable job. But when it’s 69F out, mowing is a joy. The area behind me, by the way, is what I call the rabbit patch. The area used to be covered with pine trees, which I removed in February of 2008. The area is very steep and very rough, so I’m letting it go back to woods. I planted four arbor vitae trees below the driveway. They’re doing well, and the deer leave them alone.

The Snapper mower, by the way, does a beautiful job mowing the steep and uneven grounds of Acorn Abbey. It’s the Jeep of lawn mowers.

Zombie cookies

The SafariCookies control panel

I have been carefully watching, and manually managing, my browser cookies for quite some time. It’s quite a lot of trouble. And it’s also disturbing. Most disturbing is that I’ve found that cookies have been regenerating, even though I never visited the site that the cookies belong to. I’ve also found that Flash cookies keep reappearing even though I went to Adobe’s web site and, supposedly, configured Flash on my computer not to use local storage.

What’s going on? I’m not sure. We do know about the existence of “zombie cookies,” because several evil Internet companies have been sued by privacy advocates because of them. Zombie cookies come back after you delete them because they’ve stored copies of themselves somewhere else — usually Flash storage. We also know about Samy Kamkar’s “Evercookie” and the new tools available to evil web sites in HTML5.

I recently downloaded and installed two Safari plug-ins that are a must-have for Safari users on Macintoshes. The first is SafariCookies, which makes it much easier to monitor and manage your cookies, including Flash cookies. The second is Safari AdBlocker. Both are free.

After I installed SafariCookies, I found that I still had more than a thousand Flash cookies and Flash “databases,” even though I thought I had locked down Flash and deleted all the Flash cookies from my file system. I don’t know where this stuff was being stored in my file system, but I had SafariCookies remove them.

If you are using other browsers on Windows, I don’t have any recommendations for you at present. But I’d recommend that you do some research to find what’s available.

Privacy advocates take the position that it is illegal for Internet sites to defeat your efforts to refuse and delete cookies. After all, your computer belongs to you. But corporate America has declared war on Internet users. Their intent is to make the Internet into a place where they can make money any way they can, while strangling any use of the Internet that isn’t about making money for corporations. To keep the upper hand, corporations are using both technological development (as in HTML5) and the usual political dealing and payola (as in their attempts to strong-arm the FCC and buy off the Congress to defeat net neutrality).

For some background on this, see my new category “Internet privacy” over to the right.