Finally ate a good dinner and my purchase of the day

Around here Army daughter likes to do the cooking.  Since they live here almost for free (they paid their share of the bills and also they buy most of the "food") she likes to think that her cooking is part of their share of doing things around here.  Her cooking is awful.  When she was a kid I used to tease her that she liked putting a little bit of peanut butter in her salt cookies and she liked putting a little bit of tomatoes into her salt sauce for spaghetti.  She hasn't improved much.  Yesterday she was coughing and looking absolutely terrible.  She said that she was going to the store in the morning and wanted to know what I wanted for dinner.  I told her that even if she was going shopping don't worry about dinner on Saturday night.  I'll do the cooking. 

Ah, real food for dinner tonight.  Before I get into what I cooked I need to tell a little story about her grocery shopping.  Remember, she doesn't help in the garden because they'd rather shop at the store.  On her last shopping trip she brought home a jar of jam and a lemon for the salmon they were going to make for dinner.  What about the 50 jars of jam in the cabinet?  Or the lemon tree in the back yard?  Nope, not as good as store bought.  With this in mind, let me tell you about dinner tonight. 

We had a deer roast, given to us by a friend of mine who hunts.  I made scalloped potatoes using potatoes from the garden, powdered milk, cheese powder, and a tablespoon of butter.  I also made a vegetable medley all from the garden of yellow and green zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, bell pepper, jalapeno pepper, onion, and garlic.  I threw in some Italian seasoning that I buy in bulk at Winco.  I made bread using flour, yeast, salt, garlic, a little sugar, and water.  I spread about a tablespoon of melted butter on top just prior to baking it.  We ate it plain without adding any more butter or oil to it.  The grandkids (five of them tonight) had a juice mixture of peaches, plums, and apples just blended together in the blender with some crushed ice and water.  Yes, we had real food tonight.  I am one content person.  Son-in-law likes my cooking; I think Army daughter would prefer store bought preservative filled fake food.  I fed eight of us for a grand total of less than one dollar - the cost of my stored food plus the butter.

I researched some whole house fans and picked one that I purchased today from Home Depot.  It's a Master Flow 30" belt drive unit that's supposed to move 6000 cu. ft. per minute.  That's enough to knock me off my feet if I'm not careful.  The plan is to only have to run this thing for about 10 minutes in the early morning.  I figure if it's in the high 60s or low 70s first thing in the morning I can cool the house down to about that temperature and then close up the house for the rest of the day.  It should keep the house no hotter than 80 if I do it right.  The electrician friend is supposed to come help tomorrow but since this is not just going to be put right in since it's wider than the joists I'm going to have to do a little bit of framing first.  I'll see if he's willing to help with that or if he just wants to make sure the wiring is done right.  If he's not up for actual physical labor the project may not get completed until next weekend. 

I haven't spoken to anyone yet about the wind turbine.   Since there's a dealer a few hours from here there should be someone who has one that I can take a look at and interview them to see how happy they are with it.  I like that it's advertised to be either grid-tied or off grid.  You can have it set up to charge your batteries off grid then when the batteries are charged tie it back to the grid and turn the meter backwards. 

Today a friend of mine gave us a 52" TV.  Army daughter also went to her storage unit to pick up her 52" TV.  We were all scratching our heads at dinner tonight wondering why we got either.  We now have 5 TVs in the house.  The grandkids only watch if I'm watching with them.  We watched High School Musical last weekend.  The TV hasn't been on since.   I think I'll give one of the TVs to oldest daughter and her family.  The rest can collect dust. 

Bug-out renter's chicken is broody again.  I'm going to bring some of our fertilized eggs up there for the hen to set.  She hatched two of the four eggs I brought last time.  The chickens run loose up there.  One of the things that struck me about Hawaii was all the wild chickens.  I'd like to get a lot of wild chickens running loose at the bug-out place.  

Granddaughter decided she didn't want to wash her clothes in a bucket this week.  She was perfectly happy with me putting them in the washing machine.  They are getting hung up on the clothes line although Army daughter and son-in-law keep offering to take their clothes out of the drier so I can put ours in.  Do you know where the lint comes from that you collect in the drier vent?  That's from your clothes falling apart.  No thanks.  I'll let the sun do the drying.