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Aire de Vita

Carbon monoxide is a fun little chemical. I think we’ve all been given the primer by our local fire departments when we were kids, or at the very least were taught that smoke is the main killer in a house fire. Stay low and GTFO. I like that. New motto, kids!

And as a basement-dweller with a 40-year old furnace, I was forward-thinking enough to install a CO detector. However, it turns out that symptoms can appear before air concentrations reach the alarm point. In my case, 24ppm (alarms are calibrated to sound at 30ppm). So the kid and I had a fun evening of nausea, fatigue, and headaches; but no alarm clued us in to the problem.

The mystery was solved with a visit from our preferred HVAC technicians, because at this time the furnace wasn’t running consistently and the fan wouldn’t shut off. The diagnosis was that the heat exchanger-that steel compartment that separates combustion gases from the breathable air-was cracked. Ergo, exhaust was leaking into living space, which triggered a failsafe that kept shutting off the gas and overriding the thermostat to continually circulate air to avoid toxic gas buildup. Win for ancient furnace engineering, I guess. I mean, I didn’t chemically asphyxiate. Huzzah!

So we needed a new furnace. But why stop there? The A/C was just as old, and a major energy sink. What we needed was a massive technological improvement!…within budget. The answer, of course, as with most things in life, was a spreadsheet.

Three companies may not have been the largest sample size, but it gave me a pretty good idea of what was out there. Here are my conclusions:

  1. Every company will offer you a system based on your usage of the property. Similar to how my own home’s former owner ripped everything of slight value from it before listing, so too do HVAC companies offer the most basic, inefficient, and cheap of systems which are shamelessly labeled as “for rental properties” or “if you need to install a new system to sell the house”. Because, fuck the next guy or the broke-ass renter. These base models aren’t offered by the sales folks once they know you’re not selling or renting, which, in their defense, the homeowner wouldn’t likely purchase for himself anyway.
  2. The quality of the components is not a linear price function. Every step up in price nets something much better. There’s a formula here somewhere. It certainly makes getting the high-end equipment easy to justify.
  3. Some of the companies will put more emphasis on the equipment, and others more on the guarantees and warranties. This is why I looked up all the model numbers after I got quotes. The manufacturers all include a standard 10 year warranty anyway, so the additional peace of mind comes from the installer’s warranty. And like getting an extended warranty on anything, this locks you in with the 2nd party and costs a lot, for a problem that probably won’t happen and could be fixed for less by someone else.

So what did I get? Why, the best equipment for the best price from the most reputable company for the standard manufacturer and installer warranties! I now have a variable speed A/C with a dual-stage furnace, with a 97% efficiency rating.

Granted it cost a few thousand more than a base model, and it’s uncertain how long it’ll take to recover that with reduced energy costs, but I sure am glad I did the research and avoided getting taken for an inflated price on inferior equipment with an unnecessary warranty.

Also, they threw in a UV sanitizer and electrostatic air purifier!

And while I won’t likely hook up my thermostat to the internet, or use its scheduling function anytime soon since we work from home, it’s pretty cool to have preset modes of temp ranges.

And no more CO poisoning, hopefully.

The future!

–Simon

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Calvin and Hobbes – Publication Edits, 1

Every couple years I like to read through my copy of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes series. As a 90s kid, it has nostalgic appeal. And as an adult now, re-reads always offer little bits of sophistication that I missed before. Good times all around.

But on my last read, I noticed subtle variances in the dialog handwriting occasionally. I never really gave it much thought, but I couldn’t let it go. So I decided to do a cross-reference with internet publications and sure enough, I noticed a dialog change. As I’m in the midst of another re-read, I’ll document these as I go. Here’s the first one I found:

January 7, 1987

From The Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection. I took this photo.
From gocomics.com: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/01/07

(As this site is not monetized, I consider posting these to qualify under the Fair use doctrine of copyright law. The website in reference also indicates their own reprint was with the publisher’s permission.)

A common “insult” I remember at this time was indeed telling siblings that they were adopted, so period-wise, this wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. I suppose that for sensitivity’s sake, the publisher made an edit. Personally, I can’t say that I like this. For one, it’s changing history, and that practice creates cultural lies. And two, I didn’t see anywhere in the introduction that these edits were disclosed, which makes this a borderline falsely-advertised product.

Also, “genetically engineered”? That wasn’t really so ubiquitous in public knowledge back then. And the human genome wasn’t fully sequenced until the 2000s. The text substitution isn’t a good choice.

At least the mystery of the handwriting has be solved. I’ll post more if I find them. I recall there being more than one instance.

–Simon

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Smoked Pork, Revised

For eclipse day I smoked pork shoulder again. Actually I smoked two. When done right, it’s a nice cheap way to make lots a tasty food, which is essentially the origin of BBQ.

Smoked Pork Butt

But this time, perchance partially by accident (the meat thermometer malfunctioned and stopped giving readings until I reset it) and partially by intent (the meat reached 160 at 3:30AM and I didn’t want to wrap it at the time), I managed to improve upon the recipe. I will therefore document the changes for my own future reference.

Changes in bold:

  1. Brine meat for a minimum of 12 hours 24 hours. Just a standard salt and sugar brine here – nothing fancy needed. The flavor will come later.
  2. Place meat unwrapped in smoker cold – both meat and smoker. No preheating. Place cold meat unwrapped in preheated smoker at 250.
  3. Smoke at 170 – 200 225 degrees until internal meat temperature reads 160. Temperature is based on preference – colder smoking gives more contact time with smoke and therefore has a more smoky taste. Also I like cherry wood for pork so far.
  4. Reduce temperature to 150 and hold for 5 hours. This will be too cold to generate smoke so there’s no need to add additional wood during this time.
  5. Pull the meat at 160 (at this point, much of the water and most of the fat will have rendered out, and the collagen will start to liquefy, which you want to stay in the meat). Cover with rub. My rub base is ketchup, mustard, apple cider vinegar, and brown sugar. As a self-proclaimed pitmaster though, I won’t tell you my spice mix. But I will tell you that the rub shouldn’t taste very good on its own (like a marinade). If it makes you wince, you’re good to go.
  6. Wrap meat tightly in aluminum foil. I prefer to remove the thermometer probes first and then punch through the foil. It’s easier, and creates a tighter seal.
  7. Put the meat back in the smoker and cook at 275 until the internal meat temperature reads 205. This is the stage at which most of the collagen is liquefied. The next day’s leftovers will be a mass of meat and gelatin, which indicates successful collagen breakdown. This is good, even if it doesn’t look like it. Wiggle wiggle.
  8. Place the meat, still wrapped and with meat probes, in a cooler. There’s no real reason to rest it as you would a steak, since the collagen isn’t significantly redistributing as water would. But resting it at this point will allow the collagen to continue to liquefy if any hasn’t yet, and it will gradually cool to a touchable temperature for pulling. More importantly though, this gives you a buffer by which you can finish smoking prior to dinner and time the preparation of side dishes. You could technically wait as long as you want until the temperature hits 140, at which point you’ll be in THE DANGER ZONE! OOOOOOOO!
  9. Shred, stuff in face, and wait for your well-deserved adoration.

The changes resulted in an even juicier and tender chuck o’ flesh. The extended low temp time definitely added to collagen liquefaction, and the longer brine made for greater juice retention.

This is now documented for my future use! Huzzah!

–Simon

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Eclipse 2024

In the end, everything worked out as planned and hoped. In my first viewing of a total solar eclipse, the food was great the the weather perfect! Huzzah!

Eclipse
2017’s eclipse

It was also surprisingly scary. I know the event isn’t actually a harbinger of doom, but I didn’t expect it to look quite that creepy, with the moon just appearing next to the sun and turning black. An existential moment of personal insignificance.

Anyway, here’s some pics:

You can sort of see a missing bite
Binocular projection
I thought this was a neat screenshot of an augmented reality overlay
Another shot through the filter
Unfiltered and bad auto focus
Party in progress with some apparently needed booty dancing

Last year at this time Canada was on fire and the ashes rained down as a blight upon the land. I like this year better!

–Simon

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Kurabuta

So this is a cool random discovery.

Pork is an interesting meat. In my experience it’s often dry and funky. And there’s a variety of cultural reasons for and confirmations of this:

  • Trichinosis – a parasite that develops in pigs when they’re used as garbage disposals. Killing the parasite requires cooking pork to temperatures that make it dry.
  • Pigs fed garbage diets develop of funky flavor.
  • Heavy seasoning is often employed to mask funky flavors (brine, sausage, smoke).
  • Marketing pigs to the mass consumer population led to the development of streamlined pig diets that reduce funky flavor and trichinosis. This also led to pig meat becoming less fatty in nature, but with less fat the meat dries out even quicker.
  • People were slow to change their cooking habits to account for trichinosis elimination and drier meat.

Ergo – the pork we’re used to now is either heavily processed or very dry and lacking depth of flavor.

Then I discovered kurabuta pork!

Perusing the meat cooler at my local upscale grocer, I noticed what appeared to be beef due to its deep red color, but in the form of pork shoulder chops. Fortunately the internet was available in my pocket and revealed the mystery: a specialty breed of pig fed a non-grain diet. Free-range/grass-fed or something to that effect.

It’s juicy and meaty in flavor.

The pork revolution is at hand! Keep an eye out for this stuff. Down with boomer pork!

–Simon