Rice Crust

Left-over rice, or any pasta, makes a fine breakfast cake; and I'm not adverse to piling on anything else that might be around and topping it with an egg. Fielded a phone call about how loading was carried through a crooked post. An interesting conversation. I told him to make an eight foot long miter box, establish (an arbitrary) 'top' to the log, so he could make parallel cuts. Then, this is the cool part, you stand the post up, brace it off. Whenever you harvest a potential post you usually leave both ends wild, too long, so you can cut them back. You establish the base cut. I do this with an electric chain-saw and I'm good at it. Then, using a plumb-bob, you determine that the center of the top bearing falls within the footprint of the base. Make the parallel cut. It's always worked for me. Several engineer friends have dubbed this dubious data, though building inspectors always approved them. An eight inch oak trunk is pretty stout. Under compression, wood is very strong. I read recently that someone is building a seven-story wood framed building, using various innovative wood products. Concrete has gotten expensive and we're running out of sand. China has used more sand in the last decade than the US had used in the last hundred years. If Trump has his way with The Wall, they'll be bringing in sand from a thousand miles away. That'd be a sweet contract to have. My first job in Colorado was replacing a building that had burned down, a three-story structure in a Historic Zone, mandated to be built in the manner of the original, 8x8 and 10x10 Ponderosa Pine. They did allow me to use brackets and lag bolts. It went together fairly quickly because I could mass-cut all the components, I'd hired someone to help me stand everything up, then hired a guy from the local tire store to use an air-gun to drive the bolts home. I'd retire to the local pub, because I couldn't stand the sound. This was in Ridgway (no 'e') and I went on to build several places there. As I think back on it, I built maybe ten houses, between Montrose and Telluride, in the ten years in western Colorado, one project a year; the rest of that time spent getting a goat dairy certified and running a ranch. I'd call this period Raw Milk, if I were to write about it, and it was glorious. During the separation and divorce, which takes forever in Colorado, I built two more houses in Utah, then put my books in storage and took on the Jefferson project, outside Winchester, Virginia. Get shed of all that. Wipe the slate clean. I loved sleeping in Tom's bedroom, spare, a rope bed with a straw mattress.