Running Bear's August 2025 Coffee Shop

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Ah, the lovely art of troubleshooting problems that turn out to be intermittent...
Mine wasn't going to be intermittent. I found that the rear corner of the freezer was on top of the power cord, and recent movement had rubbed off the insulation on the neutral wire and severed it. A quick cut and splice job on all three wires got me running again. Saved an embarrassing $250 service call.
 
Mine wasn't going to be intermittent. I found that the rear corner of the freezer was on top of the power cord, and recent movement had rubbed off the insulation on the neutral wire and severed it. A quick cut and splice job on all three wires got me running again. Saved an embarrassing $250 service call.
It's always nice when the problem is obvious -- and fixable. :)
 
Soda, I like soda with food, except for breakfast and I never run out. Because I haven't been watching for the "good" sales and I let my supply of soda run low I bought two six packs of 16.9oz bottles of caffeine-free diet Pepsi for $4.50each to tide me over. Running out of soda is not an option for me.

Lately I have been drinking diet 7-Up. I'm a sucker for advertising and all the talk a while back in the coffee shop about and the videos of the old 7-Up commercials I had to have it. Next in the queue is sugar free A&W Root Beer. I like to switch it up. Diet Canada Dry Ginger Ale is a regular for me, I still have a two-liter bottle of that. I also drink my wife's homemade, sugar free iced tea. The tea is weak by design to limit caffeine. She mixes in a pack of Kool-Aid lemonade, so it is like half tea, half lemonade, it is very good!

I also have Food Lion's version of Dr. Pepper, diet "Dr. Perky" it was only $1 for a two liter. I am proud to be a cheap bastard, so I bought it, and it is good! It's not caffeine free so I drink it sparingly. I do like caffeine-free diet Coke, but I don't like Coke Zero or Pepsi Zero, go figure. I love Coke but that has been off my list for many years due to diabetes.

Whatever happened to a case of 24-12oz cans of Coke for $4? That is a rhetorical question, but something I always think of when buying soda.

My wife makes a pot of Columbian coffee every morning. She drinks one cup, and I drink the rest. After that is gone, I drink instant coffee. I have been mixing Maxwell House instant coffee with Aldi's decaffeinated instant coffee, I like it! I have a 24oz tin coffee cup I fill countless times each day. I like the lightweight tin cup for my decrepit hands.

I drink Coffee all day. I like a cup of coffee before I go to bed. It has no impact on my blood pressure or my sleep. Just the opposite for the blood pressure they tell me; it is a diuretic so I must drink other fluids throughout the day. It works for me as they have me checking for signs of dehydration, so far so good. When I don't overdo things, my pain level is low enough to allow me to sleep well.

All the extra fluids weren't helping with my low blood pressure. It kept me active running to the bathroom. Now they think the low blood pressure is caused by fatigue. It's a rare condition, but rare conditions are nothing new to me and I get fatigued easily. The treatment: take a nap as needed. I can do that, and it has been working.

Boy, most of y'all seem to be pop addicts. I am a water addict. Well, being how I dehydrate so easy, Gator Aid too. Don't remember the last time I had a pop. Think 4 - 5 months ago with Mug root beer. Maria is leaning more and more to the water drinking thing, has a can of Coke maybe everyday. Way down from before. Now if I could just get her off of coffee after that 1st pot.
Todd, I must have my soda! I guess you could say I am a soda junkie.

As you said before, you and I have a lot in common. I too must watch for dehydration, but I don't like water! I do drink about 20oz of water when I take my medication twice a day. I think of it as another medicine and just drink it.
 


Good morning, all! A mostly cloudy day here in Houston. We await rain this afternoon from a tropical low in the Gulf. Guessers are saying maybe an inch of rain and possibly 35 MPH winds. The wife finally convinced me to hire a lawn guy. He came last night and mowed, trimmed and edged. Did a very nice job.

Soda - Seldom if ever do I drink soda. I was never really a fan. As for caffeine, I drink a cup of hot tea every night before bed, doesn't stop me from falling asleep nearly instantly. I will, however, have to agree with David, give me a scotch.

Trains - I hope to get in the train room this afternoon. Maybe finish the op session I started a week ago.
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STAY SAFE
LATER
 
I know y'all are wondering

what does Troy have on the kamado grill today...?

How about ...

Rocks and dirt?

532568866_18513832975035711_3373647101013549969_n.jpg


Figured I'd use up the leftover, unburned charcoal from yesterday's brisket ("used" charcoal... the stuff that was left after I closed the vents and let the fire die out)... I added a few mid sized lumps to help get the temp up. Left-over charcoal burns with less energy than fresh.

And I figured I should add my gravel and "levelling Sand" - both from bags in the landscape section of the local big-box lumber and hardware store. I doubt they did much to clean them up, so a couple hours at 350+ F degrees should kill the baddies.
 
Ah, the lovely art of troubleshooting problems that turn out to be intermittent...

Got the ladder out, moved the server cabinet, and climbed up to check out the camera to see that all the solder joints up there are okay. Realized I'd turned it off when I saw that it was broken, so I turned it back on. And it's suddenly working.

I haven't touched it, and it's working perfectly again.

We'll see how long that lasts...
Many moons ago, I used to repair tv's and put up tv antennas. Went to a home for a service call, tv wasn't working.
Yep, turned the volume- on/off control and nothing happened. Went to remove the back of the set and
noticed the power cord was unplugged. Plugged the tv in and everything ok. Apparently the wife unplugged the
tv to plug in the vacuum cleaner. When she finished, she neglected to plug the tv back in. Guy was mad (not at
me) but I had to charge him for the service call.
 
I know y'all are wondering

what does Troy have on the kamado grill today...?

How about ...

Rocks and dirt?

View attachment 235334

Figured I'd use up the leftover, unburned charcoal from yesterday's brisket ("used" charcoal... the stuff that was left after I closed the vents and let the fire die out)... I added a few mid sized lumps to help get the temp up. Left-over charcoal burns with less energy than fresh.

And I figured I should add my gravel and "levelling Sand" - both from bags in the landscape section of the local big-box lumber and hardware store. I doubt they did much to clean them up, so a couple hours at 350+ F degrees should kill the baddies.
So, that's your secret flavoring ingredients for your briskets?
 


From the "it's always something" category.

Yesterday during a down pour of biblical proportions, I noticed a minor leak coming from the vent flashing assembly around a plumbing vent pipe that protrudes through our roof. The roof is not five years old!

During the rain I went into the attic as I had not reinstalled the wall to give me access to the vent from the inside. I have enough roofing experience to know these kinds of things require the most skill and I worried it would leak. Sure enough, it was a slow drip. It's a good thing I hadn't started on my layout. I would have reinstalled the wall to build in front of it. I wouldn't have found the leak for months as slow as it was leaking in the heavy rain.

I have a 30-year warranty on the roof, but I'm not calling the company that couldn't install the boot and flashing correctly the first time. I'd do it myself but the risk of my unstable 🫏 falling off the pitched roof is too high. Not to mention my decrepit hands.

I'll find a small competent contractor to do the work. I will need a handyman's services for other things. Time to find one.

It's always something if it's not one thing it's another.

I feel bad for old people... wait I am one! 🤪

 
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Good evening all. Flo. A double Singleton please.

What is that?
Oh! Silence.
After having one, two or five grandchildren here over the past three weeks, they have gone home.
Silence!

Young Jimmy Marston is still fixing the wheel on the truck. Max the guard dog s watching intently. Harley, the other guard dog is wandering up to see what is taking the time.

IMG_0316.JPEG
 
This morning it was overcast and was only 80F by a little after 11am. It's now 1:30pm and 90F at our north sensor on the house and partially cleared up. Still some of the sky is overcast and gray while others have blue patches and puffy white...

But I avoided the direct sun into the office this morning due to the overcast sky so the office was a degree or two cooler, which is noticeable... I still need to get the shades up on all the east facing windows in our upstairs bonus area.

Soda/pop. As a kid we called it pop or soda pop, growing up in Phoenix. I moved to New England at age 10 and learned the word "tonic" as a generic word for soda. And also the plain word soda, without "pop" appended. Living in Utah Pop is again one of the standard words, or soda pop when your parents are trying to emphasize how bad it is for you.

Growing up we didn't drink it much because of cost. We'd have it for special occasions like birthdays or the occasional root beer float. We also made our own root beer and even had a bottling ram thing to put the lids on bottles.

We also didn't go out that often to eat. A couple times a year maybe to Shakeys pizza or something plus the free hamburger at McDonalds for participating in collecting money on Labor Day for the Jerry Lewis Telethon. (You could go door to door and get donations and take them to McDonalds and they'd give you a free Happy Meal or whatever the kids meal was called in the 70s). So we didn't have much soda eating out either.

After moving to New England, I would occasionally go with friends to eat and had soda then, or at friends houses, so a little more often, but still not a lot.

Going to college and living in the dorms, where we had a cafeteria with open self serve taps for soda (like almost all fast food places have now), and having been soda deprived, I drank so much soda I got sick of it.

Since then I've mostly been on a "soda is only for eating out" policy as a way of moderation. We rarely buy it, though occasionally we do -- especially if guests are coming or dinner or to help on the house or whatever.

The problem is we eat out a lot more than I did as a kid. So I still get more soda than I should. (Now, being unemployed, we almost never eat out though I did go to Cafe Rio by myself the other day because they sent me a $5 off coupon to "come back" and my trove of non-converted points were set to expire this weekend if I didn't go at least once, and they're worth almost $10). I have not been to Taco Bell in a good while due to the job conditions, but I am particularly a fan and especially like their Baja Blast Mt Dew.

I did buy a bunch of 12 packs of sugar free Mt Dew of various flavors, Coke, and Dr Pepper a few years ago when our Kroger affiliate had them on good sales. They lasted me a couple years as I would not drink them that often. Every once in a while when I was tired or in my office and needed a distraction.

I love soda, which is why I only drink it for special occasions or when eating out. It forces moderation.

Luckily we have really good water in our house. It goes through three sediment filters, two different chemical filters to get rid of chlorine, fluoride, and a ton of -mines and other bad things, plus some filter I forget what its for but I think it is biologics and some heavy metals or something, plus a UV filter... So I drink mostly water.
 
Good afternoon. The heat advisory continues.
I have returned from getting my dental work performed, and am $1900 poorer. But my tooth is no longer infected.
I was notified by my home internet service I have run over my allotted data, and my speeds will be reduced until the end of the billing cycle. I generally use my cell data to do things like stream satellite radio, so I don't go over my limit. Then I looked at my cell data, and it was nearly zero. Once again, my phone connected to my home wifi, even though I'd disabled that feature, and had been streaming gobs of data ever since the latest phone update quietly turned it back on. It also turned on private ip addresses and blocked several other things it identified as privacy issues. I was wondering why absolutely everything had suddenly started demanding verification codes on my phone. I guess now I know.
I believe privacy is a great thing, as long as I am the one in control of what data I do and do not share.
 
I did buy a bunch of 12 packs of sugar free Mt Dew of various flavors, Coke, and Dr Pepper a few years ago when our Kroger affiliate had them on good sales. They lasted me a couple years as I would not drink them that often. Every once in a while when I was tired or in my office and needed a distraction.

I love soda, which is why I only drink it for special occasions or when eating out. It forces moderation.

Luckily we have really good water in our house. It goes through three sediment filters, two different chemical filters to get rid of chlorine, fluoride, and a ton of -mines and other bad things, plus some filter I forget what its for but I think it is biologics and some heavy metals or something, plus a UV filter... So I drink mostly water.
I'm curious, since I don't remember, and if you don't mind my asking:

What's the LDS policy for soda? I knew that Coffee was avoided, but can't remember if it's because it's "hot" or caffeinated?

Worried me when I was being considered to photograph an LDS wedding reception. I hit the coffee hard whenever I photographed weddings. Needed the sugar I added, and the caffeine to stay awake during some the lengthy speeches. And on the drive home.
 


I'm curious, since I don't remember, and if you don't mind my asking:

What's the LDS policy for soda? I knew that Coffee was avoided, but can't remember if it's because it's "hot" or caffeinated?

Worried me when I was being considered to photograph an LDS wedding reception. I hit the coffee hard whenever I photographed weddings. Needed the sugar I added, and the caffeine to stay awake during some the lengthy speeches. And on the drive home.
Pepsi is fine. The LDS church is a major shareholder.
 
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