Random Raves 54: You will succeed. It is inevitable.

Please, how did you break your bed?
 
Please, how did you break your bed?
I lifted the four corner feet up on risers, but I forgot about the centerline piece underneath, which was then a couple of inches off the floor. After about a year of that, the strain on the side pieces caused one of them to snap suddenly.
 
I once purchased a recliner with a lifetime warranty.

Part of the internal metal construction that does the reclining (elaborate accordion-like device) broke.

Like these cup-holders you may have seen:

cup holder.jpg


I contacted the company thinking they would send me the part that broke (little four-inch segment of that total structure), but I couldn't see how I was going to remove it from the entire expanding structure and put the new piece in. Everything seemed factory riveted, in a way I couldn't undo.

They sent me the whole structure. Not only that. The reclining mechanism is two such frames, one on each side of the chair. They sent me both. The trick was to completely remove the structure from the interior of the chair. There it was just mounted with regular style screws. There were dozens of such screws, but I removed the old structure and installed the new one. I kept the part for the other side of chair in case it should break too. That side never did. The fix kept the chair in service until I was ready to throw it away for other reasons.
 
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I lifted the four corner feet up on risers, but I forgot about the centerline piece underneath, which was then a couple of inches off the floor. After about a year of that, the strain on the side pieces caused one of them to snap suddenly.
We don't want to hear about your boring old civil engineering disasters.
What about the bed?
 
I apologize for that ^ uncharacteristic, unmedicated rudeness.
I confess that I worked with a civil engineer friend for many years designing and optimizing vertical axis wind turbines.
Here's a photo of a 5m diameter version. I hope that it will make you feel better because it was situated at a sewage treatment plant, something close to every civil engineer's heart.
 

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I apologize for that ^ uncharacteristic, unmedicated rudeness.
I confess that I worked with a civil engineer friend for many years designing and optimizing vertical axis wind turbines.
Here's a photo of a 5m diameter version. I hope that it will make you feel better because it was situated at a sewage treatment plant, something close to every civil engineer's heart.
How could you stoop so low to work with a civil engineer, let alone be friends with one? I have heard that they are people who have given up on life and have no creativity. Clods really.
 
Over the pandemic (and beyond) I relied on a food service to deliver me food boxes with ingredients and assembly instructions. I ended up collecting almost 300 distinct recipe sheets, each one formatted in a very similar way - dish description and ingredients on one side of a sheet of paper and instructions on the back. I was going to throw them out, but my roommate suggested that I organize them into a cookbook.. That got me thinking..

I created a web accessible database of all the recipes, which made it possible to quickly figure out how to best organize the recipes. I bought 3 binders and looked at the data and it didn't take long to figure out that it probably makes most sense to break down the recipes into 3 distinct binders, each one representing a different set of continents. Each binder would then be organized by country and noodle or dish type.

I am happy to report that this project has reached an important milestone - all the recipes are now organized and inserted into the 3 binders.

Spoiler :




The next phase of the project is to re-organize the dividers so that the label starts at the top and moves down. Right now they're a bit all over the place. After that I will have to write in each category name for each of the 48 dividers.

The first binder contains all 108 European recipes. The biggest subcategory here by far is Italian, with 77 recipes. It is divided into 14 noodle/dish-type categories such as Gemelli, Cavatappi, Risotto, etc. French comes in second with 14 recipes, subdivided into 3 categories. On top of that there are 6 Greek recipes, 2 English, 2 Russian, 2 Spanish, 1 Swedish, 1 Dutch, 1 German, 1 Hungarian, and 1 Pan European.

The second binder contains all 93 Asian recipes, including all countries that are geographically in Asia minus Russia. There are 31 Chinese + Taiwanese + generic/fusion east Asian recipes, subdivided into 3 categories (rice, and 2 types of noodle), 14 Japanese recipes subdivided the same way, 14 Korean recipes in one category, 8 Vietnamese, 8 Thai, and an "other SEA" category incl. 3 Indonesian, 1 Malaysian, and 1 Singaporean. On top of that there are 6 Indian recipes, as well as 5 Middle Eastern, 1 Lebanese, and 1 Turkish recipe.

The third binder contains all 78 recipes from North & South America + Africa. There are 51 American & Canadian recipes, which includes the types of dishes you might find at North American diners as well as some cajun recipes and other regional stuff. It's subdivided into 9 categories, such as pork chops (15 recipes), meatballs, meatloaf, steak, chicken, seafood, etc. Next up is Mexican with 19 recipes in 3 subcategories, and an "other recipes from the Americas" category with 1 Argentinian, 1 Brazilian, and 1 Cuban recipe. The African category contains 2 West-African recipes, 1 North-African, and 1 Ethiopian recipe.

Now that I have finally created all these categories and organized the recipes in the binders, it seems that I should probably buy more dividers. I want to divide up the Chinese & Japanese dishes further, and probably the Korean ones as well. Maybe Vietnamese and/or Thai? Mexican recipes could probably be broken up further too.

I rarely order these food boxes anymore.. I like their system in that I can skip my orders ahead of time, so for months at a time I don't get charged.. but every once in a while I'll log in to their website and look at the recipes on offer and maybe order 1 or two. If I don't order in a while they like to send me $30 discounts, so that factors in my decision as well. Overall I've found this whole thing sort of opened me up to more culinary opportunities.. in that without these food boxes I would have never cooked 90% of these types of dishes. It's a lot easier to stick to what you know. I also found the cooking sessions therapeutic, and there was no "I now i have to get to the grocery store to find all the ingredients" related stress. The cost is reasonable too. And now I have 3 cookbooks that I can use as inspiration for dishes for when I do have energy to go out to the grocery store. And I have a web interface I can use to quickly search through them. So if I want to make tacos, I type in TACO and it shows me all the taco recipes. Then I can pick pork, beef, or chicken or whatever. Then it's a matter of leafing to the right section in the right binder. I am pretty sure it is going to lead to me cooking more and buying the ingredients manually more often VS relying on a delivery service.
 
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