WordPress is up to it again. A new version, version 5, was released today and my sites all automatically upgraded. Problems were expected with vintage plugins and themes, but so far as I can make out, mine have weathered the change without incident. Time will tell. The editing feature has completely changed, and I am still getting used to it. Right now I cannot find a way to save my draft entry. A basic function, perhaps it auto saves. Time to copy the entry, close it, open it again and see if it is intact! Eureka, as I was copying the text, the Save Draft function appeared on the screen, flashed, announced that it had auto saved, without any input from me. Now that the Save Draft function is visible, I am able to use it to save the draft any old time I care to. Time to play around with this and get a feel for how things work.
The weekend approaches. The project this weekend is to find new tires for the car, the best we can get for a price we manage to pay. Attila has a nose for bargains, to it is game on.
A big decision was made yesterday. Many years ago, I don’t really know how many, but more than four, we purchased whole wheat flour in bulk for bread making. It just so happened that bread making flagged shortly after the purchase, for some logical reason, could have been a busy work schedule with multiple, multi-location jobs, but I’d have to look it all up. Whatever the reason, the whole wheat flour was not made into bread when it was fresh. We moved this flour to Mist Cottage when we moved here three years ago. I wanted to cut our losses and throw it out, it was clearly not fresh. Whole wheat flour will go rancid if not stored in the freezer, and this whole wheat flour was not stored in the freezer. Attila balked at throwing it out. So there it sat for another three years. I made a few loaves of bread with it, at Attila’s request, masking the off flavour with garlic. But my heart was not in baking bread with inferior ingredients, so as a result I have been avoiding bread baking. Yesterday Attila agreed to throw the rancid flour out! Into the compost it will be going, in small increments so as not to overwhelm the composter. Thank goodness!
The whole wheat flour was stored in five gallon, food grade, buckets. Last night the first bucket was emptied (it wasn’t full). The first wash did not remove the smell of rancid flour. The second wash did not remove the smell of rancid flour. So a damp cloth with baking soda sprinkled on it was used to wipe the inside of the bucket, and that did the trick. The bucket smelled sweet and fresh. It was left to dry, with the similarly cleansed lid, overnight. This morning the bucket was used to store a bag of corn meal. A label was attached to the side of the bucket, and to the lid. It will be stored in the cool basement, on layers of cardboard so that it does not touch the concrete floor.
There are a few more partial buckets to empty, which will be used for storing packages of food that we don’t want exposed to the damp air in the basement.
I will buy whole wheat flour again, but in very small quantities. That will be very expensive, so we won’t be using much whole wheat flour. Someday I would like grind my own flour, using heritage variety wheat berries. Wheat berries will store well for long periods of time. That may or may not come to pass. For now, I will purchase whole wheat flour in small quantities for bread making.
Worldly
Weather
-8C
10:00 AM EST Friday 7 December 2018
Condition:Mainly Sunny
Pressure:103.1 kPa
Tendency:Rising
Temperature:-8.4°C
Dew point:-12.6°C
Humidity:72%
Wind:NW 12 km/h
Wind Chill: -14
Visibility:24 k
Quote
“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”
Herbert Spencer
1820 – 1903
Boy, can I commiserate with stored things that aren’t up to snuff. We brought some items back from the cottage a few months ago and are finding that anything stored in plastic picked up a musty smell from the cottage. That’s all you can smell, must. Fortunately, things stored in glass survived intact and a few things weren’t there long enough to pick up the musty smell.
How in the world do you get a musty smell out of cottage when 2 years of use hasn’t gotten rid of it? 🙁
BTW, love the quote. Very apropos to the times.
Teri, it is disappointing when things don’t store well! That musty smell sounds awful. Mist Cottage smelled very bad for a very long time after we purchased it. Slowly that has been conquered, incrementally. Moisture has been our enemy here, leaking garage roof, wet basement, and now the unheated basement has a few little pungent smells I have been chasing down, which ended up being from the thick layer of dirt behind the furnace, that didn’t get cleaned until last month.
The things that really helped here was drying things out, we have to run a large dehumidifier all the time, and spraying with aqueous oxygen to kill off all mold, mildew and spores. There were things we had to pull out and throw out, porous pieces of chipboard that had mildrew, could not get that out. Painted surfaces were eaiser. Concrete walls required repeated treatments, over years, to clean them up. What I like about aqueous oxygen is that it is more powerful than bleach, but only for 15 minutes, after which it reverts to ordinary water and just evaporates, and it isn’t acid, you can breath it and get it on your skin and it does you no harm.
And I forgot, Kilz, what we couldn’t sterilize and clean, or rip out and throw out, we painted with Kilz. It works.
Thanks for the rundown on what you’ve done to minimize nasty smells. Most of the house is painted. I do know that there was a musty smell coming from the front door area when we first got there, though now we don’t notice it as much as it’s gone through 2 winters with low heat on.
I’ve no doubt there’s some mildew hiding somewhere, I’m just not sure how to find it as it’s not visible to the naked eye.
That is a tough one Teri, finding the culprit. I hope it isn’t under the floor, in a wall, or in the ceiling. You will get it figured out, hope to hear the story when you’ve got it mastered!