mckate's Profile

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What city are you flying to? If it's a smaller European city, you're going to get killed to have a US carrier take you there, especially if you're coming from a non-hub US city yourself.

Have you looked at using a major carrier to get you from the US to a major European city, and then booking a separate ticket on a cheap European operator like Ryanair to get you the rest of the way? Or maybe a train? And on the US side, same thing. Are you close enough to drive or take a train or a puddle jumper to a major international hub like Chicago, Atlanta, NY, etc?

YES! I am going to ask for this for Christmas. I am extremely depressed about how my garden turned out this summer--we got, like, three tomatoes from 5 plants! And I don't know how to fix it! Too much sun? Not enough? Not enough water? Too much? I'm clueless.

And I'm tired of going on the internet and being like "well, they say it needs full sun, but they live in Maine, so let's adjust for that...oh, it does well in partial shade...in Florida...arrrrgh..." I mean, what's "full sun?" What's "full shade"? An objective baseline is helpful for newbies!

"The books would have been more accessible if the second story floor had been kept."

Yes, but we're talking about people who decided to remodel a house simply to store books. The quest for the most practical and efficient approach to problem-solving went out the window some time ago, you know?

The prior tenants' kid had written on the walls, in permanent marker: "Not ulawd to rite un walls with pemminit markur."

Sigh.

I'm begging you to cross-post this to ohdeeoh. Please!

Don't conflate good growing practices and homogenization with pasteurization.

You can have excellent pasteurized whole milk that is non-homogenized (you shake it b/c the cream separates), that is from cows that are not given any antibiotics or non-organic feed, that are grass-fed, that are free pastured...all that good stuff.

Pasteurization is simply the last step of the process. For instance, the above poster who said "I drank raw milk, I just boiled it before I drank it," was actually drinking pasteurized milk! Boiling milk IS pasteurization!

The one clear downside is pasteurization definitely changes the taste of milk--it's more "gamey" when it's not pasteurized, and a lot of people like this taste for the same reason they like raw milk cheeses.

If raw milk is PERFECTLY handled and comes from guaranteed healthy animals, it's probably only a little more dangerous than pasteurized milk. But it's really not reasonable to expect perfection, and there have definitely been e. coli outbreaks and other diseases associated with raw milk.

My bottom line is if you're a healthy adult, a bad batch of raw milk won't take you down the same way nothing short of poison will take you down. If you like the taste of raw milk better and it makes you happy, go for it--odds are you'll never get sick, and if you do, you just get food poisoning. You'll live. But don't expect magic health benefits--something like 4/5 of the world's population can't digest lactose as adults, so it's not like human health needs raw milk. And it's a bad idea for kids under the age of 8, the elderly, and for anyone who's pregnant or has a health condition. Odds are if they drink it nothing will go wrong. But if they do get a bad batch, the health outcomes can be really devastating.

Where did you get the doors for the roof and for the back deck? We are looking for exterior doors, and to convert a window to a door...

We like to do house swaps! That way, someone is in your house the whole time, taking in the newspaper, turning on and off lights, etc.

Also, alert the neighbors when you'll be away, and the local police. People tend to be pretty decent, they'll make a call if something looks off.

"an attempt by a Queen to get in touch with a simpler life that must have been more alluring for her than the cold marble vaults of Versailles."

Pretty sure she'd have felt differently about the allure of peasant life if she'd ever actually been a peasant. I can see where being unpopular in the royal court might be something a person wants to escape from, but really, it doesn't much compare to your kids starving to death.