I had to renew my passport and now they let you take your own picture. While this seems like a good thing, it’s a little harder than it sounds. You can’t just take a selfie and be done with it. The background has to be of a certain off-white hue, you can’t be smiling (or frowning) and it should be a quality shot of yourself.

So I found an empty wall and fortunately had a roll of white vapor barrier that I hung behind me, had to bring in the ladder to attached the lights to so I had proper lighting and pulled out the tripod to hold the camera, lined it all up with my watch remote and took pictures. The results horrified me. I mean I look at myself in the mirror everyday but what I was getting in the pictures was a much harsher reality than I was ready for. I had a turkey neck, was pale and looked more like a proof of death picture than anything else. Hell my drivers license was much more flattering if that says anything.

So where I’m going with this is I charged my wife with setting me up with something to keep my skin from looking like leather. The results were an in shower face cleanser and an after shower skin moisturizer and another for the face and neck. While I cannot stop the effects of aging, I can help soften them. This is why the ladies look nice well into their later years while the fellows look like leather neck.

I guess it happened during covid that anything that was open 24 hours wasn’t open 24 hours and hours were scaled back since then. I ran into the issue maybe last year, I had to get some band aids or something at 3am and that was never a problem as there was a Walgreens and CVS diagonal from each other just down the road. Nope, both closed. The 24 hour Walmart super center is no longer 24 hours. And evidently the home improvement stores aren’t open until 8am on a Sunday. Jackasses used to have a Home Depot that was open 24 hours and now they can’t even open until 8am. What is the point of living in a city of 8 million people if you can’t even find a hardware store open at 7am on a Sunday? I’d be really bent out of shape except there was no traffic on the roads, probably because there’s nothing open to go to…

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Started cooking the ribs today at 11:15am and took them off at 5:15pm, they were seriously good eats. We did the 4 racks, ate half for dinner, will take a rack and a half over to dinner tomorrow night and 2 racks have been vacuum sealed and frozen.

I’ve also decided that we’re going to try smoking turkey breasts. To this point I’ve only ever done beef and pork, time to do some bird. I really like the idea of getting a 2 pound breast and smoking it and slicing it really thin for low processed lunch meat.

It was a beautiful day to do the smoking. This will be the last day for a while but it is like late fall meaning it’ll be nice and chilly tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday which is the way it should be in my humble but honest opinion.

Since I’m doing the ribs tomorrow, I had to get them rubbed. So 4 racks of ribs are sitting in the fridge all rubbed up and we’re out of kosher salt. I’m excite about the plan to smoke up all the ribs and then taking half racks and vacuum sealing and freezing them. I figure we’re eating half a rack tomorrow, one rack to sisters meaning 5 half racks for the freezer. We’ll see how it goes but Billy Martin said it should be fine.

Also made some Ghee today, I only got half a jar from a pound of butter, I thought it was more and I thought that it was easier to strain the product with coffee filters, but its still good. With the advent of the cast iron usage the ghee is pretty important as it’s the best possible oil for that.

Made it to the gym and took the truck, I need new batteries for it. It lasts longer between maintenance but maintenance is more expensive.