Again with the smoker last week.
I did chicken leg quarters and breasts for family dinner Monday night over charcoal and pecan. Thanks to Oldest Son for the Uncle Jammy’s River City Rub that I used.
I added the breasts about 2 hours after I started the quarters. Note that if you’re going to do that, provide lots of airflow to the firebox so it gets back up to temp quickly. I had the cookbox open for about 90 seconds and the temp dropped from 270 to about 175.
It was getting late and the meat probe was reading low, so I moved the breasts over to the gas grill. After another half an hour, I checked things with an instant-read thermometer and found all but two quarters were in the 170 range. The only two quarters that were under 165 were the one with the probe and the one in the back corner behind it. That didn’t make any sense, but that’s life.
It was a learning experience. I didn’t get the skin as crispy as I would have liked, because I was worried about overcooking it, especially when I realized everything was basically already done. What I should have done was up the heat toward the end to crisp the skin up.
I think the next smoker meal will be meatloaf.
Invest In Real Estate, They Said
It’ll be fun, they said.
The tenant at one of our local rentals, who happens to be Youngest Son, texted me Sunday night saying the water heater seemed to be out. Sigh. I went over to try to relight it, but couldn’t do it. I noticed the wiring to the pilot element was somewhat lacking in the insulation department too, so we called a plumber. They showed up late in the day on Tuesday, changed out the wiring, then couldn’t relight the pilot. They said there was no gas coming through the line. That was disconcerting. Youngest Son verified that his account was up to date, so we were left with some sort of failure.
Wednesday, the plumber came out to check the rest of the line, starting from the meter. When he opened the meter to check for a cap, he realized there was no gas coming into the meter. That was curious. When I checked with neighbors to see if anyone else was having problems, the guy across the street said ONG had cut a service line going across the street because it was a dead line serving the empty duplex next door to our place.
I suspected that the service line split to serve our place too. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of trying to explain this to ONG, but it turns out our plumber had a connection to the regional guy at ONG, and would I like them to call? Yes, please.
Later that night they sent a guy out who confirmed my suspicion and announced they’d have a crew out the next day. Thursday morning, the crew arrived and ran a new service line across the street, though they couldn’t finish that day. They returned Friday morning, finished the work, then we had to play phone tag with the tech who would relight everything. But Youngest Son finally had water heating by four that afternoon.
It was a long week, but this wasn’t as bad as our last rental issue a couple of years ago. But that’s a story for another time.
Reading
I came across a Facebook post that gave me just a smidgen of hope for the churches in the U. S. City Church in Fairfield, California runs a ministry called City Park N Sleep. Every night, the church makes a portion of its parking lot available for people who just want a safe place to sleep in their cars without getting hassled. They get showers, dinner, and breakfast with a few reasonable rules. There’s a 10 PM curfew and your vehicle has to be in running order. There’s on-site security, too. City Church has a bunch of similar ministries aimed specifically at “the least of these,” designed around the concept of loving your neighbor (and recognizing who your neighbor is). It’s nice to see a church that pays attention to what Jesus said.
The Supreme Court will finally address civil asset forfeiture. I really want them to heavily rein the practice in, but with such a conservative bias to the Court these days, I’m not hopeful. Asset forfeiture is another example of well-meant ideas that galloped out of control. The initial idea was to seize money that drug dealers made. While it has its origins in British maritime law and was used heavily during Prohibition, there was a gap from 1933 to the early 80s where it wasn’t used much at all.
Then came the War on (Some) Drugs™. Civil forfeiture cases skyrocketed in the 80s as agencies rushed to get all the “free cash,” cars, and even airplanes they could. The cases back then were almost always part of an ongoing criminal investigation, so it worked out okay for the most part.
But then agencies figured out that they didn’t have to have accompanying criminal charges in civil forfeiture cases. The cases had always been styled “State of Oklahoma vs. $28,276,” and because it was a civil case, the standards of proof were different. The state didn’t have to prove where you got the money. You had to show that it was “clean,” that it wasn’t the result of criminal activity. The cops didn’t care that you’d withdrawn your life savings to go buy a truck to start a business. All they saw was the $28,276 that they could use to buy new gadgets and geegaws for their officers.
Do most agencies put this seized money to good use? I’m sure they do. Some fund their K9 program. Some agencies buy critical equipment for officers, like vests, tactical first aid gear, and so forth. But there are plenty of opportunities for abuse of civil forefeiture. Cases might drag on for years. The people involved might not be able to afford an attorney. In many situations, the cost of defending the case might exceed the value of the seized property. Reason lists dozens of cases where the value of the property far exceeds a reasonable penalty. That brings up Eighth Amendment excessive fines concerns.
As Radley Balko wrote in 2019, “Civil asset forfeiture is manifestly unfair, loaded with perverse incentives, based on a legal fallacy and opposed by an overwhelming majority of the public (once they know what it actually is). It’s also typically carried out with little transparency or oversight, and it’s a policy that, when we do have data, has been shown to be falling far short of the justifications for its existence.
Those failures probably explain why police agencies are so opaque about it in the first place.”
Like I said, I’m not hopeful, but I have my fingers crossed.
It may surprise you that I still read religious blogs, but I do. I’m not always sure why I do, but I do. This post at Red Letter Christian, I Miss Going To Church caught my attention, because I’ve occasionally felt something similar since my deconstruction and deconversion.
For me, it was mostly about missing out on the people I used to interact with. I’ve told myself since I left the church that the people who quit talking to me weren’t really my friends in the first place. If they were, they’d still talk to me, right? Never mind that I didn’t call them. Of course, part of the reason I didn’t call them is because I didn’t think we had anything in common besides church. I figured if that’s all your relationship is based on, what kind of relationship is it? But Mary Beth Unthank just nailed a lot of the things that drove me nuts about my life in church.
The politics of church itself are nauseating, not to mention the enmeshment of evangelicalism in right-wing American politics that has created the heretic cult of Christian Nationalism. I don’t miss… attempting to explain the denomination’s faulty theology to questioning teenagers without saying something that will make their parents leave the church…. Being a pastor’s wife (even when not leading, that is a role we live 24/7) meant I must always consider how my participation could affect others. That constant evaluation, relentless concern, inescapable self-editing led to suffocating anxiety, crippling fear of letting people down, and paralyzing imposter syndrome.
Her comments about grief hit home as well. I too was far too certain about who I was and who God was back then. Then again, I was supposed to be the spiritual leader of the family and I had no clue what that looked like.
Read her post. It’s good stuff.
Why is crap like forced sterilization still happening in the 21st century? The doctor involved in the 2019 case, who removed a fallopian tube without consent, over the objections of other medical staff, should lose his license and be charged with assault. There’s no other word that describes what he did. It’s so gross that this still happens even now, but there are women in the U. S. who want to be sterilized but can’t get the surgery because the doctors worry they might change their minds. I’m curious to see how recently this has happened in the U. S. I’m sure it crossed racial lines down here, sweeping up not just indigenous women but also Black women.
Writing
I wasn’t sure where to put this part.
Much is being said about Sound of Freedom, the movie about the founding of Operation Underground Railroad.
Back in early 2016 when Booktrope released The Sad Girl, which was about human trafficking, another author and I donated some of our first month’s profits to OUR. The other author (whose book was also about trafficking) had heard of them and liked their work, so we went with the idea.
That was around the time that human trafficking became the crime du jour, and everyone and his brother was working against it. All sorts of new legislation and task forces and so forth. Everything seemed to involve trafficking. Picked up a hooker and drove her to the park? You trafficked her. I’m not making light of trafficking. It’s a horrid and horrible thing. But it seems that people focus too much on the sex aspect. It’s not all about sex. Sometimes human trafficking is about labor, where you trick someone to come to another country and work for you, then pay them next to nothing while they’re supposed to be working off a debt. And they can’t go anywhere because you’ve taken their passports.
At any rate…
A month or so after the release, I started digging more into what OUR was all about. I found a couple of places suggesting that the way they worked may have actually caused more trafficking. They would sometimes go to a bar and ask around for girls. Then when some were brought in, they’d say, “No those are too old.” Then the pimps/traffickers would come back with younger girls, and OUR would contact the locals at that point. But were they actually rescuing kids who’d been taken long ago? Or kids who’d just been kidnapped? Granted, in the overall scheme of things that may not matter much. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. I got the impression from what I’d read that they rarely did in-depth investigations to pin down all the bad guys in a particular ring/gang.
I also began to hear complaints about their lack of follow-through after a rescue. People suggested that OUR would come in, do their rescue, get their footage, and turn the kids over to the local government, which was often ill-equipped to deal with them.
Anyway, here’s a piece by MinistryWatch, which is like CharityNavigator but focuses more on churches and parachurch ministries. The article mentions coverage by Vice; you can find all of their articles here. There’s also a good article over at The Atlantic about OUR.
I’m not sharing this to bash OUR. I think the concept is great. I just don’t think OUR is pulling it off as well as it could.
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