Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like,
Mar. 1st, 2018 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2F3rz8T
Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like, done anything. Nothing went wrong it’s just. One of those days where you don’t set out to do anything active and then your watch buzzes and is like “Congrats! 10,000 steps!” and you’re like “I swear to Christ I had that feature turned off” and then you think about how when you’re at your office job you’re lucky to get 4,000 steps in a day (that one’s like, you definitely ran some errands, that wasn’t a regular day) so you wouldn’t know if you had that setting turned off or not.
Anyway. We’re maple sugaring, but like, way less than a usual year because it’s a pain in the ass. So I had to go get propane tanks filled. Normal years we set up a wood-burning evaporator (and I’m not usually here for it), but this year we only tapped five trees and four of them aren’t doing shit. The last one, though, is like, EMPTY THIS FIVE-GALLON BUCKET AND BRING ME ANOTHER, so we’re like, okay there bud, tone it down a little huh?
So. Did you know how you make maple syrup? It takes FORTY GALLONS (that’s like four thousand liters) of sap to make one gallon of syrup, so it takes approximately eighty fucktillion hours of boiling to evaporate enough off.
I can’t do the math, though. I’m trying to reduce the sap just enough to make a sugar wash to ferment for distilling. And I just– I cannot for the goddamn life of me figure out how much I need to boil it down. I have a refractometer and everything, but I don’t know what the numbers mean, and all the sugar wash recipes tell you pounds of sugar per gallon of water, which is utterly useless to me. So. That’s incredibly frustrating, and I’m surrounded by people who can do math but I don’t know how to articulate my question well enough to get my answer. Very frustrating.
So instead today I did a fashion shoot of cuts of frozen meat (v. exciting), and then took Farmbaby out to lunch with my mom and dad and my dude, and briefly visited the historical society, and then have put together a beef and beer stew (actually it’s venison, which is in abundant supply here) for dinner, and am babysitting this pot of sap that is almost boiled down to syrup and so has to be closely watched. (There’s a pot of sap going in the barn, and this is the nearly-finished stuff that’s been going since the day before yesterday and is like, minutes away from finished. Er, hours. Hard to say. Can’t leave it unattended now because it’s guaranteed to finish and burn if you leave it.) But I’m just glad to sit down for a minute.
But I don’t get how to do this math with the maple stuff and it’s driving me crazy.
(Your picture was not posted)
Today has been A Day and I haven’t, like, done anything. Nothing went wrong it’s just. One of those days where you don’t set out to do anything active and then your watch buzzes and is like “Congrats! 10,000 steps!” and you’re like “I swear to Christ I had that feature turned off” and then you think about how when you’re at your office job you’re lucky to get 4,000 steps in a day (that one’s like, you definitely ran some errands, that wasn’t a regular day) so you wouldn’t know if you had that setting turned off or not.
Anyway. We’re maple sugaring, but like, way less than a usual year because it’s a pain in the ass. So I had to go get propane tanks filled. Normal years we set up a wood-burning evaporator (and I’m not usually here for it), but this year we only tapped five trees and four of them aren’t doing shit. The last one, though, is like, EMPTY THIS FIVE-GALLON BUCKET AND BRING ME ANOTHER, so we’re like, okay there bud, tone it down a little huh?
So. Did you know how you make maple syrup? It takes FORTY GALLONS (that’s like four thousand liters) of sap to make one gallon of syrup, so it takes approximately eighty fucktillion hours of boiling to evaporate enough off.
I can’t do the math, though. I’m trying to reduce the sap just enough to make a sugar wash to ferment for distilling. And I just– I cannot for the goddamn life of me figure out how much I need to boil it down. I have a refractometer and everything, but I don’t know what the numbers mean, and all the sugar wash recipes tell you pounds of sugar per gallon of water, which is utterly useless to me. So. That’s incredibly frustrating, and I’m surrounded by people who can do math but I don’t know how to articulate my question well enough to get my answer. Very frustrating.
So instead today I did a fashion shoot of cuts of frozen meat (v. exciting), and then took Farmbaby out to lunch with my mom and dad and my dude, and briefly visited the historical society, and then have put together a beef and beer stew (actually it’s venison, which is in abundant supply here) for dinner, and am babysitting this pot of sap that is almost boiled down to syrup and so has to be closely watched. (There’s a pot of sap going in the barn, and this is the nearly-finished stuff that’s been going since the day before yesterday and is like, minutes away from finished. Er, hours. Hard to say. Can’t leave it unattended now because it’s guaranteed to finish and burn if you leave it.) But I’m just glad to sit down for a minute.
But I don’t get how to do this math with the maple stuff and it’s driving me crazy.
(Your picture was not posted)
