100Tours

I swear he's the ghost of Odinson coming back to troll us all..

so far there's no one switching off the petrol pumps in my area 4 times a week..

I learnt a good lesson driving in Kruger a few years ago - was looking into the bush while driving and when I glanced back at the road there was a rock python crossing - thick as my thigh, and about 3-4m long. Stopped in time, but not without installing my missus in the passenger footwell.

makes sense - they're replaced the fish sauce with salt in their formulation. . I'm in the camp of Patch here though (the patch of Patch?) - happy to reduce meat but not really aiming for complete elimination.

Even without ears Patch, it's still meat :-D In the spirit of saving the whole cow however - I'm eating a lot more lentils. and 2 particular dishes have been stand out good.. lemon lentils - baby spinach, tin lentils, zest of a small lemon (finely cut), teaspoon of soy sauce. In a pan - Wilt spinach (low temperature with a little oil and a splash of water), add lemon zest, drain lentils and add to pan. season with soy. Was really tasty with the lemony bits added, works well as an accompaniment on the plate. red curry lentils - red curry paste tin of coconut milk or cream slice of galangal or ginger bay leaf or lime leaf dried diced butternut tin of lentils fry 2 tablespoons of red curry paste in a little coconut cream or coconut milk. add in a slice of galangal or ginger and a bay leaf or a thai lime leaf, a dried chilli too if you want to heat it up. add diced butternut and the rest of the coconut cream until the butternut is cooked through (add a little water from the lentils if required). Drain lentils, add to pot and heat through. serve with rice. (not quite vegan because there is fish sauce in the red curry paste - I've never seen that offered in a vegan variety, but pretty close) Eat first, we can fight later if you're still in the mood.

looks a lot like Belgium/NL where they don't have hills..

The lack of mountainbikers in the fossil record doesn't present an issue for you? or mole snakes?

thanks

Same thing in the W. Cape when they implemented water restrictions but then had to make up for lost revenue because water sales volumes had dropped. It's a tax. not a cost. How have you addressed power supply for the following (either alternative low-power devices, no device, or clever energy solutions) - oven? - washing machine/tumble dryer/iron/vacuum cleaner - swimming pool - a/c - hairdryer/hairtongs etc. (assume your wife has hair ) Also do you run batteries downstream of other batterie (e.g. if you have batteries linked to your solar do you still have backup batteries in your gate/garage door/electric fence). It seems to me that you should find a set of high resistive power devices to leave to the municipality. Swimming pool pump is the most obvious. And washing machine can wait for good no-load shedding times.

Ours runs the hot water for the kitchen and the guest bathroom, so most nights it only does a half-sink of dishwashing water. Once in a while we have someone stay over and then it runs a bath or a shower, but it doesn't see a lot of use. It shares the gas supply with my gas hob and we have a gas fireplace that gets used a little in winter. All-in-all we use about 3 of the big 19kg bottles a year with that set up. The guy who did the install did caution that it doesn't really make sense for your main bathroom (except there's no gas loadshedding, so maybe it's not a bad idea). If you've got city gas however it is a no-brainer. A thought if you've already got an electric geyser is to put the gas geyser in downstream of the current geyser, then turn it off, or turn it to like 40 degrees so that it isn't ice. That will mean the gas geyser has less to do and you'll save on gas. the electric geyser will be a lot more efficient too. Then when the time comes for the electric one to go you can make a decision about adding solar or just going all gas.

No argument from me - I am reminded to pay attention to supplements There are 2 very distinct vegan camps - vegan for health or vegan for animal rights. If vegan for health then I assume you're doing your homework and that you will educate yourself and mitigate against the potential pitfalls of not having meat/dairy in your diet. I'd still like to have a discussion about why you're leaving out eggs and dairy if your choices are only based on health (calcium particularly important for aging well). Are you avoiding leather and wool products too? We might be talking vegetarianism.. As a generalisation the 'vegan for animal rights' group can be a bit less thoughtful about their choices, and these are generally the group that makes the news. This is also where I have an issue with veganism campaigners - people are influenced to cut out meat (have you been to a feedlot/abbatoir etc.), but without learning anything about vegan diet health. This is also the group that is most likely to feed their kids a vegan diet - which has the added risks of undernourishment during high growth years.

On sizing and design of these things, We (JHB) are down for 4h at a time, so I think there's a benefit to having a backup solution. Also we had the pleasure of losing our substation during December so we had 4 days where we were off for 8-12h at a stretch, which you might assume will happen to you at some stage. (power off - stop gap repair - repair blows - next stop gap fix - regular loadshedding, you get the picture). Currently I have a 6kVA inverter with 8 batteries. This runs for 8-12 hours till empty. Cost was R40k for the inverter, R20k for the batteries and a few grand for transfer switching and wiring. So call it R70k all in for a reasonable solution. And loadshedding will be a regular occurrence for at least the next 10 years (on the assumption of rational behaviour to fix things starting from now). Also I have a gas hob and a gas geyser - I'd say really good investments for being able to have hot water. Gas geyser was about R20k all in, running on bottled gas. We still have an electric geyser in the main bathroom, so this replaced our mostly idle second geyser - note you can fit these in-line with a solar geyser (or other) so that they are top-up heat only if this makes sense for your install. On the backup circuit I'm running most lighting (excluding our main bedroom, which was just awkward to include on the UPS circuit), TV/WiFi/Speakers, Front Gate and Alarm (because those 9v batteries don't survive long with loadshedding), Fridge, PC/laptop power. The stuff that waits for Eskom power is the stove, electric kettle, washing machine and my wife's hairdryer. These are not good loads for batteries, so if you want to run them it is better to go for a generator (even then the kettle/stove are probably too heavy for a small gen). Next step I am considering is solar (and disposing of most of the existing equipment ). The challenge is that I need to get back up to something like my current 5-6kVA capacity, and that seems like a fairly large installation.

BBC summary of the B12 issue. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50836442 Basically you reduce your risk of diabetes and heart disease, but (probably) increase your risk of stroke, neuropathy and bone density issues. The fact-based approach would be to reduce your meat intake, but not to stop entirely. ovo/lacto-vegeterianism (i.e. veggies, milk and eggs) is also a good halfway house. going 100% vegan is not a sound fact-based choice, although I do accept that facts are not for everybody (and facts and diets almost never go together).

I have thought it through a few times:- The area we were riding is really rocky - often not possible to veer off, so you're stuck on the path with the snake. I literally only saw the snake at about 2-3 bikelengths away because I was right behind another rider. Riding over/past the snake is a bad idea (in this situation) because there's lots more time and target for the snake to strike you. The track is maybe 20cm wide and you're doing maybe 15kph. The snake is already a bit upset. Falling on the snake is a really bad idea. The best option is probably to stop better. I've heard that staying on the bike, right-way up, is best for braking performance. Uncleat away from the snake. The one thing I wished I had known was which direction the snake would choose to escape.

Strike first - ask questions later.. I had an incident where a mate of mine riding ahead of me clipped a cobra on a piece of singletrack out near the cradle game reserve (I would have said cape cobra given the yellow colour, spread hood and being a bit over a metre long, but AFAIK Gauteng is not within their regular range so I'm unsure of species). Nevertheless the bump made the snake rear up, with the back of its hood towards me and looking down the track at the other rider. I braked rather hard, locked the front wheel and vaulted the handlebars. The few metres gained in this manouver putting me now vertically above the snake and bearing down on him. I picked left, had a close up look at said snake on the way past and landed mostly on my head and shoulder just off the path. The somewhat frightened snake disappeared off to the right, seemingly shaken but unharmed. The whole thing happened much too quickly to make decisions about acting differently. I'm not sure what you learn from this - the riders behind me stopped somewhat more gracefully and had a long chat about whether they wanted to do any more riding. I'm hoping the snake learned its lesson.

I use actual wax, from a candle, in a beautician-style wax melter, as a base layer. Works well, and if i redo every 10-12 weeks it seems to be just fine. It does need a bit of bedding in on the first ride thoguh before it settles. we have a lot of bikes and this is a good way to minimise the time spent cleaning and waxing chains. Can top-up with a commercial wax in a pinch too. Making your own way. hmm... Even when I ride a lot I use maybe 1/2 bottle a year

Hmmm, so yes privatisation would do a lot to improve the quality of the electricity supply, but business rescue for SAA? It basically turns all government bonds to junk - the guarantees are no longer worth anything. we've stopped the bleeding by taking the blood out of the body

First Movember, now Veganuary. That's a typo just waiting to happen ..

The strategy team is usually out on the road in their Hilux towing the marketing team back home..

Yup we got to ride with him for about 10k's - he was mixing it up with our tandems after Op de Tradouw. How a guy of 45kg's holds 85kph on a downhill is beyond me.

I have always thought that we're just on the receiving end of the rest of the world's refurbished devices. I'm not sure ours get sent anywhere, but I'm not complaining.

I had to check my bias on this one - I don't think vaping is a good idea in the first place. The current state of play is 8 suspected deaths and 530 people with suspected vaping illness in the US (suspected by the CDC). Suspected means that there is a very likely connection - like developing a lung disease after starting vaping. They are not yet tied to any specific ingredient, and the vaping products involved do not show an obvious common ingredient between them. The existing industry is looking for volunteers to continue with the vaping experiment until the connection is sufficiently well proven to be able to regulate appropriately.

If you're motivated by the science: 1. You should eat more veggies. 2. They should not be processed (bread is not a vegetable, neither are those plant burgers) 3. For environmental reasons veggie production shouldn't rely too heavily on fertiliser, or insecticides, or travel very far. (plant burgers flown in from a factory in California, for example) 4. Most of the world can't afford to fix items 1 to 3 in their current diets. Assuming you can change these things, 5. You should eat less meat. 100-200g a week is enough. This is 2 portions a week, each being the size of a cigarette box. 6. If you don't like meat, you can go a long way to keeping things natural by having milk and eggs in your diet. However, 1. Almost no one has been vegan for 30 years, no one has been vegan for their whole life (the unfortunate exception being a number of kids raised as vegans in recent times, a number of whom have severe nutrition issues). A 1-week study doesn't equate to decades of following a vegan diet for 60-80 years (Ask the people who thought vaping was safe last year). 2. We know that there are some nutrients which are most easily accessed from animal sources that you may miss out on if you're vegan. The risk of various deficiencies is particularly serious for pregnant women and children. The next most high risk group is athletes. There are deficiencies we only discovered from people on a vegan diet. 3. I have not yet seen a study on the downside of eating meat in moderation. Until I see that I'm a meat eater. If you're motivated by the feeling you get when you think about eating animals then we just agree that we're not motivated by the same thing.

What you could do (but don't) clearly doesn't add to your impact on the environment. So 'having kids is the biggest impact you can have on the climate' is entirely accurate. I'm not judging whether this makes it OK to have kids, but the logic seems fairly infallible. The effect of adding a person to the planet has a bigger impact than any emission reductions you can achieve for yourself (assuming you have a similar standard of living to your kids, and that you cannot get your own emissions below 50% of your starting point). Having (half) a child adds 50% to the total emissions of each parent, them having children even more. It was popular to say that 2 kids are 'just enough to replace ourselves', but that maths only works if you either remove yourselves, or get rid of the grandparents. Global overpopulation is a big part of our problem.

plantains