Walt's Corner

My local Veterans Administration will be breaking ground on their new hospital next week. Expected to be a 492,996 square foot medical center, it will be built next to the existing William Beaumont Army Medical Center (WBAMC) with a scheduled completion date in 2028. Clark Construction has been awarded the contract.

Until 2021, both EP VAHCS and WBAMC shared connected facilities. Then WBAMC constructed their new hospital. That project was riddled with setbacks both in time and money. Construction began in 2013 with an expected completion date in 2017. But that completion date kept getting extended. Clocking in at $1.4 billion ($629 million over budget) it finally opened in 2021 and dubbed the most expensive hospital in the world by us locals.

It will be nice to have the emergency room of WBAMC co-located with the VA hospital once again. Not to mention just a little bit closer to my house. Question is, how long will it take and how much over budget? Currently the projected cost is just south of $617.5 million. I saw the model at the current VA hospital lat week. Assuming I’m still around, I’ll keep us up to date right here.

They say we humans are born with two innate fears – falling and loud noises. All the rest are learned. I would offer there are three base fears. Add spiders to that list because I can’t recall when I first feared those eight-legged monsters. As long as I can remember that fear has been foremost in my mind. I remember riding in my grandfather’s red van with black spiderweb painted on the side and red shaggy carpet on the inside when a spider rappelled down from the ceiling on its string of web. I pointed it out to my grandpa and much to my horror he reached out, grabbed it, and stuffed it into my left-hand pocket of my pants. I screamed and tore those pants off. Looking back on that hazy childhood memory now, he probably didn’t really do that.  That spider in my pocket was probably as real as the killer dog in his basement, the bear that chased us out of the woods that lined his country property, and the snipe we chased down in his back yard. But the fear was real.

Building on that common fear and stepping outside her collection of short stories, Splatterpunk Award Winner Bridget Nelson released her first Novella, Red Inside. The story follows a group of patients/nurses/doctors through what will end up being their last day on earth. Not everyone dies in the end, or do they? You’ll have to read it for yourself. She pulls from her previous career in the medical field and experience as an exotic pet owner to weave a web of horror that is sure to unsettle you. A fast-paced story for sure but will leave you wishing it took just a little bit longer to get there. I give it 8 out of 8 spider legs. Signed copies are available from her website and all the other array of formats on Amazon.

The original Pizza Hut Pizza Sauce recipe has been left behind for posterity’s sake. On a napkin. Displayed in the Pizza Hut Museum. Vaguely. 

To interpret with my own words in parenthesis:

• 2 onions
• 2 green peppers
• 1 celery
• 6-8 garlic buds

Grind freeze (put in a food processor or blender and process until a fine green sluice that can be frozen and saved for later)

Add:

• salt
• Pepper
• Oregano
• Add above (referring to the onion/pepper/garlic sluice)
• 2 #10 cans tomato (sauce)
• #10 paste (tomato)

The vague part is the quantity of the salt/pepper/oregano.

Keeping in mind this recipe is enough to feed a literal restaurant, I needed to break this down into smaller, home-manageable chunks. So here is what I found useful for me. Feel free to adjust the salt/pepper/oregano to your likings. 

Reducing the onion/bell pepper/garlic too small doesn’t provide good results in your blender, so I recommend  halving that part. Use 1 onion, 1 green bell pepper, half a large celery stick, 5 garlic buds (what can I say, you can’t have enough garlic). Process to a fine green sluice then divide your sluice into 3 or 4 separate containers before freezing. Or maybe make “ice cubes” of them in a tray and figure out how many sluice cubes you need for a particular batch. For me, I divided into 3 equal parts and freeze.

My final recipe looks like this:

• 29 oz can tomato sauce
• 6 oz can tomato paste
• 1 serving of the sluice
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp ground black pepper
• 2 tbsp oregano flakes

Mix all ingredients well, divide into however many portions you need and freeze any left over. This makes me about 8 small pizza’s worth of sauce. Suggest letting it sit in the fridge for a few hours or even overnight for best results.

Bonus recipe – Fairy Dust. I worked at a Pizza Hut in the 80s. There was this concoction of Parmesan cheese and oregano (equal parts by volume) in a shaker that was sprinkled onto every pizza. 

Issue resolved on Norcold N611 Absorption fridge. 2015 Lance model 1995. We ride it hard and put it up wet. Been on 227 (over 22k miles) camping trips with it since 2015. Mostly boondocking in the national forests, BLMs, and remote state parks (like interior Big Bend Ranch State Park, IYKYK).

TLDR – in gas mode fridge would light, but didn’t know it was lit, so eventually would shut itself down for safety. Taking an emery cloth to the igniter and burner resolved the issue.

Long version with theory and disclaimer.

Disclaimer. If you aren’t experienced with working with propane appliances you probably shouldn’t attempt this. Proceed at your own risk. There are professionals who get paid to do this shit.

Problem: fridge would light, you know that “tick tick tick tick tick.” It would light right away, but the tick tick ticking would continue every every 5 seconds or so, indicating that it didn’t know it had lit, or thought the flame had blown out and is attempting to relight. This is a built in safety feature. If it senses no flame after so many attempts to light, it will shut off the gas and your green “on” light and orange “gas” light will flash on the front of the fridge alerting you to the issue. This prevents gas build up that could potentially cause a fire.

When the fridges senses it’s not down to proper temp, it sends a signal to the gas solenoid to open the flow of gas as well as a voltage to the electrode that sits about 3/16th inch above the burner, creating a spark. The spark ignites the gas, then the same electrode acts as a sensor by continuing to supply a small voltage measured in milliamps. The computer board monitors the milliamps. This voltage travels through the electrode and through the carbon of the flame and reaches the burner – which is grounded. No flame – no circuit for this small signal to travel to in order to reach ground. Computer board shuts off the gas flow if this happens.

In the picture, you see the blue flame. Looking exactly like it should. You see the red cable plugged into the frame, and to the right of it is the gas tube flange nutted to the burner. One Philips head screw holds each item to the frame. Removing both is as simple as removing the one screw that holds them in. Turned off the gas at the tanks. Burned the remaining gas off with the stove.

Prior to removing the burner tube, you must unthread the flange nut from the copper gas tube securing it to the burner tube. Then the tube slides right out.

Cleaned both the electrode and the burner with emery cloth (like fine sand paper). Reinstalled both. Reconnected the gas and checked for leaks with some liquid gas detector. Sealed fine. Turned the fridge back on. Fired right up as usual. Additionally, the minute it fired up, the tick ticking stoped. It now knows there’s a flame. Side note, since the part was so cheap anyways, I ordered a new igniter electrode off Amazon for about $19 and replaced the 10 year old one since I was in there anyways. Replacing that part did not fully fix the issue but when combined with cleaning the burn tube the issue was fully resolved. Also, while I was in there I went ahead and vacuumed the entire area and wiped it all down.

I was low-key hoping I wouldn’t be able to fix it. Would’ve provided me with the excuse I needed to get one of them high speed 12-volt compressor fridges. The one I was eyeballing that would be a direct-fit replacement costs about $1300. We’ve got the solar and battery power to be able to run it instead of the propane.

Last year, about July, I received a replacement credit card. My green coffee bean subscription was on that card. I attempted to change it but they told me there was no way to change it. Rather, I’d have to cancel and start a new one with the new credentials.

I cancelled. But when it came time to start a new one I just bought 20 pounds of a single bean instead. That lasted for several months and I then I repeated by buying yet another 20 pound bag of a single bean. I did miss the rotation of origins and the surprise of what beans I’d be getting every month.

This month I started the subscription back up. 4 new, unknown beans a month. A pound each. This month’s subscription just arrived and I’m all giddy inside.

May 2024 brings me, in layman’s terms, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Costa Rica. For the coffee savvy lot of you, here are the exact lots: Guatemala Michicoy Finca Rosma Lot 2, Ethiopia Hambela Benti Nenka, Rwanda Milles Collines Peaberry, and Costa Rica Red Honey Don Oscar.