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Welcome to November .
Maybe you're not dreaming of leaves but they are on the way so, we thought we'd provide a 5 minute beak from all the harvesting of those reds, yellows, golds and purples. We hope you will enjoy this month's efforts and hope for you to have a fabulous month and wonderful Thanksgiving.
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What's Happeing To Oil Prices? | |
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Over the past year and a half energy prices have been riding a roller coaster. First came the pandemic of COVID 19. Instantly jet fuel demand and gasoline demand plummeted. Oil and gas producers were selling their production at prices well below their costs. Many of them either went out of business or couldn’t pay their loans back in a timely manner.
Add in the cancellation of the Keystone pipeline to get oil and propane from remote areas of the U.S. to market, and the return of the U.S. production will take some time. Moving oil in a pipeline is more cost effective than moving it by rail or trucks.
More recently in Asia and Europe wind turbines have not had enough wind to help generate the electricity to fuel their economies. China also has had drought conditions so less hydro-electricity has been produced. Both Europe and Asia turned to natural gas to produce electricity.
A year ago, natural gas was selling in the U.S. for under $2.00. It is now over $6.00 in the US and almost $20.00 in Europe and Asia. Many commercial and industrial users have turned to oil as a less expensive option than natural gas. This has pushed up the demand for oil.
With the return of travel and jet fuel demand, as well as much higher gasoline demand we have a much higher price today than we had a year ago. You could buy gas at Costco for $1.77 a gallon last year. Today, $3.45.
China has stated that they will buy their energy needs to cover their requirements for the next few months, regardless of the price. Also, the current administration is asking oil producing countries to produce more oil as per below. This may help ease the supply crunch.
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The U.S. is likely to ask OPEC member states to pump more crude to help ease a surge in energy prices, according to oil historian Daniel Yergin. " Joe Biden knows that high gasoline prices are not good for incumbents," Yergin, vice chairman of the IHS Markit, said Monday in a Bloomberg TV interview. "We'll certainly be hearing more from the administration." | |
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So where do we go from here? Our thoughts are that it will take some months for the supply chain to return to some sort of normal and for prices to ease. This will be based on demand, winter weather, and the return of U.S. production to put the market back into equilibrium.
In the meantime, we are doing everything we can to ensure that your home comfort is our top priority. We have reached out to our heating oil and propane suppliers and they have assured us that they will be able to serve us, so that we can serve your needs in a timely manner as well. We will also continue to communicate with you as the heating season gets under way.
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American states are a weird assembly of riotous traditions, laws, and items. Pumpkin pie is the official state pie in Illinois, Oregon has an official state nut, and New Mexico an official state question. Oklahoma, deep in the Bible Belt and contrarian, insists that watermelon is its state vegetable. In Missouri, the official state dessert was an ice cream cone, in Nebraska, Kool-Aid is the official soft drink. Vermont declared maple as its official flavor.
By these standards, Minnesota declaring the photo above the official state photograph didn’t seem that unusual. More unusual was the photo’s journey — from being poorly received at the Minnesota Photographer’s Association in 1918 to being printed in the millions of copies, and sold across the country, a photographic equivalent of Whistler’s Mother.
The original was taken by Eric Enstorm in Bovey, Minnesota. The man featured was a local peddler named Charles Wilden, who lived in a sod house and disappeared into obscurity immediately after the photo was taken. While the photograph would later come to symbolize penitence, piety, and the ministry of ‘Our Daily Bread’, Enstorm’s intentions were less clear.
While he had Wilden clasp his hands and bow his head and arranged household objects around him (he also scratched the glass negative so that the picture frame on the left appeared as an open window through which divine light shone), the book on the table was not a Bible but a dictionary.
Wilden himself was a town drunk, and Enstrom later reflected that his thoughts were about the First World War, rationing, and privations faced by his fellow Minnesotans on the home front.
In a 1961 interview, Enstrom recalled that he wanted an image that would inspire thankfulness. He noted, “I saw that he had a kind face… there weren’t any harsh lines in it … this man doesn’t have much of earthly goods, but he has more than most people because he has a thankful heart.”
This thankfulness was again in short supply during the Great Depression of the late 1920s, and local churches began using the photo. Enstorm and his daughter would obsessively paint over the original prints (and even producing a matching image with an elderly lady) to give it the appearance of oil paintings.
Eventually, when demand outstripped their ability to produce hand painted prints, the Enstorms sold the photo rights to a Minneapolis publishing house affiliated with the American Lutheran Church. After this, the photo found its way to churches, restaurants, homes, and boats around the United States.
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In June 2006, Iowa paralegal Jane Wiggins looked out the window of her Cedar Rapids office and saw a cloud unlike any she’d seen before. “It looked like Armageddon,” she told the Associated Press. “The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change.”
Wiggins sent a photo to the Cloud Appreciation Society, a weather-watching group founded by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author of The Cloudspotter’s Guide. Other sightings were registered around the world (this one appeared over Tallinn, Estonia), and eventually Pretor-Pinney nominated it as an entirely new type.
The 2017 edition of the World Meteorological Organisation’s International Cloud Atlas included asperitas in a supplementary feature. The name is Latin for “roughen” or “agitate” — “not necessarily gentle or steady, but quite violent-looking, turbulent, almost twisted in its appearance,” Pretor-Pinney said.
It’s not new, really — such clouds have always been up there — but it’s the first formation added to the atlas since 1951. “We like to believe that just about everything that can be seen has been,” Society executive director Paul Hardaker said. “But you do get caught once in a while with the odd, new, interesting thing.”
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With the onset of winter we get less light. Morning deliveries are often before sunrise and the late fall light fades so quickly that it makes it quite difficult to find house numbers. Please make sure that we can see your house number on the house or the mailbox. It will make a real difference to our drivers this winter. Thanks. | |
Take Your Fish For A Swim | |
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Stumbled on this great food website. It suggests a version of poaching your fish – it’s called a la nage. Here how they do it:
Making an à la nage preparation is very simple. I start by sautéing aromatic vegetables, like onion, garlic, celery, and fennel, in oil or butter until translucent.
Then I add the poaching liquid, which can include wine, water, fish stock, clam juice, you name it. If I add wine or another alcohol, I'll usually add it first and let some of its alcohol boil off before adding the rest of the liquid.
Then I nestle the fish into the broth—which should be just deep enough to partially cover the fish—bring it to a simmer, and cover with a lid. When the fish is cooked, it's ready to serve, typically in just minutes. There are three distinct recipes at Serious eats. The link is below:
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-fish-seafood-a-la-nage-poached-broth
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In the Japanese art of kintsugi, broken pottery is not discarded but mended with a lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum, to connote an appreciation of the flawed and the imperfect and to mark the repair as one event in the object’s life, not the end of its useful service.
The Japanese philosophy of mushin finds an analogy with human life. Christy Bartlett writes in Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (2008):
Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated … a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin.
… Mushin is often literally translated as ‘no mind,’ but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. … The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject.
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How quickly have your forgotten? Think you know who this young lady is? Tell us here and you may win one of those amazing Amazon gift cards. Only 21 of you recognized Factory Butte Utah as our beautiful place and 64 of you recognized Stone Cold Steve Austin. Winners were: Noel T and Brian S. Plus our caption challenge was won by Rachel M with the line: "Squirrell!!!"
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Just a reminder that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is on again for those who long to be a kid again. | |
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Are you heading off to Florida or Arizona or Europe for a few months this winter. (We’re going to try!!).
Anyway, let us know before you go. If you’re staying and you’re not using wood to do some partial heating, let us know. OH and if there’s a new baby in the house – or if Grandma has come to stay – or if you’re planning to work from home again this winter let us know. All those things will contribute to increasing your fuel usage and with more information we’ll be in better place to make sure you never run out of fuel this year!
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How Frederic Tudor iced the world | |
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Prior to the 1800s, ice was a decidedly regional and luxurious affair—you could enjoy it if you lived near sources of natural ice and could afford it. But in 1805, Boston-born Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor had a hunch that harvesting ice from the frozen lakes, river, and ponds (including famed Walden Pond) of New England and shipping them south to the tropics would make him “inevitably and unavoidably rich.”
So began the North American natural ice trade. In fairness, the dubious-sounding hustle had a few false starts. Ice, it turns out, has a tendency to melt. Thus, the first few years saw major financial losses. However, using techniques like packing the ice tighter and employing sawdust as natural insulation, Tudor found his groove around about 1810.
Later on, after a brief stint in debtors’ prison, Tudor employed the time-honored sales tactics of a drug dealer by topping up his wealthy customer’s ice block orders—which they mainly used for cooling medicine and food—with some free product, encouraging people to try drinking their beverages on the rocks. It caught on, of course, and then he started charging them.
In 1833—with his business booming and a much more efficient, horse-drawn plough technique for cutting ice in place—Tudor undertook the ambitious plan to ship ice to Calcutta, India, a 14,000 mile journey. Investors were skeptical but an editorial in the India Gazette thanked Tudor for making “this luxury accessible, by its abundance and cheapness.” Tudor’s success spurred global competition, thereby taking the ice trade global.
“Drink, Spaniards, and be cool, that I, who have suffered so much in the cause, may be able to go home and keep myself warm.”
— Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor’s diary entry after making a delivery to Cuba.
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1845: John Gorrie of Florida invents the first ice machine, a refrigerator that creates small ice cubes. He is granted a patent in 1851.
1847: Ice is shipped to 28 US cities in large blocks. Delivery men chip off the desired weight with a pick.
Mid 1800s: Wooden ice boxes become common household items. Previously, people relied on holes in the ground.
1868: The world’s first commercial ice plant opens in New Orleans, Louisiana. The product is called “manufactured” or “artificial” ice so urbanite consumers can distinguish it from their usual natural block ice.
1883: In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain notes that manufactured ice is quickly replacing natural ice and compares the product to mass-market jewelry—once for the rich, now for everybody.
1920: According to the US Census Bureau, the country’s 4,800 ice plants employ 160,000 people and produce 40 million tons of ice a year—750,000 blocks every day. Industries like seafood and farm produce boom as a result.
1930s: The first ice cube trays are invented, perfect for the freezer compartments increasingly showing up in US homes.
1952: The first Holiday Inn hotel, in Memphis, Tennessee, becomes the first to offer access to ice machines free of charge, complete with a bucket in every room. The practice caught on and became a notable quirk of American hotel culture.
1960s: Electric refrigerators, room air conditioners, and overland transportation cooling systems diminished the need for ice block manufacturing. Today it exists only in speciality forms (for ice sculptures and the like).
“In 1860, there were four artificial-ice plants in the United States; in 1889, there were about two hundred; by 1909, there were two thousand.”
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Jimmy Stewart watched him from his apartment. He battled Godzilla. And drove Hamilton Burger crazy. Who is this? Tell us here and you may win a lovely Amazon gift card.
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Daniels Does The Math - AGAIN! | |
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A New Energy Kinetics
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Cost For Fuel Oil for 10 Years | |
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Assume 800 gallons to heat a 2200 sq. ft. home
Assume average heating oil cost at $2.99 per gallon.*
Assume 40% reduction in heating oil usage = 320 gallons saved each year.
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Equates to a reduction of oil cost of
$956.80 each year
$79.73 on average per mo.
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Now...here's the good part: | |
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Challenge Us: Call Us Today and
Get All The Details!
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*Avg, home heating retail prices over 11 years 3/09-3/20 was $2.999 per U.S. Energy Information. See below. Savings shown up to 40%. 0.99% for 120 months through EnergizeCT. Limitations apply. For illustration only, example does not include any additional installation costs such as chimney liner, if needed. Choice of system, availability of financing and down payment will affect final monthly cost. See Daniels representative for complete details. CT License S1-385517
HOD#19 / Daniels Propane. LLC: CT License S1-302857
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“Remember, remember the fifth of November…“
Guy Fawkes is said to have been carrying this iron lantern when he was arrested in the cellars underneath the Houses of Parliament on the night of 4–5 November 1605. Fawkes and his conspirators planned to ignite barrels of gunpowder concealed under firewood in the cellar during the state opening of Parliament, with the aim of blowing up the chamber and killing the Protestant King James I. Thanks to an anonymous warning, the cellars were searched, Fawkes was discovered and the plot failed.
Celebrating the fact that King James I had survived the attempt on his life, people lit bonfires around London, and later the introduction of the Observance of 5th November Act enforced an annual public day of thanksgiving for the plot’s failure.
Gifted to the University of Oxford by Robert Heywood in 1641, the lantern joined the Ashmolean collection over two hundred years later in 1887. Guy Fawkes’ lantern is currently on display in our Ashmolean Story gallery on our lower ground floor.
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Quipu – a complex writing system using knots in broad arrays of strings. Sometimes referred to as “talking knots” it is a form of record-keeping sed in several early civilizations including Peruvian and ancient Chinese, Tibetans, Siberians and the Polynesians. There could be from 4 to 2000 cords, the primary function of which was storing and communicating numerical information in a decimal system used for ensue and calendrical data, tax obligations and managing accounts and trades. | |
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It's new movie season.
Hollywood will soon begin trotting out its award season hopefuls, with some heavy-hitter filmmakers stepping up to the plate during the final few months of the year. Steven Spielberg will unveil his take on his personal favorite film, West Side Story, In December, while Adam McKay's latest dramedy, Don't Look Up, will drop on Netflix in late December, and comes packed with a starry cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jonah Hill.
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Ridley Scott's House of Gucci debuts over the Thanksgiving holiday, an updated Ghostbusters adventure launches November 11th, and the latest mega-budget offering from Marvel, the cosmos-spanning Eternals, hits theaters in early November. And be on the lookout for King Richard, starring Will Smith, and the coming of age drama, The Tender Bar, from director George Clooney, who co-stars with Ben Affleck and Tye Sheridan. | |
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“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” — Richard Feynman
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” — Samuel Johnson
“Read what interests you. If Scott does not interest you and Dickens does, drop Scott and read Dickens. You need not be any one’s enemy; but you need not be a friend with everybody. This is as true of books as of persons. For friendship some agreement in temperament is quite essential.” — Lyman Abbott
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Xylothek – aka xylarium – wooden library.. The scientific aim behind the xylothek was to record arboreal biodiversity by forming a library from the trees themselves. Each volume is made of wood of a different tree, their spines composed of the bark – sometimes with the moss still attached – their contents being specimens of the tree’s leaves, seeds, branches, and roots, and usually accompanied by a detailed description of its biology and uses. An example came be found in Padova University, Italy.
The first one was the Shildach in Ottoneum in Kassel German built between 1771-1799 by Carl Schildback which housed 530 wooden volumes. The largest, naturally is in the US – Samuel James Record Collection – 98,000 examples.
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Wooden Book – the Civil War diary of Solomon Conn – he bought a violin, never learned to play it, yet kept a record of 30 battles including Chickamauga to Kennesaw Mountain to the end of the war. His group lost 283 men. He and the violin survived. | |
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Daniels Energy: CT License S1-385517 HOD#19 /
Daniels Propane. LLC: #846 CT License S1-302857
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