Tag: Random Thoughts

To AirBNB or not to AirBNB

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article this week on AirBNB, and some of the rather extravagant fees some owners (“hosts”) are charging. Apparently, some have learned from hotels that you can charge for random things and if you hide it (say, not disclose it until after the reservation is made), you have an extra revenue stream. The comments are even more illuminating than the article.

Hotels are not allowed to charge random fees without disclosing them first, which is why you know ahead of time that your inner-city lower-rung hotel has a “resort fee.”

We booked an AirBNB once, because it was right down the street from our kids and we were going to visit for the first time in a couple of years. We usually stayed in the one hotel in town, but it was fully booked, so we decided to be adventurous.

We were not charged any additional fees. This is because a couple of weeks before our stay, I received a note from our host that said her kids were moving back to town and she needed the space, so she was very sorry, but she was canceling our reservation.

We found a Hampton Inn one town over to replace it. I have never had a Hampton Inn manager tell me he needed my room for his kids. (I almost said “loser kids”, but for all I know, her son may have just finished his residency at the Mayo Clinic and was starting a practice in rural Ohio.)

To me, our cancelation summed up the issues with AirBNB. It’s not a company, it’s a booking platform. They have some standards, but the reality is that the hosts run their own business, and they can do what they want, until enough people complain. Some hosts are better at business than others.

I’m all for “family first”, but if you’re running a business, canceling on a first-time guest to accommodate family is not a good business practice.

A selling point for hotel chains is “consistency.” The exception is Best Western, which is not a chain, it’s a marketing organization of independent hotels. AirBNB is not even a marketing organization – it’s a bunch of homeowners who decided to rent their extra rooms and meet the bare minimums that AirBNB requires.

So, some are great, some suck, most are in-between somewhere. Some have the host living next door, some have the host with a number of units in one town and he lives three States over.

Some cancel because they need the space.

At my age, I need consistency. So, I think that was one and done for AirBNB.

The Grand Consolidation

This was the year I finally started looking at my website costs. Ouch. I have managed to try a number of services over the years, and there really is no consistency on pricing. Also, I tend to leave sites in place years longer than they need to be.

For websites, I love WordPress as a development and content management system. You can use the commercial version and pay to have your domain routed, pay to have ads removed, pay to have email, pay, pay, pay.

You can pay GoDaddy to host WordPress for you – it’s not the commercial version, so there are not as many options, but it’s cheaper. It’s just you have to do much of the maintenance yourself. This should not be a problem because I am in IT, but I am also busy.

You can pay Namecheap to host WordPress for you – it’s cheaper than GoDaddy and WordPress, and they keep the software updated. You do have to do something about spam yourself.

So, I’m migrating to Namecheap, site by site. The other advantage is that their website charges are less, as well.

Now, I’m trying to combine all of my WordPress sites into one, and just point to the individual sites from the different domains. That’s the ultimate goal.

I have written a lot of crap over the years. Keyword: crap. Still, I think it should be saved for posterity – if nothing else, as a warning to others, or for bloggers to learn by example, because a bad example is still an example.

Stay tuned.

Musings about The Kids’ Table

I was originally going to register this domain (actually, it was the-kids-table.net but that domain was replaced) and give all of my cousins email addresses that I could remember. That never happened. Then, it was going to be a place to have everyone meet – like a virtual conference room. That happened once, and I keep forgetting to schedule another. The in-person meeting has been in progress for over ten years, but I’m sure it will be scheduled any day now.

So, I have a domain and very little to show for it. For now. And, yes, I’m still at The Kids’ Table.

RIP

There are many phrases I never thought I would write, and one of them was, “Well, now I’ve been to a funeral on Facebook Live.”

My cousin Joey Koch died from COVID-19 this week and his funeral Mass was in D’Hanis this morning. There were actually more people at the service than I expected. Most of the people I talked with weren’t attending, and they were family. I find this tragic, but not surprising in this times.

His was not only a COVID case, it was a Facebook case. On January 21st, he posted that he had been fighting COVID for eight days. Two days later, he posted that he was in the hospital. By February second, his blood pressure was low and he was on a ventilator. He seemed to rally, took a turn for the worse, and then he left us this week. In the midst of all this, he had his fifty-seventh birthday.

So, this morning, Holy Cross Church live streamed his funeral. Without this, I wouldn’t have attended. His sister sent me the link to the livestream during the rosary. I was crying in my recliner. I hate funerals, but I really hate funerals through a small lens that somebody in the back of the Church remembers to adjust randomly.

At the end of the rosary, before Mass, while everyone was readjusting things, the camera panned around the front of the Church, and I saw Joey in his coffin with his Texas A&M cap beside him before they closed the lid. I am not sure this was helpful for me.

Watching one of my cousins’ funerals online was a very strange occurrence. Usually, a death in my Mom’s family implements the same drill. Call or text relatives you haven’t spoken with in a while. Coordinate arrivals in Hondo or D’Hanis. Assume you will meet at least some of the mourners at Hermann Sons the night before the Mass. Attend the reception after the services, and somewhere in the afternoon, realize you are probably laughing quite a bit more than proper at a memorial.

However, this is the time of COVID-19. When we talked online during the drill, I think we were each waiting for the other to say, “I don’t think I’m going to attend.”

Finally, my brother suggested we have a Celebration of Life (a memorial where you’re expected to laugh) some time this Spring, when people are vaccinated and everything is back to normal-ish. This way, nobody had to feel badly about skipping the funeral.

That’s when I realized we’re also celebrating the one-year anniversary of the two-week lockdown. Everything is probably never going to get back to normal-ish.

This morning, I realized I still felt badly about skipping the funeral.

So, now I actually know someone who died from COVID. I have friends that have recovered. I know people who lost relatives. I know people that know people. This one was close to home.

I hate funerals. I hate saying “Goodbye.” I don’t like endings that I don’t control. However, I don’t like skipping funerals even though it was the right thing to do from a safety standpoint. I never thought I would regret not going to a funeral, but this one is close.

I really don’t like endings that were pointless. Joey’s ending was pointless. His ending was pointless because he died of COVID-19.

Joey was being cautious. He had mentioned on Facebook that it wasn’t just about you, it was about the people around you. If someone in your household is in a high risk group, you’re in a high risk group by default.

However, caution does not beat stupidity. It is rumored that he contracted the disease at work. Someone in his office went to Florida to visit family for Christmas and someone there was showing early symptoms. His coworker came home and just went back to work. No mention of any disease. Oops.

COVID-19 is the idiots’ disease. Not that idiots contract it, but that idiots spread it. If you travel somewhere, self-isolate when you get back. Not because it’s the law, but because it’s just common sense. If you think you’ve been exposed, get a test. If you think you’re sick, warn the people you’ve been around. If you don’t feel well, just stay home. If you don’t, you may find yourself feeling better just in time to bury someone you knew.

Happy Accident

My Brewsy kit contained three airlocks, so I can have three bottles of wine or cider fermenting at a time. Plus, my half-gallon glass bottles arrived from Amazon this afternoon. Virginia wanted to try black cherry and the basic advice from Brewsy (which I ignored) was to do cranberry first, so I had ordered RW Knudsen Just Black Cherry and RW Knudsen Just Cranberry – both 100% juice. The slight problem with the juices is that they are only available in 32oz bottles, so I needed two of each. (A Brewsy packet will process between 1.5 quarts and 1.5 gallons, but I’m not going for volume, yet.) The bottle size issue is why I did apple juice first – the Kroger juice is a 64oz bottle, and it is processing in the actual bottle.

I don’t really have to obsess about 100% juice, since some of my co-vintners are fermenting Hawaiian Punch and Dr Pepper, but I haven’t been that brave yet.

This was going to be the same simple procedure as yesterday, and I was going to do Cranberry, since that is supposed to be your first project, and I was running back and forth, checking the Sweetness Calculator, and trying to learn how to use my hydrometer, and measuring sugar and a lot of other steps. Plus, the added “complexity” of fermenting in a bottle other than the bottle the juice came in.

The process still went well, I don’t really believe the specific gravity reading, but I will ask for help on that later. I’m pretty sure I did something wrong or I can’t read. I really need to remember to get large print everything from now on.

So, everything mixed, sugar measured, juice measured, magic packet added, dogs tripped over, and it’s in the closet, ready to become wine. Whew.

Then, Virginia said, “Hey, you used one bottle of Black Cherry and one bottle of Cranberry!”

She was drinking the juice I had left out to leave headspace, so I said, “Wait! What juice are you drinking?” She said, “It’s cranberry and it’s tart.”

So, we have a mistaken mixture, or what a vintner would call a “blend.” It is 32 ounces of Black Cherry juice and 18 ounces of Cranberry. I call it “Happy Accident”, because I don’t think I should put “Dammit!” on a wine label.

So, I have sugar measured to make Cranberry semi-sweet, when 2/3rds of the source is actually Black Cherry. This is going to be interesting.

5 Feb 2021 9:45pm

Source Juice: 32 oz RW Knudsen Just Black Cherry (100% juice), 18 oz RW Knudsen Just Cranberry.

I followed the Brewsy “semi-sweet” recipe from the Sweetness Calculator, based on Cranberry juice. We’ll see what happens.

  • Removed 14 oz of juice from the bottle – later had to figure out which bottle it was from
  • Added 229 grams sugar
  • Added one Brewsy packet

Proposed Schedule (updated with actuals):

DateTimeStepCompleteComments
Fri Feb 59:45pmFermentation Began√Here’s hoping for a happy accident
Sat Feb 6 Morning
11:55am		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√Bubbles – had to swirl the bottle to wash some yeast residue back into juice
Feb 6Afternoon
7:10pm		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√A bit late! Bubbles – still some yeasty residue on bottle, another swirl
Feb 7Evening
4:15pm		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√Bubbling happily
Mon Feb 8Afternoon
11:00am		Check for bubbles – swirl the bottle√Slowed down but still bubbles
Feb 89:45pmEarliest End for Fermentation(Will probably need more time) – Decided to leave it until morning, at least
Feb 8 9:50pmEarliest Racking after FermentationPostponedRack before Cold Crash
Feb 8 10:00pmEarliest Start for Cold CrashPostponedRemove airlock, replace cap, into fridge
Tue Feb 91:35amTaste Test√Wee bit boozy. Think I will leave it until morning and then cold crash.
Feb 99:25pmRacking √Prior to cold crashing
Feb 99:30pmCold Crash√Into the cold
Wed Feb 10 MorningChecking√Some sludge developing, will rack this evening
Feb 10EveningRackingSkipped
Thu
Feb 11		3:05pmRacking√Not too much to filter
Feb 119:30pmEarliest End for Cold CrashWe have wine!
Feb 11 9:35pm Tasting
Checkpoints – Wine-making