Quoting Michael Loo to Jim Weller <=-

Whenever I fry diced potatoes I add onion (or chopped leek if I have
onion hand), garlic, celery, a mixture of sweet and hot red and
green peppers and a wee bit of animal protein, usually something pork.

Potatoes O'Brien we call it, even those of us who
don't eat the things.

For some reason I thought Potatoes O'Brien was a baked in the oven
potato dish with melted shredded cheese on top. But I looked it up
and I now realize the error of my ways. It turns out I've been
making them for decades

Potatoes O'Weller?

This mornings brunch dish was diced potatoes, no celery, with onion,
Caribe peppers, bell peppers, and ham seasoned with my all purpose
pork seasoning, Back Eddy steak seasoning and my own Italian mixed
herbs so basically just about everything in the spice cabinet. As an afterthought I stirred in some leftover corn. And since it was
breakfast, a fried egg on top.

From the appearance and low heat level I believe my so called Caribe
peppers are in fact Cubanelle peppers.

I'm not sure which is the right way to go, if there is one.

requiring such a short interval is going
to cramp a lot of people's style.

Frequent winter house checking and drain flushing is simply a
practical necessity in the north and everyone who comes here gets
to know that real fast.

So there must be commercial house-checking services.

There are.

if there were no tenants or bad tenants in arrears I
worked for free.

Heh. It was incentive for you as the agent to keep
the properties occupied, then.

Yep and be careful choosing tenants too.

So this is where the burden shifts. What about if
there's a theft and little or nothing is taken?

Breaking and entering makes some kind of sense,
whereas just plain breaking not so much.

Most policies have a $500 or $1000 deductible and I would never make
a small claim as I would loose my claims free discount for 5 years.

I've seen electric blanket-type arrangements for
pipes in Alaska and northern New England.

That's called heat tape.

Of course,
with a significant power out, that isn't going to do
much good, either.

They'll thaw pipes without a steamer though.

18" of attic insulation instead of the standard 12",
8" walls [...] triple glazed [...] windows [etc/

I wonder if such provisions can
be written into forward-looking building codes.

Certainly. In 2012 the City of Yellowknife adopted the Energuide
80 standard which incorporates all those features and which far
exceeds the national building code. That's why I know first hand
that construction costs go up 20% while utilities are reduced 50%.


Cheers

Jim


... I found it on Real Recipes.

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