Disabled Veterans Property Tax Exemption

So I went to the Texas Veterans Commission website thinking I would find the info about the tax exemption. Come to find out that the website I was really looking for was the Texas Veterans Portal website. I can't remember if there was a link from one to the other or not. And ultimately, even the Texas Veterans Portal took me to the Texas government website to get the information about the tax exemption--the Comptroller's website. It had the info and the form to fill out, and when I had downloaded the form then I went to see where I needed to send it, and it said to the appraiser for the property, in this case Brazos County. So then I went to that site, and as it turns out, they have an automated online form. So I had to do it all over again, but the advantage is, I was able to submit online, so I was able to check that off my list--my part anyway. Now we'll wait and see what the appraiser's office says. 

I should probably look into that license plate while I'm at it. I'm on a roll!

Bodyweight exercises

Looking at exercises on this page. Like that it shows how all the exercises are done. Contenders for today are 

Jump squat

Mountain climbers

Froggers

I also went and looked for a twisting exercise and found twisting planks. So now that's four exercises. But hey, let's cut out froggers and put in our friend the pushup.

...

Then I thought about making sure I had a back exercise in there. Because I feel like I really need that right now. And my four primary have been upper body, lower body, core and back. I was looking for that info on basic movements and found this. I'm thinking I need to revise my thinking a little. Enough research.

salsa

 I don't remember which dried chile I used last time when I made salsa, but this time I used pasilla.

Southern cornbread and buttermilk substitutes

I think this is the third time I've gone looking for this recipe, so into the blog it goes! My thing is savory cornbread. I can't remember if all southern cornbread is savory or not, but this recipe is. Interestingly, the author--Elise Bauer--mentions up front that sugar shouldn't be in cornbread, but then in the recipe she lists sugar as optional, and goes on to explain in the article that it doesn't make the cornbread sweet. I tried it and was surprised to learn that it was true.

The article also calls for a cast iron skillet. I use my cast iron skillet so much it just stays on the stove. But today I'm going to deviate because the oven is currently in use (roast beef in progress). I'll be making cornbread in the toaster oven for the first time, so I bought a 8" cake pan. We'll see how that works out. At first I thought about decreasing the recipe, but since I'm going to make more than one pan of cornbread, that isn't necessary. I think I'll go for two, so I'll follow the recipe twice and whatever is leftover will go in the third batch.

Anyway, here's the link: Southern Cornbread--Simply Recipes

And while I'm on it, I should include this link to buttermilk substitutes from allrecipes.com, since I rarely keep that around. Since I seem to keep yogurt these days, I'll just include here that 

¾ cup yogurt + ¼ cup milk = 1 cup buttermilk

asymmetrical cloning

Okay, so I came up with the bright idea of cloning disks that aren't identical. The target drive is smaller than the source drive, so this doesn't work. So I'm trying to figure out how to do this. Here's what I'm thinking right now. The source is 1 TB and the target is 500 GB. There are three partitions on the source drive. Two of them are small, around 500 MB, and the main partition takes up the rest. The order is 500 MB, ~1TB, 500 MB. So I can copy over the first and last just as they are, with the exact sizes, and then the remaining space goes to partition 2. 

Here's the actual partition information:

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type

/dev/sdb1  *          2048    1126399    1124352   549M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdb2          1126400 1952463634 1951337235 930.5G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdb3       1952464896 1953519615    1054720   515M 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE

So I played around with the numbers on a spreadsheet, and the sectors is end-start+1. And if you divide sectors by size you get 2048.

AND

Disk /dev/sdc: 465.78 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors

So, doing the math, if I subtract sdb1 and sdb3 sectors, that leaves 974594096 for my new sdb2. According to DF, only 91G of space is currently being used, so that should be plenty. Then I should be able to do a dd or something. Well a dd will work for the identical ones, but maybe not for the asymmetrical copy. Hmm...

...

Now I'm working with parted, and the sizes are different, which is making me nervous, so I think I'll go with those sizes:

Number  Start   End     Size   Type     File system  Flags

 1      1049kB  577MB   576MB  primary  ntfs         boot

 2      577MB   1000GB  999GB  primary  ntfs

 3      1000GB  1000GB  540MB  primary  ntfs         msftres

...

Now I'm using the GUI partition editor, but I screwed up in my delete and everything is right, but the big partition is sdc3 and that's making me nervous, so I'm going to delete and start over. So here are the numbers

second partition--

size 464.72 GiB

First sector 1,126,400

Last sector 975,712,255

Number of sectors 974,585,856

Third partition--welp doesn't matter because it's copy paste.

Nice versus kind

I'm not sure if I've made this distinction before here, but it is very significant. I went to YouTube and found some very quick examples:

Being "Nice" vs. Being Kind

The thing that stood out with what Andrew Blum said is that being nice is really about you, not the other person. It's about making you feel more comfortable by avoiding confrontation. I like how he called the alternative courageous.

Being nice vs being kind

The thing that stood out in Mark Walsh's explanation is that sometimes niceness and kindness are the same thing, but not always. The photocopy of compassion.

Curry 101

Okay, I've looked this up WAY too many times. I keep Googling 'Curry 101' and not finding the page that I'm looking for. Just now I changed it to 'Curry 101 basics' and that worked. Anyway, the page I was looking for is The Complete Guide to Making Indian Curries at Home from First We Feast.