For $15, you get a giant cup of feed for the donkeys, fallow deer, ostrich, sheep, and goats.  You also get three tokens that work in three different spots to feed the chickens, rabbits, and ducks.  They give you a cup of nectar to feed the rainbow lorakeets.  The lorakeets are a lot of fun.  They will sit right on your hand (or arm, or shoulder, or head), and drink the nectar right from the cup while you hold it.  Finally, you also get a token redeemable for some sliced squid so you can feed the STINGRAYS.  All of the animals are amazing, but the stingrays are worth the price of admission alone.  You place a slice of squid between your fingers and put your hand underwater.  An obliging stingray will float up to your hand and vacuum it up for you.  It’s a really strange sensation, but these guys are sooooo soft and gentle.

All of the staff are extremely friendly, and it’s obvious that they care deeply for all of the animals in their care.

This is literally one of my favorite places on the entire planet.  I highly recommend you stop by if you’re anywhere near Phoenix or Tucson.

Phone: (512) 517-6620
Address: 2901 TX-29, Bertram, TX 78605

Highway 29 RV Rescue is the FlexArmor dealer closest to me.  They offer a full range of RV service in addition to FlexArmor application.  They’ve got a bunch of real nice folks over there.  Give them a call if you’re in the area and need a rescue or if you want to talk about getting a roof with a lifetime leak-free guarantee.

For more information on FlexArmor, check out the FlexArmor website.

What would drive a man to such outlandish, nonsensical cookery? Youtube, duh…I’m subscribed to Townsends channel, where they “explore the 18th century lifestyle“.

This video came up on my feed, so I gave it a watch…

When he says it was the best pork chop he’s ever had, well, he was just so enthusiastic about it I had to see what he was on about. So, I mixed up a batch in rough proportions described by the video:

• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
• 6 tsp kosher salt

I gave it a try and decided to put in another couple teaspoons of salt. I also ground up an anise pod and added maybe 1/4 of the resulting powder. The result was an unexpectedly nice balance of salty, savory, a little sweet, and spice from the cloves and anise, but am I really supposed to put this stuff on MEAT? ACTUAL MEAT? CLOVES AND NUTMEG ON MEAT?

I had some pork chops in the fridge, so I let them come up to room temp, slathered them with kitchen pepper in rough amounts as demonstrated in the video, and slapped them on my cast iron with a little ghee for lubrication. Made a pan sauce with the leavings from some chicken stock and white wine, whipped up some instant mashed potatoes (don’t judge me – they’re easy and delicious), and piled it all up on a plate with some applesauce on top.

I’ll be damned if that wasn’t one of the best pork chops I’ve ever had. All of the flavors that I expected to work against themselves on meat actually go together really well. This was an unexpected treat. I have since done up a couple of ribeyes with Kitchen Pepper to great success.

    # Enable profiler output if FLASK_PROFILE_DIR is set
    flask_profile_dir = os.environ.get('FLASK_PROFILE_DIR', None)
    if flask_profile_dir:
        import pstats
        from werkzeug.middleware.profiler import ProfilerMiddleware
        app.wsgi_app = ProfilerMiddleware(
                            app.wsgi_app,
                            stream=None,
                            profile_dir=flask_profile_dir,
                            sort_by=pstats.SortKey.CUMULATIVE)

Drop this little block of code in your create_app() (or whatever equivalent function you’re calling) and whenever Flask is loaded with the FLASK_PROFILE_DIR environment variable set it will write profiling information to the specified directory for each call:

GET.bootstrap.static.css.bootstrap.min.css.8191ms.1610040075.prof
GET.bootstrap.static.css.fontawesome-all.min.css.8196ms.1610040075.prof
GET.bootstrap.static.jquery.min.js.8230ms.1610040075.prof

The directory must exist ahead of time since the code does not create it; a simple exercise left to the reader if you want the script to handle directory creation for you.

.prof files are not human-readable, so you’ll need to install a utility to translate them for you. SnakeViz is a pretty nice little utility to accomplish this. It will parse the .prof file, spawn a web server on localhost:8080, then open a new browser window to it for you. At the top of the page you will see the call stack:

You can click on the different options to get different views of the data. There are icicle (shown) and sunburst layouts available. Clicking on any of the colored boxes will zoom down into that portion of the call stack. Take some time to try it out and click around. There’s a lot of good info available here.

In my case, I was trying to determine why my application was taking 7-8 seconds to load a single page in a staging environment as opposed to the 200 milliseconds I’m accustomed to in my development environment. Looking at the call stack, it’s readily apparent that MongoDB calls are taking the bulk of the time. Also, note that the MongoDB calls taking so long all have sessions.py above them in the call stack. This tipped me off to look at the flask_sessions collection, which had bloated to over 1.8M documents. After drop()ing the collection, my staging site immediately sprang to life and was delivering the performance I expected. I’m still not sure how the collection got that big, but I expect it has something to do with some shitty code I wrote when hammering out the auth module originally.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have a different method that works better for you.