I picked up my Victorio Grain Mill today. It seems that it came in a few days ago and the Canada Post delivery slip got stuffed in the bottom of my mailbox.

The reviews on this are uniformly positive. So what are my thoughts?
- It is slim, compact, and designed so that the clamp slides up into the body and the hopped covers the clamp. The only piece that doesn't slot nicely together is the handle and that's not huge. You could pack this into a BOB, to be honest, and barely notice it.
- There is absolutely no worries about putting it together wrong. There is only one way that this goes together and it's easy. The design is simple.
- It makes beautifully light flour, and it can be used for everything from grains to nuts to spices. Presumably coffee, too.
- The handle is easy to turn. My 4 year old can do it and get flour, albeit very slowly.
- I'm going to get nice arms if I keep using this. (This is a plus and a negative!)

Okay, the negatives.
- Remember I said Explosion can get grain slowly? Yea, me, too. Mr. D had a try and filled a soup bowl in just a few minutes. The faster you turn the handle, the faster you get flour, and fast turning requires muscles. I'm sure I'll get faster as I get used to using this.
- The best way to keep the flour flowing is to constantly stir the grains in the hopper. Otherwise, they just sit against the grinding mechanism and don't move. That's a little annoying, and I consider it a bit of a design flaw. The reason is that the flour exits to the side, like a meat grinder, instead of the grains dropping on top of the grinding mechanism and exiting at the bottom. A little help from gravity would be good with this. Mr D realized that we could stir the grains with a fork while grinding.
- Even if you have strong arm muscles, their claim that you can get 1/2 cup of fine flour per minute is a bit extreme. That would mean 30 cups if you ground constantly for an hour, and I just don't believe that. I'll see if I can time Mr D sometime soon. I'm willing to be wrong.

In short - if you're a peak oil prepper, this is a good, sturdy, simple grain mill for a good price, and if you can't imagine yourself forking out hundreds of dollars for a really great machine, I do recommend this. Just be warned that it takes a lot of cranking to make flour.

Now in other news - I want to thank all of you for your prayers and thoughts. I always appreciate them. Because it's a holiday weekend here in Ontario (Family Day is tomorrow/Monday), the absolutely earliest I'll hear from the doctor would be Tuesday, but I expect that he won't even get the lab results until the middle of the week. So in the meantime, we're trying not to worry too much!

Mr D and I have decided that our main focus right now is finding out what's wrong with Explosion. Mr D's sleep apnea is clearly not serious, despite the doctor's attempts to terrify us into rushing out and buying a CPAP machine. Not breathing 13 times per hour is nothing compared to Exile's 38-40 times. According to the Lung Society, 5-15 episodes is "mild", 15-30 is "moderate" and over 30 is "severe". We're going to put a humidifier in the bedroom and make sure he sleeps on his side.