Five Hundred

Five hundred in a row happened today with the Wrath of the Boneyard MTB race in Meriden, CT. It lived up to it's name in spades and was one of the toughest race coursed I've done. Wet rocks galore made extra fun on the single-speed. It seemed like a good idea last night though in hindsight, the Yeti 575 would have been a very good weapon of choice.

No worries though as what doesn't kill you, and try as it might, it didn't, makes one stronger. I think that I've come to the realization though that single-speeds are a whole lot of fun to ride but really, really hurt to race. Guess I'm soft though as the real tough guys do it week in and week out.

This was a great old school course with new school layout and planning made for a tough but good course. Thanks a ton Fabian, Chris and Jill and the folks from the Meriden motorcycle club for letting us use your playground.

Day five hundred also ended a little better than day four hundred, which was spend racing in frozen slop in Louisville. Good times and good fun.

Today is also Cathy's birthday. Happy birthday to my wife and best friend. Thank you for spending another year, with me. You are my everything and I would be lost without you.

That's it.

Death by Meat

Cathy's folks came down for a visit Friday so I decided to load up the smoker again with a medley of meats. The premier cut was a big old pork loin but at staggered intervals I also threw in some chicken thighs and then some Polish beef sausage.

For wood chips I used some maple and some crab-apple from the wood pile cut into small slabs and soaked in water. Over the course of the afternoon the meats spent their time in the smoker and by 6:30PM I was set to pull them out. After a short rest I opened up the loin to find a juicy and near perfectly cooked piece of meat. The chicken although it looked to have shrunk a bit was also super juicy and tender, cooked just right as well. Even the sausage, which only had a couple of hours over the smoke and low heat was also very tasty.

Good times indeed and with the addition of some coleslaw and corn bread a great way to kick off the visit. We followed it up with a wonderful lemon cake from our friend Roni's bakery, Jake's in Nashua as well as some of her custom ice cream in group celebration of recent anniversaries, birthdays and the like. Hard to improve upon that, indeed.

Less Lawn

The old primary garden from back in the day

After many years away from the perils of home gardening, team Two Adventures has decided to jump back in, this time on a slightly smaller scale and slightly more sophisticated. Years back we got into gardening in a big way. It started out small but over the span of a few year grew to include one 20x30' garden as well as a secondary 10x20' plot. Our primary crop was potato though we also grew squash, radishes, tomato and various other things.

We never had great success with much of anything, save for the potato, green tomato and summer squash. Neither of us are huge fans of summer squash and there are only so many things that you can do with green tomato. The potato was good though and kept us from having to buy almost all fall and winter. We also used the remnants as seed for the next season.

Alas, our passions changed and we bought a vacation house in Maine, which sealed the deal on the garden. Simply no time for the nearly constant upkeep of a traditional garden, what with the weeding, watering and all and so we raked the gardens back over and planted of all things, grass. Nearly every season without fault since then we have looked longingly at other folks gardens.

New raised bed garden space

With the nearly persistent reminders discreetly coming from a MTBing Facebook friend I finally decided to dip a thumb back into the soil and see what we can get. This time though we went above ground, with a small and controlled raised bed system. Last week I put together three raised bed borders out of simple pine 2x8's with a pine strapping rail on the top to dress them up a bit. Each bed is 32x96x8" and is held together by simple lag bolts at the ends. I had a whole bunch of Danish Tungoil from some furniture builds years back so treated the frames with that in order to help slightly weatherproof them, assuming that little bit of sealant wouldn't leach badly into the soil. Guess we will see.

We have a reasonably decent size lot at our house with a full half of an acre. Unfortunately there are few spots that get constant direct sunlight due to the number of trees that we have and of course, because of the shade cast by the house. With that in mind as well as ease of watering, which we plan to do via rain barrels from the gutter down spouts on the back of the house, our choices were somewhat limited. We settled on a spot that was fairly close to the where the barrels will go and still gets a good amount of sun. The middle of the lawn gets the most but isn't really that practical. This will probably have an effect on what we grow but it is still a good compromise.

Sort of reminds me of coffins

Rather than dig a whole ton of sod in order to get to bare soil I took the easy way out. I chose to border edge the plot where the beds will go, mow the grass really low, put landscape cloth over the entire area then mulch it once the frames were back in. I then put a layer of peat moss down followed by a full yard of screened compost between the three beds. Once I have the rain barrels I will plumb a hose fed (manual) irrigation system and we should be ready to plant. We plan to do cucumbers as the cats can not get enough of them. I'm thinking that I will make a slanted wire mesh screen for them to climb up on one and of one bed and plant lettuce in the other end. We will also do winter squash, but are thinking about starting a small natural garden out back for that and just letting them go. Lastly, I think we are going to try potato in a hanging bag and see what happens.

Who knows, we may end up with nothing but at least it will mean less lawn to mow.

What's for Dinner

Picked up a rack of pork spare ribs this morning at the grocery store. We haven't been buying them very often lately but instead we've been getting individually sliced country ribs. The latter are typically rubbed and cooked on the grill sauced. The former however, work best on the smoker.

Mid day I rubbed the rack with a traditional blend of spice and brown sugar and let them sweat in the fridge for a couple of hours. At the same time I cut up some maple and apple into small pieces, threw them into a bucket and added water so they would soak. At about 2PM I cranked the smoker up, loaded the wood and then put the ribs in for the afternoon. With a couple hours to go I threw some sauce on so it could candy a bit to the good bark that I had going already.

2hrs sweating in the rub, 5hrs in the smoker and viola

Just before 7PM I pulled them out, let them rest a bit and then we ate. Very good stuff, nothing terribly fancy, but well worth the effort.