Firsts of the Season

I've been noticing firsts this year, many related to cycling. First ride after the long, bitter winter. March 6, 2010.

First time I got lost/boxed myself into a longer ride than intended. That happened on March 28. First toe cramp trying to keep up on the bicycle, April 8.



First time I've grilled in way too long, tonight. Normally I'll grill even in hard weather, and I did grill some chicken breasts the other day but it wasn't the same.



Tonight was the first burger & brat festival to grace my grill. I don't think I was the only one with this idea, judging from the smell of my neighborhood. Or the fact I had to buy name brand hot dog buns when the Wal-Mart house brand turned out to be sold out.



There's a lot of food on this plate, and full disclosure, my eyes got too big for my stomach. I had eggs and toast for brunch and that served me well enough on my hill ride, but by the time I shopped, got the grill going, prepped everything and cooked my stomach thought my throat was cut. So before you start lecturing the fat bastard about eating so much, I didn't clean my plate, though I did manage to do in all the produce shown here (along with some I nibbled as I prepped).

Hill Ride from Mom's

Far from the longest route I could have picked, this was a workout. The original plan was Switzer to County Line Road to Shawnee Drive, but County Line Road is torn up, so I continued up 55th into KCK. 55th has it's moments, hill wise, as does Oak Grove Road, see also Shawnee Drive.

Not to mention going downhill on 18th. I topped out at 36.3 mph but that was because I had to be careful not to build up more speed than I could stop from at the bottom, where it intersects with Merriam Lane. It's a little rough in the transition and crossing the tracks, but 18th Street turns into Foxridge on the JoCo side and that offers it's own punishing hills. It wasn't until the second of these that I finally had to move the chain by hand to get into that Ultimate Granny Gear of mine.



14.5 miles, averaged a lousy 10.1 mph, but that's due to a lot of climbing at 3 and 4 mph.

It's funny, growing up in Johnson County, you heard things about KCK, especially about the Turner school district. But riding up through Turner, if I didn't know I'd crossed the boundary, it was indistinguishable from Johnson County. Nice houses, clean neighborhoods, well maintained streets.



Then, coming down 47th I saw a discarded hypodermic syringe in the gutter and I thought, well that's one difference between here and Johnson County. Not that Johnson Countians don't do drugs, I've smelled plenty of reefer wafting from car windows and over privacy fences on rides through affluent parts of Shawnee and Lenexa.

No, the big difference is our IV drug addicts pick up after themselves.

Or maybe it was just the detritus of a diabetic slob. Maybe.

Yep, Again

The girls both wanted to go to Moon Marble even though the weather begged us to come outside and play.





They had champagne flutes on a scale with my favorite beer mug.







And inevitably lots of great handmade marbles.











Above is a premonition: it's what my garage workbench will look like a few months after I someday buy a torch and some glass and start trying to make marbles myself. I need another expensive hobby like Bombshell McGee needs more tattoos, but as with her ink, I'm sure it's more a question of when than of if.

Not Quite So Great Anymore Mall

I needed minutes for my cell phone, and while we were there we walked a lap around the Great Mall.



That joint is dead. All of maybe four outlets open in the food court, the rest shuttered up. J.M.Porters has a display in about every fifth retail unit, but with the bars down, for window shopping only. A Firefighting museum and a model train museum are in units that once had actual retailers.

There's a church in what used to be a Soutwest decor shop, and they still have the Southwestern stuff, it's just the church's furniture now.



They can't even attract a Christian Science Reading Room or Libertarian Party Headquarters.



It's kinda of cool, some of the stuff to see, but there's so much of it that's utterly marginal, they must be practically giving the space away.

Moose Meatball

I'm not sure where this saying came from entirely. There was a setup TV show, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, I caught one time where one of the things the actor 'family members' of the groom side did to make it hot for the bride's real family was to greet each other with 'moose!' salutes.

To do this, they'd raise their shirts and make 'ok' signs around their nipples with their fingers sticking out to make the rack and shout, 'Moose!'

Emily contributed the 'meatball' part, and I think it was something she picked up from a friend at school. But if I pulled up my shirt and went 'Moose!' she'd avert her gaze and say, 'Meatball.'



Which has nothing to do with anything, I rode the Blue Moose ride, sort of, tonight. As usual, cutting across Roeland Park to bypass the maniacal climb into KCK (and subsequent glide down what the sign claims is 14th Street but anyone can see is actually a collection of bomb craters).

The Animals passed me and Lawn Chair Larry around 69th and Lamar. My goal is to have them pass me at progressively later spots on the route. I wonder if I can get to where they don't fly past me until Somerset.

Larry did a much better job than I did at keeping in shape this winter. The guy I remember showing up on his Lightning recumbent (the feet-first bicycle is where he got his nickname, it's a lawn chair on wheels) in October was much easier to keep up with.

I'm trying, so far with little success, to get a regular group of sub-Animal riders to hit this ride and form a no drop alternate for beginning to intermediate riders. I can't always ride on Thursdays, but three out of four weeks of the month I generally can. If, by some miracle, you are slower than me, I'll wait at the tops of hills and whatnot. I don't know what that's like, but if you're really out of shape I'll bring a crossword puzzle along or something.

15.6 miles, average speed 12.6 mph, top speed 34.0 mph (don't tell the cops, that was coming down Cherokee on the final descent and it's posted 25).

Speaking of that final descent, I was amused when a Nissan Altima swung around to pass me near the top of the hill. I thought, I think I'm fixin' to ride a bit faster than you're fixin' to drive. And a short while later, as the hill got steeper, it came to pass. I left him standing still.

Stereotypes: Maybe They're True After All

I've followed, more with morbid curiosity than real interest, the case of Constance McMillen, the Mississippi high school student who made the mistake of asking permission from the so-called authorities to be her self and was told, in as many words, 'No.'

The ACLU, and I have no love for that bunch of asshead lawyers but even assheads are sometimes right, sued on her behalf and got a ruling in her favor, but since a 'private prom' was already planned the judge didn't make the backward hillbillies who apparently run this school district put the party back on.

Big mistake, judge. The 'private' organizers pretended they were doing what the law and common decency requires, while staging an elaborate hoax in which this poor girl and a half dozen or so other kids showed up at the wrong place while the supposedly 'normal' kids got to have their heterosexual only prom without the 'distraction' of a chick in a tux with a female date.

Parents, and from what I can tell, school administrators were in on this cruel and senseless prank. These are adults, adults who probably believe I should fear my children being in contact with gays. I fear my children being in contact with the kind of immature, bigoted jerks who would help their children pull a stunt like this.



I know, some of you just say, 'I don't agree with that.' Which is bullshit. I didn't choose to be straight anymore than this chick chose be queer and if you think choice enters into it you're obviously bisexual and should not be trying to impose half of your natural instinct on someone else. A girl in a tux dancing with another girl is not hurting anyone. You want to protect your 18 year old offspring from such a sight? Good luck if that person is going to live outside some hick enclave of Mississippi or attend a college of some sort.

Some stereotypes seem to have a basis in reality. Whatever these people might think of teenage lesbians, all people in Mississippi are ignorant hayseeds who brush their tooth with their finger until proven otherwise.

Somebody's Havin' a Monday...

So a big rainstorm starts up right as I get on the highway causing numerous accidents and backing up traffic. Okay, the rain didn't cause the wrecks, bad driving did, but it was probably bad driving that would have gotten by on dry roads.

Then a block and a half from work I had a blow out.

First job I had to run on the DocuColor, out of the gate it jammed so badly and bizarrely I actually had to have a Xerox Tech come out and clear it, it was impossible without disassembling part of the machine to clear all the scraps of paper. See also the job that was running when I went to lunch; I come back and the machine as gone into 'Fatal Error' and won't even tell me how many clicks ran before the glitch.

See also the black bean soup I brought for lunch, frozen leftovers from when the plains were black with buffalo. It was a batch I had too free a hand with the cayenne I realized as the sweat poured off me and tears ran down my cheeks, but that realization was after I dribbled the first sip of it down my shirt and had to rinse that in the sink to prevent a stain. I bibbed in Jethro-style after that, and promptly had a near miss with choking on this over-spiced (though still pretty tasty) comestible.

I was half afraid to ride the Trek Recovery Ride because the way things had gone, I figured I'd get hit by a derailed train or something.

As it happens, some new, cool people showed up and so did my brother, and a good time was had by all. A year ago I hadn't done anything that looked like a workout on a regular basis in a good six years. I'm still slow, I still huff and puff up those hills, but I think it's progress that a good ride with good friends seems to erase sins of the day.

A margarita seems to help quite a bit, too. Those special margaritas from Dos Reales...

Still, I couldn't help thinking, Everything went wrong until I got on the bike.

I can't do the Brewery Ride tomorrow, though. Gotta get a new tire — it sucks driving side streets on a doughnut spare to commute.

Inspriation...

I have a dead tree in my back yard that needs felled. Actually I may have a couple.



Anyway, I was going to take them down to stumps and then Todd the Tree Man inspired me. I think I'll take them down to six feet and see if I can't make some folk art with a chainsaw. If it goes badly, I can always lop it down nearer to the ground.



If it goes well, maybe a little Easter Island action will keep the squirrels and deer away from my tomatoes? Okay, probably not.

But I'm such a sucker for folk art, why is it I haven't done any in my yard?

Screw It!

Okay, I bought wood screws to go with the Yellawood I'm making my raised beds out of. I got home and found my Phillips head didn't fit the screw and went back to Home Depot.



'You need a #2 for those,' the guy said. 'Terrible system. When we sold those screws with our decking we sold a ton of screw extractors.'



I hadn't seen deck screws over by the pressure treated joists I bought. That's why I had headed to the hardware section and selected 3" wood screws.



He sold me a head that fits them, and what can I say? I'm the first to admit I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but of the corners I've done so far, I only have one that doesn't have a stripped out, partially in screw or two (or three) sticking out. I can bend them over with a hammer or cut them off with a hacksaw (or dodge them all summer), but damn. Is pressure treated lumber that much harder to screw into? Or should somebody have their nuts cut off before they pass the Stupid Gene to the next generation? That someone being whoever cooked up this lame-ass screw.

With ones that I had to give up on but do no work of value on the joints, I didn't have enough screws to finish so I called it off. I'll get some of whatever they sell as deck screws to finish and then figure out if hitting shit with a hammer or bobbing things off with a hacksaw or my Dremel is less effort...

I Bowled a 206!

Easter at my Dad's house. I have about a hundred and fifty nephews judging from the noise. And we adults are adept at shouting over the din and making the whole scene louder than bombs.



Oh, and there was a nephew's birthday folded into the event. It could be worse, he could be a Christmas baby like the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster who was always told a few days before Christmas to pick out something from under the tree for her birthday.



Lots of great food, and Grandpa Calvin attempted to fly the helicopter even though it turned out to be way to windy for that. And lots of Wii time.

One of my nephews things he's unbeatable at baseball on the Wii. I had fun heckling him, but even more fun beating him at bowling. I bowled a 206, which is pretty amazing since in real life, I think I've only broken 100 once, and not by much (I think it was a 115).



For sure, you know you're divorced from reality when someone like me thinks an open frame is a tragedy instead of the norm.

My arms are so sore from yesterday's lumberjacking adventures in the back yard I about couldn't play.



It was great, though. Faced with a 7-10 split, my sister in law said, 'Now he's got to make the Vampire Spare.' And her husband, without missing a beat, channeled Count Von Count and said, 'Aha, I vant to suck at bowling!'




I know, it's not as funny in print, you had to be there. Glad I was, and though I did very well for myself at bowling, I did not in fact get the Vampire Spare.

What, No Ostriches???

Stride Mystery Gum. Got a pack on Friday, and I can see why they call it 'Mystery.'



It's a generic berry flavor mixed with a generic citrus flavor mixed with mint. Anyberry-Citrus-Mint probably wouldn't sell so well.

So there, I blogged it, now let the Austrians on Ostriches come crashing through my walls to tell me to zip it.

I Know, My 'After' Pic is Most Folks' 'Before' Pic

Until this whole tomato garden fascination fired up, I'd always resented my yard.



A lawn is a high maintenance girlfriend who won't put out. It doesn't do me any good, yet I'm required to do stuff to maintain it.



For years my fantasy has been to pave it over. Or, since my two beds of Lillies are the one thing that looks good after 13 years, 13 years in which I've done nothing but look at the Lillies, I've thought maybe I should just put Lilly bulbs everywhere and let the whole lawn become a Lilly bed.



Minimum effort has been my M.O. when it comes to yard work. I mow the lawn when I start to fear the city might do it for me and then charge a premium rate for lawn care. All the while fantasizing about what has been my dream house since high school, a gas station with garage bays converted into a house. Plenty of parking when you entertain and you never have to mow the grass because it's a parking lot.




So now the need for 'full sun' had me out with my chainsaw playing lumberjack. I had two and a half dead trees back there, plus a maple bush that grew back after the Asplunde guys took a maple tree to the ground. They wanted to just top it, but I said you might as well take the whole thing, I don't want it.



Thing is, the Asplunde guys are charged with keeping the power lines clear, they're not into stump removal and the thing became a bush.

I've got five trash cans full to overflowing with branches and logs, and there's still at least that much shit still in my back yard waiting to be hauled off and that's with most of two whole dead trees still standing.

My forearms are twitchy and sore, I can barely make a fist. And I still have those beds to build, so I'm not buying compost tomorrow even if I did have a friend with a truck they're not afraid to haul stuff in available for an Easter run to Suburban Lawn & Garden.

Hilly Shortish Ride

I did a 15 miler today, a light ride but I had much gardening to do after.

Coming up Puckett out of KCKC, I had to get off and walk the bike. I went from praying the I'd be able to shift to my Ultimate Granny Gear to forcing it and still not being able to ride it out. I was huffing and puffing just walking my bike up this road, it was insane.

Not a great ride, but not terrible if you still want to play lumberjack in your back yard after...

Tomatosaurus Rex Taking Shape

I visited my dealer, the guy I'll buy buying a bunch of heirloom tomatoes (and some peppers) from in a few weeks. He offered to show me his setup and give me some helpful tips and since my successful agricultural activities are limited to a couple seasons beekeeping and three tomato plants, and since my failures in this area are too numerous to list...





I'm more than a little impressed. In five years, this high school teacher has gone from growing a few tomatoes for himself to full on semi-pro nursery.





Growing tomatoes and whatnot from seed in his greenhouse and a grow box made with a discarded glass door and some 2x4s, he's able to fund his own gardening addiction, do missionary work (addicting others), and to hear him tell it provide him with hours of pleasantly diverting tasks nursing the seedlings along and separating them into 2500 Styrofoam cups.



He showed me his rain barrel setup and drip irrigation fed by it, his raised beds and gave me absolutely gobs of advice about how to set up a raised bed that works on the cheap and where to get good compost in bulk.



I'm going to have to try some of the many varieties of basil he's got on offer, too.



My Tomatosaurus Rex plans have already been revised heavily in light of his advice. I'm not going to give the Micro Tom that only gets six inches tall its own plot in the garden when I can grow it in a pot. I'll add another indeterminate in its place in all likelihood. And since discovering that my railroad ties are both more rotten and harder to move than I anticipated, my one long bed has been replaced by three 4x8's.



I really love these 'Texas' cages. They're collapsible, made of stainless steel and designed to interlock so you can stack as many as you need for a monster indeterminate like the Mortgage Lifter. At $22 a unit, I don't see any coming to my garden this year, I'm trying to figure out if I can build a cage out of PVC on the cheap or if I'm stuck with trying to come up with a robust staking system.





Not that I have to worry about cages yet. It's too early to put the plants out even if I tried to get him to sell them already. And even if he did sell them to me, they haven't outgrown a coffee cup yet.

Tentative Plan

In 1993 I put in an ambitious garden, a 24 x 30 plot in the back yard of our house in the Northeast.

Then the frost got the peppers and tomatoes, which was followed by 40 days and 40 nights of rain that drowned pretty much everything else. One day the sun came out and we suddenly had knee-high radish tops. The artist formerly known as Frau Lobster and I frantically harvested these radishes which were the size of Jonathan apples.

But they were woody and flavorless, waterlogged and more or less inedible.

Then there was the time I tried to grow a Big Max pumpkin and forgot the sprinklers were running one afternoon and drowned those plants.

I have, though, successfully grown tomatoes, three or four years ago when my Dad had some extra plants he didn't want to put out.



There's so many varieties I want to try, but my means are limited. I'm trying to find someone with a pickup truck who wouldn't mind helping haul some compost to my house this weekend. I got a tip that instead of buying $10 bags of potting soil, I should head to Suburban Lawn & Garden where you can get a cubic yard (a pickup truck bed full) for $40. With the railroad ties I already have around what used to be flower beds in my back yard, and what my dealer will charge me for the plants, I can get this whole thing done for under $100.

My friends at Tomato Town got me into this, and their sampler bag is why so many varieties. Small purple tomatoes, big yellow tomatoes, some are striped, ribbed or shaped like peppers.

And speaking of peppers, as long as I'm at it, I figured I'd put out a few of those as well. I'm drawing the line at onions, garlic and cilantro, these 24 plants will keep me plenty busy. I can buy those other three things in August when it gets to be Salsa Season. See also Chutney Season. See also Pasta Sauce Season. Because they're perishable and you can only eat so many BLTs and tomato salads.