Theft!

My Chiefs magnet has been stolen. This is the second one I've had, and it really pisses me off. Besides the fact that I bought the thing, I've also paid for it with years of grief from fair weather fans who ridicule me for supporting my football team.

Wow

The past couple of years, Em's choir concerts have featured girls who sang and boys who grunted in a monotone while appearing mortified that someone might actually hear them or even see them on the stage.

So when Em enrolled in Trouble Choir, which is made up entirely of girls, I thought, What a brilliant idea.



But of course the Trouble Choir wasn't the whole show, this was the whole choral music program, what they've been able to work up after seven whole rehearsals. And, no kidding, it was the best choir concert I've ever been to.

Bar none, ever.



Including the boys. I don't know how much of it is the difference in choir teachers, the guy Em has now that she's at the high school really seems to know how to get the kids to turn loose and perform. He also seems to understand how to not pick material guaranteed to turn any teenager off. Some of it, I'm sure, is that the boys are older, but what, a year in some cases? It doesn't seem like 12 months of age could make this much difference.



Because it's shooting a bullet versus throwing one.



And then, of course, came dessert.

Trouble Choir Truffles

Em has a dessert concert tonight, the high school's Trouble Choir.* I was going to try and make caramels with sea salt embedded in them. Saw Alton Brown doing that on Food Network one night and, realizing I had everything in the house to do it myself, I had to restrain myself from making a batch of caramels.



Because I know myself well enough to know that making a batch of caramels at midnight would mean having consumed most of a batch of caramels by 1:30, adding guilt and weight gain to sleeplessness when I dragged my ass to work the next morning.



Em thought they sounded gross, so I offered to make Oreo truffles instead, knowing she loves them (who doesn't?) and that I've made them before so there's less risk I'd screw it up completely and end up bringing store-bought cupcakes to the concert.



Originally, I planned to make some coated in milk chocolate, some in chocolate with orange zest and some with sea salt embedded in the top.



Then I ran out of melted chocolate halfway through the batch and had to run to the store for a second bag of chips. By the time I got home, I just wanted to finish. I did sprinkle some sea salt over a few of them. Em's pretty skeptical of those, but really, it's a great enhancement, entirely worth the extra sodium.



Oh, the reason there are candy sprinkles in the first pic but not on the truffles, Mo seems to have pulled a fast one, grabbed the candy sprinkles when I wasn't looking, downed them all and threw the empty bottle in the trash. The little butt-head.

Recipe-wise, I've made these before, though it's been awhile. The effect is very convincingly truffle: one package of Oreos, eight ounces softened cream cheese, blended into a paste; coat with melted chocolate. I added a tablespoon of vanilla to the interiors this time and a dash of salt. After I formed the cores, I stuck them in the freezer for about 45 minutes to harden them a bit before coating them; likewise the finished candies for a half hour or so and then moved them to the fridge to keep the shells hard until it was time to go. In the winter time, this last step would be unnecessary, but when it's over 80ºF in the kitchen, yeah. Not to mention there's cream cheese in there.


*It's really called Treble Choir, but really, a choir consisting entirely of teenage girls?

Zen Pizza (Sorta)

I made a black olive with Alfredo for the girls, then couldn't decide what to do for my pie. I had leftover hamburger from making cheeseburgers, not much, but a little nugget of ground beef that wasn't quite thawed and thus didn't become patties on the grill.



I'm not much for hamburger as a pizza topping, but mix in a jar of pesto and it's not bad. Then I had some jalapeños, Paul Robeson and Limmony tomatoes and three kinds of basil from my garden (Sweet Italian, Thai Magic and Purple Stem), so there was that. Some olives left over from the girls' pizza. Half a red onion which I caramelized with some dried fenugreek and minced garlic.



What the hell, why not throw a tin of anchovies in as long as we're breaking two of my cardinal rules of pizza making:

1) Keep it simple, stupid.
2) Go easy on the toppings.

I make a thin crust, and generally you want it lightly topped to ensure the slice has some structural stability. Plus, cooking at extremely high temperatures, (550ºF for about four minutes), a thick pie threatens to not really cook through before the crust starts to scorch. And some of the most delicious combinations are utterly simple: bacon, fig and gorgonzola with caramelized onions is about as complicated as I normally get. Pizza Margherita, shrimp scampi, chicken carbonara, these are simple things.

On the plus side, this complicated supreme type thing is colorful. And managed to be pretty stable despite being overloaded. And since the pesto meat sauce and caramelized onions went on hot, all the cooking that was really required was to cook the dough and melt the cheese.

It's good. It'd be better with hot Italian sausage instead of hamburger, but I worked with what I had.

And the combination reminds me of that bad joke about the Buddhist monk and the hot dog vendor, the monk saying, 'Make me one with everything.

Which reminds me, in terms of complicated food, I keep meaning to try an Indian pizza, say my Goan shrimp curry made into a pie...

I'm Cold and Wet, Please SPONSOR ME!

For real, people, will ya sponsor me for Bike MS? It's coming up in a couple weeks here (September 25/26), and I'm still shy of the minimum fundraising to even ride. I'll do the hard part, around 182 miles in two days on a bicycle, sleeping in a tent that Saturday night. You do the easy part, pony up a little loot.

Those of you who have already ponied up, thank you a million times over. Especially (and you know who you are) the one who wanted to give something even though she's been out of work for over a year and threw five bucks in the kitty.

For the rest of you, I hope this will inspire you to give:

Tonight's 'training ride' (last season, I called all my rides 'training rides,' though I've gotten to be enough of a cycling enthusiast I just want to ride every chance I get) was the Blue Moose ride, and me and Roj did it in the rain. Around 19 miles, it's normally a situation where I struggle to keep up with the herd and get dropped about, oh, a quarter of a mile into it. Tonight, the five or six other riders who showed up asked us if we wanted them to wait (I was still jacking with my bike bag and whatnot when 6:30 came), and I told them I was too slow to keep up with them anyway, and they rolled out.



My thinking wasn't that I could go for a 20 mile ride in the rain. My thinking was weather.com claimed only a 10% chance of rain for the window the ride would occur in and Roj looked at radar and said it looked like shit was breaking up.

So I imagined that by the time we crossed into KCK, it would be overcast, mid-60s and dry.

Two out of three? It drizzled, misted and rained pretty much the whole ride. The temperature was warm enough that it wasn't unpleasant; ten degrees cooler and we'd have frozen our asses off. But no blazing fast descents down Puckett or anything like that. Actually, I coasted down that hill breathing the fumes of a UPS van who would have been difficult to pass if the road had been dry and I was wanting to fly.

Anyway, I reasoned that it could rain on Bike MS and I'll still have to ride, so I might as well get the practice riding on wet roads with water beading on my glasses. It could have been much worse, it could have rained harder or been cold to boot, so ride carefully and call it 'training.'

The rain slowed us down, no personal records for speed tonight, meaning we finished in the dark as well as the wet. And coming down Cherokee at the end, I almost got hit by an asshead in a car. A Ford Focus, I think. He was turning left, and seemed to have stopped, realizing I was coming and had the right of way. Then right when I got there, he turned in front of me and I barely had enough brake to avoid the collision.

I shouted some choice words in his direction, so if you live in Prairie Village around 71st and Mission, sorry if your kids learned some new words this evening. This was by far the closest call I've ever had on the bike, and it was so mind-bogglingly, inexcusably stupid it didn't so much frighten me as make me mad enough to fight.

No, It's Not A Race! ;)

Mission Farms ride tonight, 17 miles and this is one well organized ride. Caroline hands out turn lists, designates sweepers and leaders, and stresses safety and the rules of the road.

Everyone seemed to be complaining about being tired and/or sore, most of them from yesterdays Brain ride, me from the Giro d'Hell with Roj, 45 miles of hills, headwinds and rain.

Everyone was taking it easy, it seems, except me. I decided to see how long I could stay with the main group, which turned out to be pretty much all the way so long as I changed colors and saw spots.

My lungs burned, I huffed and puffed and every time I was sure I wouldn't make a light the group made, I did. Which meant I was still keeping up, but also meant a breather lost.

Then, as we got to the downhill/return part of the trip, I saw my average speed was 15.4 mph.

That's faster than my average speed outside the airport pretty much ever. I did 15.4 on 8/17 in Gardner on a relatively flat course, and I've occasionally done better than 14, but except for the downtown airport on June 12 of this year, when I did 16.0 on a nearly flat course for 22 miles, I've never gone anywhere near that fast for any distance.

So I poured it on. I huffed and puffed and stood on it and called out 'on your left' to the occasional rider, and absolutely killed myself trying to get 16.0 to show up on my average speed. Managed to get it to a mere 15.9 mph, at which point the spots I was seeing did that warp speed jump thing and turned into lines as I came into the Mission Farms parking lot.

People always tell me to get a road bike, it'll make the difference. But my goal is to get to 17 or 18 miles an hour average on my hybrid first. Then, when I can afford a road bike, I'll be able to keep up with anyone.

Giro d'Hell

Most folks seem to just intuit that I'm not the piper to follow. I map out rides and invite people and generally, I'm the whole group that shows up.

This promised to be a little different, Dr. Jill expressed interest, Kitty RSVP'd that she was probably game, and Roj, well, a guy that does RAGBRAI on a BMX, it's hard to propose something too crazy for that guy.

I didn't think I was too crazy, I thought we'd leave at four and in four hours we'd be able to cover the 42-ish miles my map outlined. Back before dark and all that.



Everyone but Roj ended up in the Regrets column, and I guess Roj ended up there in a way. As in, I bet he regrets showing up. His sister called, while I waited, and said he'd just gotten to her place and was worried I'd leave without him, but really, without him I was the whole group.



She sent some awesome smelling Cascade hops she grew in her back yard, so Roj showed up looking every bit the bicycle messenger for the pot distributor, with the little baggie of herb clutched in his hand.





We didn't get rolling until 4:20, and what with the gnarly hills, the headwinds, and stopping, we kinda ran out of daylight and, as it happens, weather. The way I'd planned it, given the forecast, we should have finished with a strong tailwind. But those southerly gusts only held up long enough to thwart our progress south in western Shawnee.





We lucked out on the rest stop situation. As we rode out 47th to Old K-7, Roj was saying we needed to find some grub or he'd bonk.



I wasn't sure what was out there, really, I've ridden almost all of this (except 63rd to Mize to 83rd) before, but convenience stores are few and far between. But there was a Shell with detour signs to steer us around construction that was 23 miles in, right around the half way mark. We probably loitered too long when it comes to the daylight situation, but it was a place where you could get water, Diet Dew, Peanut M&Ms and other anti-bonking agents.

I swear, Peanut M&Ms are nature's perfect food for a long ride: the candy shell is simple sugar for immediate energy; the milk chocolate has some slightly more complex sugars along with a bit of caffeine and whatnot, and then the peanut has salt and fat with complex carbohydrates for later. If Adam and Eve hadn't blown it, I'm pretty sure we'd all be living on Peanut M&Ms and Rooster Booster Lite.



By the time we were headed west, the winds had come around and the sky had blackened. It wasn't all bad, the temperature dropped by almost twenty degrees in fifteen minutes, which made up for the persistent headwind no matter which way we seemed to go.

It also wasn't all good, because it started raining before we got done.

Roj started to fall behind by margins I couldn't account for, and after waiting longer than I thought probable at a light, I said, 'I didn't think I was riding that fast.'

'You're not,' he said. 'My knees, I had to walk it up that one.'

Crap. A well planned route, we'd have some sort of shortcut/chicken exit plan. This route, though, you are kind of boxed in by where you can get through on a bicycle. The only real choice, at 95th and Renner was whether to take Renner to Midland (which means some hills) and then climb back up out of the Mill Creek Valley, or go east into the darkest sky of all and take the relatively flat frontage roads. About the same distance, I think, and Roj's knees told him, 'Well the flat one.'

Which was only relatively flat. This whole ride was basically a hill ride once you get past that first leg on Merriam Lane. At the top of the ramp to Quivira near 87th, he said, 'I thought you said no more hills.'



My cycling 'puter said 45.2 miles when I finished, but Roj had ridden from Westport to begin with. I put his bike on my rack and gave him a ride home, as much pain as I could tell he was in on the climbs, no way I could let him ride another eight or ten miles in the dark to get home.

We should have left an hour earlier (or more). Eventually I'll learn, and if I don't, I better find a way to lay my hands on a Magic Shine.

Dinos & Trains

Took the girls to Union Station with my Dad, step-mother, step-brother and about a hundred and fifty of my loudest nephews.



It's sometimes hard to tell what Mo is really connecting with, but she definitely dug the dinosaurs.



Em is often too cool to enjoy such things, but having dozens of little cousins to interact with through the exhibits flipped her switches and she had a great time, too.







Some of the dinos are motion activated, but there's also plenty the kids can push buttons to activate. Of course, it says 'push one button at a time,' but who are they kidding?







I was also impressed that Mo dug the trains so much. I even heard the words (well, word, it ran together) 'Trainawesomeyesokay.'

Labor (of Love) Day Ride

Everyone is invited. It's been harder to get rides of real length in since the days have gotten shorter. Gone are the days when I could get on the bike at 6:00 in the evening and get thirty-plus miles in before dark.



So, my ex is picking up the honyocks a tad early tomorrow and I'm heading to the Trek Store (they're not open, just a convenient and familiar meeting place) to do a bit of a hill ride. It's only a few weeks before Bike MS (sponsor me, baby, I need it!), so it's a good time to tackle a bit of distance and some hills.



If anyone is game for it, I'm inclined to Route B, which will take us out Merriam Lane and up Rosedale into the hollers of KCK, on Shawnee Drive, then down Key from Gibbs to wind up on Holiday Drive. Holiday Drive is a hilly booger, and it'll take us to 47th Street which looks like a blacktop version of The Mamba.

Then down Old K7 to Mize, Clare, and back via Prairie Star Parkway (which has some challenging climbs of its own).

The beginning is pretty flat, and the finish is mostly frontage road, so a good cool down, but that middle 30 miles or so will be some honest work.

Anyone is welcome provided they are fit enough to manage a 36-43 mile journey. No need to be fast, I'm not particularly.

Pops in the Park

Took our picnic basket full of goodies and our canvas chairs into Theater in the Park for a free concert this evening.



Huge turnout, people were still piling in after we got a place near the back. People were spreading picnic blankets outside the fence of the theater. I'm guessing, based on Starlight as a comparable-sized venue, that there were five to seven thousand people on hand.

We had sandwiches, carrot sticks, cheesey poofs, oreos, and diet cola. We had bug spray.



But by the intermission, when the sun had gone fully down, we realized we hadn't brought much in the way of stuff to keep us warm. And it got plenty cool.

I was okay, as Em pointed out I have insulation, being built like a walrus and all. But the girls were getting chilly. I suggested the bags from our canvas chairs, and Em decided that would look stupid. I put the sleeves from the girls' chairs on Mo's legs (one each, she tried but couldn't get both legs in one). Then I offered Em the bag from my much larger chair, figuring her skinnier legs and the bigger bag, it'd work, but she thought, again, this would look stupid.



I dunno, but in my book the thing that looks stupid is putting vanity above comfort, especially when you're sitting in the dark and nobody is looking at you anyway.



I anticipated, it being a 'pops' concert, that it'd all be show tunes, movie music and so on. But they started off with some Glinka, Suppé, and Dvorák. Small beer, I suppose, for classical music, but still definitely classical music.

It wasn't until after the intermission that we really got into the Sound of Music, Music Man, and Star Wars stuff. A good overall program for an all ages crowd, and by all ages, I mean all ages. Within ten feet of me were a kid who couldn't have been more than two and George Burns' father.



Anyway, it was a perfect evening, great weather even if we weren't really ready to cover our legs, good food and snacks, good music, the orchestra sounded great, and for as many people as there were, the traffic leaving wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.

The Other Half of the Hot-Rod World

Got a bit of a late start, meaning to get a bit more length of ride in what with it being like three weeks to Bike MS, but a little riding is better than not at all.



The weather was too ridiculously good to not ride anyway. Having packed a picnic dinner for me and the girls for later, we headed to my Mom's and I rode less with a plan than with my cycling computer set to the clock so I could be sure and get back in time.

I rode south because that was the direction the wind was coming from, figuring to return with a tailwind. Then I got to 71st and thought how great it would be to go down Puckett, so I headed east and then cut north on Mission Road to get over that way.

Mission Road north of 67th is freshly paved with a bike lane: match that with a 10 mph or so tail wind and that's some effortless riding.

Descending Puckett is so much fun, I wish there was a ski lift so I could just ride down that hill over and over. It's not the fastest hill in town, I only hit 38 miles per hour, but with its turns and dives, it's about as fun as downhill gets.

At the bottom, I had to brake to avoid a hot-rod, which I didn't think much about, it's just a car, right? Then on Southwest Blvd, which is normally deserted on a Saturday afternoon (and thus ideal for cycling), I was faced with quite a bit of traffic walled in by cars parked on the side of the road everywhere. People were charging to park in their yards and whatnot for a big car show at the drive-in.

Greaserama, a big hot-rod show, it was explained to me.

But I thought that was at the Speedway.



Nope, the guy said. Greaserama is where you find the real 'no billet' hot rods. Billet, he explained, refers to absurdly fancy and/or expensive custom aluminum wheels. Nothing high tech, no $90,000 projects, just good old school hot rods and antique cars.



I said, I didn't know there was a 'new' school.

'That'd be the Good Guys, that show out at the Speedway,' he said.

I guess I can relate, the whole low-buck ethic and all that. Though a lot of the enthusiasts coming in were in their own old-school rides, from before there was such a thing as emissions controls, and the exhaust they made was no fun to breathe as I rode along Merriam Lane.

That Friday Night Lights Thing

Gardner-Edgerton High was the Metro Sports game of the week, meaning we'd be on TV. Which made it seem natural to go pay to sit in the bleachers instead of watching the game on TV where we'd really be able to see what the hell was going on.







Unfortunately, it was a bit of a lopsided game. Don't get me wrong, just because I'm a Chiefs, Royals and Pirates fan, doesn't mean I'm into losing. It doesn't. Really.



Beautiful, cool weather, found some friends and hung out. I was impressed with the fan support of the visiting team, Blue Valley West Jaguars. When I was in high school, I don't remember many visiting teams putting much more than their marching band in the bleachers. They filled the visiting bank and made a lot of noise.







So it wasn't dramatic. Rockhurst was playing Hutchinson, the team that beat us in the state championship game last year, and the score updates from it were far more intriguing (I guess Rockhurst managed the W by one point, 29-28 in overtime). It was fun, though, and Len Dawson was maybe twenty feet from me before he got bored and left.





It's better for everyone if the teams are evenly matched, and in this case, for whatever reasons, they weren't. It was 49 to 7 when we decided we were chilly and left with eight minutes left in the fourth quarter.





Maybe part of the reason I don't like seeing such a lopsided score, too, is I'm still scarred by my Shawnee Mission North years, when almost every week we were on the receiving end of a beating like this. And not because we were playing teams that had placed second in the state the year before, I seem to recall at least one school running up the score on us and finding out later that was their only win of the season.