Local Treasures

I popped for a membership to the Nelson-Atkins last year, but the visit I bought it on was one of those kinda burnout situations. The friend we took with us that day had never been, and she got a scooter because one of the reasons she'd never gone is she isn't physically able to do that much walking.

So after that marathon, where we came about as close to seeing the whole thing in one day as I'm ever going to get, that membership didn't get used so much for a while. The membership gets you in to the various ticketed exhibits and covers parking in their garage, which is eight bucks otherwise (and on-street parking around the place is very limited).

But the last few months I've been trying to make more frequent but short trips with Mo. It's much more enjoyable when you spend a half hour to an hour, just kind of pick a wing and do that.

It's a remarkable thing for a city of half a million people (or more like two million if you figure metro area), to have a museum of this caliber. It's not the Art Institute in Chicago or the Met in New York, but the Bloch addition by itself is about the same square footage as Museo del Prado in Madrid, and the collections are high quality. And where I shelled out $18 when I hit the Modern Wing in Chicago a few years back (and it was worth it, not complaining), anyone can walk into the Nelson, it's strictly suggested donation.

It was pretty busy, a touch crowded in places, but shouldn't it be? Actually, given what's on offer for basically free, there should probably be twice as many people wandering these galleries.

April Mead

So my wife likes to forage. She filled one of our deep freezers with pears, autumn olive, persimmons, and so on last fall. I kept meaning to do some meads with them, she kept saying that produce was set aside specifically for that. I don't care much for persimmon so I passed on that part. There was also store bought cranberries, three pounds of them.

It would have been good if I'd gotten on this sooner, the advice I've gotten is don't leave the fruit in the freezer more than a month or two. But I think I dodged the freezer burn bullet, and freezing does help make the juice more available.

A lot of meadmakers will just make a standard mead as a starting point, mixing honey and water, then put the fruit in a mesh bag in the fermenter. I haven't tried that method yet, I've been using the fruit juice to mix with the honey, which works too. But last fall, working with fresh fruit, I learned the limits of the wine press.

To defrost the fruit, I mixed a weak sulfite solution (one Campden tablet per five gallons of water) and let the fruit thaw overnight in the water.

The autumn olive and cranberry in the press still didn't yield much juice, after a ton of work, a little under a gallon. I was pretty discouraged. Corinna claimed the pressed fruit for jelly and I moved on to the pears.

You can see here how the autumn olive would rather squirt out between the staves of the press than give up juice. The pears, though, strong language was enough to get them flowing. Once I filled the press with the pears, I ran a knife down through them to help break the skins and then pressed away. With less effort than the three quarts or so of cranberry-autumn olive juice I quickly had almost four gallons of pear juice and relatively drive fruit left behind. Not like what you'd get with a hammer mill followed by a hydraulic press, but as good as I was going to get.

I was going to also make a standard mead, also going to keg up one of last October's batches, rack the other. But I was coming off the last wave (I hope) of illness from this winter. This time it was all bronchitis type stuff, I don't know if it was residual from the flue I had last month or just another round of crud.

And one thing after another, the honey had crystalized harder than anything I've ever seen. It doesn't affect how it works, but it affects how much work it is to dissolve it. I felt like I might as well be trying to dissolve rocks from my yard. The rest of the bucket, I thought of a clever way to heat it to re-liquify it: I'm going to take it to work in my car before I try to work with it again. Solar gain should get it up to 140ºF or so, that should do it.

I think that standard mead is what I'm going to make at Big Brew out at Bacchus & Barleycorn on May 6. I did demonstration brews out at B&B a few times way back when. Like I think it's been upwards of 15 years. It's a fun project, but my all grain brewing setup is pretty bulky and my process is very slow. I'd get out there first thing, a couple hours before anyone else, and still be the last one cleaning up. Plus, I think the last time I did it I was driving an F-150, so I had a lot of hauling capacity. My gear pretty well filled the Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon I drove before that, too.

These days I drive a 2006 Scion xB, which is a roomy car for an econo-box, but I'm not sure I can haul everything at once in it. But for mead? A couple-three buckets, my brewing tool box, drill, degassing wand, a few measuring cups and spoons, a scale, I could haul my mead setup in a Smart Car. Plus, if I go standard mead (as opposed to spending six hours wrestling with pressing fruit juice, I can be done and cleaned up faster than an all extract beer brewer.

After that standard mead, it'll be about time to get more honey, from there I think I'll try the aforementioned technique of making a sack style mead and dropping a mesh bag of fruit in it.

Taste of Shawnee

Our favorite sushi restaurant (not my favorite, necessarily, I'm a sucker for Bob Wasabe, but the restaurant Corinna loves to go to that I do too) is in Shawnee. But Sushi Mido doesn't participate in Taste of Shawnee for whatever reasons. I personally believe they should, some of the crowd that comes out for this is probably in the demographic of people who think sushi sounds scary, but if they could sample a roll only risking one ticket, I bet a good percentage of them would find out they love the stuff. And if you can't enjoy the rolls from Sushi Mido there's something dead inside you.

But plenty of fine eateries do participate. Some are chains, some are local restaurants that have a few locations, some are mom & pop type joints. I'm guessing they're all owned or run by Rotarians since it's a Shawnee Rotary is who puts it on. Which is how I end up going, Dad's a Rotarian and I end up with quite a few free tickets, which makes it a heck of a cheap date. I bought a few out there, but when four people can basically pig out for seven dollars, that's a deal.

And being that I'm the new recipient of a Judgement with a Stay for some medical bills, I'm all about the cheap dates. Everybody knows that if you send $100 a month to someone you owe a big medical debt to, they'll keep it out of collections. Everybody knows they won't (or maybe even can't) sue you if you're making that good faith effort to pay. Ask Leonard Cohen about what everybody knows, it turns out everybody is misinformed.



And I have good insurance by today's standards. So now if I pay some lawyers $200 a month (and presumably keep paying KU Med $100 a month as well), they won't garnish my paycheck. This is what winning looks like in America today.

Anyway, back to the happy stuff. Taste of Shawnee. It was a lot of fun. I recognized from RAGBRAI the signature sound of an antique John Deere one cylinder engine cranking ice cream. Corinna was super excited when I showed up with a dip of it, I was like, I didn't see it, I heard it. About two thirds of the way through the route every day on RAGBRAI there's an ice cream vendor that sets up with those putting, halting motors and I like ice cream (whereas my wife loves it), but after fifty miles on the bike in Iowa in July, ice cream is like a miracle.

Mo found pizza, cotton candy and turkey sandwiches, which means she was pretty much in hog heaven. She drank a smoothie, too, which see seemed skeptical of at first, but then once she'd tasted she realized it was pretty awesome stuff.

Molly Seal of Approval

We were late for our movie, or rather really early for our movie since we went to the next showing of Going in Style. So we stopped in on the Kemper Museum.

When Mo sees a piece she likes, she typically goes and stands by it or in front of it and waits for me to take a picture. She doesn't seem to have much interest in looking at the photograph, but I take it. Last time we were at the Kemper, my camera's batter had died and I had to pretend to take pictures.

3rd Annual 73rd Running of the Pines

I can't believe how much I look forward to this event. Which was rescheduled. And restricted because last year it was asses & elbows. We need to find a bigger venue because there are so many clowns that want to get in the clown car.

What clown car? BSA, vintage and open class Pinewood Derby. Just like when I was in Cub Scouts except I don't get bullied and there's pizza and beer. And your car can have a Boogie Nights theme, or be Milk & Cheese ("shit your pants and run!"). And while we learned the hard way that the open category can't include C02 propulsion, the pretty much anything goes category just unleashes creativity.

Witness the 3D printed car with two tungsten disks embedded in it and bearings in the wheels that weighed almost a pound. Or the buffalo car that smoked it at half the weight.

Also, Boy Scouts/Cub Scouts does Pinewood Derby, I don't think the girls get to play. But at the 73rd Running of the Pines, girls were ruling: two of the three categories were won by female entrants.

If I can figure out a way to work it with Velo+, I think the next logical step is to add a model rocketry event. My KCAR friends can help, and it could cross-pollenate the scenes, my bike nerd friends getting to know my rocket nerd friends, that kinda thing. Can't launch rockets in the bike shop of course, but there's nothing that says you can't ride to a launch site. And have beer and pizza.

And since the penis thing has been broached by Dylan's car, I might need to shop for a marital aid that can be fixed up with wheels. And I have those four big wooden disks just waiting to be made into wheels on a Pinewood Monster Truck. Oh, and then there's the weed themed vehicle possibilities: why not put wheels on a bong?

As it is, we've had beer, coffee and like I say, penis themed cars. And my fairly offensive Milk & Cheese cards.

Oh, or maybe a Thug Life hip-hop car? The possibilities are endless.

And the whole thing helps heal the psychic scars my Cub Scouts experience inflicted on me.