A Day in the Life

Crankles
I've been sad since Mom left.

And I'm skeptical about Dad's ability to keep the house in order without her.

Sometimes it's hard getting up in the morning.

But there's work to do.

Like making sure the connections are connected.

And chewing my bone.

And putting up Dad's shoes. He leaves them all over the floor.

Sometimes I let my little sister sit in Dad's lap.

But not for very long. Dad needs me.

I think we'll all pull through this.

Fatty
I don't know what the hell his problem is.

While the dog mopes around, I have my hands full. Rolling the bath towels.

Sorting the dish rags.

Or gathering the hangers.

To hang the shirts.

When I'm not doing housework, I occupy myself with my myriad of hobbies. Like exercising.

Lying in wait to ambush the dog.

Rubbing my face on everything.

Or saving the boys by fighting off invisible enemies.

So, yeah, I mean, everything's going pretty well.

I've Got Chills

They're Multiplying
We had another snow last night and this morning the temperature jumped up to the 30s. This created a thick layer of snow fog, about six inches deep, that creeps along the ground, pours over curbs like liquid, and dances in the street like flame.

This is what the grocery store parking lot looks like:

Last week we moved our pickling operations in the direction of a different fruit. Green Beans.

I packed them in with a lot of garlic and dill. More than I used for the cukes. These were also quick pickles. By Friday, they were ready.

If you're used to fresh pack vinegar pickles, the cloudy brine might look a little alarming. It's cloudier than your store bought pickles for two reasons.

One, fresh pack pickles go through the canning process to kill all microbes. I'm creating petri dishes to culture as many lactobacilli as possible. Much of the cloudiness comes from masses of bacteria. Yum.

See the scale in the picture? That's right. 1 micron. Picture an inch. There's 25 thousand microns in an inch. If the lactobacilli were the size of fish oil pills, the green beans would be a two and a half miles long.

Two, I'm using table-grade sea salt for my brines. It has added magnesium chloride. You've seen athletes chalk their hands in magnesium chloride for a better grip in rock climbing, weight lifting, and gymnastics. But not for pool cues. That's silicon and aluminum. Morton started adding it to salt as an anti-caking agent and their famous slogan was born.

In addition to giving little girls something to pour all over the sidewalk, magnesium chloride clouds brine. So there.

The so-called Dilly Beans were super duper. Very garlicky and pickly. I took a jar to poker night where they must have been a hit. I came home with an empty jar.

I also started a second sauerkraut batch. You can see the color change of the first batch at one week in comparison to the new batch.

Also, look at the bubbles. That's the exciting thing about fermenting. It's not so much a jar of vegetables as it is a little wilderness, churning and frothing with living things fighting for survival. At night, when it's quiet, you can lean down, and listen to the gas escaping from the lid. It's like listening to it breathe.

By the second week, the fermenting had stopped in the first batch, so I've moved it to fridge. It came out sour and very, very crunchy. I haven't decided how to eat it yet, but I have it on good authority that sauerkraut soup is pretty much the bees knees.

This weekend, we moved from leaves and fruits to roots.

I'm doing spiced carrots and Korean-style pickled garlic. If you've ever peeled six bunches of garlic by hand, then you know how much fun this was. The carrots will be done in about two weeks. The garlic, however, will take at least six months. So we'll know how those did at the first of August.

Today, the whole house smells like garlic and vinegar.

Also, I've learned that people into fermenting are called fermentos. So, I guess I'm a fermento now. For some reason it sounds slightly less pretentious than birder.

Parting Shot
This weekend's forecast: snowy with a chance of squirrels.

Cemetery Run

Oops, We Did It Again
So last night we did the Kick'n Asphalt in Decatur. They held the run in Graceland Fairlawn Cemetery to benefit Easter Seals. This was our 6th race this year and probably my favorite.

There were a couple things I didn't like. No bibs. They didn't give out bibs to track your time. Which is fine, I guess, I don't really run for time. But when you have a bib, you can thumb tack it to your wall or tape it into your scrapbook or fold it up and stow it under your pillow. It's sort of keepsake. Memorabilia. Proof that you were there and you did it. They did hand out popsicle sticks with place numbers on them. Which sort of reminded me of PE freshman year in high school. Aine got 39th. I got 40th.

Also, weird was the fact that the staging area was at the funeral home attached to cemetery. So, when you went in to go to the restroom, every room was filled with runners in neon colors and blinking lights and glow sticks. It felt bizarre.

On the other hand, there was a great festive spirit. Energies were high. Everyone had wrapped themselves in blinking Christmas lights, glowing necklaces, glow in the dark shirts, crazy sparkling hats, and head lamps. Dad sent us a pair of headlamps for the run. We had some technical difficulties with one, but I wore the other.

I wasn't the only guy wearing a headlamp. I was the only guy under the age of 50 wearing a headlamp. It paid off though, the course had dark corners and potholes.

The run was amazing. We started at dusk, with the sun setting red and orange behind the massive, dark Scotch Pines and White Oaks in the cemetery. Because dense woods sheltered the area, you couldn't hear anything but the wind and a distant train wailing in the night. After darkness set in, the course felt so still and isolated, you could easily have been running through a tunnel underground.

Also, it was cold. Very, very cold.

Across the finish, they gave dude a medal.

In addition to the usual fare of water and Gatorade and bananas and power bars, the Salvation Army set up a trailer handing out cups of chili. It was pretty much canned Hormel chili with beans, but they gave me a handful of saltines, and after a cold run it tasted beautiful. I almost wept.

Even this morning, when I burp, I can taste the chili all over again and I get sort of emotional.

This run also had the best goody bags of any race I've done so far. It included a backscratcher, a koozie, two pens, a pencil, a package of tissues, a glow in the dark shirt, a Christmas ornament, a glow bracelet, a glow necklance, and a coloring book.

So, good race. I will definitely do this one again. If Aine says we can.

Only one downside to this whole experience: I ran my usual Friday afternoon 6-miler, so with no day off between my Friday run and the Saturday race, I sort of feel like a used piñata.

The Before-and-Afters:

In other news, Autumn has arrived. So, 30s-40s at night. 50s during the day. The beasts have chillies pretty much all the time.

And we have to sweater up before walks.

On the other hand, the leaves have started to turn.

And here's a picture of the same trees with gratuitous roses in the foreground.

Those are over on Fox. In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to get some pictures from Mattis Park, the Arboretum, and we're going to take a trip out to Allerton to see how it looks in the Fall.

Parting Shot
This afternoon's Squirrel Watch Report is brought to you by Fatty McTalons and Flops Furgeson.

Life's Been Cheddar

The Results Are In
My time for the Run4Raley 5k: 25:57

Which means I ran a 8.4 minute mile. Which isn't very fast. But it was pretty fast for me. Now we're gearing up for the Pumpkin Classic 10k in Morton. Last week, I totalled 17 miles. This week, I'm hitting 21.

Thanks, Fanks
I gave up on Dr. Fankhauser. His instructions were rambling, inconsistent and lacking in vital information. The good doctor uses well water and cultivates his own rennet from calf guts to make cheese, so he doesn't spend much time on explaining the intricacies of using store bought milk for apartment dwellers.

After ruining 4 or 5 gallons of milk in pursuit of hard cheese, I bought a book.

On the right. Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll. She started the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, from whom I bought the rennet and the calcium chloride. From what the rave reviews say, she kickstarted the homemade cheese revolution. She writes instructions for those of us who don't milk goats.

(On the left, you'll see Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood about the period between the ratification of the Constitution through the end of the War of 1812. I finally finished the dry ramblings of Dr. Middlekauff.)

The first thing I read was NEVER USE TAP WATER to dilute your rennet and calcium. Chlorine in tap water cripples the rennet and gives you a weak break. Also, she says, NEVER USE IODIZED SALT. The iodine kills the bacteria that give your cheese flavor.

So we did it for real this time. I got to the curd cutting phase of the cheese process.

I cooked the curds.

And drained them.

Then I salted and spooned the cooked curds into the cheese press Dad made.

I had plenty of assistance.

I pressed the curds overnight.

The next morning I unwrapped the hunk of cheese and let it air dry for 2 days.

At which point I waxed it.

I now have a waxed hunk of cheese in my fridge. In four weeks, On September 18th, I'll cut into it and taste the deliciousness of my very first cheddar.

Easy As Pie
We're still doing a homemade pizza once a week. It's actually one of the easiest and fastest dinners to make if I remember to throw some flour in the breadmaker on time. The last two have been utter successes. The first I found randomly on the internet, the second I copied from a local restaurant.

Potato, Asparagus, and Feta Pizza

Pear, Feta, and Pine Nut Pizza

It's a Citrus, Khaleesi
Pitaya. Dragon Fruit. This fruit, from a night blooming cactus, comes from South America and Asia.

You just cut it in half and scoop out its guts. It had the texture of a pear and a very mellow flavor. Too mellow. It almost didn't taste at all.

Erin Go Bragh
Or at least until the first sip. We made Irish Coffees. Only, we didn't have cream, so I guess they were Black Irish Coffees.

Aine didn't finish hers.

(And, yes, under my wallet and phone, you see the Bernard Bailyn introduction lectures to his Peopling of British North America series. If Wood is the Obi Wan of early American history, Bailyn is the Quigon Jinn.)

Home Invasion
The other morning a small spider, the size of your pinky nail, crawled to the middle of my office ceiling. It was just hanging out. Minding its business.

Then Piglet saw it. She just wanted to rip it into small pieces. Frustrated at the spider's inaccessibility, she started mrowing at it. Alarmed by the commotion, Crankles rushed in to save the day.

Then he saw the spider. And he started whining.

They have a good time hunting roaches and flies together, but this distant spider completely stymied them. She mrowed. He whined. And that noise lasted for the first twenty minutes of my work day.

Parting Shot
Life in Illinois seems precarious at times.

But this does not alarm us.