Labors of the Day

Has Labor Day snuck up upon you without warning? Perhaps a quick escape to the La Crosse area would make a delightful last minute excursion. This holiday weekend is the La Crosse Area Bicycle Festival. It is simply one of the most beautiful areas of our great country that there is. And if competition is what you desire, there is the La Crosse Gravel Classic. It’s a classic. I competed in a WEMS Race long ago in La Crosse. Good people out there and it is not as long of a drive as you may think.

Don’t like the crowds? The following weekend, September 10th, is the Pickwick Historic Mill Run and Walk somewhere across the border in Minnesota. (DO you know the Minnesota Mountain Bike Series races in Wisconsin?) Brings to mind this 18th Century Cooking channel we have been enjoying on YouTube. Half the recipes seem to be for a pudding of some kind. How can you not appreciate that?

Misao is on a project craze. She has been creating mason jar solar lights from cheap solar lamps, canning supplies and and a glue gun. I did the wiring for the hanger.

The Hugh Jass is fast approaching. The Fat Bike Series of Fat Bike series is back for this coming Winter. And it is going to be a bad one. The squirrels are turning nearly black around here. Hugh Jass had Summer discounts for a race series package. There are always fat bikes for rent, but reserve one ahead of time. Wheel and Sprocket is the major player in supporting local race series.

The Saris Gala is going Olympic, if such promotions and advocacy are your thing. That will be November 4th.

Surprisingly, I have been riding quite a bit. I have ulterior motives however. I keep my eyes open for Black Walnut trees in order to harvest their fruits. Yes, you can eat them. I may make some Black Walnut ink from the husks; or a wood stain. The exercise log is filling up.

A daily bounty from the garden. Misao and I canned some bread and butter pickles together. Sometimes it is better not to speak, especially in the proximity of large quantities of scolding hot water. We went mishap free.

The $140 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.

Recreation 2017

Minooka Park, Area 5, Tuesday August 16, 6:00pm, will be an all skills level ride led by a prestigious member of Metro Mountain Bikers. A chance to see what the mountain bike trails at Minooka are all about, if you don’t know already. And don’t forget about the Wednesday Night Races which will finish out the season at the Alpha Trail.

Or if you are looking for more immediate gratification The Warrior Dash is tomorrow at The Rock in Franklin Wisconsin. I hear they have heats going off every half hour.

I haven’t gotten down to my race weight yet, but, believe it or not, I have gotten out to ride. And I have found myself not out of shape. Comes from good living.

My wife said to me the other day. “Let’s take a weekend off and go on vacation.”

“That’s a lot of chocolate.” I answered in a most serious of tone.

“What?” she looked bewildered.

“The money we would lose from not selling and what we would spend on vacation…. That’s a lot of chocolate.”

“You’re right.” my wife sighed a moment later.

Take heed young men. The learning never stops here. You have to speak to woman in a language they can understand.

 

This was our vacation; baseball and The state Fair. Okay, I had to wait fifteen minutes for a hotdog at the stadium, or in other words until every other line had been completely worked through. The guy was working hard, he just gave everyone else their orders, including some guy who kept walking over from the drink concessions, before he would give me my hotdog. Then he tried to hand me three. “One hotdog.” I said and then, “Thank you.” Not sure if the two people waiting behind me for the other two hotdogs thanked him.

One of the hottest most humid days of the year and we went to The State Fair. we did out culinary rounds and struck up a conversation with a couple at a shared table. The gentleman looked familiar. I saw on Facebook one of my high school classmates was at the fair at the same time.

We watched some fat pigs attempt to make it around a race track and then hit all the vendors. Thank God for air conditioning. I bought some glue. The We Energies facility had a nice educational garden but their Solar Speedway show was cancelled because of clouds. So much for solar energy. This globe, one of many was in their garden display. I bowled with a guy whose daughter made those, with some autistic group, out of old bowling balls. I had given him a couple. …could be?

They were changing out the animals in most of the barns so we couldn’t see much in that regard. I think the DNR display facilities improve every year.

I looked for the dog shows on the State Fair site but couldn’t find the K9 activity stage listed (it was under family entertainment). But we caught a show no problem. They are pretty much continuous.

Getting cream puffs over to my parents house before they melted and home to watch the Olympics rounded out our day. Watching the women gymnasts I imagined anorexics everywhere were cheering for the Chinese.

I really know how to plan a vacation.

With the heat, the 4th of July and thunderstorms Ike our dog has been stressed and is still having seizures though far fewer than before. We bought a second round of “thuja” a homeopathic medicine. There seems to be some marked improvement. Perhaps the first  round had been energy depleted somehow. That’s how those homeopathies work.

Don’t be calling me homeophobic.

I think I will bring an end to my “40 Below” Yahoo group site. I will print out my exercise journal from that site for posterity. I started a new exercise journal on excel on a really old Internet non-compatible computer.

The $139 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.

Feel the Burn

HEY! The Polish Moon Ride is tomorrow. Bring your accordion.

The Tour d’ Fraud is over. I saw some coverage of the Tour d’ Fraud. I enjoy it. I could almost feel the burn myself as I watched the leaders push on. If we were a bit better off financially I might have even paid for an online coverage package. When you cycle you enjoy watching cycling events. I look forward to the Olympic coverage.

At the Olympics I fear they are experiencing more than one kind of burn, several in fact. And the citizens are feeling the burn of tear gas and pepper spray. Go Team USA.

WORS is the series a Minooka is the place. WORS broke a record for what one organizer called the WORS modern era. Gone are the days when WORS attracted 1,200 plus competitors regularly: AKA the 90’s. For this new century they set an attendance record of over 800 competitors. That is a 30% increase in what has become typical for their more popular races.

Minooka is where most of the newest mountain bike trail development is taking place. The right course in the right place at the right time. Metro Mountain Biker’s volunteers have already invested well over 300 hours in local trail work. Minooka is continually improving their course. There are some great devoted people behind it, not to mention the county employees who facilitate it all.

I didn’t burn the beans. I roasted these in my popcorn popper; of the whirly pop variety. If you have not tried fresh roasted coffee… you don’t know coffee. Tastes best at three to five days after roasting. Many say that it goes stale after seven days. But I have heard others claim it’s fresh for ten days, even three weeks, and one gentleman, roasting over an open campfire on “18th Century Cooking” professed it fresh for six weeks. You can find green coffee beans on Amazon. More about my coffee roasting experience and Bulletproof Diet later.

The sun burns. All my cabbage is harvested. Gave some away, ate some and tried my hand at a bit of sauerkraut. Added some fresh dill to the kraut. Some of the turnips were a bit damaged but we enjoyed what we could just the same. The Beans and tomatoes are ripening. We have had some eggplant, cucumbers and Swiss chard for a while. I will plant some more salad vegetables. The maturation of many plants is slow this year. My brother has also noticed the same lag in his garden in Indiana.

To make more space for productive plants I finally removed that barberry bush under the heat of a burning sun.  It didn’t burn, God didn’t speak, but I found the removal of this thorny intrusive symbolic to my life. No sun screen for me. If burning and wreathing in pain was good enough for us when we were kids, it’s good enough for me now.

“I told you not to take your shirt off.” my mother used to say.

Some garden buffs have claimed that if you eat healthy fresh live foods you will not burn. The sun is good for you (vitamin D) and man has been exposed to it for like forever. That doesn’t mean they do not wear big hats for protection, they do.

I wonder if they tested the sun screen the racers use in the Tour d’ Fraud.

I mended that hole I found in the fence. Pulled the two torn edges together with a clamp from my workshop, then weaved and tied it back together. My efforts inspired my neighbors on both sides of my lot to start cleaning up our fence lines from their sides. Think of me as Mr. Motivator; an inspiration.


I heard that! …Thinking, I have to wonder, no I must distress, that anyone would look at gaining something of value as losing something else of value. Not sure what that has to do with anything.

The naturalization of our riverbed has been completed. Good luck Wauwatosa as the slowing of the river here will influence your flooding potential far more than ours. The bridges up river are lower than our flood wall. Are you going to feel the burn. Those Bernie supporters sure felt the burn; being cheated and lied to. I saw one democrat bad mouthing a Bernie supporter to his face on national TV. You would think she was talking to a republican. “…How does it feel? …How does it feel?…” Going a bit Bob Dylan on myself.

An ease to tending our garden this year has been that it truly has rained when the weather man (or woman) has said it would, more times than not. Otherwise one forgets to water when you are expecting rain and it does not come.

The $138 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.