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.