A Few of My Favorite Things

Blueberry Clif bars, hip flasks of brown liquor,
Long zone 2 rides, that make you much quicker.
Dirt trail descents that make my heart sing,
These are a few of my favorite things...

When the hills rise, when my knees ache,
When I'm feeling low,
I get out on my ride and I pedal away,
It's oh so much cheaper,
Than blow!

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Yes I like riding my bike. I like nights like tonight as well. It lightly raining, almost like we're in a huge terrestrial mister. There's a heavy fog hanging over Crofton. It reminds me of a few hundred great nights I had back in the day, living in Europe. On nights like this I was generally curled up in an comfy chair in Manfred's cellar wine bar, in Wuerzburg, sucking down Bacchusbeutels of Franken Wine with some friends, snacking on a cheese plate, and basically just hooting and hollering and enjoying a great time. After that it would be a walk home across the pedestrian zone to my apartment. Or similar nights in Munich or in the cities in Northern Germany where I worked. The next day would always break a little chilly, a little overcast, but sunny, as if the sky had cried itself out overnight. Then it would be time for a run, to get to work, and to look forward to doing it all over again. I probably didn't like foggy nights before living there.

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I like making bread, to the point where the whole wheat oat bread doesn't seem all that challenging. So what's a boy to do? Make sourdough, naturally. You can get bread dough to rise using bread yeast, or bicarbonate of soda. But a really old fashioned way is to pull some local yeast out of the air by letting the air flow over a medium that is friendly to yeast, but hostile to the worst of the local bacteria. Then you let the medium sit for a few days until it bubbles up. This bubbly mixture contains naturally occurring yeast and bacteria, and if you're lucky and mixed it up with the right stuff, it will yield a tasty, slightly sour loaf of bread - sourdough. I got a sourdough starter underway this afternoon. I ran around the house, inside and out, with a small open container of medium, in this instance pineapple juice and flour. Now I'll let it sit for a few days, stirring occasionally, and adding flour and pineapple juice in a couple days. With a bit of luck, in about 4 or 5 days, I'll have some qood quality, locally grown sourdough starter with which to make bread for myself, and maybe some sourdough loaves for my friends for Christmas. If they're good and all. Otherwise it's coal and maybe some old tires.

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Don't look at the sky. It's the Red Eye of Sauron.


It isn't really. It's evidence of a far-off planet. One thing I really like is the high quality pictures of space that we're getting from orbital platforms. When I was a kid, there were a few nice photos of space, like Earthscape, but most of the stuff was obscure, black and white stuff, and if you didn't like that there was all this plastic-fantastic pencil drawing stuff from the kid's encyclopedias of the day -drawings of space and planets and asteroids and whatnot that I now know to be utterly misbegotten and inaccurate. We've advanced a long way in 35 years, and I really like that. It's funny being Racing Age 42 but still being able to have a child-like sense of wonder about something. The one thing I don't like is people don't seem to give a crap about exploring space, and the bias a lot of people seem to have against colonization. I hate to break the news folks but this lump of rock has a habit of getting hit by other lumps of rock with disastrous results. We'd better be looking for a little place in that nice neighborhood over on the other side of the Milky Way if we're serious about long term survival of the species. But in the mean time, we can look at the pretty pictures. Really, seriously pretty pictures.

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Just a reminder - The Superior Cross is going to be in Manassas next Saturday, November 22, and the Tacchino is going to be at Leesburg on November 23. I've never done Superior but hear it's pretty good. The Tacchino, I can tell you with total confidence, always rocks. I hope you can make one or both; either is suitable for beginners. The Tacchino has the added bonus of Belgian Beer Primes in the masters, and if it all works out Sausage Primes for some of the other races.