… while I come up with a catchy title for this post. I can feel it on the tip of my right prefrontal lobe. I mean my other right prefrontal lobe. This may take a few minutes.

Nothing seems to be happening. Maybe we’re stuck with another lousy title.  That makes it two posts in a row. Oh well. At least two is a small row.

In the meantime there are some recent snapshots to share. Of course. Vacation came to an end, as it always must, dammit, but getting back to work is not a problem– I love my job 98.7%.  So I still bask in the glow of those last few days of time off as I roll back into my habituated groove. At least there was some productivity and the weather was beautiful.

I made some bread. Hard red winter wheat.

Add water, yeast, honey, olive oil, salt, mix with dough hook.

Let rise, knead, repeat, put into loaf pan, bake at 350°F about 35 minutes.

What? No photo of the finished bread? No. Sorry. It came out really well. Freshly ground flour makes some pretty amazing bread lemme just say …

Another project. Picked up some dropped pears. The deer have fallen way behind cleaning up the orchard.

Cooked the pears way down for a few hours. Nice spread except for the little gritty things pears sometimes have.

Harvested the rest of the jerusalem artichokes in bed #17. Also called sunchokes.

Been bringing bags of the jerusalem artichokes to work and preaching to the masses of their wondrous-ness-ocity. It’s almost embarrassing how I prattle on about these humble tubers.  Fortunately I’m an oblivious fool. Though they can be prepared in any of the infinite number of ways that potatoes can be, I like this simple approach.

Scrub sunchokes well, slice lengthwise, place cut side down on salted cooking sprayed (lecithin spray like Pam) cookie sheet, a little more salt on skin sides, then roast at 350°F for about a half hour, until soft and hopefully a little brown. If not flip them over and broil a bit. Mmmm.

Infinity plus one: sunchokes are eaten raw by some folks. Potatoes? Not so much. Anyone else out there ever enjoy eating raw potatoes?

The texture of the skin would probably be off-putting to “refined” palates. Plus they give you gas like mad.

I’m hoping that the gassy side effects will go away if I eat more of them– build an immunity? Or maybe the gas can be harnessed for extra propulsion on bike rides. Whatever. If I step out of the room suddenly, it is just politeness. Prattling ends …

Other accomplishments of the stay-cation were lots of 2 & 3 hour bike rides, removing a giant spider from one of the garage doors, completion of some interior finish tasks involving wallboard, joint compound, and paint. On one of the bike rides I checked on the state of the Route 114 cairn. It’s doing fine. Nobody’s knocked it down for well over a year.

Side view.

View from the road. Looks to be in good shape. Sort of a person shape.

Birds nest in a tree by the road over in Hillsborough.

Geese waiting for their flight south.

One very cold spider. Lived in the garage door all summer. It moved a little. Really slowly.

Kitty goes behind the barn. She likes to hang out there.

While recharging in vacation solitary mode, my brain came up with all kinds of profound crap to write into posts. All forgotten now. Except this. On a bike ride, I thought I’d coined a new word: instanternity. It should make some sense, as we all experience those moments where time rests and burns a little point into memory space. But it’s not really a word. Google it. Dare ya.

Operation Complete.

I’m way overdue for a bike ride post am I not? I have this week off while my wife’s in SC visiting her friend. They will be competing in a 3-day combined driving event. With horses and buggies. Calling them buggies is improper and I do so on purpose. My wife loves horses and these events and has a great time. And I arrange vacation time from work to align with these trips of hers so that I can take care of our critters (1 horse 1 dog 1 cat) and enjoy some peaceful solitude. That seems to be getting more difficult as I age. Always considered myself to be completely bore-proof. But true idling has become increasingly difficult. What an idiotic complaint!

Right. Try THIS you stupid human. You people and your giant brains! Sheesh.

Sleeping in every morning has thrown off my early morning workout while watching TV news, but as these autumn days march toward winter, I’ve been able to get out and ride once the temperature gets above 48°F. Much cooler than that is just not much fun. So yesterday I rode up to Newbury and brought the camera along.

CHICKEN FARMER I STILL LOVE YOU.

The popular and somewhat random graffiti along NH RT 103 in Newbury has had a sort of makeover. Over the summer it had been streaked with some kind of white paint or something that ran down over the letters. At one point I thought it might be bird droppings, but then realized that was not very likely because A) the rock face leans toward the viewer so any bird perched on the ledge would have trouble  hitting the wall (except in extreme wind) and B) there are no local birds big enough to make that kind of mess. I bet some anti-chicken farmer revolutionaries shot white paint balls at it. Long story short(er), (why is phrase always used way too late?*) some kind soul has rather effectively framed the message in a nice red box. It must have taken some time to paint around all those letters. Thank you for doing that whoever you are.

I continued north to Newbury village, stopping at the public library where a friend of mine works. I asked her to take a couple of pictures of me in my ridiculously funky cold weather riding gear. She reminded me that denim and cotton socks were poor choices, despite having the chamois padded spandex on underneath. And tucking the pant legs into the socks may keep them from getting caught in the chainrings, but …  I didn’t mention that I was also wearing 4 layers of Techwick, because, well, who cares? The outermost layer is worn for its high visibility, this being deer hunting season. Any stray bullets should see that I’m not a deer and veer off.

Yes, I’m waving at YOU, Internet. Photos by Rosie.

After leaving the library I headed up to the Sunapee State Park. First the beach, where I’d hoped to see a flock of geese in the lake but didn’t, then to the mountain where preparations for the ski season are well underway. They’ll be starting to make snow any time now. And we should be seeing some natural snow soon as well. Hooray.

As I was framing this shot, the chairlift started up. Yet more proof that God exists.

So I was back home by 3:15. Time to do some more puttering in the garden. I replanted the bronze fennel plants that I’d ripped out the day before. My wife told/asked me on the phone that evening (rather emphatically) that those were perennials and why the hell did I do that?! I didn’t really have an answer, but the roots were fine so I pulled them out of the compost pile and planted them back at the ends of some of the beds. They would not have composted that well anyway. Sour grapes? Oliver was nearby as I worked, getting some quality time with our toy owl.

“You call this quality time? I have to sit on this rock all winter!”

I guess the owl’s not really a toy, but a sort of scarecrow. Guess I will bring him in for the winter. He can stay in the greenhouse.

In conclusion, The End.

Oh yeah, before I forget, the title of this post is just a sort of experiment to see if I get any more traffic. It has nothing to with sex or machines. Obviously. What were you thinking?

*For the same reason, as vermonter recently observed, that people say “not to change the subject” when they intend to do just that. Quirky colloquialisms.

Not something to look forward to really, but try and stop it. Winter that is. The list of things that must be done before snow flies has always been a downer. But in the last couple of years I’ve managed to check most of the boxes on the list. Not that I have an actual list. It’s mental really. Get the gardens cleaned up and fall crops planted, bring in all the winter squash, get snow tires mounted on cars, clean the chimney, cover next year’s woodpile, put away lawn mowers, take out snow blower, etc. Totally mental. List I mean …

We had a new front door installed a few weeks back. Oliver inspects the work.

Hunter doesn’t seem terribly impressed. Big deal, another door I will always be on the wrong side of.

Our old front door was hideous, heavy, and weather-worn. Note funky mechanical doorbell.

My wife invested a great deal of time and effort on this project. And money. Turns out doors are not cheap. But she “saved” big bucks by doing the staining herself, which took a couple of weeks. It came out looking like beautiful mahogany.

Stained glass insert featuring 3 pretty flowers … need a nice photo from the inside …

The new door has a funky mechanical doorbell too, which was installed after the photo was taken. And the light fixture was upgraded too. Now this all makes the whole front porch look like the big old piece of crap that it is. A project for the not-too-distant future. I imagine that my wife is already dreaming up the details. She knows better than to tell me about those plans since I’ll just say how stupid I think they are. Can’t help it, it’s my first reaction to almost everything. Jeez that’s stupid. Isn’t it?

…

Ah, the smell of creosote in the morning. Yuk.

So I climbed up on the roof with the stepladder, chimney brush and ropes. Sweeping the chimney went OK until one of the ropes came untied. Fortunately I was able to pull the brush back up and retie the knot. It was a pretty day so after I got done with that mess I brought the camera up and got a nice shot of the whole backyard panorama.

I love this view looking to the west.

Back to a couple of weeks ago. Got all the winter squash and pumpkins harvested from behind the barn and pulled all the vines, cornstalks, and tomato plants. There was quite a nice pile of squash, but the pumpkins didn’t do well at all. Only 2 actually ripened on the vine, and of those the bigger one

Had to get all these squashes into the root cellar.

Loaded them into the Camry’s large trunk then drove them over to the house.

Back to the present. We took a ride through the remains of Hurricane Rick to the Mystic, CT area last Saturday. Visiting relatives. We saw this weird “house”. It was pretty interesting looking. Not sure what it was.

Happy Halloween everybody.