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We’ve had some gorgeous weather over the past three days and I’ve taken advantage of the situation to get out and start getting the house ready for spring and summer.The weather in Wisconsin really warmed up on Saturday, so I jumped into action. First, I put almost all of the screens back on the windows and the sliding screen door on the kitchen door. Since the temperature was north of seventy, the next order of business was to get those screens in use by opening the windows. It’s amazing how much of a difference that makes with the general air quality in the house.

After that, it was time to get tortoise into his outdoor pen for the first time in 2007. Once I got him in there, he basked heartily in the sun for most of the day while chomping on dandelion greens. He obviously missed the natural light and grass. While I was putting in his pen, I noticed that it needed some repair because a dog jumped on the wire mesh roof over the winter and broke a couple of the tie-wraps that hold it together. I’ll have to add that to my list of projects.

Getting the laundry out on the line was the next order of business. That meant getting the clothesline and clothespins out of the basement and the clothespole out of the rafters in the garage. Once I had that setup, two loads of laundry went out on the line.

Finally, Dalla and I jumped in the car to run some errands. I needed a sledge hammer to take apart the stone and brick planter next to our front steps, along with some softener salt, and some ladder hooks. I tried to buy the sledge hammer at Menards, but when I asked where the keep the sledge hammers, the woman asked me, "What kind of sledge hammer?" My response? "A sledge hammer." After all, how many different types of sledge hammer can there be? As it turned out, they only had short-handled sledge hammers, so I ended up purchasing one at Sears.

Dalla patrolled the yard while I dug the dirt out of the planter (three wheel barrows full) and then used the sledge hammer to break up the stone, brick and mortar. I got about two thirds of that thing broken up before I had to walk the dog, make dinner, and take the laundry in. Once we get that broken up, we can start rebuilding it using a concrete form, but that’s another project for another day.

While I was working around the house and whatnot this weekend, Sarah was in Memphis with her friends from college. They try to get together every year or so and this year they picked Memphis as a destination. They had a good time checking out Beale St. and Graceland. They also at some tasty barbeque, of course.

Yesterday, several people around my office developed a hacking cough that forced us to go home early. Of course, we were really going home because the weather was so nice, so the cough was just a joke that we were all in on.

Tonight, Sarah and I are hoping to bottle the beer that I brewed a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully, that won’t take more than a couple of hours.

When a number of my colleagues were at the Pole during the early part of this year, they installed a webcam behind our firewall there. As such, I’ve been able to watch the sun go down over the past week. Once below the horizon, the sun won’t rise there again until 21 Sep 2007.The pictures below show the sun heading below the horizon, the sun on the first day it is below the horizon, and the sun several days after it set.

The photos are blurry because the webcam is focusing on the dome that encloses it, rather than the objects at which it is pointed. In addition, some snow and ice is sticking to the dome, so that introduces some artifacts into the photos.

A partial journal for our trip to Arizona in 2006.Wednesday
==========

Arrive in PHX. Rent Dodge Stratus and head south on I-10. Stop for lunch at
Lucy’s Cafe. David: Pepperoni and Sausage pizza and Widmer Hefeweizen;
Sarah: Chicken Ceasar salad (and wine?). Purchase bottle of Encore 2001
blended red for Tina and Mike. Start heading south again. Trash along
Interstate. Rooster Cogburn’s ostrich ranch. Arrive in Tucson. Meet Mike
and Tina at condo. Geoff and Colleen arrive later in rented HHR. Head out
on hike up Ventana Canyon trail from back of development. Geoff searches
for bighorn sheep. After hike, a swim in (warm) development pool and some
soaking in (hot!) spa. Dinner at Gaazi’s Italian restaurant. Decent, but
not spectacular. Huge servings. Dessert at Cold Stone Creamery. Not worth
the money. Sarah and Geoff drive to Tucson airport to get Geoff put on
Stratus’ allowed drivers list. David nods off while they are gone. When
they return, David and Sarah push aside sofas, strip them of cushions, and
make bed on floor.

Thursday
==========

Sarah and Dave walk over to nearby resort to purchase newspaper. Geoff and
Colleen pack up their stuff and say their goodbyes. Off to Pima Air and
Space Museum for AMARC tour. While on grounds, see Sikorsky Skycrane, Super
Guppy, Vomit Comet, variety of unique and not-so-unique aircraft. Use the
walkie-talkies that came with the condo to communicate while at Pima Air and
Space. AMARC tour is on an air-conditioned bus. See numerous aircraft,
including many B-52s and Titan missiles. F-4′s are being turned into target
drones. Numerous A-10′s soar overheard during our time on the base and at
the Museum. Dinner at El Charro. David has draught Dos Equis Amber and
Carne Seca: dry meat; house specialty; it’s okay. Sarah has fish tacos;
they were good. Back to the condo to watch the Olympics. Sarah and David
go for late night swim and quick soak in hot tub before bed.

Friday
==========

David and Sarah start morning with 1 hour hike on Ventana Canyon trail.
Find a better path to resort to buy newspaper. After breakfast, drive to
west side of Tucson and visit Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Watch Raptor
Free Flight demonstration with Harris’ hawks. See pumas, gray wolf, other
desert cats, no desert tortoise (hibernation), no desert reptiles or lizards
(probably hibernating), javelinas, cacti too numerous to count. Eat lunch
at picnic area. More Desert Museum after lunch. Cloudy day, so Kitt Peak
observatory night viewing canceled. Stop at Wild Oats Market and buy
catfish, eggs, yams, and whatnot for dinner. No decaf coffee, so buy coffee
from Ike’s Coffee instead. Next to Basha’s for mangoes.
David and Sarah make corn-meal encrusted catfish fillets, yam fries, and
mango beverage for dinner. Also serve bottle of Encore wine. After dinner,
Sarah has dark chocolate bar while everyone else eats frosted brownies.
Watch Olympics after dinner.

Saturday
==========

Up early. David finds new newspaper dispenser in condo development.
Because condo only has place settings for four, dishes are an issue.
Dishwasher soap dispenser failed to open the previous night, so David washes
all dishes by hand before others awake and while Sarah runs on Ventana
Canyon trail. After breakfast (including strawberries from previous day’s
shopping trips), off to Rincon Farmer’s Market (Sarah’s pick). David buys
five AZ-grown grapefruit. Sarah buys dog treats for Dalla and Maya.
Discover that morning that Sarah’s sunglasses are broken. David and Sarah
share tomale and chile relleno. Tina shares her egg and chorizo burrito
with Sarah and David. All browse the cactus dealer behind the market. The
market was held in a large white barn that has a green roof. David and
Sarah are sorely tempted to purchase some nice furniture but lack a good way
to get it back to Wisconsin, so pass. Meet a Rottweiller-Mix named Milton.
His person sells supposedly hollistic dog food and treats. After Farmer’s
Market, visit Colossal Cave. Nobody is keen to pay for the cave tour (it is
relatively expensive), drive deeper into the park and spend some time
visiting the historic ranch. Visit an original CCC structure which is now a
museum. Take picture of fabulous painted French doors. Pile back in car to
seek lunch. Have lunch at bar along Old Spanish Trail (road). David and
Sarah both have a mesquite-smoked chicken breast which is really good. It
actually tastes like it was smoked with mesquite. After lunch, drive to
Tucson Electric Park to see if we can see any of MLB spring training
(pitchers and catchers had reported). Nothing is going on, so we head
South to visit the Titan Missile Museum.
Sunday
==========

Monday
==========

There are few books written that have the potential to be almost universally popular. Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan is one of those books.When I brought a copy of the book home from the library late last week, Sarah almost immediately grabbed it off the coffee table and started devouring it. Soon after, she revealed that my sister, Amy, also had finished the book recently. I picked the book up on a whim after seeing it on a table at the library. The picture of the dog on the front cover drew me in and the words inside ensured that I took it home.

Grogan is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and telling stories is his primary skill. He uses that skill to its utmost in this book as he relates all the antics, successes, and failures of his family’s life with Marley, a 100 pound golden lab with far more brawn than brain.

This book is one of the few books that had me laughing out loud page and page. It’s the rare book that makes me laugh out loud even once; at times, Marley and Me had me laughing so loud and so hard that I had trouble reading. For page after page I would chuckle, chortle, guffaw, and hoot with glee at Marley’s delightfully rambunctious and often brain-dead antics. The Grogan family’s equally naive expectations and complete lack of experience with a wild beast only added fuel to the fire.

If you’ve ever owned a dog of any temperament or breed, I highly recommend Marley and Me. Even if you’re not a dog owner, the skill displayed by Grogan in telling the story makes this book a delightful read. In short, get this book and read it. You’ll thank me later.

To paraphrase Fred Willard in Waiting for Guffman, the Midwest is the best coast in baseball. If you consider the Mississippi River one of the coasts. And you would already know the Midwest is home to all that is good and wholesome and admirable in baseball, except Midwesterners are too grounded and humble and decent to brag about it.

The East Coast? Forget it. The East Coast is in decline and in denial. Those overpriced, overrated and over-hyped AL East and NL East teams have produced just two world championships in the past six seasons. The Atlanta Braves had a losing record this year. The Yankees get knocked out of the postseason earlier and earlier. The Red Sox are so desperate they recently agreed to pay $51.1 million just for the right to negotiate with Scott Boras.

Meanwhile, the West Coast is too busy producing bad movies, expensive coffee and software security updates to field championship teams. Money Ball has yet to produce an American League pennant in Oakland, let alone a World Series win. The Dodgers haven’t won a World Series since Patrick Swayze had a career. The Giants haven’t won a World Series since moving to San Francisco. The Mariners and Padres have never won a World Series. The AL West is so weak it can only manage four teams, one of which is in the Central time zone.

And the Midwest? The Midwest is the proud home to the 2006 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals, the 2005 World Series champion Chicago White Sox, the 2006 American League Cy Young award winner (Johan Santana) and now the 2006 American League Most Valuable Player (Justin Morneau). The best player in baseball (Albert Pujols) and the best pitcher in baseball (Santana) both reside on the Mississippi.

How do the Midwest teams do it while operating with payrolls so limited they include paying their players with postdated checks? It’s no secret, and folks on the coasts can see the answer for themselves if they ever bother to look out the window while jetting over what they derisively call “flyover land.”

Central division teams succeed the same way everyone does it in the Midwest: by getting up earlier and working harder in worse weather than everyone else in the country.

East Coast and West Coast teams simply buy their rosters, but Midwest clubs raise theirs like the region’s farmers who grow the crops that feed the nation. While Derek Jeter is still at a nightclub slurping Grey Goose off the chest of the latest Maxim cover girl, Pujols is building up his powerful wrists by waking up early and milking the cows on the dairy farm he bought with his first contract bonus.

While Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi shoot every possible chemical into their body, Justin Morneau is bulking up by eating so much hearty sweet corn on the cob that he could test positive for ethanol.

And after a long summer of striking out batters with his 90-plus smoke, Santana ices his arm during the winter by holding it out the rolled-down window as he drives to Lake Minnetonka for a little ice fishing.

The Midwest’s supremacy goes beyond the players and the standings, though. You may root for a team on one of the coasts, but when you go to a game, the beer you drink and the hot dogs you eat likely come from the Midwest. Heck, even the stadiums themselves are rooted in the Midwest. The East Coast is the home of the House That Ruth Built, but the Midwest is the home of HOK, the stadium firm that builds most of the game’s other houses, including Yankee Stadium 2.

About the only thing the Midwest is lacking compared to the coasts is scandal. The West Coast is the home of the Cream. The Midwest is the birthplace of cream of wheat. The West Coast has the Clear. The Midwest’s got milk. The West Coast has Barry’s head. The Midwest has the Metrodome. Face it. In every way, the Midwest is superior to the coasts right now.

Although, admittedly, there is no defense for the Kansas City Royals.

Originally written by Jim Caple at ESPN.com, but then they shut it away behind their silly Insider system, so I copied it here for my own edification.

March and April are by far the cruelest months in Wisconsin.In March and April the weather warms up noticeably for stretches which
causes the expectation of spring and summer to rise up in area residents.
Unfortunately, nice days like today and tomorrow invariably are followed
by days with forecast temperatures in the twenties and a chance of light
snow. Today, the temperature should be in the low fifties with sun, while
tomorrow we should see the lower sixties with a slight chance of rain. Both
days should do much to eradicate the remaining snow on the ground in all but
the tallest drifts and most densely packed ice. After that, we’ll be left
with a few scattered piles of dirty snow and grayish-brown grass and soil.

Saturday night, Sarah, Amy, and I attended the NCAA semi-final women’s
hockey game between Wisconsin (ranked number one in the nation and the
defending champs) and Harvard (ranked number six). The game started at
19:00 local time, and went into four overtimes before the game was decided.
It was a tight contest and anyone’s game right up until Wisconsin scored in
the fourth overtime. By the end of the third, even the fans were getting
tired, so I can’t imagine how tired the girls on the ice were.

Sarah bought a new bike on Saturday at one of the local bike extravaganzas.
It’s a high-end Trek (Madone 5.2) with a carbon-fibre frame and Ultegra
components. She saved more than $1800 off the list price, which made the
purchase a bit easier on the wallet. Since she’s been logging so many miles
with her bike club the last couple of years, I don’t have any doubts that
she’ll get her money’s worth out of this new bike. It, of course, instantly
became the nicest bike in our house.

That purchase also pushed her back into the lead in our non-existent contest
to see who can justify owning the most bikes. She’s now got five to my
four. Even that four is suspect as one of the four is down to a frame and
handlebars since I cannibalized the rest. However, if you
counted the three bikes I’m planning on selling this spring, I’d have
seven. Now if only we had somewhere to store all those bikes that
wasn’t our basement…

Dalla got another squirrel on Sunday. Sarah took her hiking in the
forest attached to the university and she found a squirrel foraging in deep
snow reasonably far from a tree. The squirrel just wasn’t able to push
through the snow fast enough and the Mighty Hunter made it pay.

Before I left for the Pole, I brewed up a batch of wheat beer. However, I had to leave before it finished so I didn’t really get to sample it until I got back in late January. The whole time I was gone, I wondered how my beer would turn out.Despite a color more appropriate for an amber, the beer was actually quite good. Not every bottle was equally good; some bottles were merely adequate while others were very, very good. In general, I enjoyed the end result so much that I decided to keep brewing.

The biggest headache of the first batch was letting the wort chill before I could pitch the yeast into the fermenter. Letting the wort cool took about six hours which meant that I could never brew on a weeknight and that all sorts of undesirable little nasties could get into the beer while it was in a vulnerable state. So, I investigated how to cool the next batch faster, and ended up building a wort chiller out of some copper piping I bought at Home Depot, a few feet of vinyl tubing and a double-handful of plumbing bits from a local hardware story. Earlier this week I put the whole mess together and it all seemed to work. However, the real test was going to be how the apparatus performed the next time I brewed.

While we were in New Zealand and Australia, I drank more than my fair share of English-style bitters. Unlike the name might imply, bitters are not really bitter. Rather, bitters are usually amber in color, full-bodied, somewhat malty, often with a hint of floral scent, and perhaps even a bit of sweet flavor. There aren’t many English-style bitters brewed in the US, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take advantage of my home brewing equipment.

This morning I spent three hours brewing up five-gallons of beer that is now fermenting. The wort chiller worked as advertised; the wort cooled down to roughly 70° F (from boiling) in a bit less than twenty minutes.

Of course, I won’t know how I did with this batch until I can drink it roughly three weeks from now. I have seven bottles of my wheat beer left to tide me over until then.

Unlike Michael Perry’s classic book, Population 485: Meting Your Neighbors One Siren At A Time, his latest book, Truck: A Love Story is a merely adequate effort.Truck marks the time through a year spent restoring an old International Harvester pickup truck that had been rusting away in Perry’s back yard for the last twenty years or so. It’s a nice idea, but it isn’t really the central focus of the book, and at at times, it seems as though Perry is straining to tie together the truck restoration with whatever is going on in his life. The use of the truck’s restoration to track time seems even more meaningless when you realize that his brother-in-law does most of the heavy lifting for the restoration.

Perry helps out with the restoration, but because his help is minimal, the truck often is relegated to a paragraph or two at the end of the chapter.

Since his last book was so well received, Perry now spends a non-trivial amount of time on the road attending readings and meetings editors. This invariably leads to discussion of the differences between life in small-town Wisconsin and New York City. However, we already know that most people who live in those quite disparate places live different lives. We’re not necessarily seeking validation of that fact. What we’re seeking is what made Population 485 interesting: Perry’s examination and revelation of the complex and deep lives led by ordinary people.

In the end, Truck: A Love Story is tolerable reading, but it doesn’t break any new ground and it won’t displace any books from your mental list of the Top Ten Books of All Time.

Ruth Reichl was the New York Times food critic for six years in the mid to late nineties. Her newest book, Garlic and Sapphires ia a humorous and interesting look at her stint at the Gray Lady.Reichl was recruited away from the LA Times to be the NY Times food critic in 1993. One of the first things she realized was that she couldn’t go to most restaurants as herself because she would be too quickly recognized. As such, she was forced to adopt elaborate disguises to ensure that she was treated just like most everyone else who walked in the restaurant door. Garlic and Sapphires is as much an examination of what is means to disguise oneself as it is a memoir of her time in New York.

Reichl adopted a series of disguises, complete with wigs, make-up, shoes, and clothes that fit the part so that she wouldn’t be so easily identified. Each disguise was different–the stunning blonde, the nearly invisible little old lady, Reichl’s mom–and each seemed to invest her with a different personality. In her book, she discusses how people treated her differently depending on which disguise she wore and how this makes her feel.

In addition, she recounts what makes a restaurant worthy of four stars, and what dooms a restaurant to a lousy one star rating. During her time at the Times, Reichl reviewed many ethnic restaurants and gave them two or three star ratings, something the previous critic would never have condoned. This break from tradition gave her critics no small amount of ammunition to use against her. In their minds, the only good restaurant is an old-school French restaurant.

In addition to a discussion of restaurants, Reichl discusses the food they serve. If you don’t usually think about what a particular herb brings to a dish, Reichl may open some new doors for you. She also describes how certain foods ought to be prepared so as to not be over or under done and how many restaurants get it wrong.

Finally, Reichl provides recipes in each chapter of the book that are germane to the contents of that chapter. Not all of the recipes are trivial, but none of them are so fussy that they couldn’t be made at home by an experienced cook.

While this book isn’t one that I would normally pick-up and read, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an interesting and entertaining book. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys eating and wants to see the world from the food critic’s point of view for a while.