baseball

Last week Doug and I went to see an advance screening of "The Tenth Inning," a continuation of Ken Burns's Baseball documentary. While in the lobby of the auditorium waiting for Doug, I happened to run into PBS's government affairs director who I know from work. It was a few minutes before the start of the show, and he was nice enough to take me backstage to meet Ken Burns and his co-producer Lynn Novich. I only had a chance to talk to them for a few minutes, but it was pretty neat. He talked about Buck O'Neill, his national park series, and some of work-related things on public television funding.

After the screening Burns and Novich came out and answered questions, and throughout that they talked about Buck O'Neill a lot, which I certainly liked. Anyhow, the purpose of the post (probably would have been better had I bothered to post this before it first aired) is to recommend that you watch the new episodes - the excerpts we saw were great.

shameless plug

On October 3 I am doing a kayak-running biathlon. The race is a fundraiser to to help soldiers and veterans wounded in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. If you would like to make a donation (my goal is only $200, so even something really small would be very helpful), you can do so here.

fingers crossed for a return to the 90s

For the past three years, and the bulk of the last ten, football Sundays have been...kind of depressing due to the dismal play of the Chiefs (there have been some exceptions). I know it was only one game, but hopefully Monday night's win against the Chargers is a sign of things to come. It has been a long time since we started the season looking this good. They need to keep it up against Cleveland tomorrow.

outer banks

The day before Labor Day, Doug, Lelaine, and I drove down to Kill Devil Hills, NC for a week at the beach. It was our third time going down to the Outer Banks - it is Lelaine's favorite beach within reasonable driving distance.

We rented a condo across the street from the beach and lucked into good weather every day but one (there was no hurricane damage from Earl, which had passed through a few days before we arrived). My favorite part of the house was that it was well stocked with beach chairs, boogie boards, and even a beach buggy thing to haul everything.

There was a lot of beach time, but we stayed pretty busy. We drove the 70 or so miles down the coast to Hatteras where we went to the graveyard of the Atlantic/pirate museum, twice went to the fairly desolate Coquina Beach with big sand dunes, kayaked around Roanoke Island (no sightings of John Smith or the lost colony) in Manteo, and went north to Duck and Corolla, including driving on the beach.

It was a very relaxing trip, but the week went by fairly quickly. We were hoping to paddle surf one day, but it ended up not working out - I guess that will have to wait for out trip to Mexico with my family in November.

Here are more pics.

Book It! for Adults

I am trying to challenge myself to read as much as I can this August/September recess because I never have time when Congress is in session. It is a challenge worthy of the Book It program from my early days where you would get the free Pizza Hut pan pizza if you read so many books. So far I've read Pillars of the Earth, The Girl Who Played with Fire and Club Dead. Right now I am in the middle of The Forever War. I went a little crazy with checking out books and buying books (see picture on the left) for our week beach vacation, but I think its something I was born with.

In elementary school, one of my favorite times of year was when the book fair came. We got a flyer a few weeks ahead of time and I would go through every title and mark every book I was interested in. I would then tell my mom how much money I needed to buy these books at the book fair. She would always let me buy what I wanted and I remembered being upset if a book that was in the flyer wasn't at the fair for some reason. I do remember one year my mom pushing back a little at the amount of books I wanted--I think I asked for $40, which does seem like a lot of money to give a kid in elementary school, but it was for one of the nerdiest things of all--to buy books.

Still a nerd, my goal is 3 books this week (what else can I do when I laying out on the beach?) The trouble is figuring out which ones to bring. I can get a bit finicky, so I need lots of choice. I'll admit, I'll probably pick up the Charlaine Harris book since you can read those so fast. An easy one. Have a recommendations among these choices? After these three, am I worthy of a pan pizza or at least a gold star?

My First Canning Adventure

Last weekend, I took up the age-old tradition of canning and curing. I found a book recently published called Homemade Living: Canning and Preserving on the Design Sponge site I now frequent and thought why not?

So I set off for Leesburg for a farmers market that I knew carried a lot of organic produce and hoped for slightly cheaper prices than the city. I was in luck! Prices were noticeably cheaper, which is important because when you are buying 8 pounds of peaches and tomatoes, it adds up! Based on what was available I decided I'd make blues and bay, tomato basil sauce, peach lavender butter, and cherry lemon thyme marmalade.

As for curing, I found a recipe in The River Family Cottage Cookbook for curing your own bacon and it was actually easy! Basically rubbing a cure mix on pork belly for four days and then eating and enjoying! I had a little sample last night and besides it being a tad salty, it was so good! You can cut it really thick and it is luxuriously decadent.

Here's what I learned:

Unitaskers are your friend in canning: Earlier in the week I bought some supplies to can including a canning rack, funnel, lid lifter and jar scraper. Little did I know, I forgot one other key supply--a jar lifter! Seemingly superfluous, it actually services a very important anti-boiling water burning skin function.

Canning is more relaxing than cooking: It is a step by step process that by nature takes time, so you're not furiously chopping to get ingredients in after the onions have caramelized or trying to cook an entree and two sides so everything comes out hot.

I hope to get a pressure canner soon so I can try canning low-acid foods (clementine cointreau curd), but I think I'll have to sell Chris on the first set of canned products before we add anything else to our kitchen.

I haven't opened any up yet, but while we are on vacation next week I am sure we'll be trying the goods. I have more photos on our flickr site too!

earl

We are supposed to head to the Outer Banks on Sunday, where right now everyone is evacuating due to Hurricane Earl. Hopefully when it touches North Carolina it doesn't cause much damage and everything, including the house we are staying in, is ok.