The Tides of Change

Why is it impossible to recreate the first time you experience something?

The weekend was spent relaxing on the beaches of the Outer Banks, NC. The weather was fine: occasionally threatening rain, but only so cloudy as to take the sting off the midday sun and keep temperatures pleasant. The water was refreshingly chilly. We were far from the only cats on the beach, but never had any problem securing a spot for our chairs. We sunbathed, swam, read, ate, drank, and were merry.

But it wasn't anything like the first time. The first time, OBX felt like a coastal wilderness like I had never experienced back home. I'd had an idea that people escaped to places like this, camping in the dunes and cooking tuna over an open campfire on the beach. Now here was I, feeling a million miles from home and loving it.

So perhaps its not OBX that has changed, but me. And of course if you visit at the end of September, hitting the beach around dinner time, then it's easy to forget that such a majority of the population of the East Coast and beyond (we saw a lot of Quebec plates this time) treat OBX as their Summer playground.

It's heartbreaking to see a beach full of F250's. There's really no reason for it. For an avid fisherman I can see the benefit in him taking his jeep to the surf with all his tackle and bait and supplies for the day. A family on a beach trip need to park the truck in the parking lot, hand the beach chairs to Junior and start walking. The Environmentals are doing what they can to protect the wildlife, but making themselves hugely unpopular in the process. As a chemist all I see is the residue left behind. Hundreds of vehicles carrying material from the roadway onto the sand, laying down a blanket of Carbon monoxide, complex hydrocarbons and trace precious metals. I was always taught that the beach was a vulnerable environment by dint of its nature as a transition from sea to land.

Of course I respect the rights of visitors to recreate on the beach, but as with all things, with rights come responsibility, and little responsibility is being exercised by most of the visitors. What disappoints me is that as the people who have been visiting the area for decades complain about the erosion of their rights, they fail to realize how they have not kept up on their responsibilities to be examples of how to treat the environment with respect, to educate other visitors about the fragility of the beach and it's inhabitants, to exercise a little frugality and not abuse the resources that the barrier islands hold. Having completely ignored these vital roles, now they only have bad things to say of the legislators and civil servants working to do what they didn't do themselves. No, you can't fish from the beach around the inlet, because where the trucks used to be sparsely dotted along the waterline, they are now wing-mirror to wing-mirror. The traffic along the dunes rivals Highway 12. The Oystercatchers and turtles want just a sliver of their home to call their own.

Origami 001

Origami 001, originally uploaded by evens.john.

While in Boston we stopped in some cool shops along Beacon street, including a puzzle and game store. I picked up a book called 3-D Geometric Origami: Modular Polyhedra by Ron Gurkewitz and Bennett Arnstein.

I've managed some simple models that required fewer than 10 pieces, and that start with standard origami squares. Not sure if I'm ready to tackle the 20 piece Triangle Module Dodecahedron yet!

Chocolate Mint Tea

Kristal's Mom gave me a few Chocolate Mint rootings when we were starting our gardens. It has done rather well just outside our front door, so I attempted to make tea today. I took enough stems to give me a loose handful of leaves, and brewed them in just-off-the-boil water for about half an hour. I then diluted it down to double the volume an ended up with about a quart. It's rather nice. It doesn't taste overpoweringly minty. In fact it doesn't taste of much at all at first, but leaves a delightfully refreshing feeling in your mouth!

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July!, originally uploaded by evens.john.

Just got back from an awesome trip to Boston with Kristal, Chris and Rowie for Independence Day. Chris really wanted to make an appearance on my Blog, so here he is!
We:
Took a tour of Richmond

Went Canoeing on the James
Shot handguns at the range

Drove to Boston
Ate Thai food

Heard the Declaration of Independance
Saw the USS Constitution fire a 21 gun salute
Went to the original 'Cheers' bar
Went round the corner to 'Sevens'
Walked down the Esplanade
Played Uno in an Irish Bar
Ate Fried Dough
Watched the Fireworks

Visited the NE Aquarium
Ate Dim Sum in China town
Tried bubble tea
Toured Beacon Street
Ate wood oven baked pizza
Drank in the Replica 'Cheers' bar
Drank some more in a cool bar with live music
Got lost on the way back to the Hostel

Visited the MIT Museum
Visited the Harvard Natural History Museum
Ate all we could eat at Fire and Ice
Sat in a park

Drove back to Richmond
Stopped at the Statue of Liberty

The Photos are on my flickr.

Churrascaria

OK, time for a food post.

Since Kristal and I moved in together we have tried to limit the number of times we eat out each week. The effect of this has been to greatly expand the variety of dishes we prepare at home. Especially with the new grill, we have been dining in style at a fraction of the cost of restaurant fare. While I occasionally miss the popcorn shrimp at Outback, $10 of steak from the grocery store and a bottle of marinade will feed us for dinner and the next day's lunch and taste just as good (if not better). The only establishment we frequent now is our sushi restaurant (where we are considered patrons). We have discovered the secret to getting a lot of food for a small price, and rarely buy alcohol there (the tea is too nice).

Last night, beyond our wildest expectations, we weren't in a sushi mood. There was nothing to eat in the house save ground beef. Searching the internet was turning up few possibilities for new places to visit, and we ended up driving around Innsbrook in search of a place I thought I saw once...figuring we'd end up a Cheesecake Factory (their extensive menu is bound to have something that tickles our taste buds). In our meandering we came across the Ipenema Grill. It looked....expensive. But for whatever reason our curiosity get the upper hand and we started on a wonderful adventure of meat.

I have no idea what they eat in Brazil. The images that come to mind are beaches, slums and the rain forest. None of those landscapes include a restaurant of any kind. It turns out that the most popular style of dining is the Churrascaria. The service is Rodizio - a kind of all you can eat buffet, in which the meat is circulated on giant skewers by a team a waiters wielding equally huge carving knives. The Prix fixe was reasonable, so we agreed not to bolt for the door...

Before you accept any meat, the practice is to visit the salad bar (also providing side dishes). In hindsight, it is unsurprising that the food has a distinctly Mediterranean flavor; after all, Brazil was colonized by Portuguese, Italians and others, including some of Middle Eastern origin. For whatever reason, it felt slightly Greek, perhaps because of the ubiquity of olives!

On returning to the table, one flips a small acrylic sign from red to green, and the men arrive bearing carnivore heaven. The host mentioned ten type of meat. I tried to keep track, but as the meat-coma set in and my cognitive powers receded, counting to ten became a bridge too far. This is as much as I can dredge from my subconscious: smoked sausage, chicken wrapped in bacon, sirloin, tenderloin, pork ribs, lamb, and the roasted pineapple. All the meat is cooked in a South American barbecue style known as Churrasco, originating with the Gaucho cowboys. As far as I can tell, the key to everything Brazilian is lime juice. Everything was incredibly moist, tender and tasty.

I have to try a local beer whenever I can, and Ipanema offered Xingu. All I'll say is I may never drink another Guinness. Well, of course I will, but every time I do I'll think of Xingu.

New Rubber

The 8000 mile service is complete! I did the oil, filter and plug changes myself, then took it to the shop for new tires. I was thinking about saving up for some pimpin' Metzeler touring rubber, but then found a large chunk of metal embedded in my rear tire and had to accelerate the process. I think the stock tires will do just fine.

Garden Update

Tomato Flower, originally uploaded by evens.john.

We have flowers on our tomatoes and zuccini!

Motorcycle News

I dropped a bike for the first time in my life on Saturday. I had to work in the morning, and was in a rush to get out of there! In my haste I lost my balance backing out of a parking space on a slope. I've always said that I'm the type of person who know when an accident is unavoidable and concentrates on minimizing the consequences. True to my form I made virtually no attempt to keep the bike upright, instead my focus was trained on putting my machine down gently. The outcome? It landed on the clutch lever which bent like so much cheese then snapped neatly in half. No paint damage. No broken mirrors, no scratched mufflers. I was still pretty mad at myself. It was scorchingly hot and I was stripping off my gear as I tried to stand the bike up. In the end I relented and sought help from a petite workmate who in fact made all the difference. After pumping the gas out of the flooded cylinders and carbs I was back on the road. Holding on to the clutch at a red light was agony, but the bike shifted much better having more lever travel.

I picked up some sweet chrome levers off eBay, and fitted they this evening. They look pimpin'! However, I'm now back to rough shifting as the lever hits the bar. I've adjusted the cable as much as I can without the clutch slipping, so I'll just have to see how it goes.

Gas Grill!

To celebrate my being in the USA for two year, Kristal acquired me a gas grill. A work friend of hers had no further use for it, so it came for free. It wasn't in very good shape, so I sanded down all the wood and metal, stained or spray painted as appropriate and generally cleaned it up. The worst job was getting the spider nests out of the gas lines. Apparently no one sells pipe cleaners anymore (people just buy Drano) so I had to buy a 99c wire bristle toilet brush and make a few alterations. After much sweat and bloody knuckles I finally had it clean enough that gas didn't get backed up and create a fireball around the taps!

The weather is awesome for grilling right now. Yesterday was burger night - tonight we had sausages. Maybe tomorrow I'll do chicken kebabs....

Anyone remember the Baywatch episode with the ladybugs?

Last weekend we took a trip to Sandbridge and got attacked by ladybugs. At one point I had three all sitting on my at once. The water was cold, and the sand kept on blasting us, but we had some killer seafood for lunch and I found a cool shell (a fairly intact Conch).
I thought you'd all like to marvel at me doing a Baywatch impression (minus the yellow floaty thing).

Costco

Yesterday we made our first purchases at the Mecca of excess known as Costco. My place of work offers cheap membership each May. Although we got the cards a few weeks ago, and had gone in to take a look around, it has taken us this long to summon the courage to actually buy anything. I think I found the deal of the century in a set of Floor Mats for by truck that came in at $13. We don't have to buy ground beef, yogurts or Snickers bars for a while!

SFG Update

I can't really tell one plant from another, so I had Kristal tell me exactly what we had and I wrote it all down. The box on the left was planted from seed, and the right box was planted with starters.
For the purposes of web accessibility I should have created a table using html table tags. But I was lazy and did probably the worst thing I could've done. I turned an Excel file into a JPEG and posted the information as an image. Al Gore (the de facto creator of the internet) would be horrified. I added some poorly drawn grass to try to convince myself that an image really was the most appropriate format in this context, but I know in my heart that I guilty and not even providing alternate text can atone for my sloth.

Updating my blog

I hope you all like the new more personal blog banner. I created this guy when the Simpsons movie came out. It was a pretty good representation of my facial hair situation at the time. Anyway, I found him in my picture folder and though he would do a good job of welcoming readers to my blog.

I have high aspiration of updating my blog template. I need to upgrade to Blogger's new templates, but that would involve resetting the various colour and font changes I have made. At the moment I am still unclear as to the advantages of the new templates. Since I barely find to time to write posts, I dread the prospect of spending hours working on my template just to have it look identical to the current incarnation. I'm so out of practice with HTML that editing is a process of trial and error. I was trying to remove the padding about the banner image today, but can't for the life of me find the appropriate line of code to change. It isn't helped that the Blogger templates are written with some form of style-sheet that is unfamiliar to me.

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I took the plunge and the new template editor is much easier to work with. It took about 10 minutes to make some colour and font changes, reinstate my banner and enact a few other minor edits. My only disappointment is that clicking on a colour swatch to select a text colour is much less satisfiying than locating to appropriate line of code and editing the hexadecimal number.

George

George, originally uploaded by evens.john.

Kristal and I visited Crump Memorial Park this evening as I'd seen some young lambs there last weekend. We also walked around to see the pigs. A couple of volunteers arrived to tend to the garden, so we got a formal introduction to George and Martha (the pigs!).

The park garden grows the usual vegetables and of course tobacco, which is cured in the only surviving tobacco curing shed in Henrico county, also located on the property.

Square foot gardens

garden 026, originally uploaded by evens.john.

Due to our limited yard space, patchy knowledge of gardening principles and abundance of creativity we are attempting to grow our vegetables in square foot gardens. We picked up a ton of dirt on a recent trip to Mathews, and threw it in a 4x4 box. Apparently the grid is also very important to the method of the SFG. Today we picked up some starter plants for Home Depot. We have a second box which we will try to start plants from seed! Watch this space and I'll let you know if we manage to grow anything!

Earth Day

Great Horned Owl, originally uploaded by evens.john.

Save the planet or I'll set my Great Horned Owl on you! Make no mistake, this guy could really ruin your day - look at the size of those talons! Unfortunately he's not my Great Horned Owl to boss around. That job belongs to Quinn from the Wildlife Center of Virginia, who introduced us to this beasty and two other injured bird from his collection at the Henrico County Earth Day celebration.
That's right, it's Earth Day (officially 22nd April), and Kristal was on the clock manning a booth to promote DCR Natural Heritage and the protection of rare species in the Henrico Area. I helped he set up the display, then wandered off to watch this guy pull Red-Tailed Hawks out of a hat. Well, there was only one hawk (and two owls), and they were in cages not hats, but it was still freakin' awesome! Especially when our friend pictured above tried to fly away and half the front row suffered cardiac arrest.
Also presenting was 'Keep Henrico Beautiful' (who I quizzed about recycling at work) and the James River Advisory Council. I talked to the gentleman at the JRAC stand for some time. He had been stationed in the UK with the USAF when he was younger, so actually knew where Reading was, which is always nicer than meeting somebody who went to London once. He told me a lot about volunteer opportunities on the James River, as well as fishing lessons, which I'd definitely like to try.

Texas

I took three days off work to visit Martha and Graham while she was in Texas. The Lone Star State definitely went far beyond my expectations. Although I only had a short time and stayed around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, we saw so many different environments. Both cities had very clean downtown areas with great bars and restaurants, lots of plazas and parks. We visited McKinney Ave. in Dallas for some lunch when I got off the plane. With a tram running up and down the street, it kind of reminded me of Sheffield.
Then we went to see the spot where JFK got shot. A little way down the street there is this strange monument memorializing the man. Even after reading the accompanying plaque, we really had no idea what any of the elements were meant to symbolize. As I said, there is an abundance of plazas and parks in both towns, so we walked around downtown Dallas to visit various points of interest. One park is home to a herd of life size brass longhorn cattle and their brass cowboys. Next door is a Civil War cemetery - I couldn't believe I'd traveled 1100 miles across the country and still hadn't escaped the Confederacy!
After we'd done Dallas, we headed back to Ft. Worth. The way back to Graham's apartment we passed through the Stock Yards, so stopped to take a look around even through it wasn't on the itinerary until later in the week. It's really a cool place: the streets are paved with bricks and all the saloons and general stores have wooden porches over the sidewalk. We kept missing the cattle run, but by all reports it wasn't that exciting. Some of the shops form a railway station for the steam train from Grapevine. Although most of the shops are tacky (with cowboy gear that was made in Taiwan) at the very end we found this awesome spice shop which sold every type of spice plus different salts, meat rubs, curry blends and teas. I picked up a few ounces, hoping the sniffer dogs at the airport wouldn't get me! We were getting thirsty so we popped into the White Elephant Saloon were a very curt barman who didn't understand half of what we said ended up giving us free beer. Time had gotten away from us, so the stores I wanted to go in for cowboy boots were shut, so we made haste to H3 Steak House for just about the best Ribs and Steak I've ever tasted in my life. Granted, the place wasn't cheap, but I think we all agreed it was worth it, and did our best to clean our plates.
We pottered back to Graham's apartment and after a brief respite, decided that we needed to walk off dinner a little. Graham wanted to show us this great pub that has a lot of beers on tap, so we took the scenic route to downtown through the water gardens. At the Flying Saucer, I tried a local brew IPA, which was pretty decent, but we were all dog tired after one pint so called it a night.
On Tuesday we headed out to the West of DFW. The main plan for the day was to visit Possum Kingdom Lake. I'd been told that the landscape started to resemble a desert very soon after leaving the DFW area. I didn't find it to be so. The ground got sandier, but there were plenty of hardy trees and prickly pear cacti. It's definitely Ranch country, with the stereotypical iron archway incorporating the ranch name over every driveway. Cattle, horses and to my surprise goats were present in large numbers. We stopped for some lunch at the lake, and watched some boys jump in, then climb straight back out of the cold water! The next attraction was to be Dinosaur Valley SP near a great barbecue joint, so we set off along some scenic roads towards Glen Rose. Our route took us through Granbury, which had the cutest town square. This quaint ice-cream parlor caught our eye, and with the temperature pushing 80 we indulged in a round of root beer floats. Martha put 'Twist and Shout' on the duke box, then we headed out again in the heat.
Dinosaur Valley was one of the highlights for me. Down in the Paluxy river, all these dinosaur footprints have been exposed in the layers of rock. At first all I saw was round holes that could have been anything (but were apparently sauropod prints). Then as my eyed discovered the three toed prints of the Acrocanthosaurus, it was suddenly the coolest thing on the planet! Plus the park is really pretty - we took a stroll down the river trying to spot a snake or an armadillo.
Unfortunately the barbecue place we wanted to eat at was closed, so we made our way back to town to find some dinner (with a brief stop to change a flat tire caused by a four inch bolt embedding itself in the right-rear). The BBQ joint in FW was classic (their motto was: "Life's too short to live in Dallas"). It was counter service and the meals were served in polystyrene trays and consisted of a huge pile of meat, sauce, beans, 'slaw, potato salad, two slices of bread and half a raw onion! The beers came in frozen margarita-style fishbowl glasses. Another fantastic meal at the opposite end of the price range!
Wednesday was kinda short. Graham had to get a new tire, then we went back to the Stock Yards so I could get some boots. After that it was time for me to catch my flight back home.

Window Boxes

Germaniums, originally uploaded by evens.john.

Today before embarking on a manly motorcycle ride, I set up the window boxes on the front of the house. The gentleman at Inside Out on Brook Rd suggested Germaniums, offset with the ivy. I also made a box and a pot with some pink and white Dianthus.

Town and country M/C ride.

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I'm having fun with Google Maps - I like being able to plot a route so I can see where I've been a share it with other people. Today, I set out with the ambitious plan of taking a Northerly route to the Pamunkey river, then heading South to Route 5 back to Richmond. However, in between leaving later than planned, being completely lost most of the time and the weather taking a turn for the worst, I traced a slightly shorter route taking in some of the countryside of Hanover, before visiting part of the city that I normally steer clear of (but is interestingly historical).

First bike ride of the year

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Spring is here and we were given two hours early departure from work on Thursday for our Spring Holiday (aka Good Friday). I was worried that the river would be too distant to comfortably reach by bike from my new place. However, I think I've found an OK route that gets me off the main roads as much as possible. My legs were feeling the burn by the time I'd made the return trip. The way back was predominantly uphill of course.
The River was looking pretty healthy. I'm not used to seeing it neither really low, nor swollen and full of debris. Last year was a year of extremes. While I sat on a rock and had a mid-ride banana, a fat, juicy crayfish climbed right up onto the rock in front of me before being swept away by the current.