Last Friday I had people over for a birthday pizza bash. Great fun and great food was had by all. I bought enough dough for about 25 pizzas and we ate probably 22 all told. The pizza stone is one of my kitchen favorites: nothing tastes better than pizza popped straight out of the oven, except for maybe pizza that has been pulled straight from the oven 4 minutes ago, after the cheese loses its ability to peel the skin off your mouth.

I was also happy to debut my first ever home-made sausage. The picture should say it all, but 8 pounds of sausage is a lot! I need to tweak the recipe or my technique a bit, I have not quite mastered the interior texture, these were a bit too grainy and not quite as unified as I'd like.

Just in time for racing season: a benediction for the fleet of wheel!

http://www.theblessingofthebikes.com/

Due to the regrettably inexorable march of time, I am rapidly approaching my 30th birthday. Heck of a deal.

No new news on the job front, but that's to be expected, I think. I have however purchased all the necessaries for making my first batch of home-made sausages. A nice fat pork butt, some casings, some spices and away we go! This will hopefully complement the home-made bacon, homebrewed beer and some nice home-fired pizza that we're going to be making this Friday. Thirty shouldn't be so bad afterall.

My third batch of bacon is now ready to be eaten, and I must say that it's the best of the lot! Jennifer and I ordered a bunch of supplies from Butcher Packer Supply: pink salt (Sodium Nitrate), wet casings and also some dry casings for making sopresata. This, combined with the cookbook that Jean gave me for my birthday, will put us well on our way to making our own fresh and cured sausages! I just have to make sure not to kill myself with botulism.

Alrightie! The presentation is up on the Darumacycles Blog. I had a really good time meeting people and talking about Jennifer's bike. As it turned out, a lot of the other presenters didn't really have a good feel for the format (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide) and so didn't present the information in a very interesting way. I think (perhaps because I have little else going on right now) that I was able to put a bit more into the presentation, and it turned out quite well. In my dream world it would have been something like, "Aaron, great presentation! I loved the bikes, but have you considered working for a city planning/design/architecture firm? Here's my card..."

No dice.

I was able to chat up the Philadelphia City Planning Director, but he's got a smaller budget than I do right now, so I guess I'll hit the pavement.

Ok, I've had some requests for a report on the presentation I gave last week and it is forthcoming, but check out these shirts first!



I have never been happier to be an Iowan!

I've started a new blog as I am figuring out what the hell to do with my bamboo bicycle concept. I dearly love building these bikes, and am already in the process of building one for my brother Ian's boss at Willy Bikes in Madison. The new blog is called Daruma Cycles, with a link over on the sidebar of this blog. Daruma is a Japanese god/good luck charm. He's known for perseverance and good will and I think that I'm going to need both of those if this venture is going to succeed. The Japanese buy little Daruma dolls at temples around new years, and then make a wish while coloring in the pupil of one of his eyes. When the wish comes true, you color in the other eye, and then burn the daruma to send your thanks heavenward.

I'll be much happier once I get done with the presentation I'm giving this Friday at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson architectural firm. One of my teammates from the bike club is an architect there and recommended me for the session. The format is 20 slides, 20 seconds each. It'll be a fast and furious presentation and I hope I'm up to it. I'm a bit rusty after several months of non-academic work.

 

It is time to get back on the horse again. Winter be dammed, it is approaching cycling season. As much as my bike Pinky loves the snow, after crashing once or twice, I think that I'll stick to a different bike for slippery conditions. I eventually put the snow tires on my cyclocross bike. That was a good idea for sure. I always love the invincible feeling of studded tires as they click across the ice, saving my ass from certain flattening.

New Surf Club, and I'm in it. ESSC stands for the Eastern Seaboard Surf Club. Check out the Blog!

Bicycle construction remains a-pace. I've been working on building a new frame jig, this time more easily customizable and much more sturdy. I've also begun the process of curing the next round of bamboo, should be interesting as I've decided to put it into the smoker!

In other news, my first recipe from the Alaska Bootlegger's Bible turned out not to be the smashing success that I'd hoped. Milk wine, as it turns out, tastes pretty gross. When the ingredients are powdered milk,sugar, Lactaid and yeast,one can't really hope for much, but at the same time, I had some high expectations for something at least drinkable. Nope. Not for human consumption, though I might try to set the stuff outside to see if the cats get drunk off of it.

I've been a bit delayed, but I thought I'd post some pics from my newest diversion, SURFING. I got a call from our friend Matt who happens to own two surfboards and two wetsuits and we headed out about 10:00 on December 2 to Ocean City to foray into the wild world of surf. I spent most of my time trying to get out past the breakers, and had maybe 3 chances where I could maybe have stood up on the board. I didn't really stand a chance. I emerged about 2 hours later, exhausted but strangely exhilirated.

A couple of observations: Wrestling your way into a wetsuit on a 40 degree day is not exactly fun, but is in no way as bad as wrestling your way out of one, wet, on a 40 degree day.
Secondly, Waves, while they may not look crazy from the shore, are much bigger when your head is only inches from the surface of the water.

I had so much success making a bike at home that I thought I might diversify... TO BACON!!

After reading several accounts on how inferior store bought bacon was, and how easy it is to make your own, I decided that I had to try it for myself.

Step one is to get a pork belly. I happen to have a butcher at hand who not only sells pork belly, looks like he has a little one of his own! You take the pork belly and slather it with a dry rub of about 50% salt 50% brown sugar and stick it in a ziploc bag in the fridge for about a week. I thought that I would be creative and I took some pineapple and blended it up with the salt/sugar mix and pasted it all over the little porkbellies. Bad idea. Pineapple apparently has some sort of chemical in it which essentially digests meat protein. After about a week in the fridge, I looked in the bags and found that instead of drying out the juices and curing the bacon, the exterior of the pork belly had turned to salty pig slime. No matter, I simply washed off most of the slime and re-salted the little bastards, left it in for another 3 days and proceeded with the process.


The picture here shows the cured pork belly with the salt brine washed off. The most disconcerting part of the whole affair was the fact that pork bellies come with skin and in this case, a nipple, still attached.

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Next step was to wait over night while the surface dried out into a "pellicule" and then smoke the bacon. I decided to turn our chimanea into a smoker by placing a plank over the top and front, and then suspending a piece of wood with spikes and a thermometer from the top. This would be my pork holder. I stoked the fires, and then quenched them a bit by covering the bed of coals with a double layer of tin foil. This kept the heat in the chimney at about 200-250 degrees, ideal for smoking. To create flavor, I put some water-soaked apple wood chips that my dad had mailed to me (think I'm crazy? Meet Ronn Ritz)on top of the foil layer. The water keeps them from bursting into flame and produces more smoke. Then I sat back and waited for about an hour and a half while the bacon smoked and reached an internal temperature of 150 degrees.

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After smoking, the bacon was essentially done. All that remains is to slice,

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and enjoy!!

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Tastes pretty damn good. Next time I skip the pineapple, add some sage and some sodium nitrate!

If you're still curious about the bamboo bike project, I've posted more pictures on my flickr page.

There is some descriptive text next to each. The basic gist is that it wasn't honestly all that difficult if you have a sense for how bikes are put together. The total cost for frame materials was somewhere in the range of $200, and that includes the MDF and bolts used to make the jig. I'm hoping to put together a cyclocross bike for myself this winter some time--I think that the vibration damping qualities of the bamboo would be nice for that application. I've harvested some more bamboo and while waiting for that to dry, am contemplating my next frame jig, hopefully something more adjustable that will work for different frame dimensions. I'll post more on that process as it goes along.

Wow, thanks to everyone who has complimented me on the bike, you boosted my ego just like I had hoped. I've received numerous inquiries about the project and a bunch of "You should sell that!" comments. No plans for such things yet, but talk to me in a couple of months and I may have a different opinion depending on how the job market treats me. I'm kinda not too optimistic about that; too many people are way to freaked out about their financial future to offer me a job. Kinda sucks, but I'm more or less resigned to it, and I've been able to find some alternate employment for the time being. My new gig is guinea-pigging for the NIH. I'm going to be a part of a cholesterol study in which they starve me, feed me heavy cream and then take a core sample of the fatty tissue of my ass. ALL HAIL SCIENCE! At least it pays well, $1200. I would imagine that it will be at least moderately unpleasant because the pay is so good. No one would pay you that much for something easy.

Tonight I finished Jennifer's Bamboo road bike. I have but two words to describe how I feel about the thing: Supreme Satisfaction.



The project has been ongoing much of the summer, I started in late May by harvesting some bamboo growing north of here along the Schuylkill River. I then dried the bamboo for about a month and a half out in the back. By the time the bamboo was bleached a pleasant tan, I was ready to begin the bike.

Stage one involved plotting out the geometry, along with about 6 hours of relearning trigonometry as well as drafting on the kitchen table to get things right. Then I built the jig, mitered the bamboo tubes and glued them together with epoxy.

Next I began the process of laying up carbon fiber sheets around the joints. I've got no pictures of this because my hands tended to be covered with epoxy at that time















After probably close to 100 hours off and on over the course of the summer, I finally finished the frame and then began the lengthy process of acquiring parts. I opted for Campagnolo, because really, it's the best. That, and I had a number of spare parts floating around from my various Campy bikes.

And here is the finished ride. The kanji on the down tube and seat tube read, Ichi go, Ichi e, which is a Japanese saying that translates roughly into, "you have one chance in life, so make it your best," or alternately, "every instance is unique and valuable." Honestly, it sounds a lot less corny in Japanese. I first heard this term on a sake brewery tour when we were in Nagano in which our host's actions truly exemplified the idea of ichi go ichi e.
As for the bike, I put it together at Trophy Bikes and took it for a quick test ride earlier today. The ride quality is TOTALLY SWEET! I realize that I have a bit of a bias, but truthfully I have ridden very few bikes that felt nicer. The bike seems to float over bumpy road surfaces, almost as if it were on giant baloon tires, but nope, they are just 700x23 clinchers pumped hard as rocks. My big worry was that I had not gotten the frame alignment right, but that seems dead on too; riding no-handed is no problem. Oh yeah, and it corners like a fricking roller coaster and it accelerates as fast as anything I've ever ridden. Maybe that's due to the fact that it weighs only 16.5 pounds! I had no idea that it was going to be so light and honestly did a full on "YESSSS!" complete with double fist pump when I hung it on the scale.

Despite my bias, I think that my claims are somewhat well founded. I had as many people as I could test ride it earlier today, mostly to show off, but everyone was suitably impressed, and I don't think that they were just doing it to be nice. I am SUPER PSYCHED, as was Jennifer. She insisted that I take pictures of the bike and post them as soon as I could, and then proceeded to put the bike in the bedroom so that she could take pictures of it. I think that she likes it.

Here are some shots:

I honestly don't give a crap about baseball. I remember one summer being cajoled by Jude and Alf to drag myself to a Twins game. It sucked. All I wanted to do was escape and I think I bitched the whole time about how slow and boring the game was. Shitty shitty baseball.

But, on the other hand, THE PHILLIES ARE THE 2008 WORLD CHAMPIONS!!!!!
There's something pretty awesome about the collective joy and catharsis of a winning sports club in a city like Philadelphia. People here are pretty up front about their emotions and those emotions overflowed last night as people were honking, screaming and apparently throwing rocks late into the night to celebrate. I even found myself cheering a little when Brad Lidge struck the last guy out in the top of the 9th inning. Yes, I even know some of the players names now. I even know what some of the plays are called. The apocalypse has come.

Here are some pics from my latest cross endeavour.

I'm well into the third fall here in Philadelphia. It's been nice not to have school to contend with, but honestly, I'm getting a little buggy without fulltime employment. I have been assured that there are jobs out there, but damned if I can find them. I have thus far been able to occupy myself with small tasks around the house, building Jennifer's bike and various other things. Now I'm just antsy. At least I have a bike to ride.

I was cross examined this weekend, in a big, painful way. Result: Pass, but just barely.

The Granogue race was on saturday. The race course is laid out in a segment of the DuPont family estate, and has a wide variety of hills, dales and rooty trails to negotiate. Overall the course was on the technical side with those riders who could get out in front quickly and stay away in the following melee at a distinct
advantage. I, without the virtue of preregistration, found myself squarely starting in 108th position at the line. Not the ideal place to be on a course in which crashes and ugly conglomerations of riders make moving up relatively difficult over the long haul. I felt pretty decent, had no real mechanical failures and eventually found myself in no-man's-land toward the middle of the race. This is not quite as bad a place to be as in a road race, but it still no easy feat to bridge
up to riders further along the course. With one lap to go, I managed to get a side stitch and lost 3 or 4 places to various other folks and ended up in 49th.

Wissihickon on Sunday. Got there plenty early and the wide open course was great for spectating but also great for whipping any last trace of heat from a person's body. I'd raced the course in past years and had a bit better idea of what to expect, plus the wider trails allowed me a bit more chance to pass people. I also preregistered (a must for a big cyclocross race) and was a few spots ahead of last this at the start line. The race went pretty well, and except for my general weakness in the tighter technical spots, I did a decent job of making up ground
against other guys. I ended the day in 30th spot. Another Pass.

The best part was sitting in the sun afterwords, drinking some Victory beer and watching the OTHER guys suffer. That's what cyclocross is really all about.

Ahh, I just had a true hankering for the home country, the midwest. My sister, Leah, recently wrote an article for Minnesota 2020 about locally produced beer from Minnesota. Beer brewing has always been an autumnal hobby for me, mostly because summer is too goddam hot to boil up a kettle of boiling wort. Fall days though, bring me the desire for hoppy, malty goodness.

For some reason fall always produces ueber strong feelings of nostalgia in me. I don't know what the deal is, but the crisp, cool mornings and the smell of drying and decaying leaves suck me back in time to previous years. Fall rolls around and suddenly I can think of nothing more than bike touring through Europe, or hiking through the mountains above Nagano, or running in cross country meets across the upper Midwest. Why, it was just about 8 years ago to the day that I ran my best 8k time at Lacrosse, Wisconsin. 26:24 I believe.

This fall has been occupied with thoughts of job getting and bike riding. Jennifer's bamboo bike frame is complete, I just need to get some components and build the thing up. I'll post pictures of it when I get things all settled. I had a great time at Interbike with my dad; we totally got overexposed to bicycles but somehow I still want more. Part of it is that the show is like candy for me. I just can't bear to let the sugar high go, and so I want to purchase all of the stuff that I saw there. Maybe when I get a real job I'll be able to afford all of these goodies.