Mystic Aquarium

More vacation, this time on the opposite side of the state.

Slowly I turned

Kent Falls State Park
Somewhere in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut
Picked up the sprog and her friend from camp, where they'd been all week. It was raining like crazy earlier, but it cleared up enough to stop on Rt. 7 and have a picnic lunch.

A shot from halfway up the falls.

I just got home, and can see that sometimes the phone just ain't a camera.

Cardio Thursday

I totally blew away the 1.69 from the other day.

Problem is, I get more and more tired out after each session. When the hell do I start feeling better, feeling all that energy that they keep telling me that I'm supposed to having?

Cardio Saturday

This was from Saturday morning. Somehow, I always feel "lighter" on the weekend, and now that I'm on vacation, everything seems a little bit easier. Saturday marks the end of three straight weeks in the "Body for Life" program. Normally they want you to go for 12 weeks, but I've only got the 8 weeks of July and August. I'm seriously considering, though, continuing this for another four, through the end of September.

Not sure how much faster I can go on that stupid treadmill, though.

'Twas grilling and the slithy toves...

From Movable Jewel comes part of the secret to Bro. Don's "Top Secret" ribs:

"It starts the day before with selecting the best meat I can find."

From Ashida Kim's "Zen Koans:"

31. Everything Is Best

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

"Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer.

"Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best."

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

It's interesting to hear a bunch of middle-aged guys talk cooking. Invariably, it involves grilling.

This is a picture of the birthday present I bought myself last year. All stainless - although you'd hardly know it after a solid year of use; right now it's pretty black inside. Black, however, is much better than how my twelve previous grills have ended up. I'm one of those guys who grills all year - summer, winter, monsoon season, dust storms, blizzards, plagues of locusts - and predictably I'd end up replacing the inner parts by the end of the year. Last year, I decided that I needed a more professional model.

I shopped for a month before deciding on this grill from Costco. It is very well made, and when compared to grills in a similar price range, the workmanship was superior to some of the better known brands. So I grabbed the shop pickup truck and went to Costco on a Friday afternoon. I wheeled a cart down to the outdoor department, and tried to drag one of the boxes onto the cart.

It wouldn't budge.

I figured that it was hung up on the skid, so I tried the next box.

It moved about two inches and stopped.

A guy behind me who had previously voiced some good-natured jealousy that I was buying the rather pricey piece of cookware, pitched in to help. A third guy saw us struggling, and joined the battle. We managed to drag the box onto the cart. Just as we got the box situated, I saw the shipping label. Remembering that there are 2.2 lbs. in a kilo, I did the math in my head.

"Holy c*w!" I exclaimed, "No wonder we couldn't drag it. The grill weighs 300 pounds!"

The two guys shook their head and wished me luck. At the checkout, I asked for help getting it on the truck, and after securing it in the bed, I drove home.

That's where the fun began. The pickup has big tires and high springs. There was no way that I was going to lift it off the bed. I managed to drop the tailgate, and used a piece of plywood as a ramp and slid it to the ground. My wife was smart enough to come out just as I finished.

"How the hell are you going to get that up to the deck?" she asked.

Good question. The deck was in the back of the house, up seven steps, then up another two.

"No problem," I assured her, "I'll open the carton and just bring the pieces up and assemble it on the deck."

I cut the metal straps and pried open the crate.

The grill was already assembled.

That's right; in an age in which one needs an engineering degree to put together bookshelves and magazine racks from Ikea, my new grill was almost completely put together. I actually had to dismantle it in order to get the weight low enough to manage it up the stairs. For a half hour I undid screws and bolts, and managed to drag the now-200 pound behemoth around the back of the house. My wife, ever resourceful, remembered that she needed to clean the kitchen. I, stuck on the bottom stair to the deck, balanced the grill with one hand and called the house phone from my cell phone.

"I'm stuck," I told her, "I need your help." She reminded me that moving heavy objects was not in the wedding vows - her way of hinting that I was going to owe her a vacation, or at least a weekend painting the closets. She came out to the deck and while I held the back end of the crate, she lifted the front up one stair at a time. At the top of the first deck, she declared her part of the process finished, and retreated to the safety of the kitchen. Somehow I managed to get the crate up two more stairs and across the deck.

By that time it was 6:30 pm, and she poked her head out to ask if I could fire it up to cook some burgers for dinner. I reminded her that one third of the grill was still in the garage; we sent out for pizza and ate outside. That is, she and our daughter ate while watching the floor show called "Daddy trying to reassemble the grill before it's too dark to see."

By 9:00 pm, the grill was finally reassembled, the gas hooked up (I have not one, not two, but three tanks of propane - as I wrote, I do a lot of grilling), and the bugs were biting. I fired up the grill and admired the ceramic searing burner and the smooth, shiny stainless grill. I rummaged through the freezer and found a few frozen hot dogs; moments later they were sizzling... well, mainly that was the sound of the ice melting.

That's when I discovered that "stainless" does not mean "immune to discoloration."

And if anyone knows how to clean a stainless steel grill, I'd appreciate any advice - as I mentioned earlier, it's beginning to look like it came out of an old diner. But that's okay - after well over a year of near-continuous use, nothing has burned out, worn out or broken off.

I wish I could say as much about the griller as I can about the grill.

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

Some headlines write themselves

How could I not mention the headline from this afternoon's Hartford Business Journal?

"Bathroom causes evacuation"

I'm sure that there is a causal relationship, but still...


Actually, the article refers to a smoke alarm in the Hartford State House being triggered and causing employees to leave the building.

Still, the 12 year old in me is having a giggle fit.

Death by Blog Meme

Getting tagged with a blog meme is a love/hate thing. On one hand, since most of them are left-over teenager "Truth or Dare" games, they're a PITA. On the other hand, if nobody ever tags you, then you start to feel left out. Proof that some of us never seem to leave junior high school.

Anyway, Chris Garlington over at my new blog discovery (and not un-ironically named) "Death by Children" got sucked into agreed to play along when he was tagged by themolk and decided to spread the misery over here. This is an interesting meme because instead of asking for your favorite ice cream flavor or to pick random embarrassing fact about yourself, this meme has one pick five posts that you feel identifies, or gets to the core of your blogging. For me, this is interesting because this blog barely even has five posts; I started this as an offshoot of my Masonic blog, The Tao of Masonry, when I started getting the itch to write about things that are a bit off the Masonic path. With that in mind, I'm going to list posts from both blogs.

In no particular order:

Marriage, Memorial Day, and the Kobayashi-Maru
For anyone who's ever gone shopping without a safety net.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation - Part 2
I'm not crazy about flying. But I certainly prefer flying to falling out of the sky.

Auntie Em! Anti-M!
In which I finally admit to the secret world-wide Masonic konspiracy." (One of my favorite posts)

Guarding the West Gate
Was Freemasonry really better in the "old days"?

Master of My Domain
What I did wrong - and how it was okay in the end - as Master of my Masonic Lodge.

I'm not sure if these are my best writings, but I think that they are all good examples of what I'm trying to do here.

No blog meme is complete without the tagging, of course, so I'm picking on:
Burning Taper, Pagan Temple, John Ratcliff, Chris, and Christian Ratliff

20 minutes of cardio is only how far?

Three times a week I ask myself this question:

"What? I've been running my butt off for the last twenty minutes, and I've only gone a mile and a half?"

Ok, not record breaking, but pretty good for a beginner.

I've been doing this diet and resistance training for the last two weeks, and ever other day is a cardio workout. 20 minutes of running on a treadmill, first slow, then more quickly, then fast, then a slowdown, and the cycle repeats.

It's kind of like being at work.

A few months ago I had to do a "stress test" at the hospital, and I could barely run for ten minutes. Of course, I was carrying around 20 extra pounds, and the stress test was designed to work the hell out of you. As it happened, I was pegged at "normal" on that test. I think I'd do better now.

Anyway, I've got six weeks to go. Don't even ask me about the weight and resistance part. The program is designed to push you until your muscles give out. I do this right after work every day, and usually I consider myself lucky if I can drive home.

Are we there yet?

Okay, the presidential elections are still well over a year away, and already I'm sick of the campaigning.

I'm not, however, sick of the parodies. Let the send-ups begin!

I Can Haz Sidecar?

For some reason known only to the gods of teh int3rw3bz, one of the most consistently popular blogs on Wordpress is a place where people send in terminally cute pictures of cats (they allow token other animals, but it's mainly a feline blog) that have been "capped" - tagged with sickeningly cutesy captions. The blog has spawned several parodies, and I can envision a time in the not-too-distant future when the phrase "I can has ___ ?" will be as ubiquitous as "All your ____ are belong to us."

No, I'm not going to give you the name; I have no wish to be linked to it. Go to Wordpress and find it yourself.

So it's probably no surprise that when my Harley-riding, camera-wielding sister sent this out, it was the first thing that popped into my head.



The dog's name, by the way, is Polly.

Go ahead. Ask me.

*sighs*

Because she had a parrot named Rover, of course.

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Edit:
Just to show that my sister really is not a crazy cat dog lady, here's the link to her own websites:

Shoot Photography
The World in Black & White