Salad Spinners Strike Again

The Salad Spinners once again competed in the Great Urban Race: Madison this year.

Fun Fact: How did we get our name?
Funny story. The race used to take place in June. The first time we did it, we signed up 2 weeks before the race because of a Groupon. When you sign up, you need to come up with a team name. We didn't want something lame like "Buckingham Team" or "Mad about Madison" so we tried to think of something unique. Early June is characterized by a few things: Frequent lawn mowing, wedding invitations, and copious amounts of lettuce. We took our name from two of the above, want to guess which?

We were going through a wedding registry for one happy couple (we will call them the Lactucas), and laughing at some of the silly things they wanted. For some reason, we found it particularly funny that they had registered for a salad spinner. "Wow, they must really like their lettuce dry!" "What kind of people eat enough salad to warrant an entire tool for drying your lettuce?"*

That, and the fact that we had a bathtub's worth of lettuce in our fridge inspired our stellar team name: Salad Spinners! We got some green shirts and the rest was history.

Back to the present: this year was our fourth year doing the race. The start was at the Coliseum Sports Bar near the Alliant Energy Center. It's a big bar, with a parking lot, so that was good. However, it's also a full 2 miles from Capital Square with nothing of note in between. We were concerned that the course would be significantly longer than it has in the past. Compounding on our concerns was the fact that there is only one bus route that goes past the Coliseum on the weekends, and it doesn't even go downtown! We decided that we didn't care how we finished, it was more important to just have fun and not worry about running too much.

As we started solving clues, we were pleasantly surprised when we learned that the course had been designed such that all the locations were west of Capital square. In fact, all the locations, except one, were within a nice tidy circle near the bar. The one location was on Capitol Square, and would take us a couple of miles off course. Luckily, we could skip 1 location, so that made the choice easy.

We had to do a few interesting challenges along the way:

First, we stopped at a Kombucha making company. Kombucha is a somewhat sketchy fermented tea beverage. It's supposed to have health benefits, or maybe kill you. Jury is still out.

We had to "wash" our hands in a vat of yeast and bacteria used in making the drink.

 After the Kombucha stop, we ran over to Vilas park. Adam had to ride a bike very slowly through an obstacle course. The only rule was that you had to take longer than 1 minute to complete the course. Adam's expert skills at riding a bike slowly paid off!

 We then had our longest running leg of the day, half way around Lake Wingra to Wingra Park. There we hopped into a kayak. Sweet! we kayak all the time, no problem. Wait, what? We have to do it blindfolded? Oh...

Emily sat at the front and shouted commands to Adam in the back, paddling with a blindfold. We had to navigate a figure 8 course and return to the dock. We did it with minimal crashing!

 From There, we had a couple of stops at locations along Monroe Street, including our favorite kitchen shop, Orange Tree Imports, and the delightful Maurie's Chocolates. We even got a sample Truffle!

Also, as an added bonus, Adam got to push Emily around in a shopping Cart. Don't tell the fine folks at Trader Joes!

From there, we headed down to Regent Street to play Bacardi and Coke Plinko, and then to a yoga studio to mock up a fake person's yoga schedule. Since we skipped the Capital Square location, we turned back toward the finish.

Two more stops: Movin' Shoes for a shoe kicking challenge, and then Nutzy Mutz where we got to hold naked mole rats. Then it was just a short jog back to the finish.

We finished in 2 hours, 50 minutes, which was good enough for 8th place! Another top 10 finish for us. In total, we ran almost 8 miles over the course of the race. We didn't take any bus rides, because the course was easy enough to just run the whole thing. There weren't any places that a bus would have helped much.

We had a ton of fun again, and we look forward to doing it again next year!

*Apparently, the answer to this question is people like us. We now own a salad spinner.

Sad bear (I mean pear)

I guess our garden was running a little too smoothly this summer. Chalk this one up to gardeners' greed. When we came home from church on Sunday, a large branch of our Karl's Favorite pear tree had cracked off, taking a good chunk of the trunk with it. We salvaged the pears we thought were big enough to possibly ripen (count = 150) and composted those that weren't (count = 50). See what I mean about being greedy? :) The pears on this tree are supposed to get Mason jar size, so 200 on any one branch is a little ridiculous. But this is the first year it has blossomed and thus produced fruit, so we just couldn't help ourselves. I emailed a local tree expert to get his take on the best way to help the tree. Hopefully he has some good advice.

On a happier note, here are some pictures of our yard this summer. Each year it gets better and better, and each year I start making my plant shopping list for the following spring a little earlier (I already have a fairly substantial list for next year). Adam decided I'm officially a "garden geek." Since he also calls himself a geek in certain areas, I take this as a compliment.

Ok, so this next one wasn't taken in our yard, it was taken at Nelson Dewey State Park. But they did have a nice prairie. I can only dream of my own full-fledged prairie some day.

 

Vigilance

Posted: Rabbits are not welcome in our yard.

You have received fair warning.

Did you know that rabbits are not rodents? I always thought they were, but apparently, they are lagomorphs.   The distinguishing difference is that lagomorphs are voracious herbivores, while rodents tend to be omnivores. Try to fit the word lagomorph into your conversations for the rest of the day. For example: "That Kyle guy's a bit of a lagomorph, don't you think?" 

Cute, huh?

We have a bit of a rabbit problem. They eat everything. They eat our shrubs. They snip the flowers off our bulbs. They nibble our rose bushes. They even strip the bark off our fruit trees. I have tried repelling or trapping them in the past without success. It was time to escalate the battle.

Yesterday, I purchased a Daisy Powerline 880s pellet gun. It looks really intimidating, and even comes with what I will henceforth refer to as a sniper scope. In truth, it's not terribly powerful, but it is enough to get the job done. I have not yet dialed in the sight, because I need an opportunity to do a little target shooting in order to do that.

However, I discovered this morning that the sniper scope is accurate enough to hit my target at 15 feet. Specifically, I hit a rabbit from 15 feet away out my guest room window.  It was a pretty clean neck shot, which would be perfect if I were planning to save the meat. I am not ready to skin a rabbit yet, so I did not keep the meat. Luckily for his friend, it's not yet accurate enough to hit my target from 35 feet. Soon.

In a lot of old westerns and fantasy novels, people name their weapons. Davy Crockett had Ol Betsy. The Bagginses had Sting. Anybody have a good name for my rabbit-sniping pellet gun? I was leaning toward Widowmaker. 

A quick garden tour

Just a quick tour of our yard.

The first rose of the year. This one smells fantastic!

Baptisia (False Indigo)- A Wisconsin native perennial.

nascent Pears:

Blueberries in bloom:

Siberian Irises

Perennial Bachelor Buttons

Garlic in the front, potatoes in the rear.

Garden Updates

With all the rain we've been having, everything is very green. The perennials are sprouting up like crazy (as are the weeds, but we won't talk about those!).

Here is the deck landscaping that I put in last year. Everything came back and as you can see from the large plant (perennial bachelor's button) in front, some things are spreading maybe more than I intended. :)

 These are trilliums that my grandfather insisted I dig up from the family woods in Manitowoc last year. I thought it was unlikely they'd come back since we transplanted them in the middle of a drought and MG&E drove over them with heavy machinery in December before the ground was frozen. But they must be tougher than i gave them credit for. Trilliums start out with white flowers and then the flowers turn pink as they age (as this one is doing). Some wild leeks and trout lily are also in that clump.

 Last summer we noticed a couple morels growing near our woodland corner. This year i spotted just this one. We may or may not have unintentionally stepped on it. Whoops. I don't think we were going to eat it this year anyway, we'd rather it spread its spores.

 Here's our current vegetable garden. The closest bed has carrots, tomato plants, peas, and eggplants. Yum. In the middle bed you can see garlic on the right (planted last fall) and potatoes in the middle. The cucumbers will be on the left side. They're planted, but not sprouted. The farthest bed has a lot of the cole crops and leaf vegetables.

 Finally, here's Adam's new sci-fi garden. The small purple bush on the left side is a black lace elder. It will get much larger. The floppy leaves are giant alliums. I've also planted a 'Merlot' coneflower, some calamintha 'White Cloud' and some dahlias that have yet to poke their heads above ground.

Happy Spring!

Pear Blossom Special

Look a-yonder comin'

Comin' down that railroad track

Hey, look a-yonder comin'

Comin' down that railroad track

It's the Pear Blossom Special

Bringin' my baby back

Well, it's official, our fruit trees are in bloom. The Apricot blooms finished up earlier this week, so we'll see whether any of those will produce. We aren't expecting much this year from the apricot tree, since it's only been planted one year.

This week, we have:

Cherry Blossoms: These are the most spectacular, they grow in tight clusters along the branches. In the picture below you can see our neighbor's mature pie cherry behind our younger sweet cherry. They should happily pollinate each other, though they are at least partly self-fertile.

Pear Blossoms: These were about to pop when I went to work this morning. So they should be fully open by the time I get home. Both trees blossomed this year, which is an improvement over previous years when only our Jung Hardy Wisconsin blossomed. Pears require a pollinator, so we haven't gotten much fruit in the past. This year, we will hopefully get a nice crop. These trees are pretty well established now, since we planted them first thing when we moved into our house 5 summers ago. The picture at the top is a close-up of one of the Jung Hardy blossom clusters. These pears flower on terminal buds or fruiting spurs, so you can see the blossom clusters standing off the main branches a bit.

We also have a plum tree that is in bloom. Only a handful of blossoms on that tree this year. It is self-fertile, so we'll have to wait and see whether it bears anything.

On that note, I will leave you with a gratuitous Daffodil picture:

Good morning

We finally got the warm temperatures needed to make some of the plants and trees wake up. The bloodroot just peaked over the weekend. It flowers profusely for about 3 days and then the petals fall and the pretty foliage appears. Sadly, it looks like we lost about a quarter of our patch with last year's drought.

I planted lots of new bulbs last fall (thanks to Melissa for introducing me to Brent & Becky). The daffodils just started blooming in the last couple days. Here is a cute variety that has several smaller flowers on each stem.

Last spring we planted our first apricot tree. Looks like it's going to flower this year. Since it's so young if it does fruit, we'll pull off all but one or two apricots, but it's encouraging to know that it seems to be happy.

Is it spring?

I think last winter's very strange weather made this winter seem that much longer. I've been watching for my bulbs to come up. It wasn't until Easter Sunday that the snow cleared enough that I saw my daffodils peeking up and the crocuses were able to start blooming. They're still taking their sweet time, but I'm going to try to enjoy the slow unfolding and use it as a lesson to slow down my life enough to breathe. I tend to rush through life, checking things off my list.

And speaking of things to enjoy, here is a happy set of siblings and spouses (and baby Zoe) on Easter Sunday.

 Maybe we're happy because this is what I made for dessert. Thanks to Cheri for the motivation to finally buy a tart pan.

Frolicking through February

Well, it's the last day of February. It's been a relatively cold and snowy month. After the excitement of the trip, it's been nice to get back tot he rhythms of regular life. We have adjusted ourselves back to getting excited about simple things.

Emily has been planning all her gardening work for the summer. But summer doesn't begin the produce season for us. No, we have already harvested our firstfruits of the year. That's right, we picked our kumquats. These beauties were a gift from our great Sister-in-Law, Courtney. We nurtured and cared for the tree all summer, even taking it outside when it was in bloom so the bees could pollinate it. The bees loved it, and they did their job. We got two rather large kumquats from the tree. We each took one, and ate them. They were delicious! Also very very sour.

February was also Valentine's day, of course. We celebrated with some roses and a fantastic chocolate bundt cake. I'll let you guess who bought the roses and who made the cake. If it's any kind of hint, the cake was delicious!

I spent much of my February free time building a cabinet for Emily. It goes next to the piano and gives her a place to keep her sheet music and books. I was going for a simple/retro look. I think I did a pretty good job of capturing that. But I'll let you be the judge:

We've also had a fair amount of snow this month. It's been a little warmer lately, but no less snowy. So we took the opportunity to prune our fruit trees and grapevines. Our Karl's Favorite pear continues to play the role of curly willow. It's a pretty convincing ruse if you ask me. No matter what we do, we can't get him to grow straight branches, so we're just going with the flow. He's a healthy tree, and hopefully he'll bloom this year so it can pollinate the hardy pear  and we can get more than a single pear.

Well, that's all for now. I leave you with our friend, Buster:

Retrospective

Now that we've been home for a while and had a chance to reflect, I wanted to share a few more photos from the trip. Maybe reflect on the things we saw and did. We both agreed that this was a really great trip. One of our best. There is very little we would change. Maybe we would stay in different neighborhoods in Cambodia or Hong Kong. There are probably a few things we wouldn't bother to see. But that's minor. It was a great trip. We had a lot of fun and experienced some great cultures.



The Top 5 Highlights:

1. Mekong Delta speedboat cruise. This was such a unique opportunity to see life outside the city in Vietnam. We got to experience a taste of how farmers and villagers live in Vietnam. The contrast with Ho Chi Minh City was stark. The tour we chose was perfect. We didn't see any other tour groups on the trip, and the guides were great. We spent the whole day on a boat rather than a bus like many similar tours. We tasted authentic food and met some great people. A great tour for sure.

2. Angkor Wat and the rest of the temples. It was amazing to see these structures built so long ago. You could experience a bit of what it was like to live in the Khmer Empire centuries ago. The art and architecture of these temples was fantastic. There was a great mix of preserved temples alongside temples that have been given over to the effects of the jungle and human hands. The temples themselves were testament to what people can build, while the ruined state of many were a display of nature's dominance in the long run. It was a once in a lifetime experience

3. Hong Kong's skyline. It's iconic, known the world around. The blending of Chinese and European cultures in Hong Kong makes for a unique and vibrant city. The fact that the usable land is so small means that they have undertaken great feats of construction. Some of the largest skyscrapers were literally built on top of what used to be water. Others are nestled into the sides of mountains. The buildings themselves are designed with aesthetics in mind, which makes it one of the greatest skylines in the world. At night, the skyline lights up with led billboards and light shows. It's easy to ignore the advertisement and just enjoy the lights.

 4. Kowloon and Mongkok. In Hong Kong, there are neighborhoods all over the city. After visiting many of them, we decided that our favorite was an area known as Mongkok. It is located in the Kowloon area, across the harbor from the Central business district. This area was full of markets, shops, restaurants, malls, etc. The food was great, much of it served from street-side vendors. We ate fish balls, wontons, random hunks of meat that may have been pork tenderloin or tongue or something else. We also discovered egg balls, which were fantastic, and we hope to learn to make them ourselves soon.

5. Cooking school in Siem Reap. We really enjoyed spending a few hours learning about Khmer food. Our instructor was patient and thorough. We got to experience the market with a local, and then taste the food that we made with the ingredients we saw in the marketplace. We learned a lot about this cuisine that is not commonly found in the US. It was delicious and fun.

We've been home for about a week now. We're mostly re-adjusted to our home time zone, and somewhat readjusted to the weather. We knew about the massive snowstorm that hit Madison while we were gone. When we got home, we assessed the damage. Our big pine tree lost a couple of medium sized branches. That was the extent of most of the damage in our yard. The fruits were all ok. Some shrubs were squished, but hopefully will be ok. Our arbor vitae shrubs were splayed and squashed. I had to don my boots and coat and clear them off and tied all the limbs together. Hopefully they stay that way when we remove the twine in a few months. Our neighbor told us that he had come over to our house when he saw the power go out. Turns out a branch or something knocked down our service wire that feeds the house. Probably was our neighbor's pine tree that drops branches every time the wind gets strong. This time there was about a third of the tree down. That tree has got to go. Many thanks to Dave and Rebecca, who took care of our snow and our house while we were gone. We are truly blessed to have good neighbors. We're back at work and things are pretty much back to normal. Amazing how we can go half-way around the world, experience unique cultures and see amazing sights, then come home to our regular life and jump right back in.