Hows my little fall '12 update?

Life seems to have taken me to some busy times as of late but the busy times are ending! (I think) Here are some pictures of some of the fun things:

Our garden went NUTS this year. We didn't do anything unusually different aside from our giant load of Poo early in the spring. So I would say the poo singlehandedly boosted our growth and quality of some things. I'm not sure exactly how many jars we ended up canning but 100 wouldn't be an outrageous guess.

Those bluish things are our Brussels Sprouts. As of this writing they came up to my chest. I have a recipe for some Brusselskraut that I think I'm going to get to try due to the foreseen huge surplus.

We got a fantastic pepper crop this year too. We ended up chopping up most of them and freezing them. I did take a big chunk from this pile to ferment my own Hot Sauce, it smells great right now. More on that later though.



Thanks to a giant lack of rain and several weeks in a row with 90 to 100+ temps our cucumbers lasted longer than ever before. Turns out powdery mildew can't survive in 100 degree heat. The cucumbers lasted so long that we couldn't even give them away any more. I think we ended up making about a dozen jars of pickles which is about 8 more than we have ever made in a season. Naturally I decided I should ferment some of the leftovers into something alcoholic, a cucumber mead resulted.

For those who don't know, mead is just honey watered back quite a bit (in this case 4 to 1) and fermented into a wine strength beverage, this is about 11 to 12%.

I have this thing that I think flavors are better procured when they are added at fermentation, so here is what 5 freezer bags of cucumbers look like sitting in 5 gallons of Mead. Laura was pretty excited that I freed up all that space in the freezer and finally used my gallon of honey.

I also managed to finally get my motorcycle working again! I had to go through quite a bit of drama to get it running again. The smoking exhaust because of the oil I dripped onto it showed me that my gas tank was on wrong and when I pulled it off it popped a hole in my coolant tank and leaked antifreeze everywhere. After that the battery was completely dead, and to make matters worse when it was all together again it wouldn't start. This is when I learned about the power of a bit of starter fluid (ether). I finally got it started and have been enjoying riding around the countryside looking at leaves and boring harvested corn fields. During all of this drama/research I found a forum post tagged with a quote I liked: Only a biker knows why a dog sticks their head out a car window. 

Ah, and I did get a custom plate for the bike FIN 4, in honor of the number I made up between three and four. Hopefully there will be no additional real life similarities between that and the fin you see at the end of a movie.

I also celebrated my 28th year of living. Laura made me a delicious lamb feast and a MASSIVE peanut butter and chocolate cake. All I wanted from Laura was to play a song on the piano for me and she delivered! I'm hoping it inspired her to play some more.

Yes, I'm holding my wand. I'm having a hard time finding uses for it, turns out I'm a certified muggle.

There are still a couple of big projects that I am wrapping up and some travels planned for the remainder of the year before I can settle down a try and relax for the winter. Life has been busy and good, no complaints today!