It’s been a busy week, as we’re getting ready to sell pulled-pork sandwiches at Trade Days at Stone’s Prairie Market in Plainville again this year. The hog is being processed right now—can’t get much fresher than that!—and we’ll be slow-cooking it tomorrow. We got a lot of compliments on the pork last year; and if I may so so myself, you won’t get better pulled pork anywhere. We’ll have it in salt and pepper (my favorite) and BBQ flavors, and we’ll have chips and soda as well.
We’ll be starting at 9am and going until 3 or so, or until we run out. There will also be music by the Ragtag Irish Band and others; demonstrations of flint knapping, rope making, and other historical crafts; a farmers’ market; and more. It even looks like the weather is going to be nice. So come on out to Plainville on Saturday, May 22, and have a sandwich and say hi!
This one isn’t really a favorite, and there are at least a half-dozen Manfred Mann songs I like better. But when I lived in Iowa, my friends and I used to listen to this one a lot more than it deserved. It’s got kind of a spooky vibe to it that I like, especially the “Mayday this is Echo Hotel” part. I have no idea what it’s actually about, and there only seem to be about six lines. Maybe it really is about being stranded in Iowa. Unfortunately, there’s no real video, just snowy pictures to go with the song. Here’s Stranded, by Manfred Mann, from 1980.
When I was a kid, we used to do a lot of puzzles and play a lot of board games, and we also got Games Magazine. It had all sorts of puzzles, but one kind I never did was the cryptic crosswords. The clues seemed like gibberish and were way too hard, like they were designed for super-geniuses or something, and I couldn’t get the hang of them at all. To make matters worse, unlike a normal crossword where each letter belongs to two words, one across and one down; in most cryptics, only about half the letters are “crossed” (see picture). So even if you get all the across words, you still only have half the letters of the down words.
A few years ago, I happened upon a stack of those old magazines and started going through them looking for unfinished puzzles to do. Since the cryptic crosswords were still completely unmarked, I gave them another try, and something just seemed to click this time. I know I’m not any smarter, so maybe the convoluted nature of the clues was just too complex for a kid. I don’t know why it took so long, but now they’re one of my favorite types of puzzle. Read more »
It’s been about two weeks, so it’s time for an update. Most things are growing pretty well. I discovered that tacks aren’t enough for holding the floating row cover in place; they tore through in the high winds yesterday. So now I’ve got it wrapped around a 1×2 on each side. That’ll actually be handier anyway, since now it’s not attached to the bed at all, so I can move the whole thing if I want. On to the pictures! Read more »
There may not be words to describe how awesome this video is. It’s got everything you could ask from an 80s video: medieval setting, a pretty girl who keeps her clothes on, a dwarf in jester’s livery, puppets, and a lead singer who looks like a Viking with great hair who plays the whole thing completely straight. The song’s not bad either. Enjoy Men Without Hats, from 1982.
Just to show I don’t only listen to 80s pop-rock, here’s something with a little more class. Mannheim Steamroller is a good compromise between classical and the kind of clarity I like in music. A friend of mine in Iowa who used to build car stereos used this song to test the bass. He said this could blow out cheap speakers like nothing else. It gets a little boring toward the end, so make sure to have the volume up for the beginning when the drums kick in.
[Before I get to the post, a little blog housekeeping: I just changed my settings so that once you've had a comment approved, all your future comments will be approved automatically. That way regulars won't have to wait two days for me to get around to checking them, especially on weekends. Now back to the show.]
Gardening actually began a few weeks ago, but this is my first report on it this year. We’re trying something new this year, called Square Foot Gardening, where you physically divide your garden up into one-foot-square sections and plant them each individually. I’d tinkered with the idea before, but I tried to do it halfway, dividing the spots by measuring them instead of building a physical grid. That doesn’t work very well, because a square foot seems like a bigger area than it really is when you’re planting tiny seeds, and when things grow, they’re way too crowded. So this time we’re doing it by the book, building the actual grid and planting what it says a square foot can support. Read more »
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