We are now officially into the Christmas season because the tree is up.
We still have a few baubles to add and of course, I have to set up the train.
It’s a little different this year with the piano being at the musical hospital and all this space is available. I may try a new configuration for the train if I can get permission.
Tonight is the annual Corbin Park Carriage Ride. The horse drawn carriage will be here in about an hour and fun will ensue.
Okay, here we go!
Today, I am cooking a 14 pound turkey on our Weber Kettle barbecue. I have not done a turkey before but I feel pretty confident about the outcome. The only real question is how long will it take.
I am using the charcoal snake method. This will allow me to cook the turkey for several hours without ever having to remove the lid to add charcoal. It should provide a nice even heat around 275° for up to six hours.
Also, I’m going to sprinkle some damp apple wood chips on top of the snake. That will add a smoked quality to the cook. I will place a small pan of water in the center of the charcoal which will add a little moisture to the cook as well.
The turkey has been brining all night and I’m about to take it out and rinse it in the sink. That will remove any excess salt. Believe me, there is plenty of salt in that brine.
Here is the delightfully brined bird. It’s been soaking for about 18 hours.
11:50 AM: I have lit the starter charcoal which I will pour onto the start of the charcoal snake when it’s ready.
12:15PM: The turkey is in.
We were invited over to our friend’s house for Thanksgiving, kind of at the last moment. Susan and I had planned on a quiet Thanksgiving here at home. Since there was no pressure to present a perfect meal, I decided I wanted to try and barbecue the bird using the charcoal snake method.
That has now been moved to Saturday. Right now, I am boiling up a brine solution to soak the turkey in. I’m going to go for about a 16 hour soak.
The brine solution is a mixture of apple juice, kosher salt, brown sugar, garlic, pepper corns, bay leaves, rosemary, orange peels and water.
It’s been sitting on the stove for a while now and almost to a boil. Then it has to cool before I put the turkey in it.
Yesterday’s Thanksgiving meal at Randy and Karen’s was great. So great, I gained three pounds. There were two pies, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and lots of stuffing…mostly me.
It has been wet.
After our first snow of the season last week, it’s done nothing but rain since Wednesday. I just went out and checked my rain gauge and it had filled up to the two inch mark.
According to the weather almanac in the newspaper, we are about 2 inches short of our normal rainfall for the year to date, but we are about 2 inches over the normal rainfall for November. And there’s more rain in the forecast.
Even though my ski season has been cancelled, I have been looking at the Mt. Spokane website and watching the snowfall.
They are hoping to open next weekend. At least, a partial opening.
Lookout Pass is open on the weekends and they have pretty good snow coverage.
As we went to bed last night, we were getting the first snowfall of the year. They had forecast it and so I went out to check about 10:00 and the lawn was white. A very wet snow was falling. It turned the grass white but the streets and sidewalks were just wet.
By this morning, no sign of even a flake.
It's still early in the season. I wouldn't expect to get much snow yet. We have promising signs in the mountains. There are even a couple of ski hills that have opened, Lookout Pass for one.
It is Election Day and to turn our attention away from that, we did our annual Pumpkin Toss today. Mark and Randy came over and we had quite a few pumpkins to toss.
Today was the first day of College Basketball. That means the Gonzaga Bulldogs are back on the air for our viewing enjoyment. Neither Susan or I are big basketball fans but we like watching our local team who, at the start of the season is ranked 6th.
Tonight they played Baylor here in town at the Arena. They lost the national championship game to Baylor three years ago. I think it was three years ago. I might need to be fact checked on that.
They looked really good tonight and they easily put Baylor away, winning 101 to 63.
Their next game is Sunday against Arizona State. It’s stood to have them back!
Halloween is over and we are exhausted.
I want to start by saying thank you to our helpers: Mark, Robba, Randy, Karen, Kelly, Ron, Bob, Dan and Gina. These guys showed up at noon to help us get everything set up. There is no way we could do this without their help. We are forever grateful.
But we have to start asking, how much longer are we going to do this...at least on this scale.
Here are some pictures.
We are ready for Halloween.
We have all the tombstones and assorted decorations out on the front porch. We have a crowd of people coming over to help at noon.
Most importantly, we finished carving our eight pumpkins.
Here they are.
This will be our 19th Halloween on the park.
This is the weekend before Halloween which means that tonight is the Party Night in the bars. There was a day when I would be in the thick of it but those days are gone for this old man. And I'm okay with it.
At 4:00 today, a crowd will be gathering in the park for the annual Witches Ride. The group does a little dance routine on the basketball court and then everyone rides their bikes around the park, concluding at the Hub Tavern.
We're going to go over for the dance, drive to the Hub after and enjoy the festivities there for a while.
Susan and I have again entered drawings in the Hub Tavern Pumpkin Coloring Contest. I think Susan is going to win. As of last night, there were only four entries, so our chances of winning are pretty good.
Stand by for the results!
The party at the Green's was a lot of fun. Lots of neighbors were there and there was a lot of great food. Plus Jello shots and I brought a bunch of ice shot glasses there were a big hit.
If not for a Technical Difficulty, today would be the end of the Boiler Game. It got down to freezing last night and it was pretty chilly.
Unfortunately, the boiler has been running for a couple of weeks and I did not realize it. I thought the "Heat" switch was turned off. I checked it a while back only to discover it was in the "On" position and had probably been running for some time.
So, you all get your money back. But hang on...next year is just around the corner.
We are continuing to prep for Halloween, which is next Thursday. This week we will be carving our eight pumpkins, loading batteries into equipment and lights and bringing all the tombstones down from the Carriage House.
We are covered for candy, having over 2,000 pieces. Some are lollipops and licorice whips, some are fun size and a few, very few, are full size candy bars.
We are only a few days away from the start of the Fall Equinox, which has out us in the wonderful place where we don't have to run the air conditioner at night. The weather has cooled off dramatically in the last week but not so much that it leaves you feeling like Summer is over. Even though Summer is over.
We haven't been doing a lot around the house other than the side yard. Susan has been working out there trying to get it cleaned up. It's the one area of our yard that we've neglected and it pretty much shows it. The grass is all dead and the gardens are just growing wild.
We planted three arbor vitae's earlier this year and they have all died. Every time we try to fill in our hedge, they just don't make it. I'm sure I watered enough but the shrubs tell me different.
Next weekend, we are cleaning up all the stumps from the tree we took down. Some friends are coming over with a wood splitter and we are going to split them chunks o'wood.
The big challenge we are dealing with right now is an attack on our bank accounts. Yesterday, Susan got a call from a guy named Tracy King who said he was with Publishers Clearing House and we won two and half million dollars.
I was at the Hub when he called and he told her he had sent a verification code to my phone that we needed to confirm that we are who we are. I got the code on my text and was wondering what it was when Susan called. I ended up going home from watching the Apple Cup to call this guy back.
We are not stupid, just greedy. So we didn't give this guy any information. He already had all our phone numbers, our names and our address.
I finally got to the point where I told him this sounded like a scam and Tracy immediately told me to "Go suck off my wife."
I'm not sure how they train people at Publishers Clearing House but I'm pretty sure that kind of language is not in their guide book.
I used several choice words myself and the phone was hung up.
Shortly after, we got a call from our bank saying somebody was trying to add a different contact phone to our account.
As of now, our bank account is locked, as is all my credit cards.
We have to go to the bank tomorrow and change all our accounts. This really sucks and I wish we hadn't let the ever so slight possibility of winning big money cloud our better judgement.
Of course, taking advantage of otherwise well meaning folks is how these utter pieces of shit make their money. I still have Tracy's number and I am tempted to call him up and have a conversation, but to what end. Even if he answered, he would just hang up.
So, I'm going to try and fight the urge and just live my life...and change all my passwords.
Susan has finally completed the front porch railing project and it looks great. Here are just a few pictures to show before and after.
Things seem to be okay with the refrigerator. It does not appear to be leaking on the floor anymore and the ice being made is no longer brownish.
Susan is going great guns on the front porch railing. Here are some pictures of her progress.
I did some staining of two long lengths of quarter round that I need to finish up in the kitchen.
I hope to get a coat of varnish on it tomorrow and get this damn kitchen job finished.
I was sitting in the kitchen trying to avoid work when Susan shouted at me from the front door and told me to come out to the porch. She had been working on scraping the railing when this large bird of prey landed on the lawn.
By the time I got out there, it had flown up into our chestnut tree and posed there long enough for me to get some pretty good pictures.
I think it is a Red Tailed Hawk. According to what I looked up, the Red-Tailed Hawk is the most common hawk seen in Washington. I don't have any good shots of its tail so I can't be sure. But the breast coloration and the color of the eyes make me think it's a Red-Tail.
I'm happy to entertain anyone who has a different or more educated opinion.
In any case, it was pretty cool!
Last week, we noticed a big puddle under the refrigerator. We pulled the fridge out and sopped up all the water. It had clearly been there for a few days. You could see that the cabinets on either side of the fridge had absorbed some water and at least one of our floor planks looks a little curled. Not enough to have to replace it but we’re keeping an eye on things.
I checked today and there was some water under the refrigerator. Not as much as last time but we clearly have a problem.
We pulled the fridge out and I pulled off some of the backing to get a look under the fridge. There is a tray under there that was full off water and it was pretty slimy and dirty too. We sucked out the water with the shop vac and tried to clean out as much dust and debris as we could.
After trying to diagnose the problem, I decided to replace the water filter located at the bottom of the fridge. There was a very slow leak I saw that was located in the area of the filter.
I made the mistake of pulling out the old filter while the water line was still on. That has never been a problem before when I replaced the water filter but today, something had changed.
I had to scramble under the house to turn off the water.
Once I had the new filter installed, I went back downstairs and climbed into the crawl space. Susan and I were connected on the phone so I could easily hear her tell me to shut off the water if we had to.
To my pleasure, she did not scream to turn off the water. I came back up and checked underneath the refrigerator and all seemed well. We are keeping an eye on it. I just now took a look and it looked dry in the tray.
I really hope this solves the problem. This fridge is about 25 years old. I don’t want to have to buy a new one. We both like this refrigerator and would like to keep it.
This time of year when the temperatures regularly approach 100°, my favorite time of the day is morning on the ol’ front porch. It really is spectacular. There aren’t enough superlatives to express how enjoyable it is.
I have the sprinkler running in the yard, there are people playing Pickleball across the street, and all kinds of folks are walking or jogging by.
I’m sitting on the porch swing and there is a nice cool breeze blowing by that makes it quite comfortable.
Too bad it’s not going to last. The weather report shows a high of 94° today leading to a very hot weekend. 106° is predicted for Sunday. We’ll keep an eye on that and let you know.
In the meantime, I’m going to sit here with my decaf Irish coffee and my newspaper and enjoy the day.
After cleaning out the closet of the back bedroom, we have two beer case sized boxes of old bank records that we want to dispose of.
I called the bank to see if they had a free shredding day coming up…and they don’t. They referred me to the company they hire for the shredding but they have a minimum fee of $25.00.
I decided that my time isn’t worth that much and we have a little home shredder, I would go to work on shredding all that stuff.
You can only throw a few pages at a time through the shredder but I made great progress with a stack of old bank statements going back to 2007. Next I had boxes of old checks that I had to rip out in three small groups.
I set myself up out in the backyard in the shade of the Carriage House. Things were shredding along nicely for about 15 minutes and then the shredder shred no more.
I’m giving it a rest right now and we’ll see if it comes back.
Stand by!
It probably doesn’t help that it’s going to be 100 degrees today.
We spent some money today.
We got a quote from a couple of tree services to remove and trim some of our trees.
We ended up going with A-1 Tree Service. Their bid came in at about $4,500.00
A crew of about seven guys showed up this morning and immediately went to work on the side yard. We had them remove a bunch of bushes and two large trees.
