A Day Of Rest . . .

March 17, 2016 Uncategorized

A Day Of Rest . . .

Much Needed Rest!

With our first down day in a while, Jan and I both just vegged out today. I only went outside to tighten down a leaking water hose connection, and that was it.

About 1pm I started putting together a beef stew in the slow cooker. Back in the fall of 2013 a Company Man on one of our gates gave us two beautiful 1-1/2 pound boneless ribeye steaks, already frozen and vacuum-sealed. We tucked them away in the freezer and kind of forgot about them.

We came across them the other day while sorting through the freezer contents, working on using up stuff to make it easier to defrost soon. And since I didn’t want to pull our Weber Q200 out, only to find out we’re out of propane, we decide to go with a really good beef stew.

We’d had them thawing out for the last couple of days so they were good to go.

And it was amazing how good these steaks still looked . . . like they just came from the store.

I trimmed some of the excess fat off and then cut them into cubes. Then it was into the slow cooker with a can of mushroom soup, a can of water, and a few pearl onions.

After adding salt, a lot of coarse black pepper, and a healthy dose of

Arizona Black Scorpion Sting for some heat, I put the cooker on high, and let it go for a couple of hours before I added the potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and the rest of the pearl onions.

And after another couple of hours, dinner was served.

Jan toasted up some Hawaiian Bread Rolls to go with it, and it was a real feast. The meat was very tender without being mushy, and the flavor was delicious, with enough heat to make the top of my head sweat. So it was perfect.

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And there’s leftovers, too.

Readers from last October and November will remember my quixotic search for boot laces that would last more than a month or so. I lace my boots really tight for the ankle support (needed from jumping out of a perfectly good airplane one too many times.) and so my laces only last a couple of months before they snap.

So loyal reader Lloyd Jackson suggested I get some Paracord and make my own.

You can read more about it here: I Made My Own

And these homemade Paracord laces have been great, going over six months with out a problem. Until this happened.

Karma the Kitty decided she need a new chew toy and it seems my boots, and the laces filled the bill.

So this evening I made up a new set, but this time I added some color.

We’ll see how long these last.

Jan and I’ve been following the flooding news on the TX/LA border, with I-10 possibly closed until next Monday. So it was interested to find this photo online.

That group of buildings is the what remains of the big Welcome Center / Rest Area as you come into Texas from Louisiana. Looks like it’s going to be a while until it reopens.

Wrapping up, I want to highly recommend a book that Jan and I both really enjoyed. It’s not often that you come across a book that makes you constantly laugh out loud, but also pulls at you heartstrings, hard.

it’s the true story of a young boy growing with a neurological condition called Synesthesia, causing him to see black and white text like this.

Growing up he thought everyone saw the world like this. But colored text was only small part of what he saw. Everything had its own color, and the colors changed as the objects moved.

But a few slips along the way, like when he was talking to a Little League friend about hitting, and told his friend he liked to hit the ball right behind the glowing orange tentacles, convinced him there was something wrong with him, and that everyone didn’t see things the way he did.

And it was only in college when he discovered what he had, and that there was a name for it.