May already, sheesh. Almost time to plant the garden, and it’s still in rough shape. Every time we start to work on it, the rains come again. “We need the water.” Yeah, I guess. Sure does make the dumb grass grow quickly though. I lost count of how many times I’ve mowed already, and there are several more rounds in my future. Not that mowing is too bad; Sit on the mower and ride around, kind of peaceful actually. But, with the mowing comes the weed-eating. And there is a LOT of that. One of the things I didn’t really think through when we decided on this place was the “yard” maintenance. (Not really a yard, it’s more of a field, but it still needs kept up.) The wide open, flat sections are all well and good, but then there are all the hills. And there are a lot of them. WAY too steep for the riding mower, Heck, they’re very nearly too steep to even stand on. The best you can do is grab the weed-eater and try to stay upright. I’m darn near too old to be doing it I guess, it really wears me out. Just the front the section typically takes me 2-3 hours. And believe me, that thing gets heavy quickly. The shoulder strap helps, but I don’t use it on the really steep parts. Why? Well, because I don’t really want to fall and be attached to a hot, metal engine. (How do I know I don’t want to? Yeah, ask me. I guess I should have thrown an “again” in there.) Oh well, I guess it keeps me out of trouble. Hard to get in trouble when you’re laid up on the couch for two nights after every round of that project.

Anything else go on this weekend? Well, not a whole lot. Friday night we went to “Bike Night” down in Cameron Park. Not terribly exciting, but better than sitting at home. A bunch of people from the area ride their motorcycles down, and they set up like a little mini-carnival area to park in. Food trucks, rides, lots of bikes to looks at, that kind of thing. Saturday was supposed to be great weather, so I kind-of-sort-of went on a motorcycle ride. “Kind of?” Yeah. There was a poker run over in Rio Linda, hosted by one of the American Legion chapters. Eight of us from our local chapter rode over to support them, the idea being they’ll come up to ours next month. It was about a 50 mile ride to get there, mostly boring highway riding. When we got there to register, the guy in front of me says “I’m not going on the poker run, I just want a lunch ticket.” Hey, I didn’t know that was an option, I’ll take that too! The weather was nothing close to the forecast; it was cloudy and chilly all afternoon. To boot, I don’t really enjoy the “poker runs” anyway. So the riders took off, and I just hung out with a group at the Hall and waited for lunch. I rather enjoyed it, actually. They had tri tip sandwiches for lunch, which were great, then I rode back home and called it a day. Sunday it was Donette’s turn for entertainment, so I babysat the pups while she went out to brunch and a movie with a group. I didn’t have too much interest in “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” so it was a pretty easy decision to stay home.

So ends another weekend. Not a bad one though, in fact I shall even try to briefly recap it. My excitement began on Tuesday, when I made a pot of ham and beans. (What does that to do with the weekend? Well, nothing at all. But “beans” is in the post title so I feel obligated to talk about them.) I am quite a fan of this dish. Can’t get enough of it. I don’t make it very often though, because neither of us really like ham. (Or rather, ham doesn’t like us.) Kinda hard to make ham & beans without it though. The project began last weekend, when I smoked a cheap Easter ham on the Traeger. It’s a recipe I read about last year, but when I tried it in ’25 I wasn’t at all happy with the results. Quite the opposite, actually; I vowed to totally scrap that experiment. Well, Easter ’26 rolled around and I just couldn’t resist the big ham I saw at the grocery. They were almost giving them away. So, I gave it another shot. The recipe I was following had two cook methods listed; The first was at 200-ish degrees for “a long time,” and the second was at 275 for around 5 hours. The basic premise is, you take the ham up to 200 degrees internal temp, and it should shred like a pork butt. So last year, I did the hot and fast method. It was very dry, and the outside was so tough I just peeled it all off and threw it away. I certainly did not want a repeat of that debacle, so this time I ran the Traeger at it’s lowest setting and just kept an eye on it all day. Complete turn around, I was super happy with this one. It came out very juicy, smokey, and shredded great. Having nothing else to do with 7 pounds of shredded ham, I immediately started planning ham and beans. (Wow, that was a lengthy ham discourse, and I haven’t even gotten to the beans yet.) For the last five years or so, I’ve done ham and beans in an Instant Pot. Not bad, never really had any complaints. This year though, I decided to fall back on the good ol’ stovetop method. Soak the beans overnight, throw everything in a dutch oven, and let it simmer all day. WAY better. I guess I forgot how good this simple recipe could really be. Totally different texture; The pressure cooker works well, but it doesn’t really thicken to the consistency I like. So, in the case of both the ham & the soup, the longer, time-consuming method is worth the trouble. Lesson(s) learned I guess.

On to the actual weekend. Saturday, I grilled hamburgers. My favorite; blue cheese with bacon. (Point Reyes blue cheese, to be specific. Quite possibly the only good food product to come out of California.) That’s it for the burgers. They were actually super delicious, and I can’t wait to make them again, but I must move on to Sunday before my fingers start cramping up. Sunday, the weather finally cleared off a bit, at least relative to what it has been lately. I jumped at this opportunity to take a motorcycle ride with a group of guys. This group normally goes on Saturdays, but the weather has been so sketchy lately (including this past Saturday,) that it got moved to Sunday this time. The destination of choice was Daddy’s Ribs in Lockeford, CA. Yeah, don’t get me started, I knew this was going to be a failure before I ever left the house. It was more about the trip for me. These guys know all the great routes, I would never figure out the roads they take by myself. I’m more of the “plug it in Google Maps and take off” school, but that doesn’t really work well on a bike. Gotta have the scenery, the back roads, low traffic, etc. Indeed, it was a great ride. (Besides being, quite literally, the only guy riding a “metric” motorcycle. Still a bit self-conscious about that, but I’ll get over it. Maybe.) We got to the restaurant around 11:30, and grabbed some tables outside to have lunch. Know what? The ribs were not that bad. I’m not sure I would make the hour drive just to get them, but they were much better than most I’ve had out there. The sides, on the other hand, were nothing to get excited about. The cornbread was good. The beans and mac & cheese were… OK. All-in-all, given my expectations, I call it a success though. After lunch, we walked over to the nearby Lockeford Meat shop. This place specializes in all things sausage. They must have had two dozen varieties of sausage in the case, and a line out the door and down the street waiting to buy it. They were pretty efficient though, and the wait wasn’t too bad. I’m kind of space-limited on my bike, so I was only able to get 2 pounds of andouille links. For as much as I do love the butcher shop by our house, I have never been crazy about their andouille. Hopefully this is better, I have high hopes. Now THIS place would be worth the drive another time, I’ll be back there soon.

Technically April is 1/2 over. Gotta have a title though. My lethargy continues; I don’t really feel like typing anything, I just want to try this photo app again. So far I despise it. I want my old one to work. AAAGHHHH!!!

Welcome to 2026!! Happy New Year!! OK, that’s old news. Just like this post will be. Just making sure everything is still working, which it appears to be. I’ve taken a very short-term job, and that is keeping me busy. Wholly unable to find the 10 minutes to update this thing, as it happens. I guess that is pretty much the extent of the recent happenings in our life. Haven’t done anything new (probably a lie,) haven’t gone anywhere fun (definitely a lie,) and no plans for the immediate future. (Last lie of that sentence.) Having expended my entire cache of falsehoods, I shall post a few dinner pics.

*** Exciting update!!! My picture gallery isn’t working!!! Oh boy. What happened? I just don’t know. Furthermore, I just don’t care. You, dear reader, are consequently deprived of multiple hamburger pics, a steak dinner, some particularly delicious gumbo, and a scenic view of my last motorcycle ride. The tragedy of it all.

*** Exciting update v2!!! I got some pictures added. It still ain’t working right though. As usual, I am not to blame for this critical outage. (More accurately, I am not to blame for the the first time ever.) Something was updated to the plugin I use, and the new version either isn’t playing well or I don’t know how to use it. Either is possible, though I am leaning towards the latter. Maybe given 3 months between posts I’ll have time to figure it out, because I’m not going through the hassle that I had to for the few pics below.

Boo Chiefs. That did not end my weekend on a high note. But you know what did go well Sunday? My latest experiment, chorizo chili. I bought several pounds of chorizo at the butcher shop when it was on sale a while back, and thought it sounded pretty good in a pot of chili. Matter of fact, just chili in general sounds good lately, it’s getting cold out. Anyway, it wasn’t too hard to find a few recipes that sounded like what I wanted, so I whipped up a pot for the game. Came out well! The wife even liked it, and she generally does NOT like my chili creations. Matter of fact, we liked it so much we had it for dinner also. It will also go on some nachos this evening for a Monday Night Football meal. Glad I still have a few pounds of it in the freezer, it will be made again!

Speaking of recipes, I’ve been trying to get some organization to my collection. I decided on Mealie to put everything together. Well, I didn’t really so much decide on it, it was the only thing I found that was even close to what I was looking for. Things started off well, no real complaints. Since then though, it seems like every time they come out with new “features,” it just makes things harder. I have to think the plan is that it gets easier over time as you build up a database of ingredients, measurements, etc, but in the meantime there is way more typing involved than I care to do. I dunno. Still sticking to it so far. Not really what I am looking for, but I’m giving it a go. I don’t really like the format, although I can’t really say why. I don’t see that it lets you set a default sort either, which bothers me. (I want most recent to oldest.) If all else fails, there is a button in the lower right of each recipe that says “original URL.” Clicking that will take you the page where I found the original recipe. I guess it’s pretty much a way-overcomplicated bookmark system at that point. Anyway, a few examples of things I’ve made lately: Chorizo Chili, Hot Honey Chicken, and Beef Lo Mein.