Fat Boy Deluxe

What a glorious weekend! Spring is finally here in the DC metro area. We’ve had several days of 70° weather with the possibility of hitting 80° today. Of course this comes with the inevitable return to freezing temps before the end of the week. Get out while you can!

This was one of those weekends your just happy to be able to get outside, enjoy the weather, see old friends, AND get a ton of stuff done. I finally feel refreshed and have caught up on my sleep. Saturday I was up and about by 7:30 AM to get a jump start on the day. Out to the yard, fire up the lawnmower and made an attempt to cut the grass (leaves). Unfortunately, my plan of using the lawnmower in place of raking the entire yard didn’t pan out. Out comes the rake and 16 giant bags later, the job is done. It only took about 4 hours, but I had other plans for that time, oh well. Finished up around noonish, plenty of time to eat some leftovers from the grilling the night before and get my stuff together for…the ride.

This would be my first official MORE ride I’ve led this year. A 2:00 PM ride at Colt’s Neck in Reston, doing the full loop. I lubed the chain on Steve’s Karate Monkey and put her up on the car and headed over to the ice rink. Thought I was going to have 6 people, including myself, but turns out we had 10 people and a great ride. We rode the loop forward, stopping occaisionally to regroup and catch a breath. Lee ended up coming out, which is great, because I haven’t ridden with him in a long long time…probably since last summer. He even pulled his patented move on “Lee’s Crossing”…full steam ahead to cross a fair weather creek crossing, which is essentially a concrete bridge just under the water and it typically is slick with slime. You can see where this is going…squirelly entry with a splash at the end. Last time I saw Lee pull this off was 2 winters ago in 19° weather…his hands/gloves froze to his handlebar. But other than getting a little wet on a 70° day, Lee pulled out ok. No mechanicals that I know of, with the exception of pulling into the parking lot and a guys chain decided to blow up about 20 feet from the car…must have taken a big withdrawal from the kharma bank.

A fantastic day, a good ride, beers and chips afterwards…a truely great time. I took a few pics, but there aren’t many riding photos. I’m more of “ok we’re stopped, let me fish out the camera and snap a pic” kind of guy. Especially when leading a ride, you definitely feel the pressure to step it up a notch to make sure your not setting a slow pace for everyone. Check out the gallery:

I figured Sunday would be just as nice of a day for riding…I was right, only I didn’t even touch my bike. Kristin and I took the Busterman for a nice long walk around the hood. We checked out all the houses for sale, the ones that had been bought and redone, and finally the ones that have been demolished and rebuilt into giant 2 and 3 story boxes. Goodbye history, goodbye style, goodbye yard, hello ugly ass box with bay window views of my neighbors tiny wee house and less yard than middle unit townhouse. What a steal at 1.3 million…I’m not bitter, ha.

Anyway, after the walk we cooked some shrimp and asparagus out on the Weber Grill. We had a surprise visit from a neighborhood friend, bringing his dog Lucky over to run around with Buster…one of the many advantages to having a semi-big yard (for me at least) and having it fully fenced. The dogs can run round and round the house and play to their hearts content and I don’t have to worry where the dog is at every moment. Not too long after that, my friend JK showed up with his completely neurotic dog Neuman (or is it Newman). It was virtually a dog park at the house with 3 dogs running every which way. Figured with all the people at the house and the fact I’d been wanting to do something since Thursday night, I ran and grabbed my new brewing setup and got under way!

I’ve made some really nice upgrades in the brewing equipment area thanks to Kristin and her parents. They gave me a turkey fryer, specifically for cooking up 5 gallon batch of wort. I also picked up a wort chiller, which is just some copper pipe coiled up with a hose on each end.

Now you can brew by yourself, but it’s more fun and a hell of a lot easier if you have some willing helpers. In my case I had Kristin, Paul, and John and everyone did great! I recently made the switch to coming up with my own recipes and buying all the individual ingredients. Where I used to only use malt extract, now I’m using both extract and dry malt. I’m even venturing into the area of dry hopping. Anyway, I’ll have to make a seperate post on the actual brewing, so I can have all the details written down, but the process took a considerable less amount of time than I was used to…like 1/3 the time.

After spending most of the day outside, we headed in and watched Wallace and Grommet. Pretty funny british comedy flick. Easy end to an easy weekend.

DT