Dear Smurfette, this is for you.
You know whats awesome? It's Friday
You know whats cool? sustainable energy
You know whats annoying? talk radio
You know whats nice? kisses on the back of the neck
You know whats bad? how dusty and dirty my house is
You know whats dumb?
You know what makes me angry? being treated like I'm stupid
You know whats awkward? when my mother tells me TMI stories
You know what feels good? clean sheets
You know whats the most Annoying battle ever fought? anything to do with a medical insurance company
You know whats gross? thinking too hard about where my food has been
You know what totally sucks? paying bills
You know what stinks but used to rock? owning my own home
You know what rocks? Amazon
You know whats frustrating? hurting all the time because I'm old and out of shape
You know whats entertaining? Wii Fit
You know whats funny? Tim and I ad-libbing filthy verses to the song "I got a brand new girlfriend"
It occurs to me that even though I have a regular blog, we don't have anyplace to document barbecue stuff. So here's a little catch up on BBQ2 and our results so far this year.
Lansing (KS) Brew, Blues & BBQ: 10th place ribs
Tonganoxie (KS) Days BBQ: 4th place ribs, 10th place pork
Peculiar (MO) BBQ Roundup: 5th place ribs
BBQ on the River & Fly-In, Excelsior Springs (MO): 1st in ribs
Paola (KS) Roots Festival - zip. 13th place chicken (above), which was quite an improvement over earlier entries. 8th and 13th place chicken were only separated by a few thousands of 1 point. Those things that look like shrimp is slices of boneless chicken thigh that we added for pretties.
Next competition:
Leavenworth (KS) on 9/7-8
Atchison (KS) on 9/14-15
I hope that it all comes together before the end of the season. But I'm already looking forward to next year!
Sometimes you must count yourself lucky to enjoy your family. The pretty girls in the middle are mine. The boys are what is to be expected when you have pretty girls.
We camped, we ate, we napped, we watched the fireworks, we visited the orchards. We ate ripe peaches for breakfast and it was just about perfect.
We get a weekend off. Packing up the camper and the d-o-g-s and heading off to NE for a weekend of camping with Dangelina (that would be Dan & Angie). Then Penny can have more chances to back seat drive, as in the picture above. She always seems very concerned about Dad's driving.
In all honesty I will be surprised if they Dan and Angie still come. She's 7 months pregnant and wasn't all hyped up on the idea anyway. Plus that adds her two dogs to the mix so there's be 4 dogs and 4 adults sleeping in a 25 foot trailer. Yee Haw!
We actually hope to lure her with food. T bought her a bread machine off of Craigslist last night so we know she'll be eating in the future. When all else fails, there is always homemade bread. And maybe a side trip to Nebraska City to the orchards up there.
I still can't believe our little birdie is going to be a mama.
My neighbor "Mel" once told T and I that he and his wife were selling their house because they "Didn't want to live in little Mexico". Unfortunately, his fat, wheyfaced fishwife, the REALTOR, couldn't sell the place and took it off the market.
Last night "Mel" commented that the family that lives between us was "getting worse all the time". "There's more than one family living there" (it's parents and adult children, maybe an occassional brother stops in). "They're working on cars for money". (GASP!) "We're going to need a giant privacy fence". "They're not going to paint their house". (For the record, we attempted once to paint our peely metal siding only once in the 13 years we've owned our house and when it didn't work, we gave up. Currently we're allowing it to peel down to bare metal. Their house is freshly painted.)
Mel and his wife plan to "report" them. They "going ot put a stop to it". Well, let's make a list of my neighborly sins: My green pool and half demolished tree house must rank higher than their cars in the driveway. What about our 25' camper in the driveway? The two big piles of broken tree limbs I plan to illegally burn this month? My crabgrass? The 3 bags of soil sitting on the crappy picnic table that have been there ALL SUMMER???
Well, as Ron White says you can't fix stupid. Or racist, apparently. Mel said he'd rather "live next to a house full of drug-dealing blacks" than the nice family I took tomatoes over to a couple of weeks ago. The same people that sent over gorditas, Mexican candy, roasted corn and any number of other things in our ongoing international food exchange. The same family whose little 2-year old girl came running over to me the other day, chubby arms extended, so I could swing her up in my arms and cuddle her for a minute, just when I was grieving super-hard for a baby of my own.
I hope Whitey puts his house back on the market soon. Maybe a nice Hispanic family will buy it. Cause right now the most offensive neighbors in my neighborhood stopped to talk the most vicious trash I've ever heard last night. I comprehend more Spanish at this point than I do the shit he was spewing. At least my Mexican neighbors can speak a language I understand.
Well, we headed to Ft. Leavenworth Friday night for the Riverside Resources fundraiser competition. Never in our short cooking career have we had so much go wrong in so little time. So much that I started keeping a list.
We got there at 10 minutes to 7 only to discover the cook's meeting had been moved to 7 instead of 8. It took over 10 minutes just to figure out where to put the Mallard. Then when we tried to level it, we couldn't because of the slope of the hill we were on. But we had electricity! Only, no adaptor for our plug. Then while we're trying to figure that out, the organizer comes over to do our meat inspection. The meat was still in the cooler, next to the front door of our HOUSE. Along with our sauce and chicken marinade. By now, we're starting to attract sympathetic stares and offers of spare meat. Tim's furious and we're both starving. At 7:30 we unhitch the Mallard and I head for home to pick up an adaptor, the meat cooler and chairs.
2 miles east of Leavenworth, on the way back, I attracted the most unwanted attention of a Platte County Sheriff -- 73 in a 55, $125 ticket and a lecture about deer in the dark.
After a fun frisking by the MPs I get back to deliver food, the adaptor, the meat -- but no chairs. My very put out darling had long since lost his sense of humor and we completed our long night by quietly going to work and ignoring each other as much as possible.
Next morning dawns and most everything ended up slightly overdone and falling apart again - great for a backyard but crap for competition. The gloom started settling over both of us at awards. Nothing for chicken, ribs or pork. A pitiful 9th for brisket. But surprise of surprises... with only one sad little call we finished 5th!!!! A 623, our highest cumulative score ever!
Also I saved out 2 pieces of the frozen chocolate pie (above) I turned in for the dessert category. It got high marks but still finished 14/20 -- it's hard to screw up a dessert so everyone's scores are pretty high. We savored our pie and our 5th place and packed it in for another week.
One more competition to go... Atchison is next weekend. We'll judge at Shawnee, but no more cooking. After next week we hang up our aprons until spring so we don't have any competitions overlapping the arrival of the new grandbaby.
Because T and I are so competitive, it was neccessary for him to enter his own dessert this week -- his favorite cream cheese pie, the one that he used to "woo" me. I like this best with cherries and he prefers blueberries but we decided for competition to try peaches.
We headed to Atchison (with the meat, this time) and as usual, were the last ones in. We made it for the cook's meeting but got in to a land dispute with our neighbor (the organizers assigned us to the same spot) and ended up having to rehitch and move. The rest of the weekend went really well. Our schedule was relaxed, our boxes all looked nice and our neighbors were fun. At awards, Tim won FIRST PLACE in dessert, right off the bat! Then a call for 9th place chicken and I thought "Oh wow, we're on it". But no, the pork and brisket tanked and the ribs only finished 12th.
Now we have a long winter to rethink our strategies for next spring. We judge next Saturday and then go racing at the end of the month. Then a little fall camping and another year gone by.
The BBQ circuit is a killer but by the time we go to awards I get so pumped that I start planning for the next one. It's sick, really.
Sunday we went to Worlds of Fun with Karissa & Alex. No lines, cool weather, a little rain but not too much... should have been perfect. But turns out that in my advancing age, I have become motion sick on not only spinning things but also the rollercoasters. Nevertheless I gutted my way through the Patriot, the Mamba, and the Boomerang before finally resigning myself to bumper cars only. I am old and now, really, really lame to boot. At least there are no rides at the Renaissance Festival. And next weekend I get to judge someone else's BBQ for a change. Ha! Take that!
Why oh why would my husband INSIST that I change clothes on Saturday morning (at contest) when I was so comfortable?
Could it be that I was dressed like a character from a Dr. Suess book?
He doesn't like my pants. I do. They are like t-shirts for your legs.
I must be more specific when I go to get my hair cut. Turns out that there was a pretty big difference between "cut" and "trim". I was delighted for the first two hours, now I am just pissed. It will not do anything cute. I look vaguely like an extra fat news anchor.
On that note, am struggling to get back in the good graces of the Weight Watchers gods. 4 days on the road is making it extremely tough...
also, apparently fever blisters only come when I travel. At least this time it's only one. I popped $17 for the Abreva, let's pray I don't look like I have leprosy by tomorrow.
Time to go have mocktails with the customer, with my misspelled name badge.
"Michelle"
This is the picture I'm sending in for the Nat'l Association of Farm Broadcasters flyer. I'm supposed to take part in a speakers panel at their national convention in November. I feel seriously outclassed. I don't know why, I can bullshit a resume as well as anyone but every time I think about appearing as an authority for anything other than say, bbq or getting oil stains out of a blouse, I panic. My stomach goes all in knots.
Don't get me wrong. It's an honor. But I can't help feeling it should belong to someone else.
By the way, it took 20 attempts to get a picture that minimized my chins. 
http://www.nationalbbqrankings.com/
As of October 9, we were ranked #571 on the national barbecue rankings. It doesn't sound that impressive until you know that there are 1300 teams on the list. If that's what one little 5th place finish can do, imagine next year when we come out swinging and pick up our first Grand Championship!
And for the record, a GC is the ONLY way I'll be competing in the American Royal. Not that it's not kinda fun but I'm not much of a partier and last Friday night was like one giant mosh pit of drunk yuppies in their fake Western finest. AND I saw what may only be described as the grossest thing I'VE ever witnessed (and that includes cancer surgery on a horse's eyeball) -- a woman sitting down in a lawn chair after launching her BBQ tidbits all over herself, her lap, her clothes, her hair, the ground. 4 years at Mizzou and I never saw so much vomit. Ugh.
I just want to cook where the teams are serious, not seriously screwed up.
And what a load of fun I am, huh?
Look at her, her little peanutty excellence. She is the most perfect thing I ever saw. I am stupidly in love with this child, with her mom and dad and with my husband for giving me this chance to be a mana and now, a nana.
Under these circumstances no one would need drugs. Just having her tiny hand grab my finger like she's urgently trying to tell me something ("PUT ME BACK IN!" perhaps?) makes me dizzy.
The girl who rocks my world was born Sunday morning weighing in at a whopping 6.3 lbs, 18 1/2" long. Her mom was a soldier throughout a very difficult and drug free labor (she's pretty amazing her own self).
She's a tiny girl in a great big world with a posse of crazy parent and grandparents to love and adore her. Let the adventure begin!
yep. still alive.
Going to get my baby fix this weekend before a long and busy travel schedule this spring.
Ambivalent about church but still love God and counting on him to lend a Mighty Hand in a few situations:
All prayers welcome. Sorry to be so brief and boring but Mrs. Fix-It has other things on her mind...
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