Christmas fun

Christmas lights

A neighborhood in Tucson called Winterhaven has a long tradition of putting up lots of Christmas lights.  They block off all the streets and let people walk around and look.

The large trees all around the neighborhood are decorated with the same lights.

Some houses have little scenes out front - neon guitars..

A gingerbread house...

And a recreation of the trailer from National Lampoon's Christmas vacation!

It was a lot of fun, very relaxing walking around.

New wildlife again

Our neighbor

Zoom in...

Elizabeth and Gregg visit

My cousin Elizabeth, her husband Gregg and kids Wynne and Gus visited us in Tucson a few weeks ago, as part of their southwestern US tour.  We slacked on putting some pictures up, but here they finally are.  Here is the best picture David managed to get of Wynne - she always turned away from the camera at the wrong time.

We all went to the Desert Museum, which is a sort of combination zoo/botanical gardens.  David managed to get some good shots of some local birds and cactus.  And of course the cat...

And a super cute picture of baby Gus (as Wynne calls him).  He was rockin' a mohawk naturally for most of the weekend because his hair was growing faster in the middle.  So Elizabeth just enhanced it...

Sausage!

I like sausage. It's good. We made some.

Today's players:

The sausage we're making, Andouille, is normally of a much coarser texture than most commercial sausages, so yes... I hacked up an 8lb pork shoulder by hand.

Mixing in the seasonings:

Casing (Erika was helping with this part and broke off a moment to catch this AWESOME ACTION SHOT):

Smoked and ready to eat. It ain't pretty, but oh boy is it tasty. We're now all set for a winter of gumbo, jambalaya and perhaps red beans and rice:

Bikes!

So this weekend was the annual Tour De Tucson, a massive bike race in and around the general Tucson/Pima County area. Apparently this is a national (and actually international) event that's a "big deal" to professional cyclist as well as sport cyclists of various levels.
Website:

http://www.pbaa.com/!ETT/ETThome.html

If you click on the link that shows you the route, actually just click here:

http://www.perimeterbicycling.com/!ETT/ETTMapCue.html

Anywhoo... if you give that a gander, take note of mile 47 near the upper right of the circuit (Bear Canyon, Snyder Rd, et al). That would be where our house is, like literally... where our house is. The route doesn't take the racers through our neighborhood, but it does go through several near us, and clogged up the two main ways out of ours for most of Saturday. You could drive out if you wanted to, but it's kind of a hassle. We stayed in and walked up the road to take a peek.

Here, we're at the top of a pretty nasty little hill that borders our neighborhood. Many people's butts got kicked here. Not many folks got off and walked it, but people were chugging pretty good.

Here's some shots from back in and around the neighborhoods that the race did take place in Note the dude smiling for the shot in the next pic. We didn't even see it until we got the pictures loaded up on the pc tonight:

Peppers!

So believe it or not, we got our first frosts here in the Catalina Foothills this past week. We were dutiful and covered as much as we could to try to save our plants. Most everything made it through fine, some blackening on the sweet basil being the worst damage other than...

Our jalepeno plant.

I was warned quite firmly early in the week that if a chile plant sees frost, it will rock its world, and wouldn't you know the one plant who's black garbage bag of protection blew off of... was the jalepeno plant.

I don't think it's doomed, but honestly I have no clue. The stock looks green, firm, healthy, but most of the foliage browned and withered the very next day. In an effort to coax the little guy into putting all of his root resources into rebuilding, we did an emergency harvest. Good thing too, half the peppers I didn't even need to cut off, they just broke off withering end stock.

Anywhoo... I thought we had about 20 or so peppers on there. I was wrong.

I didn't do a full count, but it was more like 40-50. We had to pitch some because the birds had gotten at them, but as for the rest. Washed and put out on racks to dry.

From what we've read, this should take 3 weeks or so. Go go Tucson gardening experiment #432.8!

Invasion of the neuroscientists

Erika is at the annual society for neuroscience conference this week.
A picture just to get the scale of the 30,000 people presenting their
work. This is about an eighth of the poster session.

Added a room onto the house!

Old and busted:

New hotness:

Ok, ok... we didn't actually add a room, and no our established washer and dryer weren't busted. They worked fine, actually. They just didn't fit under the counter and ate up half the floor space in our side entry/laundry room. As you can see from the before shot, we couldn't even use that door.

Anywhoo... we'd been looking at all kinds of options for what to do about the situation. A little "thank you" for some activities I'd done (all legit, I promise, ma!) from a source that wishes to remain anonymous allowed us to pick these out yesterday and get them installed today. If you check out the after shot, I even installed a new dead bolt on the door since, you know... it can be opened now.

Oh, and the replaced washer/dryer combo will be going to a good home tomorrow. Nothing wrong with them, so we didn't want them just sent off to a dump or something.

New herbs

Our first attempt at growing herbs from seed - in the kitchen window!

Terrain Titans!

RAR!

Ok, maybe more like "... rar?"

These little guys are crazy small, and modeled after some old school, real deal remote controlled cars from the 80's and early 90's. The one on the left is a cartoony mock up of an old Tamiya Grasshopper, which was my first "real" remote controlled car back when I was 13.

As you can see, I made Erika get one too (made, as in I pointed out that they had one that was a dark blue/purple and it was a done deal). 3 AAA's go in the radio to power it, and to charge the car by docking it on the radio as well. Takes just under a minute to charge and they run for several minutes after. Total hoot. I'm going to get one for work as well.

So it's been a few weeks since this was actually purchased, but it's been very recently that I actually "mastered" some form of barista art (the term "art" is used very... very loosely here). Either way, this thing makes amazing espresso for Erika and I in the mornings:

http://www.mrcoffee.com/Product.aspx?pid=52

It's an actual factual 15 bar pressure-based espresso maker (as opposed to semi-forced steam, which we used to have). The difference in quality of the espresso is night and day. Normal folk may not blog about such a thing, but hey... coffee drinker since the age of 3, so...

Oh, and the beans are Amalfi Coast Espresso from good old World Market. Whee!

Riding off into the sunset

Karl's band

I just had to post this one - usually it is difficult to get pictures of Karl onstage, but this picture from the Riverfronttimes turned out well.  He looks like he is having fun.

New pool lights

We (finally) were putting in the lights around our pool so we can use it at night.  And we ran into ---- caliche.  It's what they call dirt out here - more like concrete.  So we had to go rent a jackhammer....  David seems good at it though.

It was really really sunny while we were doing the jackhammering.  As you can see by the nice shadows we made.  Note the hats - survival necessity out here.

Final results of the lights - light in the pool too. We jumped right in.

Sunset

We had a nice sunset tonight over the mountains.

Lazy Sunday afternoon in tucson

Ina's visit

David's mom visited us this past weekend to check out Tucson.  She found some nice turquoise jewelry (that matched her shirt quite well).  :)

Monsoon

We saw our first big Monsoon lightning storm tonight. I managed to get this shot of the lightning in front of our house - it was a spectacular show!

What's that, Lassie? BBQ is afoot and target temperature has been reached?

To the smoker!

My my, doesn't that look tasty.

It was difficult to get back in the house in one piece.

HAVE AT THEE!

Now for some slaw and bunnage!

Mmm...

So when we moved away from St. Louis, we decided that instead of putting our offset smoker into storage with all of the rest of our belongings for 2+ months in the Arizona sun, we would gift the mighty implement of BBQ goodness to Karl and Britni. So there we were, without proper BBQ for several months out here.

Finally, as of about a month ago, we picked up the lazy man's way to smoke: a Bradley Digital 6 rack electric smoker. As you can see from the shots, it basically looks like a mini fridge. The cooking chamber is about 3.5 feet tall and at our estimate we can probably do 30-50lbs of food in it at once, depending on the cut(s) of meat, etc...

The specimen of choice was a 10lb pork shoulder from the local megamart. It went into a kosher salt and brown sugar brine for about 8 hours, then into the smoker with apple wood at 250F for another 22 hours.

Yes, you read that right. This thing cooks quite a bit differently than the offset smoker: way... way slower. It took 22 hours for the shoulder to hit 200F, which is the target temperature for getting a pork shoulder to truly fall apart. Once it's there, all you need is a couple forks to turn it into a mound of BBQ goodness.

Quail

Just for Doris - more pictures of our quail family. The babies are really growing up fast.

Mt. Lemmon

Looking out over the Catalina mountains.

Saguaro's blooming on the mountain. After the flowers bloom they are replaced by very red fruit, that can be eaten.

Erika in the parking lot on Mt. Lemmon. Notice Pauline in the background, taking more pictures of cactus.

Our new Ford Escape, used for driving up the mountain. Thanks Ryan for the A-Z plan!

In honor of Mom and Dad Eggers visit in June we drove up Mt. Lemmon - the tallest mountain around Tucson. This is a view from the side of the mountain.