I never really understood the Bryan Adams song, Summer of ’69 where he talks about playing his guitar until his fingers bled. I mean, first of all, how? And secondly, why? I just never understood what it meant to play a guitar I guess. Fast forward to this week. I have long wanted to tinker with playing bass guitar. I don’t know why but I just like the sound of bass. They say a lead guitar gets the girls but a bass guitar gets the gigs. I don’t really want either but I think I would prefer gigs over girls since I sort of like the girl I have. So, by dumb luck (the best kind of luck), I discovered Rocksmith 2014, a “game” that works on all of the various gaming consoles. I happened to have a little extra money that I had been saving up so I hooked dumb luck together with extra money and bought a new bass guitar and Rocksmith 2014 for the XBox!
Fender Jazz Bass
We hooked it all up the other night and started playing. You see, the game comes with a cable that allows players to hook a real guitars (bass or 6-string) into the system so a real guitar becomes the game controller.
The game screen
It’s pretty cool how game-play merges with guitar-play. Basically the player sees notes coming down the screen and has to adjust fingerings and hit the string at the right time. The system picks it up and measures tone, accuracy, timing, etc and adjusts the notes to the player’s accuracy. There are a number of different songs that span the 80s through today. It doesn’t teach players to read music but it does build experience with playing notes on a real guitar and teaches a form of tab playing for guitar (check out this guy playing).
Get outta my way Dad!
So, Isaac, Abigail and I played for a few hours the other night and had a lot of fun. I kid you not, though…my fingers are still numb! I stopped before my fingers bled (I am sharp that way) but now I definitely get that there is a painful part of playing guitar that I hope will be overcome with callouses and experience. I don’t know if I will ever amount to much as a rock star, but I am sure enjoying the chance to play now and the kids and I get a lot of time to goof around together! With my playing, it is more likely that our ears will bleed than our fingers!
I get picked on from time to time and usually by my wife. Oh I know, some of you who know her well would never believe it, but it’s true…she picks on me!
Ahhh…Jergens lotion!
So the other day, were were both complaining about “winter hands” so I went to the store and started sniffing for the right lotion. I don’t like hand lotion much but bleeding knuckles suck so I suspend my dislike for the winter months. Still, I don’t want to smell like a girl. So I popped the lids on some and did the sniff test. The scents were all over the place…some were stinky or girly or reminiscent of the southbound end of a northbound moose.
Finally, I happened upon a bottle of Jergens – original scent. I knew I had my lotion! I love this stuff! It instantly transported me to my childhood where one of my relatives had Jergens in her house. As a child, that smell was one of luxury. I have no idea why but that’s how I viewed it. I look back on it now and it’s silly, but my child-brain kicked in and it didn’t matter…I wanted to enjoy that luxurious feel in my home. And sure enough, Jergens lotion is great! It doesn’t stay oily and it works well on winter hands! So I told Emily my story using those words and she has been picking on me ever since! I don’t even care though…I am living a luxurious life!
There is a second part of the life of luxury I live…
The other night I was preparing to jump in the shower around 11pm. It was a “work night” and pretty typical of my usual routine. I cranked the water on, waited for it to heat up and jumped in. I had my washcloth all lathered up when all of a sudden, water shot everywhere except out of the shower head. I looked and the flexible pipe broke where it attaches to the wall. We have long had a cheap low-flow shower head on a junky flexible hose that had a mind of its own. It finally broke which didn’t make me sad. Breaking at 11pm made me sad as neither Emily nor I had gotten a shower and we didn’t want to be unshowered for work the next day.
Well that sucks
I decided I would just go to Walmart for a replacement. It’s the only place open at 11pm. They had a wide assortment of junk but I spied one shower head that had a metalish hose rather than an all plastic hose…sold! They didn’t sell any hoses without the head but I never liked the hose or the head we had anyhow. Surely, the metal hose has to be better than the plastic one that broke.
Ahhh, the life of luxury!
So here is the luxury part. I didn’t realize it until I got home but this was not a low-flow shower head. It was an “EcoSpa” and had green ink on its packaging. It wasn’t until I got home that what made it “eco” was the “water-saving pause switch”. Talk about worthless. I saw “USA” on the package when I grabbed it too…I was feeling pretty good …until I got home. It was packaged in the US of A. Talk about a whole bunch of marketing crap! Anyhow, I feel bad having a water-wasting shower head, but I have to tell you, the regular flow shower head is super nice. I didn’t realize how pitiful the other was until I installed this new head (at, oh, about 12:15am) and grabbed a shower. Talk about luxurious!
Please don’t judge me for using all these highfalutin things. I promise to ask Emily to use the pause switch when she shaves her legs…
Double whammy…just when I was used to Daylight Savings Time, we go and switch to Standard Time. It’s dark when I get home now! Thanks Obama! And to add to it, it snowed today! I don’t understand what I did to make you so upset with me but this snow is not cool! Thanks Obama!
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was the head coach for the middle school boys’ soccer team. We finished the season last night with the county play-offs where we won 4-0! During the regular season, we had a record of 11-1 which made us the number 2 seed.
Semi-finals games were played Monday where we beat the number 3 seed. In a big upset, number 4 beat number 1 which left us to play the number 4 seed for the championship game. After some political nonsense, we finally got to the final game Wednesday afternoon where the boys were super excited!
I played soccer and other sports too as I was growing up. In particular though, I played soccer in high school and I was a fair player…certainly not good, but tolerable. Still, I liked sports and enjoyed time on the field. I do not think I was ever as in to it as the boys on this team were though! Their energy was electrifying and I think I got more hyped up than I have been in a long time!
The girls’ team won too!
So, anyhow, we shut out the other team and ended our season on a super high note! I am so proud of these boys and truly enjoyed the last few months getting to know them better, teaching them what I could and encouraging them to be good young men!
Like many folks, I typically get irritated when I see the big box stores roll out Christmas stuff before Halloween. I mean, seriously, why do they do that? I am still trying to wrap my mind around the end of summer (though these freaking cold temps are helping to make it feel real to me now!) I cannot possibly contemplate Halloween already, let alone Christmas!
Southern Comfort eggnog is from the gods!
Anyhow, soccer season is finally coming to an end. I don’ know if I ever mentioned it but I am the head coach for the middle school soccer team where Isaac attends. We have had a great year and are in the play-offs for the county championship next week. It’s dark early now and as I have regular work during the day, our soccer time is limited…and increasingly cold. After practice is over, we are usually pretty well shot.
The kids enjoying Southern Comfort eggnog!
I was delighted last night as I returned home, to discover that Emily had been to the store and found eggnog! And not just any eggnog but the very best eggnog of all, Southern Comfort eggnog! Please, people at Southern Comfort, make a product page so I can keep up to date on when and where I can find your eggnog! I would marry it if I weren’t otherwise attached to my wife and kids! It’s amazing stuff! Nectar of the gods I sometimes call it!
It’s always so sad when you get to the bottom of the glass!
The Southern Comfort eggnog replaced my exhaustion as it coursed through my system and made me awake and alive once again! I am still not quite ready for Christmas (or even Halloween really) but Southern Comfort eggnog will soothe my soul through both Halloween and Christmas! Bless you Southern Comfort, bless you!
I know, I know…you could barely contain yourself, waiting for the conclusion to the sorghum saga. In my last post, I described how we pressed the sorghum cane to extract the sweet juice using our Kentucky No. 0 Cane Mill. We didn’t really pay much attention to how much juice we actually got but it was enough to make me smile. Of course, anything greater than “none” would have made me smile. Anyhow, we got several gallons of weird looking green sorghum juice.
Cooking down but still green
To make the juice into syrup, one has to cook the water off of the juice which thickens the liquid into syrup and converts sugars and starches into wholesome goodness that is otherwise known as sorghum (or sorghums as the old timers call it).
Cooking down nicely
Originally, people cooked the juice on a wood fire in a large cast iron cauldron…sometimes several feet in diameter. The cauldron had a lip which allowed the cauldron to sit on a circular brick or stone wall inside of which a fire was built. Sorghum cookers got more sophisticated and built long, shallow evaporator pans with baffles which allowed the cooker to add juice to one end and move the sorghum through the pan to the other end as it cooked where syrup was eventually pulled off. Either of these options are still viable but involve a good bit of money to purchase or make. I already have a good bit of money invested in the cane mills and couldn’t see spending any more this year.
It thickened nicely and turned a beautiful amber
It occurred to me that a turkey fryer is not much different from an old fashioned cauldron so we decided to cook our juice in a turkey fryer over propane. I know, it is not too authentic but I had to go with what I had. One of the first things that happens when one turns on the heat under sorghum juice is that a tremendous amount of nasty foam rises to the top. This happens every time as a part of the process and the foam has to be skimmed and discarded. I had a ladle I used to dip it off of the top. We stirred the pot nearly continuously to prevent burning the syrup. It took a few hours over low heat but the juice gradually cooked down and thickened. The smell of the mixture changed from wet pumpkin (almost as bad as wet dog) to sweet…sweet something. I can’t really describe it but it was a nice smell. Finally, the color changed from green to a beautiful amber color. We tasted often and watched it thicken. I finally decided it was done and pulled off the end product. We ended up with 2 quarts plus a little of homemade sorghum syrup and it tastes great!
Homemade sorghum syrup
We learned a lot and, more importantly, spent a lot of quality together-time. We didn’t get enough sorghum to make it extrinsically worth it, but satisfaction in seeing a product through from field to jar is worth a lot to me. Seeing my kids helping out and enjoying time spent is worth a lot to me. Feeling some connection to how old farmers in WV might have produced their own sorghum is worth a lot to me. The syrup is really a secondary part to all of this, but what a sweet bonus it is!
Once upon a time there was a mule called “Brother”. Brother was drafted into turning a cane mill for what seemed like hours on end. After becoming dirty and dizzy, he began to bray for help. Another mule called “Wife” heard his braying and decided to help. With Brother on one end and Wife on the other, the cane mill turned and turned under the hot sun. Then Wife became tired and brayed, “Why can’t I have a rope to pull this load, why do I have to push?” The farmer hooked up a rope to the cane mill. Brother pushed and Wife pulled the cane mill under the hot sun. Round and round the cane mill went while Brother and Wife became dizzy and tired. Finally, both Brother and Wife started braying so loudly that farmer had pity on them and hooked the rope to a tractor. Brother sat upon the tractor and the tractor turned the cane mill round and round under the hot sun. Wife went back and forth, carrying more cane to the farmer who sat upon the ground. The two mules said nothing to the farmer about not thinking of the tractor earlier. However, every time the farmer got hit in the head by the board attached to the mill’s roller, the sounds of “hee haw! hee haw!” were heard throughout the land.
I think her story is hilarious and pretty well summarizes how our day went…
The plan was to process the cane I described yesterday into sorghum syrup. Basically, the canes are full of liquid with natural sugars and other magical things that give it a distinct flavor. To extract the liquid, farmer Warren has to crush the cane using a cane mill. Farmers in the old days used to hitch up horses or mules to a long pole attached to the center roller in the mill. As the animals walked in circles, the rollers turned crushing cane fed into the mill a few pieces at a time.
Ky cane mill ready to press sorghum
We reassembled the mill and lagged it to a few sections of old railroad ties. Old timers used to attach the mill to a tree stump that was quite solid in the ground. You see, when the rollers are turned in the mill, a tremendous amount of torque can be generated. If the mill isn’t attached to something solid, it will be spun around…not something I wanted to deal with as a 600 pound block of iron in motion is slightly more than I can handle.
The board that hit the farmer in the head repeatedly…
So, we got it assembled and rigged a board to the center shaft. I was the first draft animal to take a turn at the mill. It was slightly easier than I expected to turn the mill. It was frozen solid when I got it so nothing moved. I guess I had an idea that it would be only slightly easier to turn once it was cleaned up. I had not assembled it even once since restoring it so I had no idea! Luckily, it turned well so we decided to start crushing cane. We tried to run a single pieces of cane through it but it didn’t really work.
Note the fancy pine cones to hold the rollers in place
The rollers are supposed to be spaced at around 1/16th of an inch. On each end of each roller, there used to be bolts that could be used to adjust the spacing of the rollers. On my old mill, I was able to free the top bolts but I couldn’t replace them (not for this year anyhow). The bottom bolts remain frozen in place so I had some ability to adjust the tops of the rollers but the bottoms were set in iron…literally. We set up the mill under a spruce tree so I grabbed a few pine cones and jammed them into the top of the mill to force the rollers closer together. Surprisingly, it worked amazingly well! The spacing at the bottom of the rollers was a little too wide so I had to be careful feeding the cane so that it went mostly towards the top of the joint between the rollers. That worked just fine but was less than ideal.
Crushing sorghum cane in the cane millBefore I got too dizzyThat mechanical horse saved lives!But hurt my head…a lot!
So, as I said, I was the original draft animal but I had the vision on how to feed the cane too so my brother, who has a mind well suited for being a draft animal, took over turning the rollers (just kidding…he has a PhD in chemistry). Really, neither job was too glamorous. After a few turns, we were both dizzy (and I swear it had nothing to do with the liquid wheat we had nearby) and decided to hook it to the motorized draft animal. I remained on the ground to feed stalk while Isaac and my brother took turns riding the tractor. I suppose we ran cane through the cane mill for 3-4 hours slowly learning tricks and getting better at the process. We had to fight the mill a few times as I got impatient and fed too much cane. The torque increased and we spun the mill in circles…luckily we kept the mill low to the ground for safety. Next year, I will mount it higher and more substantially to make it easier to feed cane and to minimize rotation.
Sorghum juice flowing from the cane millSome of the crushed sorghum canes
When sorghum juice flows, it is pea green. Truly, it doesn’t look appetizing and I think it smells like the guts of a pumpkin around Halloween. Still, we got juice flowing and I was so excited. The process was working! We pressed a bunch of cane and had a nice bunch of juice to cook down. You’ll have to wait until the next post to hear about that adventure (yeah, I lied yesterday…I have to write more than 2 parts)!
Where has the time gone? I swear we have been busy…in fact, too busy to even write anything I guess. Really, my problem is that I have been in recovery. You see, a few weeks ago, Bryan Adams came to Charleston for a concert in the excellent Clay Center. He asked me to sing back-up for him during the concert. Actually, he wanted me to sing along from the audience…you know…to lead the common folk who were in the crowd.
When Bryan first announced his concert, Emily’s brother asked if we wanted to get tickets. Of course we wanted to go and reminisce about our early days of dating. I forgot how many awesome Bryan Adams songs there are! This concert was a huge reprisal of all of his very best songs. It was awesome! Some concerts are not much fun when the musician focuses on new songs that no one cares about or the really bad old songs…but not Bryan Adams! Every song for 2 hours was a classic song from my teen years! He didn’t need any technology to sound great. His live concert was just as good as his recorded work. It was amazing!
Bryan Adams in concert
The best part is that we had seats at center stage, six rows back. The concert was acoustical and simple and a perfect date for Emily and me. I tried to take some pics to share our date with you, my friends. My iPhone 4 has a camera that was woefully inadequate for taking pictures from even 6 rows back. So, not only is my voice in recovery, but so is my wallet. You see, my iPhone ticked me off so much that I got a new phone…I switched from Apple and bought a Samsung Galaxy S4…love it! No more bad pics I hope!
The background is a portrait of Bryan Adams
Anyhow, if you get a chance to see Bryan Adams in concert, go. It was a lot of fun and he has so many great and classic songs that you will know, even if you don’t remember that they were his songs!
How can it be that summer is over already?! Well, not really over but for all intents and purposes, once school starts, Summer is basically (I’ll quote Sergeant Schultz here), “Kaput”. Our county sent those poor darlings back on Friday. I get why the send them back on a Friday in some ways but couldn’t they wait just a few more days?
We woke everyone early (compared to Summer wake up time) and I offered to make breakfast. No one took me up on it. I am not sure how to take that but I guess we just had some really really good tasting cereal at the house.
As we scurried around, Abigail was literally singing, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall” as she searched around for her shoes and stuff. Emily was singing “Happy days are here again…”, much to the dismay of the kids. Isn’t it great being a parent? Driving the kids nuts is so much fun!
Anyhow, poor Abigail was sort of tentative about the whole school thing. She wants to like school but she really likes to read and they don’t let her just read at will during the day so it could be better. Isaac was basically non-responsive but what would you expect from an 8th grade boy? He’s an inch-and-a-half taller than I am now and his voice is a man’s voice. I’d say he thinks like a man but that should go without saying…he’s an 8th grade boy…I never got beyond thinking like an 8th grade boy.
So, every year I interview the kids and ask them about their plans and such. Here are this year’s installments…
Click to play the videos. They are sideways and my converter program keeps crashing so use your imagination!
A few weeks ago, Abigail attended a science in the arts camp sponsored by the WV State Division of Culture and History. It sounds weird but the idea was to demonstrate the use of robots and animatronics in art. About 2 dozen or so kids were invited to the camp where counselors helped young mad scientists put together proximity sensors and motion detectors and wires and batteries to control servos and motors to animate whatever forms the kids wanted.
Abigail chose to build Cheshire the cat! Cheshire looked very much like the cartoon version from the movie Alice in Wonderland which makes sense I guess. I didn’t know she had ever seen the movie but it seems obvious. Anyhow, Abigail’s cat detected when we tried to pet it. It purred and wagged its tail like a good kitty. When we talked to her cat, Cheshire meowed in response.
Mad scientist
I haven’t seen the girl so on fire for technology…ever! Often girls are excluded or exclude themselves from science and technology so I am absolutely delighted that she participated in this week-long day-camp and that she says she wants to work as a robotics engineer! So, thanks WV Division of Culture and History! I think you have sparked a new interest in math and science for my daughter!
