We went to Portside Pizza at nearby Shriner Lake tonight.  We joined in on a gathering of family and friends to remember my brother Dave tonight at the last minute.  We’d never been to Portside Pizza.  We’d been past it any number of times, it’s on a favorite bicycling route of ours, but whenever we’d asked anyone about it, the response was universal. “Portside Pizza?  It’s really bad.” No one ever omitted the adverb “really.”

We were surprised and pleased to find it just delightful. Tuesday nights are some sort of special event night, yet our waitress managed to keep us in beer, no mean feat with our crowd. Debbie and I got a “Portside Pizza”, essentially an “everything” pizza and it was splendid. The crust was crisp, the toppings abundant, and it was hot through and through.

And the check was just 23 bucks for the pizza and way too much beer. If you ever find yourself Shriner Lake way, Portside Pizza is really good!

Check them out on Facebook: Portside Pizza.

We – Debbie, me, and Spenser and Owen the wonder dogs – went out on the porch tonight and watched the storms roll in.    Spenser’s afraid of thunder and lightning and hid behind us, Owen sat before us, nose to the wind.   Even our dull human noses could smell the growing corn and the freshening rain.  The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled and the rain waved across the fields like curtains.  The wind was cool, after weeks of blistering sun it was delicious.

If there’s anything better than this, I don’t know what it is.

Life, actually my mom, has given me peaches, so I’m making peach daiquiris.

Peach Daiquiri

A handful of ice, a teaspoon of simple syrup, a splash of lime juice, a peach, and a shot of rum.  Stir it all up in the blender and you’ve got the perfect use for ripe peaches on a blistering summer day!

Now that the wheat is off we’re baling straw.

Our combine makes the windrows of straw a little too wide for the baler. Baling will go smoother for us if we rake the straw first into a smaller windrow. I figured this was a good job to get the Super M out for and see how my engine rebuild last winter went.

The Super M and Rake

The M did good. There’s an oil leak, and the throttle tends to slip, but other than that it worked hard for 3 hours raking the straw. By the end I was longing for the modern tractors with cushy seating, a cab, and air-conditioning.

With the straw neatly raked, it was time to bale.

Getting Started

Full Load

We do it old style, baling the straw in small square bales that a person can handle. We can stack around 130-150 bales on each wagon. It’s hard, hot, dirty work. You’re quickly covered in chaff and pricked on any exposed skin by the straw. That’s why I’m in the air-conditioned tractor driving the baler and my nephew is on the wagon stacking.

Once they’re baled and loaded on the wagon, we then unload them and stack them in the barn.

The Unloading Crew

Stacking in the Barn

Stacking the straw in the barn is hot miserable work in the 90 degree days we’ve been having. That’s why the young’uns are in the mow.

Then we sell the straw. Sometimes truck loads to other farmers for bedding for livestock. Landscapers often buy numerous bales to mulch newly seeded grass. And we sell a lot one or two bales at a time to people to put around their dog house in the winter, mulch a garden, or use for a hayride.

It’s hard work on hot days, but it’s also deeply and fundamentally satisfying work. At the end of the day, and I mean that in the literal sense of tools put away and the sun going down, not as the pointless catchphrase it has become, you can look in the barn and see all the neatly put away straw and be very certain of what you have done this day.

Deb’s roommates are at Skunk Hill for a visit, so I cooked tonight.

Barb Sandy Dinner Menu

It turned out really good (if I say so myself) and the staging of the meal (which can be an issue) went smoothly.

All I need now is a little French man-servant outfit to wear to make it the total experience.

Yesterday I was going over to see my good friends Bruce and Janice. I was cruising down Carroll Road, driving 5 mph under the speed limit (as usual, if you’re ever cussing the dawdling !$%# in front of you, it’s probably me), singing along with my favorite Robert Earl Keen song, and minding my own business as I approached the intersection of Carroll and Bethel, right by Carroll High School.

I had the green light and was just coming up to the intersection when someone blasted through the red light at at least 50 mph on Bethel. I locked up the brakes (to the engineer at Ford who designed the ABS brakes, kudos) and they missed me by inches. (Well, probably feet, but it seemed like inches at the time.)

I was shook. If I’d left home a 1/4 second earlier, if I’d driven a fraction of a mile per faster they’d of T-boned me dead on. Wouldn’t have been a pretty scene.

So friends, life is sweet, and may be oh so short. So stop reading this nonsense and go hug your beloved, or call your family, or send a friend an email, and tell them how much you love them.

Debbie and I have started writing a weekly column on buscovoice.com. If you’re one of the many who just can’t get enough of the witty, insightful, and often brilliant writing on zumbrun.net, check out our Two Farmers and a Fork at Local Columnists

We started harvesting wheat on Monday.  It was typical wheat weather, temps in the 90’s.  Fortunately the air conditioner in the combine was working good.

We got to try out the new grain cart.

Loading	More Loading
Unloading	More Unloading

I only dumped a little bit of wheat on the ground learning how to use it.

We ran about 4 hours, then a bleeder valve on the fuel filter of the combine broke off, squirting diesel fuel everywhere. How does a bleeder valve break anyway? So this morning the day starts with a parts run into McAllister in Fort Wayne. They have a miserable supply of parts so most likely this will get ordered from Indianapolis and we’ll have it tomorrow.

A later note: I was wrong to bash McAllister. They did have the part, I put it on, everything worked fine, and we’re ready to roll again.

For vacation reading this year I took along the books listed below. I’ve annotated the list with my thoughts on each.

• In Fed We Trust by David Wessel. Recommended by son Josh so I could “understand what he writes about all day.”

  I have to admit I got this one mostly so I wouldn’t have to admit to son Josh I thought it sounded about as interesting as watching C-SPAN. But it was a surprisingly good read. Not a bated breath page turner by any means, but if you’d like to know what the current financial crisis is all about, it’s worth checking out.

• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Imagine the world without people.

  Didn’t get to this one.

• A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. Hornsby’s a good writer, always worth a read.

  It’d been a while since I’d read a Hornsby book and I’d forgotten what a stunningly good writer he is. A Long Way Down is narrated by four different characters, so it took me a while to remember who each character is when the narration switched. But once I got over that I was taken again with Hornsby’s writing ability. Time and again I would read a passage and think how he’s captured perfectly a thought or emotion. That was usually followed by blinding jealousy wishing I could write tone-perfect like that.

• The Great Gatsby. You know who wrote it. Son Josh is always quoting it at me, and it’s one of the many holes my reading of American Literature.

  I hate to be ignorant and uncultured, but I just don’t think Gatsby is all that good. Josh explained some of the themes to me. “Daisy represents every unobtainable desire you have.” Yeah, yeah, but Daisy is such an unattractive character to me, as are Nick, Tom, Gatsby, and practically everyone else in the book. I can’t get past my personal distaste of the characters.

• The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland. You can’t go wrong with Coupland.

  And you won’t go wrong with this one. Wow, what a good book. Like reading Nick Hornsby I just look up and think, “man, I wish I could write like that.”

• The Dead Hand by David Hoffman. Pulitzer Prize winning story about the Cold War. The success of this book is due in part to Josh Zumbrun, see page 486.

  If you’re like me you thought Ronald Reagan was a grinning dolt, but were never interested in politics enough to really read up on the Reagan years to find out. After reading Hoffman’s incredibly detailed book on the end of the Cold War, I’m convinced my opinion was right. Reagan was a complete and utter fool. Hoffman seems oddly to be pro-Reagan, which makes me think either Hoffman or I are missing something.
  

  Hoffman’s book is well-written. It’s not exactly a Tom Clancy page-turner, but it does hold your interest. Actually a lot of the topics are ones Clancy and others have fictionalized in novels. Like a Clancy novel, The Dead Hand is pretty long and dense, but it’s worth picking it up and plowing through at least part of it to have the horror of the Cold War made apparent, and to marvel that we managed not to destroy ourselves.
  

  I worked for years on some of the weapon systems described in Hoffman’s book. I’ve been out of that business for a few years now and I’m not going back. I ain’t gonna study war no more.

• A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke. An early Robicheaux novel that I haven’t read.

  Didn’t get to this one.

• The Blue Horse by Rick Bass. I have no idea what this is. It was on the new fiction shelf and had a cool cover. That’s much the same method I use to pick wine.

  The Blue Horse was lyrical and poetic and beautiful and evocative in places. In other places it was just obscure. And in other places it was as flat and wrong as me trying to sing (and that’s about as flat and wrong as you can get). Overall, I don’t want to work that hard when I read. What does the blue horse represent? Something I’m sure, but I don’t want to think hard enough to puzzle it out. What’s with the weird family that lets them hunt on their land? They’re an almost cartoonish depiction of a Mennonite community. His descriptions of them struck me as clumsy and tone deaf for whatever point he was trying to get across.
  

  I think a lot of it was about middle-aged men facing their mortality and the failures in their lives. If you know me, you’re thinking, “that’s a book about you Chuck!” And you’re right. I prefer to read Dave Barry, who covers the same topics, but makes you laugh out loud about it.

• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. What’s not to like about the memoirs of a befuddled, beer-swilling, travel writer? Seriously, Bryson is constantly amusing (and this book is often poignant as well), almost as amusing as:
• I’ll Mature When I’m Dead by Dave Barry. And there’s no one funnier than Dave Barry, so the list ends here.

This book didn’t disappoint. If you’re 50-ish and feeling it, read this one. It’ll make you laugh about your condition, unlike the Blue Horse.

We’re on vacation in Topsail Beach, North Carolina. It’s 800 miles from home, so we took 2 days to drive here and had several interesting dining experiences along the way.

Around suppertime the first day we were looking for a place to eat and around Marietta, Ohio there were signs on the Interstate for Applebees and Bob Evans so we pulled off on Highway 7. As we wheeled into the parking lot that surrounded the Applebees Debbie spotted a storefront Mexican place. She said, “wanna try the Mexican place?” I said, “sure.”

What a find! Las Trancas. When we stepped in I figured we were in for something good. The open storefront had been artfully divided up in several dining spaces, the wait staff were all in uniforms, the decor was nice, and most tellingly, the place was packed at 5:20 in the evening.

Debbie ordered up carne asada and I got carnitas. Yum, yum, yum! Debbie’s beef was fresh and perfectly cooked with a beautiful sear. My carnitas were moist and rich with delicious charred bits. So, so good! If you ever find yourself in Marietta, Ohio, check it out.

We stayed that night in Beckley, West Virginia. We started off early the next morning and had breakfast in the Omelet Shoppe next to the hotel. I was delighted to see grits on the menu and ordered them. When I did our waitress said, “ummph.” Debbie said, “what, you don’t like grits?” The waitress said, “well, not here. I like them if my momma cooks them.” Now there’s a sterling recommendation. But to this Yankee they tasted just fine.

Finally rolling downhill towards Topsail Beach on I-40 we stopped at a Smithfield Chicken and BBQ (or SCNB as some of the signs say.) It’s a regional chain of fast food BBQ and chicken. The pulled pork was just splendid. They serve it with cole slaw and vinegary sauce. It’s definitely fast food bbq, but it’s real tasty all the same. And the service they provide is a model for what all restaurants should be.

Now we’re at Topsail, enjoying fresh shrimp every day.