Desperately trying to stay awake until the New Year (it’s 9pm, 12/31) I’ve been surfing the presidential candidate’s sites, considering their fundraising appeals. (All of the following are from official campaign communications.)

My native (Indiana) son, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is apologetic, ‘This is the last time you’ll hear from me this year’ … ‘Can you make one last contribution right now’ …

Elizabeth Warren comes across as desperate, ‘We’re only hours away from the biggest fundraising deadline of the year, and we’re at risk of missing our $20 million goal.’

Bernie Sanders pitches unity, ‘There is only one way we win — and that is together. ‘

Joe Biden, … wait … Joe Biden is from Scranton, PA? Site of “The Office” TV series? Setting for Harry Chapin’s classic “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” song? Whoa. Shaking my head to clear it.
Anyway, Joe is taking to the pulpit, “We are in a battle for the soul of America. “

Donald Trump comes across as a belligerent illiterate nitwit:

I’m With You, and I will FIGHT for you, and I will WIN for YOU.
This is a MOVEMENT.

Why is “With” capitalized, and not “will?” Why is “you” spelled “You”, “you”, and “YOU?” Why are contractions inconsistently applied, “I’m” but “I will?”

I expect in each case the candidates are trying to appeal to their base.

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I ran the HUFF today at Chain O’ Lakes. It’s a 50K trail run with an 11.3 mile “fun run.” I’m not in 50K shape. I’m not really in 11 mile shape either. I hadn’t done much more than 6 miles in a training run for several months. But one day after a pleasant training run I signed up for the fun run in a fit of optimism.

Today was a beautiful day for a run on the trails. Just above freezing at the start and the trails were only muddy in spots. At 6 miles I was feeling great, fine and strong and thinking my optimism had been justified.

Ah, hubris! By mile 8 the wheels had come off. My right knee felt like it was going to buckle on every stride. The range of motion in my right hip was down to almost nothing. I waddled through miles 8 and 9 alternately feeling sorry for myself and cussing my stupid self for signing up for a race I knew wasn’t in shape for.

At the HUFF around mile 10 you come out of the woods at the west end of Sand Lake and you can see the beach house where the finish line is set up. The end was literally in sight! My spirits and my legs perked up.

I came around the west edge of Sand Lake running faster than I had all day and remembered that I’d run that same trail when I was 15 years old and working as a lifeguard at Sand Lake. 47 years ago.

I wondered what 15 year old me would’ve thought if I’d known I’d be running this same trail 47 years later? What would 15 year old me want 62 year old me to know? What does 62 year old me want my 15 year old doppelgänger to know?

I thought about these things as I went through the last mile, feeling strong, feeling optimistic, feeling good again, and I didn’t come up with any answers for current or 47 years ago me.

I’m just happy to be feeling good again.

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The centre has held [1], perhaps things won’t fall apart. [2]

Each year Jason Holzinger, our seed corn dealer, gives us a ham for Christmas. It’s the best ham in the world, an Ossian bone-in ham.

I’ve been wanting to try cooking something sous vide and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I don’t have a sous vide cooker, and even if I did it probably wouldn’t be big enough for a ham.

But I’d read in Kenji Lopez-Alt’s amazing cookbook, “The Food Lab” about using a picnic cooler as a sous vide cooker. The idea is a insulated picnic cooler will hold a large quantity of heated water at a steady temperature for hours. Long enough even to heat a ham.

These hams are cooked and you want to heat them to around 145 degrees for serving. According to Kenji that’s right in the sweet spot for what you can do with a picnic cooler sous vide, so away I went.

I got my Holzinger ham and put it in our cooler.

Sous vide is French for “under vacuum” and what you do to cook “sous vide” is to vacuum seal whatever you’re cooking and immerse it in hot water until it is cooked.

The ham comes vacuum sealed, so all I had to do was heat 4 gallons of water to 150 degrees. I wanted the water to be 140 degrees in the sous vide cooker, and I figured it would drop 10 degrees in warming up the ham and cooler.

Pretty close to 150! Water comes out of our hot water tap at 115, so it doesn’t take long to come up to 150. I poured this into the cooler.

And the temperature dropped fairly quickly below 140 degrees. That ham was just out of the refrigerator at 36 degrees, so it was essentially a 10 pound ice cube. I added a gallon of boiling water a couple of times over the next half hour and the temperature stabilized at my desired 140 degrees.

I wrapped the cooler to help hold the heat. After the temperature stabilized I only had to add boiling water once more in 3 hours to keep the temperature up.

I let the ham sit in the sous vide cooker for 4 hours at 140 degrees, then took it out and put a brown sugar and balsamic vinegar glaze on it and blasted it in a hot oven for 15 minutes.

The glaze made it pretty as a picture, but didn’t do anything for me flavor-wise. I wouldn’t bother with it next time.[1]

The ham though was amazing, more tender and juicy than any ham I’ve ever had. It was almost “cut with a fork” tender.

There were a few “lessons learned” I’ll apply next time.

• Let the ham come to room temperature first. It took a lot of fussing with boiling water to get a stable temperature in the cooler.
• Plan for getting the ham out of the cooler when it’s done. While 140 degree water is nothing like messing with the superheated water from a pressure cooker, getting a ham out of 5 gallons of water at 140 degrees is a challenge. It’s just hot enough you really don’t want to thrust your hands into it. And picking the cooler up off the floor and tipping it into the sink was a thrill in itself.

Thanks Jason and Kenji for the best ham ever!

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I’m reading Mark Twain’s “A Tramp Abroad” and I came across this gem today.

“A (blue) jay hasn’t got any more principle than a Congressman.”

As appropriate today in Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District as it was in 1880 when Twain wrote it.

Although that does seem to be a harsh comparison for the blue jay.

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Almost 5 years ago I went to a meeting in Woodburn Indiana about nitrogen management in corn. There was a person there from the Environmental Defense Fund with brochures about selling carbon credits, i.e., we’d get paid for farming in a way that burned less carbon or sequestered more in the soil.

I really had no idea what the Environmental Defense Fund was. I thought I knew something about them, but I realized later that I had them confused with the Environment Working Group, famous in the ag world for publishing how much individual farmers got paid in government subsidies.[1]

I was curious though, both for the high-minded principle of doing something good by burning less carbon, and more by what Sir Albert Howard[2] called “the god-cursed thirst for profit.[3]“

I emailed the person at the EDF about this and she put me in touch with the group who was doing this, an outfit in Canada called Canadian Carbon Solutions.

Now, I’m predisposed to like Canadians, I worked up there for years. As I once told my friends there, “Canada has fulfilled what the US promised in the 1960’s.”[4]

I started exchanging information with Canadian Carbon Solutions, sending them our field records, yield data, variable rate fertilization shape files, and so on. It went on and on.

I retired from farming in 2016, and it was still going on. My nephew Tom took over responding to their requests and I continued to drag information out of our farming records, while complete, were pretty disorganized.

The information requests finally trickled off, and I figured that was the end of that. But then this summer Tom called me up.

We sold 70 tons of carbon credits for around 20 dollars a ton. For our farm that’s a fraction of 1% of our revenue, but I couldn’t be more pleased by it. It’s not the answer to solving the disaster we’re creating by burning fossil fuels[5] but it’s a step in the right direction and I couldn’t be prouder for being part of it or for having Tom carry it on.

P.S. As Tom pointed out after I published this, that payout was in Canadian dollars. In that case, it’s a lot of loonies!

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Two black raspberry posts in a row? Yes, indeed, I love my black raspberries [1].

The black raspberries just keep coming, like the rain this year. Normally the black raspberries are burning up by this time of year. But this year the rain won’t stop.

I picked another 8 cups in in my backyard in just 20 minutes. I made jam, raspberry syrup, and raspberry vinegar.

The raspberry syrup was simple, mash up 3 1/2 cups of raspberries with 1 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of water. Bring that to a boil and cook at a simmer for 5-6 minutes. Press it through a fine sieve and you’ve got raspberry syrup. I squeezed half a lemon into it because I thought it was a bit sweet.

Take what’s left in the sieve and put it in jar and pour 2 cups of white vinegar over it. Let it sit a couple of weeks and you have raspberry vinegar for salad dressings.

After a long wet spring the wild black raspberries are finally ripe.

We didn’t burn our native prairie last year and this year the wild raspberries are growing like crazy. I don’t know if the burning schedule contributed to this, or whether it’s just the vagaries of the weather. Whatever the reason, I have all the black raspberries I want this year in my own back yard.

I went out tonight and picked 3 cups in 15 minutes, more than enough for a nice pie.

We have these 6 inch pie pans that are ideal for 2 people. In volume it’s about a third of a normal 9 inch pie, so we don’t eat too much pie, or have a bunch go to waste.

Since I’m baking this “about a third” of a normal recipe, getting a recipe to come out right can be a challenge. This pie was without a doubt the best wild black raspberry pie I’ve ever made, so here’s the recipe for all posterity.

Let it cool for an hour or two, and then enjoy what nature has given you for free.

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5 years ago we cut down some trees for boards for fencing, to make a bed for a hay wagon, and so on. We just cut down “junk” trees, trees that for one reason or another would never make a log that we could sell to a timber buyer.

One of those trees was a maple standing in a swamp. When our sawyer, Dave Scheiber, cut into it the wood was spalted.

Spalting is when fungi colonize inside a tree and in this case created the “flames” in the wood. When I saw that I asked Dave to cut some 2″ thick slabs for me and leave the natural bark edge on. I thought that I’d try to make a table from it. (Click here for my original post about sawing these logs.)

Dave’s sawmill wasn’t wide enough to cut a slab from side to side in one piece, and I didn’t have woodworking tools to handle that either. So we cut slabs that were natural on one edge and straight on the other. Putting straight edge to straight edge is like opening a book.

5 years went by. I had the slabs stacked in our garage. I walked around them, moved them several times, and stacked things on top of them. Finally this winter I decided if I was ever going to do anything with them, it was time.

Even cut in half the boards were too wide for my planer, plus they had split and warped. They were 18 inches wide more or less, and to get them flat across that width I would’ve had to plane a lot of the thickness off.

I ripped the slabs down into boards between 5 and 8 inches wide, depending on where the splits were. I ended up with 5 slabs, 2 with natural edges for the outside edges.

Now that I had my boards I needed to get the edges straight so I could glue them together. For the natural edge boards I didn’t have a straight edge to start with, so I made a jig using surface clamps to hold the board and ran it through my radial arm saw to get a relatively straight edge.

That worked pretty good.

I ended up cutting another slab for the middle board from what’s pictured above. It’s a little hard to tell from this picture, but that middle board was twisted end to end, and while I could flatten it when I clamped them all together, it would leave a slight gap between its neighbors since its edges were no longer square to them.

While these boards were almost straight, my “relatively straight” ripped edges weren’t good enough to make a good strong glue joint. I got a 2″ edge trim bit for my router and used an 8 foot aluminum straightedge to get the edges straight enough to glue.

That worked really slick. It was essentially like a jointer with a 12 foot bed and gave me boards that were flat on the edge from end to end.

It’s looking good! Up until now I’d been despairing and ready to turn the whole mess into kindling. I started gluing the boards together, one joint at a time.

I’ve got bar clamps pulling it together, c clamps on the edges holding them flat and caul blocks in the middles keep it flat there too. Repeat that for every joint and finally…

Now that it’s glued together I trimmed the ends. The lower right edge in this picture is money side with that knob sticking out.

Then I sanded and sanded and sanded, starting with an 80 grit in the belt sander and finishing with 200 grit by hand. After that I applied 10 coats of wipe on polyurethane (sanding between each one) and it looks like this.

Ready to put the legs on now.

At this point you may be wondering how I flipped that table top over to put the legs on it since it’s long, wide, and heavy. The answer of course is, “Debbie, sweetie pie, can you come down to the shop and help me?”

I ordered these legs from steeltablelegs.com. Who knew there were people out there who specialize in making, well, steel table legs? They were very helpful, I emailed them about how wide my table legs should be, how far I should set them in from the ends and so on. They replied to my every query quickly and helpfully.

Once specified and ordered, the legs were easy to put on (although note to self, the next time you do this and one of the legs starts to fall, don’t stick your leg out to catch it).

The legs are attached, the table’s done. But I still had to get the table up to the house. With the legs on it, it is one heavy beast.

This is my soon to be patented table transport tool (TTT). Debbie and I turned the table on its side to get through the front door, and just like that, this 5 year project was done.

I’ve never done anything I’ve been satisfied with, whether it’s a crop, a software module, a stained glass window, or a woodworking project.

But this is pretty good.

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I ran the Turtle Days 5K this weekend. When I was getting ready I went upstairs to sift through my collection of race t-shirts for something to wear for the race.

Shuffling through memories of long-forgotten races I found my t-shirt from Turtle Days, 2000. What could be more perfect to wear in 2019?

19 years, where’d they go?

I’ve written down every race I’ve ever run, my time, and often the weather conditions, how much I weighed, and how I felt. Looking back to that year 2000 race I’ve given up about 5 minutes over 5K in 19 years at Turtle Days. 16 seconds a year.

I toed the line, feeling good in 2019, hoping to better my time last year by a significant margin. And for a couple miles, it was going that way. I was ahead of last year’s pace. My niece Hillary was running too, at 2 miles I was on her heels and I was feeling damn proud at keeping up with a 27 year old.

But as mile 3 dragged on I faded and ended up running almost exactly the same pace as I did last year. I was disappointed, but as I look at the 19 year trend, I bucked the trend this year by 16 seconds.

And I won my age group.

I’ll take that.

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