Hiking

In the 4 days that I've been back in the Triangle I've gone hiking 3 times. That's a lot more than usual and added to all the kayaking I did in SC, it should help keep those holiday pounds from accumulating around my waist.

Today I went hiking with Julie in Duke Forest. Usually I go in on the Concrete Bridge Trail but instead we went the way that she usually does, along the Wood Bridge Trail. And yes, I have noticed a certain lack of imagination in the trail naming at Duke Forest.

The picture to the left is near the trail entrance, looking back up the hill towards the road where the Fire Station is located.

It was pretty chilly this morning and very foggy. I live near a moderate sized stream and the fog was so thick you could almost cut it with a knife... but as I drove away from home and towards Duke Forest all that mist disappeared. Pity, it would have made for great pictures. Still, you can see a touch of "fogginess" in the picture here. I'd say the temperature was around 42f and that was the warmest it'd been in 3 days.

The hike I did on New Year's Day never had the temperature go above freezing and my hands were so cold that I had them in a hot pad for over an hour after getting home. Well, after I'd uploaded the pictures to a hiking site, of course. Priorities and all that.

BTW, that's the "wood bridge" of Wood Bridge Trail fame over on the left. It's a little out of focus since I was trying to emphasize the epiphyte in that photo.

Bruschetta Chicken Bake

This isn't some complicated fru-fru dish that you'll just use once in a blue moon. It also doesn't taste all that much like bruschetta, but it is hearty and fairly good tasting. Most of all, it's so easy you could do it every day and not mind one little bit.

The recipe comes from the back of Kraft Stove Top Stuffing Mix boxes or the Kraft web site, if you prefer.


The ingredients of this dish are all easy to work with, inexpensive, and readily available. Great, huh? Oddly enough, the Kraft mix was less expensive at Wal-mart than their store brand. I rarely ever see that.

1 can (14-1/2 oz.) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 pkg. (6 oz.) Stuffing Mix (Stove Top for Chicken from Kraft)
1/2 cup water
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 to 2 lb. boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
1 tsp. dried basil leaves
1 or 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese


Mix the tomatoes with the stuffing, garlic and water until they're moist and hold together. I do this before I cut up the chicken so the stuffing has time to absorb all the moisture from the other ingredients. Add more tomatoes or water if you want it moister.


I used a 1.65 pound package of Purdue chicken boobies from Wal-mart. At $5 the most expensive ingredient in the recipe. The stuffing mix is just 79 cents!


Cut those lovely chunks of flesh into just as lovely but smaller and soon to be scrumptious pieces of chicken.  


You want to layer the mix and the chicken and some basil. The recipe calls for a cup of cheese but I ended up using two and a half. I do love cheese!


That's what it looks like once I did all the layering. I was supposed to use a 3 quart dish but unfortunately I didn't have that size so I used a 4 quart. As a result the dish was a little thin and got a mite crispy but it still tastes great. It's baked for 40 minutes at 400f but I could have probably gotten away with baking at 375f.


Here's the tasty but crispy results. It was only the edges of the dish that got crispy due to the higher heat exchange that the proximity to the Pyrex brought.


And despite eating a fair quantity of the food, I still had enough leftovers to feed me yesterday (I made the chicken on Wednesday night), today and plenty for lunch on Saturday too. If you're fixing the dish for 2 people it won't go as far but for the cost and time involved, it's a pretty nice dinner option.

Moon transit of sun

There's a rather impressive video (you need JAVA to play it) on Wiki of the moon transit of the sun which originated with NASA and was taken by the STEREO-B spacecraft in February 2007.

Happy New Year

January 1st, 2009. The economy is tanking, that idiot is still inhabiting the Oval Office (but not for long), many of our jobs are iffy (including mine), and who knows when things will improve. But I've got plenty of books and a high-def television so I guess it'll all turn out. Bread and circuses, y'know?

And added to all that, we're getting older every day. Wow. That used to be a good thing. Now it just means another new ache added to the list every few months or so. Right now I'm in pretty good shape. Paddling for the past 6 days straight really helped me out. For some reason that rythmic arm movement really helps out my back and shoulders. Now if I only lived on a lake...

Well, for what it's worth: Happy New Year. Maybe it'll be a good one. At least we're out from under the Shrub. And for a personal resolution, I'll use the old standby: lose some weight. I'm at 207 now, I'll try to end the year at 195. I'm signed up to go on a hike at 1pm so at least that's a healthy start to the year.

Back Home

I'm back in North Caolina again. I left my parent's place around 8:40pm yesterday and arrived back home at 12:30am. It was a little windy but otherwise a pleasant drive.

Today, while at Wal-mart reprovisioning my larder, I picked up a few bargains in the Christmas area. I love these two mugs. They hold 16 ounces which is perfect for hot chocolate and they were 50% off which dropped them from $1.50 each to just $1.50 for the pair! That's a bargain for such cute penguins.

I also got a couple of rolls of wrapping paper, some gift tags, tissue paper, "holiday" scented candles, and some neat Xmas lights that look like bells and have 25 different holiday music selections that play while the lights twinkle.  So cute! (and only $6 on sale)

Even with those low prices I managed to spend over $80. Mostly on food, of course. Why I don't weigh a ton, I don't know. I actually lost weight over the holidays. Before Thanksgiving I was around 218, before Xmas I was 210 and now I'm 207. I was paddling on the lake every day for over two hours so that might have helped some. But you wouldn't belive how many cookies I put away in the last week. It's scary!

Lurking just Beneath the Surface

It's kinda spooky realizing just how much exists beneath the surface impressions that we readily perceive. In the case of the photo below, the revealed "lurkers" are the remnants of a forest that's been buried beneath the surface of Lake Hartwell for generations. This area of SC and GA was flooded back in the 1950s to provide the area with hydroelectric and nuclear power as well as a dependable source of water for drinking and recreation... but that's a different story.


The drought that this area has been experiencing for well over a year now has caused the water level to drop as much as 21 feet below normal. Right now it's 15.5 feet below full pool. Having water levels this low means that things are revealed that haven't been seen in generations. This includes small things like arrowheads but also large things like house foundations, roads, and bridges--plus lots and lots of trees like the ones in the picture above.

It's weird and more than a little spooky to think that those trees have been standing there, dead, for 60 years. Just lurking under the water--which would normally rise 12 feet over the tops of the trees. No doubt I paddled right over the trees dozens of times without any idea they were down there.

It just makes you wonder how much else is lurking under the water...

Corn Cob Tail

Mister Squirrel, why does your tail look so much like a corn cob???

Kayaking and Dying

I have two kayaks here at my parent's place. One is for moving quickly and the other is a very stable fishing kayak. Since the water is so low, many stumps and other obstacles are lurking around wanting to tip me over so I've been using the fishing kayak. The problem is that it's a lot more effort to paddle that one and it's killing me.

However despite that figurative dying from the paddling, the dying that the title refers to is my camera. It had a brief bath today in the lake and the next few pictures looked like that one to the left. Not good, huh?

After that the camera wouldn't retract the lens for a while. It was just sitting there dead and looking like Pinocchio with its lens all the way out. Fortunately it finally fired up and was able to shut down properly.

I guess it's not good for digital cameras to take baths. Especially in really nasty clay filled water. The poor thing looks a little like a blackened clump of clay right now. I'm going to give it a day or two of rest before trying to get it to work again.

Here's a picture I took before the camera-bath. Don't those tires remind you of lemmings wandering into the ocean for that last fatal bath? Just like my poor camera. RIP.

If I remember correctly, lemmings don't really march to a watery grave. That's just a myth that's existed in one form or another for centuries. I remember seeing this talked about in White Wilderness, a 1958 Disney documentary that featured visuals on just such a lemming death march. Unfortunately (especially for the lemmings) that visual was created by the film makers forcing the lemmings to jump and drown. Poor lemmings. Kinda makes me want to tell the tires to not jump...

Xmas Foot

Another Christmas celebration come and gone.

The Church-thing on Christmas eve wasn't the best service I'd been to. The soloist in my parent's congregation is getting a little old and while she sure does still have volume---to the point of hurting everyone's ears---her control is fading. It was like watching a train wreck---and nobody wants to see one of those. :-) She kept missing notes and having flat ones. And the new pastor at the church was VERY long winded and kept going on and on about some silly story that everyone's seen on the Internet a dozen times (as well as in that short book back in 2001). Something about getting two baby Jesus' in a manger package and a mom that was obsessing about the extra figurine.

Fortunately, after getting some of our money, the pastor let us all go back home. *whew* That religious stuff just isn't my cup of tea! And after a little bit of drama and one person storming out of the house, things settled down and everybody went to bed so as to allow Santa to do his thing.

As you can see in the picture, my foot is pointing the way to a lot of opened and unopened Xmas presents. A nice day was had by all. In my case, I received several books and a couple of DVDs plus a lot of chocolate covered cherries. Yum. I've been reading one of the books, a How-to regarding watercolor painting, but I can't put it into practical use until I get home where my paint set is. I also was given this really nice Nike sweatjacket by my aunt and uncle. It looks very soft and warm but I don't need it at my parent's house: they keep this house as hot as a sauna! I nearly sweat to death the first day or two every time I visit. And then, after adjusting to the warmth here---I go back to my house where I keep it at 65f. Brrrrr!