I'm So Tired

So the rear tire on Purple Haze, my main road bike, was starting to get a bit thin. How thin? Well, let's check the tire wear indicator divot.

Which no longer exists. Cool. Well I'm sure there's a little tread left, right?

Very, very little.

Alright, it's time to replace this tire. Now this tire is a Continental GP4000s-II in a 25mm width.

And when it's fully inflated it measures...

28mm, not 25mm. This turned out a little awkward last time I replaced one of the tires because I bought a Continental GP5000 in a 25mm width.

Which measures 24mm.

So to get things back on track I got myself a 28mm GP5000 this time.

And it measures...

Hmm, close enough.

As per usual, I put the new tire on the front and rotated the old front tire to the rear, since the front is more safety critical and wears out at a much slower rate than the rear.

So it won't be too long before this 25mm rear wears out and I can get back to 28mm-ish on both ends... which I had spent years thinking was 25mm.

Around The Yard

So a while back, not long after I moved in, I planted some yarrow along the back retaining wall. I ended up with more yarrow than space to plant it in, so I stuck the remainder in some pots with a plan to use them down the road to fill in any gaps if some died or didn't fill out well.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some died or didn't fill out well.

This end of the wall tends to dry out a lot quicker and gets pretty beaten on by the afternoon sun, so it's not really a shock that the yarrow here hasn't fared as well.

In case you're wondering, the irrigation hose here is a leftover from the previous owner's half-hearted (or perhaps half-assed) attempt to automate the watering here. Except they didn't actually hook it up to anything other than a garden hose quick-connect, so to use it you need to unspool a garden hose, click it into the quick-connect, turn the water on, come back later and turn the water off, then disconnect the hose and get sprayed in the face with hose water because the pressure never really dropped when you turned off the hose.

So yeah, I've just been watering this manually and ignoring the "irrigation system" here.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there, let's get that potted yarrow into the ground.

I also pruned off some of the spent flower stalks from the one here that had been somehow clinging to life. I'm hoping that these will fill in enough to shade the soil which should break the cycle of the soil drying out causing the yarrow to get stunted causing the soil to not be shaded causing the soil to dry out...

In other news, the red palm thingie in the back yard is getting horny.

For whatever reason it decided that it wants to have a second trunk. More power to it, I guess.

As for the emotional support lawn, it seems like the soil has plenty of nutrients after I did a few years of chicken shit topdressing.

And in other yards, here's a few pictures of the Santa Teresa spring that I took earlier this week while out on my morning bike ride.

And another picture of some nearby scenery.

Because why not.

Rabbit Goo

So it's high time I spread some rabbit goo on my windows.

At least it is according to this randomly-named Chinese purveyor of decorative window films over at the House of Bezos.

I wonder where I'll find the instructions on how to install this?

Anyway, the north-facing windows on my house tend to spend most of their time either partially or fully closed. This is because they face right out onto the street, and that leads to them being slightly less private than I'd like when the blinds are open. This hasn't been a huge burden, all told, but it has meant that I rarely get the opportunity to look out of the north side of my house, which I find myself wanting to do from time to time.

So the solution I came up with is to install some window film over the lower half of the north-facing windows, just high enough so that it blocks the line of sight between me and the neighbours, but not so high that it completely obscures my view of the sky and trees and so on.

I opted to go for this frosted film with a pattern of googie-style sparkle/star/whatever thingies for two reasons. First, my house was built in the 60s so something like this would have been broadly period for it. Second, the small clear bits still let me peep outside through the film if I find myself wanting to do so, while not compromising the privacy in any major way.

This stuff is pretty easy to install, you just cut it a little oversize, spray down the window (after cleaning it mind you, so you don't permanently entomb a layer of dirt under the film) and slap it up there, squeegeeing out the bubbles from the middle to the edges.

Once it's solidly in place, a little trim around the edges neatens things up.

The kitchen was the main goal for this, since the other north-facing room on my house is my bedroom and I tend to spend most of my time in that room completely unconscious and not peering out of the window.

But the window film is pretty cheap, so I did the bedroom too.

There's usually some sheer drapes that go over this window too, so it gets two layers of privacy when the blinds are open.

I apparently did my measurements well, as this was all that remained of the two rolls when I was done.

But not everything went perfectly, there was one casualty of this project.

My poor spray bottle. You left us too soon.

Stirred, Not Shaken

As I alluded to in my last blog post, an immersion blender is in my future. Well, the future is now.

This is a Kitchen-Aid something something variable speed immersion blender. It seems to be quite nice and solidly built. I guess we'll see how ti stands up to the test of time.

But the real question is: will it blend?

The answer is yes, yes it will. It even comes with a little blending cup, seen here (just in case you lacked any vessels in which to blend things), and a plastic bumper for the bottom of the blender thing in case you don't want to scratch your pots (I don't imagine I'll get a lot of use out of that, but it's a nice touch).

In A Jam

It's that time of the year again.

The plum tree in the back yard produced a crop of fruit again, although not nearly as much this year as last. As such, to make this year's batch of jam I decided to risk a heretical move and buy some store-bought fruit to make up the difference.

Do what you must to make me pay for these crimes, but know that I have already won.

And speaking of crime scenes, getting the pits and stems out of these cherries is sure a task.

Since the cherries weren't all ripening at once, I filled up a gallon bag with the softest ones and kept the stragglers to snack on.

So into the freezer they go, both to store them for a few weeks while the last of the plums come off the tree (also going into the freezer) and for the ice to help break up the flesh of the fruit.

And on the other end of those few weeks, the freezer did its job nicely.

In the end I only got about 3/4 of a gallon of plums, so it was a good thing I picked up the cherries.

Now while the ice did a decent job of starting to break up the fruit, it didn't exactly reduce them to a smooth pulp, so that task comes next.

I'm definitely buying an immersion blender for next year's batch.

Anyway once the cherries were minced I ended up with 3qt of purée.

And I learned my lesson from making a no-sugar jam last year, and decided to add sugar this year. Not quite as much as you'd use for a full-sweetness jam, but enough to take the tart edge off.

4 cups was enough to get things to a nice sweetness with just the cherries, though I ended up adding a 5th later once the plums were mixed in.

Speaking of mixing things in, the one major downside of buying fruit at the store is that they don't include the flavour; you have to buy that separately.

2tsp of this stuff was enough to get the purée tasting like cherries instead of unidentified vegetal matter, which was a welcome improvement. Honestly I could probably add this stuff to iceberg lettuce and get the same effect.

Now while I had pitted the cherries before freezing, I left the plums intact, so they needed to part with their pits.

And after a trip through the food processor, I ended up with another 2qt of purée.

And with a bit more sugar (the extra cup I mentioned previously) and running a bit of water through the foot processor to clear out the remaining fruit shrapnel brought us up to about 5.5qt total.

So onward with the next artificial augmentation: pectin. I'm honestly not sure if I really need to add any since I am including the skin, but it's cheap and doesn't do any harm.

It just gets whisked in and then it's into the pot to boil up, in two batches since it can tend to foam up if you heat it a little too quickly.

It sure is starting to look like jam.

I decided to go for 215f, since getting to 220f was taking absolutely forever and I like my jam to be a bit on the soft side.

I did the plate test and it was looking plenty jammy, so I rolled with it.

So it's into the jars with it.

And then the water bath canning.

In two batches, again.

And after cooling off a bit, yeah, I'd say that set just fine.

10 jars is a little short of what I was hoping for, and quite a bit less than last year, but I'll take it.

I think I might add some cherries to next year's batch too, even if I do end up with more plums from my tree, as the extra colour it adds really gives the jam a great appearance compared with the somewhat pale pink that just the plums alone delivered last year. Thankfully I have plenty of cherry extract left, so I'll be well prepared for the flavour-not-included commercial fruit.