Cooper Jackson

Corn fields making me hungry

Wonderful ride with lots of summer corn

What an amazing ride this morning. Another training ride except this time going kicking the moving speed up to 14mph. The corn fields are looking great I can’t wait to sink my teeth into fresh local summer corn. Just something about a morning ride to make the day that much better. My current route is about 25 miles which is just about right. I have a goal to do it at 15mph with bags. I have found that I notice the bags when I am trying to average anything above 12mph and it was really noticeable today. I had been thinking for the longest time that even after being on the bike for a while you still feel every hill. This is kinda true because I am hitting some steeper hills than I am use to with Mt. Olive road but the other hills seem to not be as hard. I guess that is what you call getting in shape. If I can only convince my belly that it is in shape….

Figured out a new Training route which is a little over 26 miles. Yesterday I did it in 2 hours about 13.41 mph moving I took 2 breaks the second mainly for photos. The route basically goes from Downtown Concord on Corban Ave which turns into 73, left on Gold Hill, right on some road which goes to Mt. Olive and then Mt Olive left onto Gold Hill.

Mt. Olive road MT mean MOUNTAIN!

Mt Olive Rd has some great hills for a quick workout!

Roller Coaster on Gold Hill Rd.

Fun on the roller coaster ride.

The most amazing popcorn from the Concord Farmers market. It is really amazing stuff.

Getting back into the 50′s! I was looking at a new year resolution to ride 200 miles in one week. I think this is the year for that. I have been riding inside 30-60 minutes a day. And I am thinking about riding a good couple hundred miles to New Bern from Concord this year. So time to get to it!

Lateef launches his techie site called hacking thought. He just built a new website for a lot of the tech projects that he has been working on plus general information about his career. Also he just launched his first Android Application called Walkscore Widget.

Google what is suggestions

Google will suggest some strange things when you type in:

what is
how
why is – one of my favorite

Enjoy

After some time I decided to try and make some new labels and after using a new pictures I decided to change the picture for each label. Since we are such a home made operation it take marketing (ME!) a while to get to making new labels since they take about 20 minutes each time.

This is the Amarone we made form a kit. It was a very expensive kit so we are hoping for a higher quality wine. We started it in May and bottled it in July.

This was my most fun label yet. We made a strawberry wine which was cheeper because we picked the strawberries was no where near as cheep as the beet wine. And I think is a pretty good wine (for strawberry). We made this in June and just are getting around to bottling it. I am looking forward to drinking it cold on a hot summer day in 2010.

We are planning on making a beet wine this week and our mulberry didn’t ferment, it didn’t spoil either which is kinda strange so we have juice. I plan to try and ferment it again this week and hopefully save the batch.

We made:
* Chicken with lemon, basil and rosemary
* Corn pudding
* Heavenly Squash
* Italian bread as usual
* Tomato, Basil, Mozzarella, Olive Oil and Balsamic (Melissa made this)
* Pizza (for the kids)

Corn pudding ended up being decimated. Also Kathy brought pesto pasta, fried okra (best I have ever had) and some pesto dip. Kathleen brought a squash souffle.
And now we have used a lot of our CSA veggies and learn some new dishes. On our vacation we got a Shaker cook book which has made me very excited to try some of the dishes. Generally have found Shaker cooking rich with dairy which is ok way me as long as I keep running

Amazing how out of shape a 40 mile ride will make you feel. After the 75 mile hike I thought I was going to do 40 miles easily. However that was completely wrong. After about 27 miles I hit a a wall that I couldn’t seem to recover from. However I made it and next time will be a lot easier.

7 Days, 75 Miles and a ton of sweat. We are feeling very refreshed and in shape after all that. It ware hard to say unplugged for that long. Now it is crazy work catch up.