Maple Sap Went Bad

Given the family schedule and weather, I wasn’t able to get the maple sap boiled down into syrup within a week of collection. I figured that since it was in the fridge, I was good to go. I mean, c’mon, I had my pot and thermometer…

I had my burner setup…

Then I went to strain the sap and this is what I found…

Cloudy and slimy friggin’ sap!

Plus, the sap smelled rancid. Those are key giveaways that you should always heed when making maple syrup.

Word to the wise… figure out a way to cook the sap down and into syrup within a week of collection. Don’t be like Dave and wait thinking the refrigerator will be your saving grace. It’s very disappointing, but on the flip side I have 9 months to procure some additional syrup making supplies that should make the task easier.

Seeds Have Been Started

The wife and kids had their respective spring breaks pretty early this year. For the life of me I can’t figure out why the school districts up here insist on having spring break in March! It’s too freaking cold to go anywhere except the Caribbean or Latin America… and who can afford that shiznit! In past years, the three of them have gone somewhere together but since the wife teaches in a different suburb than the one the girls attend their breaks didn’t line up. While the wife was on her break, we went to the high school where she teaches and started the seeds for this years garden.

I believe I’ve mentioned previously that my bride is a biology teacher. This comes in handy when I can’t figure something out in the garden or need general advice on a particular practice. Incidentally, most of the time she just shakes her head at me. Regardless, with her being a high school bio teacher is extremely beneficial when it comes to starting seeds. The high school has several of these massive three-tiered commercial sized grow light stands and there is usually enough room to squeeze in our stuff with the kids seeds. Plus, I provide the table top light stand and the large heat mat to handle the germination. The large grow light ‘carts’ handle the plants after they’ve germinated.

Here was the original plan:

By all accounts, the seeds germinated without issue. Everything was planted on March 31st. The wife sends me daily updates every morning or calls me via FaceTime to let me know/see what kind of progress has been made as she’s also been handling the transplanting with the students. Most everything was up within 7-10 days. The squash, zucchini, and eggplants took a full two weeks though. Here’s the germination list she sent me:

If I’m reading it right, I think we picked up a few plants along the way. That or some of the student plantings found their way into our family plot already. It doesn’t really matter because we always wind up with quite a few more than we planted because a decent number of the students forget to take home their plants. Whatever they forget we’ve been putting in the garden (if there is room) or we’ve been placing them in planters at the house. It’s pretty much a win-win for us.

Here are the images she sent me a day or two ago:

There is still quite a bit of room left in the stand right now but as the plants mature and get transplanted into larger cowpots, that space will disappear rapidly.

Tapped my Trees!

Now that the Foreign & Domestic series is finished, the wife and I are finding more time to do stuff together. It’s pretty much mundane household maintenance stuff but we enjoying doing stuff together all the same. Just this week we removed and reinstalled little plastic feet on our patio furniture after 20+ years of ownership. Who says the love is dead!

Much to her chagrin, this winter I ordered some supplies from the tapmytrees website because, well… I’ll eat breakfast for every meal and I really love true blue, dyed in the wool, all-American, maple syrup! You know what I’m talking about! No additives, preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, Aunt Jamima bull shit!

My property in suburban hell has two maple trees. One that was planted by her parents 40+ years ago that sits in the front yard and provides oodles of curb appeal and the one that just showed up in our backyard. The one in the backyard we have named ‘Steve’ after that stupid Michael Keaton movie ‘Multiplicity’.

In a nutshell, I procured a spile w hook, a bucket, and a lid from the tapmytrees folks. It was actually pretty easy.

Step #1: Tap the tree —> you need a spile, drill, and a hammer. Drill a 2” to 2 1/2” deep hole at an upward angle in the tree approximately three feet off the ground on the south side of the tree.

Step #2: With a hole drilled at an upward angle, on the south side of the tree at about three feet above ground, insert the spile.

Step #3: Hang the bucket from the hook, which is attached to the spile, and then attach the lid… easy peesy!

I think I might be about a week or two too late. We drove to Cleveland over the weekend for a thing for my daughter and every single valley and every single hardwood stand not only had bags hanging from the trees collecting maple syrup, but each of the valley’s was filled with campfire smoke where the locals were cooking the syrup down.

I can’t wait to cook my syrup down. More pics and maybe a video to follow!

Release Date!

Whoop! Whoop! Parts IV and V are loaded into Amazon and should be released Friday, March 1… here’s the cover art! I’ve also made Parts I-III free from March 1 through March 3! Read and enjoy the exciting conclusion to the series!

Took me a little over three years to complete these two novels… and believe me, life threw more than enough in my way during the course of this. I’m gonna take a break from writing for a few weeks and decompress. I’ve still got the two non-fiction pieces to finish and then I’m gonna review Parts I-III and prep the entire series to become an audiobook.

I Did It!

Well, folks! I finally did it! I’ve just finished Part V of the series. Now I have a couples weeks of editing and review on both Part IV and Part V and then I’ll publish them simultaneously! At about 400 pages apiece it was a lot of effort, but I’m finally finished!

WTF Sweden!

I’ve seen and read an article or two about people in Europe that are willingly microchipping themselves and my first thought is always, why?

Why would they be doing this? Do they think it is a fad like the idiots eating tide pods or pouring boiling water on themselves? 

Why would they, or anyone for that matter, give up what remained of their privacy and security?  After reading the article (link below), I can’t help but be reminded of a Benjamin Franklin quote:

 Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I’m sorry, folks... but if the Europeans are doing this now, rest assured, it’ll be on our shores in less than a decade… just in time for the next generation of socialist voters to be finishing college. I think that we, as Americans, and the rest of the world need to take off the blinders we’ve been wearing as we watched Europe’s slow decline and recognize and admit that Europe is truly lost and the patients are running the asylum at this point.

https://trendingposts.net/trending-technology-news/swedes-are-inserting-microchips-in-their-hands/?ia=334_6217&utm_source=SC&utm_medium=334&utm_campaign=6217