Weakend ramblin’s

The weekend is over, and at the end I feel weak. The calorie deficit is taking its toll.

Saturday The Wife and rode a 50 mile loop of the resevoirs south of San Jose. I did fine, but that is comparative. We did not push too hard as she started feeling the effects of caloric deficiting mid-ride so I never got to the point where I was feeling the effects … at least during the ride. Afterwards the legs were dead, dead, dead. Sunday we heaped injury onto insult by riding over to Stanford for the 40th birthday bash of our friend Josh. Besides the ride, an easy 25 miles, I ran some of the laps of the Stanford track (backwards, to video record the event), and walked a few additional. The Wife thinks that as an Elite Klutz that running backwards was not a wise call; my retort: nothin’ happened, did it? May take a few days for the legs to forgive me for those transgressions. We did not make it to Candlestick point for the CX race, as The Wife booked us for a visit to friends who live on Stanford campus. Too much socializin’!

Some observations from the out and abouts:

• There are a lot more acorns than normal this year, and they are bigger than normal. First started noticing this a month ago when we rode across Nacimiento-Ferguson road to Mission San Antonio de Padua. Once we were on the Hunter-Liggett military reservation, where the environment was mostly oak-grassland, every time the road passed near an oak tree the road surface was littered with a thick layer of crushed and whole acorns. Saw a bunch more this weekend as we road through the areas with oaks.
• Not so much color this year. We saw a few trees changing, but much less than past year.
• The rain storms of the past month have a nice carpet of green sprouting. Love it on the hills and valleys, not so much on our side yard. Looking forward to the ‘golden rolling hills of California’ (apologies to Kate Wolf) transitioning to a nice emerald green.
• Tried Alicat’s suggestion of 1/4 tsp Lite Salt in a water bottle. Electrolyte balance was good, the ‘you are backpacking and using halide tablets to purify water’ taste was not so good. Need to see if there is a non-iodized Lite Salt.

I did get some butternet squash ravioli made, and some of it consumed. But it was a bit painful. As soon as I started making the pasta, a bushing split in the drive mechanism of my pasta roller so it would not work. So I was forced to roll my pasta the old fashioned way, with a wooden rolling pin on the countertop. Time consuming, but it worked. And the results were very tasty. There were actually two batches: one with a sqash, riccota cheese, and garlic mixture, the other with a squash, marscapone, molasses mixture. More variants later, once I get the pasta roller fixed.