PoTW 4/18-4/24

Emmett has been developing quite the sense of humor.  When he discovers something is funny, he’ll do it over and over again, and then he’ll re-hash the same jokes the next day.  Quite the sign of development.  I present the above as evidence to the fact.

This morning, I got it in my head (with much prompting from the doctor) to get on my bike and ride.  My ultimate goal is to be able to get to church and back without totally killing myself.  You see, we live at the base of a very large mountain on the other side of which is church.  I managed to find a route that would get us to church without going over the hill, but rather going around the base of it.  There are still, however, a number of ups and downs to be contended with.  Today was the first experiment:  how far could I get while towing Emmett and the trailer and still be able to get back without my legs falling off?

The results:

9.5 miles.  About 5o minutes total riding time.  We’re getting there.

Next week’s PoTW will be from some place different, yet familiar!

Saturday Activities

So, the previous sourdough loaf was kind of a bust.  I neglected the second rise, and except for the edges, the rest of it was a brick.  Being sorely disappointed, I started another loaf.  Christina observed that my starter was only partly awake, and that the bottom didn’t have enough to eat.  So instead of adding a 1:1 ratio of flour to water, I added 2:1 (1/2 cup flour to 1/4 water).  After waiting about 20 minutes we could see that bubbles were forming all the way to the bottom of the jar.  Good to go.  I wanted to try another recipe (I’d been using the City Bread recipe from the Cheeseboard Collected Works), so I looked around and found a San Francisco Sourdough recipe on sourdoughhome.com.  It uses more whole wheat flour than I’ve used to this point, but it turned out quite nicely:

Christina very dutifully shot the whole thing on video:

and Emmett was cautious when testing the loaf for doneness:

After a while, we were all getting a little stir crazy in the house this afternoon, so when the sun finally broke through the clouds for a moment, we geared up and went on a ride to Michigan Park.

**SIDEBAR**

here’s what we did at the park:

Here’s the route we took:

Round trip, 5.2 miles.  I’m building up endurance for pulling Emmett around long distances.  Our goal: bike to church.

That graph on the bottom is elevation. Not looking forward to the near vertical parts.

Round trip 14 miles.  We’ll get there.