other dog

Happy birthday!

I'm kind of like your wife when it comes to that kind of thing, I don't like "fat and yucky stuff"🤢 and I like steak medium, maybe medium rare, but chicken has got to be fully cooked, and if it's got skin on it, the skin has got to be crispy. I know people that cook Boston butts and just chop the whole thing up for barbecue, but I always take out "most" of the fat, and any gristle and stuff I find. I like my barbecue to look like this- Wilbun's Supermarket in Appomattox used to have good meat, in fact some people said you couldn't beat- well, never mind that, but sometimes he would put chicken leg quarters on sale. I think a 10lb. bag was $4.99, 10 in the bag. They were great for cookouts. I would process them the day before a cookout, clean all that goop out, trim all the excess fat, and cut any loose "flappy" skin off, or sometimes just pull the skin off altogether. Then I'd coat them with the rub and leave them in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator until tomorrow when I cooked them. And I used to hate that job, cleaning and trimming all those leg quarters, it was disgusting. But taking the time to do all that was well worth it, and it showed in the finished product.

Speaking of grilling, I ordered a new offset fire box for the Char-Griller smoker. It was starting to rust a little bit, my own fault, but the rest of it is in pretty good shape. It's my own fault because one of the worst things you can do with a grill or smoker is to leave ashes in it. They absorb moisture and cause it to rust very quickly. I'm guilty of not cleaning the ashes out until the next time I'm starting to cook something. You know, food gets done, "let's eat" and cleaning the ashes out of the smoker or grill is about the last thing on my mind. This is the new unit installed. It's slightly smaller but not enough to make much of a difference, I wouldn't think anyway. The old one looked like this when I took it off. My son said he'd like to have it for a freestanding grill, so I put the legs on it and covered the hole in the end and slapped some Hi-Temp paint on it for him. I even wire brushed the cast iron grates and reseasoned them for him. They were rusty too, from being in the shed, but I don't remember ever using them but once. They fit across the top on that little edge there. I didn't need it, I have more grills than I know what to do with now. And there's another little round one like the one in this picture in the shed, along with the Pit Barrel Cooker.

I've never done it myself, but I saw Myron Mixon, AKA "the winningest man in barbecue", do it on TV on the barbecue competition show I used to watch all the time. It was called "Barbecue Pit Masters" I think, and I learned a lot. They smoked ribs, brisket, whole hog, chicken, or Boston butts, pretty much something different all the time. They had a certain length of time to cook then they turned it in for judging. Great show. Anyway, he cooked chicken thighs and he pulled the skin off first and scraped it on the inside, then put it back on before he put it in the smoker. His came out great, and the skin was crispy, which is what he was shooting for.

It truly is. I know I told the story here when it happened, but I still think of the time I watched the woman at the bakery that I was parked behind throwing away hundreds of loaves of bread in the dumpster out back. Not a thing wrong with it, just loaves the bread trucks had brought back because it was past the expiration date and they couldn't sell it. I was tempted to go dumpster diving and get myself a few dozen loaves, but with my luck I'd have gotten arrested for trespassing or something.

I marked out the bad word, don't want to corrupt any chern.

Great!

Talk about fake- just this morning I saw sleepy joe on the news saying that the problems at the southern border were the direct result of the previous administration. What? Really?!. and the sad part is that some people actually believe his b.s.

I did that too, when I worked at a garage when I was just out of high school. I would save all sorts of small parts, like brake springs and adjusters when we replaced them with new pieces, all sorts of things that I thought I might use...someday.

This has nothing to do with your parts issue, but as for the crystal ball- I've said many times that if I knew then what I know now I'd have bought a bunch of the old metal flake gear shift knobs every week, they used to have a whole aisle of of them at every truck stop. Now they bring unbelievable prices on e-bay or wherever you can find one. If I had bought some back then and put them in the deep freezer I could retire.

Me too.

I'm with you there, 100%!

...and that's another thing that burns me up. I might be totally wrong about it, and I'm surely an "old angry white guy" as gearhead grrrrrrl, or whatever alias she was using at the time called most us us here, but none of these people seem to have any sense of gratitude for anything. You don't see any evidence of "thank God, after a long hard journey, I am here. I want to become a citizen and live and work here". Instead, it seems to be "ahhh-ight, I'm here, where's my free $h!t?". But I could be wrong.

I just watched the news- they showed a video of two NYPD officers being attacked by a mob outside a migrant center near Times Square. This mob was kicking the two officers after they were already down on the ground. Makes me wish a Harry Callahan would show up and start blowing people away- but that's the stuff of movies. Anyhow, now the chief of police said "maybe they didn't think this sanctuary city thing through- if they'll attack the police, and attack police horses, they'll surely attack you too, and we just don't have the resources to handle them". WTF?! You think?! I think all this "sanctuary city" b.s. was started because of the democraps hatred of Donald Trump, just to give him a big old "eff you" because he tried to close the border in the first place. They didn't "think anything through". They've already closed a school in New York so they could house illegal immigrants there, because a storm was coming. Well, too bad, they should have stayed wherever the hell they came from. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it just pissed me off to see all those thugs kicking those two police officers. I don't hate anybody, don't care what color they are or where they come from. But no country in the world just lets people walk across the border and get food, clothes, shelter, medical help, and anything else they might need to insure their comfort- except the USA.

These are some interesting things!.. I blurred out some words myself, because it's not 10pm yet and chern might be reading. Even though we all know they know more about such things than most adults do. Anyhow, this was copied from Facebook.

That's what I was driving. Zina was very excited to have her name on the passenger side door.

Just over to Spout Spring, right outside of Appomattox.

Miracle Whip!

That's funny, I waved at you and you didn't even wave back.

This picture was on my Facebook memories today. I always liked that view of the Peaks of Otter from this spot in Bedford, Va, especially when there's snow on them. Even got Bob in the picture, heading east on 460. I always cropped the hood out of the road shot pictures, because of the safety man. He didn't want people posting any pictures that looked like it was taken while driving, because if anything happened a croo- I mean "shifty" lawyer would try to use it against you. Now I wish I hadn't, it takes something from the picture. And if I had seen it as dangerous I wouldn't have taken a picture of anything, but I didn't see it as any more dangerous than changing the radio station, or rolling the window down, or taking a bite of my scrapple, sardine, and salami sub that was in the passenger seat.

I left a nice one in a booth in Lee-Hi Truck Stop one time. I knew exactly where I left that one, no need to go looking for it. I'm sure somebody else wore it out of there.