A short ode to collegiate cycling

This post will be quick.

I think collegiate cycling is one of the greatest things you can do in college (or in my case, grad school). It’s the most team-focused cycling I think somebody can participate in without being a professional. 

I wish I would have been cognizant of the sport when I was in college. I mean, I knew of cycling as a sport. My cousin had raced bikes for years, but there was nothing at Tulane like a cycling team.

Being part of the UT cycling team was fantastic. The one bad thing about graduating from graduate school was that I could no longer participate. 

Now, both Tulane and LSU have cycling teams. In fact, Tulane is hosting a race in New Orleans and LSU is hosting the conference championships this year. That is fantastic.

So hook’em to my UT Cycling friends, geaux tigers, and roll green wave!

BeBe Casserole

There exist several food items that I associate with my grandmother’s cooking. Ground beef with carrots (when I asked her why, she said, “You gotta add some flavor.”), always smooth and thick brown gravy with roast, shredded green beans with onions and bacon smothered beyond belief. I could actually go on for a while.

However, there is one item that sticks out above all the rest: BeBe casserole. This casserole takes many forms, eggplant and ground beef, patty pan and ground beef, but the formula is the same. Cook the fleshy vegetable down with onions,  bell pepper, green onion, celery, and then add in the ground beef (and salt and seasoning, of course). Put in a casserole dish, cover with buttered bread crumbs and bake it so that it comes together. Voila. 

It’s mushy… but it’s delicious. Just a forkful of pure awesome flavor without things like crunch getting in the way. I loved this so much as a kid, I wasn’t really a fan of crunchy things.

Tonight I am making another variety, mirliton and shrimp. Same formula as above. The mirliton take a little more cooking than the eggplant, but it comes out well. It is very easy to get mirliton here as they are sold with a different name: chayote squash. My big group at work is having our Thanksgiving potluck tomorrow, so I decided to bring this. I think this is probably one of those things that everybody’s Cajun grandmother makes in some variety. But to me it is always BeBe Casserole.

Switching Gears

So I started NaNoWriMo this year. I truly do think that this is a great thing to do, and I encourage everybody to complete it at least once. Unfortunately, I will not finish.

I just never got truly excited about it this year. However, I still like the idea of using your downtime to do something productive. Not in the sense of checking things off of your todo list, but in the sense of producing something.

One of the nice things about NaNoWriMo is the notion of the deadline. The big 50,000 goal and the 30 days force you to put aside your inner editor and just write. “30 days and nights of literary abandon.” I think that is a great slogan, and it is at the heart of the endeavor. You just have to go for it, to dive head first, and at the end there is a novel. It may be terrible, but you finished it, and that is awesome.

So why I am stopping?

The conceptual core of NaNoWriMo is what really excites me, but I was not able to get excited about the particular vehicle this year. So I decided to get a new vehicle. 

I am just not sure what I will be driving.

Some may read this post as a cop out, and that is fair. But I am hoping that I can look back at the end of the month and see that I have produced something. Whether it be taking some pictures, writing posts on here about things I find interesting, or building something, who knows? (Okay, probably not that last one…)

House Update

The house continues to move along. We unfortunately had to push the closing back by 5 days, but in the grand scheme of things that’s not really anything to worry about. I have updated the set of pictures on Flickr as well.

The extended stay hotel where we are staying is interesting, to put it mildly. A bizarre collection of people are the extended stay, some of them I believe make their home there. For example, several boats take up spots in the parking lot, and it truly seems that these boats have not moved in many a moon.

So on August 24th we will be moving into the new place. Carrie will be monitoring the movers while I have to come in to work. We are also getting our cable/internet hooked up that following Saturday. It will be nice to have real internet at home again; the internet at the hotel is terrible.

All-in-all, the building process has been pretty straight-forward and not too stressful. We enjoyed picking all of the finishes as now we know it’s the house we want.

What is going to be fun is really making the house ours over the next few years. From our gardening plans to furniture to whatever else, it won’t happen overnight, but little by little we will settle in to our new home. And I am very much looking forward to that.

Catching up with JiBW3

I have posted all of the photos so far over on my flickr stream. Please feel free to leave comments.

I have enjoyed it more this year, and have not been getting the burnt out feeling that has cropped up the past two times. I am hoping the cloud cover will persist today so that I can get some softer light this afternoon. We’ll see.