Wanna See My Vacation Slides?

No? Okay, I'll leave off the slides, but still bore you with a few of the highlights of the trip, mention the attractions we visited, mention some good places to eat . . . and probably still slip in a photo or eight.

I call it the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg trip, because we stayed in a cabin in Pigeon Forge but we spent most days in Gatlinburg. The cabin was only about a year old and very nice, but the location was basically a subdivision of near-identical cabins. No mountain vistas spread out before you from these windows, just more cabins and some trees.

The big thing to know prior to visiting Gatlinburg is the walking. The tourist stretch is long, and has for-pay parking available and even if you sleep late (like we did) and get there around noon (like we did), we always found parking. It's about $6/day or part thereof (i.e., six bucks for eight minutes or eight hours), and getting from one end of the stretch to the other is a fairly long haul. There are trolleys at fifty cents per ride, with free parking at the visitors center which is a trolley stop. We tried that once and found walking preferable. I think after the one ride (two, counting coming back), we'd have taken a root canal over another trolley ride.

Of the food, we ate dinner at the Cherokee Grill, the Greenbrier Restaurant, the Best Italian Cafe and Pizzeria, The Smoky Mountain Brewery, and Calhoun's Restaurant. The only knock I have is with the Greenbrier Restaurant; while it was pretty good, it's priced as if it should be exceptional. Yet it didn't have exceptional food, service, or atmosphere. Of the other places, I wouldn't hesitate to tell you to try, and if I could only pick one it would be the Cherokee Grill.

Lunch was at the Wild Plum Tea Room, Blain's Grill, and the Applewood Restaurant. The Wild Plum Tea Room is in a small craft village section of Gatlinburg, away from the main drag. The (clickable) photo here is from the parking lot, and the attached room you see is part of the covered porch dining room. We had three choices of entrees, and we chose a medley that consisted of potato soup, tossed salad, and chicken salad, and found all tasty -- well, with one exception; Number One Son wasn't particularly fond of fruit in his chicken salad, but otherwise we all enjoyed it. As much as for the food, you should try it for the atmosphere. Quiet, off the downtown path (way off), under the trees; it had an inside dining room, a screened porch dining room, and a deck dining area. We ate on the screened porch; lace tablecloths, eclectic dinnerware, a nice, relaxing meal. Blain's was more along the line's of an Applebee's or similar; the prime rib sandwich was better than the prime rib I had at Greenbrier's. Though I think there was an Applewood Restaurant in Gatlinburg, we stopped between Pigeon Forge and Sevierville on the day we left. It was great, home-style cooking, and we bought a few things from their (separate building) gift shop there as well. I'd send you to any one of them in a heartbeat, though I'd have to give you directions to the Wild Plum. We also had lunch while hitting Obergatlinburg; your basic hamburger, fries, and coke, and I was surprised -- given you are a near-captive audience -- at how reasonable the price was for a pretty big, pretty tasty hamburger.

While we mostly ate breakfast in the cabin, we did have breakfast one day at the Pancake Pantry, which was pretty good. Be warned, though, that the Pancake Pantry only takes cash. They have an ATM inside, but I'd not be willing to give them an extra fee on top of my meal price just because they don't want to accept the same card (Visa check card) through the Visa credit card system (where they pay a fee), but maybe that's just me. Luckily, though, we had the cash to cover it (about sixty for the four of us); this avoided my making us leave for breakfast elsewhere and my kids throwing butter pats at me whenever my back was turned.

The attractions we visited included the aforementioned Obergatlinburg, Ripley's Believe it or Not museum, Ripley's Motion Theater, Ripley's Aquarium of the Ozarks, horseback riding, and the Sweet Fanny Adams Theater. Of the Ripley's branded attractions, the Aquarium was worth a visit, I suppose the Believe it or Not museum is worth seeing once, but the Motion Theater can be skipped. There are lots of places to go horseback riding, and I'd suggest if interested you leave the Smoky Mountain Riding Stables off your list of choices. Unimpressive locale, unimpressive staff, and to my untrained eye the horses looked pathetic. We left and found another place outside of Pigeon Forge, though the name escapes me at the moment.

But to wrap up my little vacation post, of all the attractions we visited the most fun was the one show we did take in. Having done the Dixie Stampede and not being particularly interested in the "kids and/or country music" flavored shows, we bought tickets to The Sweet Fanny Adams Theater. I bought the tickets a week in advance and we had second row, aisle seats though the theater is small enough that there are no bad seats. The Sweet Fanny Adams Theater doesn't have your typical Gatlinburg/Branson musical show. I've included some photos, and you can click any of them for a larger picture. In trying to classify the Sweet Fanny Adams theater shows, I guess you could call it "Monty Python meets vaudeville in a farcical adventure." Their website calls it "1890s style theatre are a combination of Old English music hall, American vaudeville, Monty Python, and Broadway musical comedy." Whatever you call it, we had a blast.

While there were parts the younger kids would enjoy, other shows would be much more fun for children. Our kids, being older, enjoyed this much more than they would have the other shows in the Gatlinburg. Lots of laugh out loud stuff, some corny (audible groans permitted) by design, and lots of fun.

There are two shows that alternate from night to night, and we saw the show titled A Knight'’s Tale and Other Acts of Superficial Foolishness. I wish we would have had time to take in the other show as well. We must have liked the one we saw, as we bought the DVD (of that night's show - ain't technology wonderful). The show includes songs, dancing, skits, audience participation (particularly the sing along), and various pieces and parts of hilarity. The Knight's Tale was the longest piece of the show and was an funny take on the traditional medieval story of the heroic knight -- though a heroic knight was central. I keep stopping myself from telling you bits and pieces of it, because if you get the chance it needs to come at you fresh. It is loads of fun.

I will mention that there are some parts to which some of the most conservative of Christians might take offense (I know this, because my parents are some of the more conservative of Christians, and would probably have taken offense a time or two) but it's less suggestive than any night of prime time television you pick. Much less. So go, see, and enjoy the Sweet Fanny Adams Theater.

Overall we enjoyed our visit to the Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge area and will probably be back.

Overshare #1

I was sitting on the toilet of the master bedroom bathroom last night and had a thought: we've lived here for almost thirteen years, and I've probably averaged at least once stop per day on that toilet. Oh, I've been out of town from time to time, but the occasional bout of intestinal flu has easily carried the average, so figure at least once/day. That'd be around 4,745 visits of a sit-down nature.

Now, figuring five minutes per visit, that'd be over sixteen days of sitting in there. During each visit, without fail, I take something to read. Figuring a conservative five pages per visit, that'd be the equivalent of something like seventy-five books. The thought last night was that I don't really like the bathroom off of our master bedroom. Considering I've spent sixteen days sitting in there reading seventy-five books, I think it's about time I fixed it up to be somewhere I enjoy hanging out. New curtains, redo the cabinets, perhaps a television . . . I wonder if they make a combination lazyboy/toilet?

The Renowned Mr. Brown

I mentioned buying a couple of toys in an earlier post, and described our first cook on the Weber grill. The other toy was a Weber bullet smoker, or as Weber calls it, the Smokey Mountain Cooker Smoker. I broke it in on July 1st by barbecuing three chickens, then did four chickens and two racks of ribs on July 4th. SWMBO and I decided we would do some more chickens this past weekend, so I was going to buy eight chickens and do four on each level of the rack. We were going to eat one Saturday night, and the extras would be seal-a-mealed and frozen for future use. The photo to the right (clickable for a larger version, as are all the photos in this post) is of the chickens. When you look, you'll immediately notice the eight chickens strangely resemble two rubbed pork butts. There's a locally owned small grocery store that, being a locally owned small-business kind of place, has a reputation of working with you on meats. With my new-found barbecue and grilling passion, I decided to try it out. They were out of whole chickens, as was apologetically explained, and they told me when , they'd have them. I think this will be a good place to get meats like I want for grilling or barbecuing, but for that Friday I was out as out of luck as they were chickens -- but, wait; they did have a real nice cryovac package consisting of two pork butts with a combined weight of 16 pounds. On the spur of the moment, I decided to cook butts instead of chickens. That decision, like so many of my spur of the moment decisions, became more than I bargained for.

Chickens take about four hours. Standing in the grocery, my memory told me butts take about seven or eight hours. My memory was bad. Turns out, butts take about three-and-a-half weeks -- or so it began to seem late Saturday night. When I got back from the store Friday and read a bit on it, I realized it would take fifteen or sixteen hours. If I wanted to be finished by ten o'clock of the PM Saturday, I'd have to have them in the smoker by six or seven am. Six or seven in the morning isn't my normal Saturday rise-n-shine time. Nineish, maybe, when I then lie in bed sipping coffee and watching people on TV do lawn work, but certainly I'm normally still sleeping at six on Saturday mornings. Ah, well.

I prepared the butts Friday night per the Renowned Mr. Brown recipe from the book titled Smoke and Spice, and the rubbed butts (wonder will that phrase draw more traffic to my site?) were in the picture at the start of this post. They were supposed to marinate for eight hours, but I didn't get them in until something like midnight, so they ended up with a six-and-a-half hour marinating time. I was actually up and at 'em, in a stumbling sort of way, at ten after six Saturday morning. I lit half a chimney of Kingsford charcoal, and while waiting for it to come up to speed I poured the Weber smoker's charcoal ring full to near-overflowing with charcoal. I first filled it half full and added some soaked Jack Daniels wood chips, then filled it the rest of the way up with charcoal and added some more soaked JD wood chips. The chimney didn't take long to get ready, so after I poured the lit coals on top of the unlit ones and assembled the smoker, the meat went on about 6:45am. The two pictures show the chimney fired up, and then the bed of coals after the chimney has been poured over the top.

Here's where I think I made a bit of a mistake. For whatever reason, I set the vents to 25% open each. The Virtual Weber Bullet website has a nice write-up on doing the Renowned Mr. Brown recipe (click the preceding and you shall see) and Chris, the guy who manages the site, even mentioned that he should have started out at 100% open on the vents. I think I added some time to the cooking by starting at 25%. I was at 225 by 7:40am, and except for one thirty minute period I kept it over 225 the entire cooking time, but next time (and there will be a next time) I think I'll leave it at 100% until I hit 240, then start closing the vents off. The worry then, of course, is overshooting the temperature; barbecuing is low and slow.

By the way, if interested in a Weber smoker, you can't find better information than at the Virtual Weber Bullet website -- and that includes the Weber instruction manual. If you buy a Weber smoker, while reading the manual is useful, more useful is the Virtual Weber Bullet website, including for original assembly; he has photos as well as directions. The picture here is of my bullet smoking the butts yesterday.

After ten hours, at 4:45pm, the lid was lifted for the first time. It was already looking good by this time, as you can see. With SWMBO's help, I basted the two butts in the Southern Sop mop liquid (from the recipe in the afore mentioned Smoke and Spice, swapped the meat between the top and bottom racks, and flipped the butts over. I also inserted a digital probe into the meat on the top rack: 161 degrees. I'm looking for 190 degrees, so there's a bit of time to go.

How much time? Total cooking time: eighteen hours. The meat went on at 6:37am, and came off eighteen hours nearly to the minute. I checked temperatures every fifteen minutes, and at 12:30 Sunday morning I finally hit 190. By the time I grabbed a pan from the kitchen, tested both butts in a few to make sure I had 190 degrees, it was probably pretty near the exact eighteen hour mark of 12:37am. The picture at the right is of the two butts just prior to going into a cooler for a forty-five minute rest (yeah, it ain't over yet).

I finally got the meat pulled and cool enough to put in the refrigerator at a little after two, and while SWMBO snoozed a couple of hours on the patio swing and snoozed for the forty-five minute butt-resting time, she was there to help every step of the way. The final weight of the pulled meat was seven pounds, eight ounces. Not that much hit the 'frige, though; pulling requires sampling.

Was it worth it? Darn right. It was fantastic eating when we munched while pulling the meat, and it was great on buns today for lunch. SWMBO made a vinegar-based sauce (from Smoke & Spice) that she and I used and we also had a tomato based sauce I had made earlier (not from scratch; five parts KC to 1 part honey, as outlined in the BRITU recipe) that Number One Son and Number One Daughter used. After lunch today, three pounds of the meat went into the freezer, and it's planned for dinner here in about half an hour.

We will be doing this again, but the next time I'll change a couple of things. One is that I'll make it an overnighter, and the other is that I'll do four butts, not two. When you take that much time, you might as well max the cooker out. I'd rather have put up ten 1-pound bags instead of the three we did freeze.

Oh, What is the Worth of the Things you Know?

For most of is, we can't answer that question. Oh, we get a tad of an idea from our salary, but there's lots of things we know that aren't figured in because it doesn't apply to our gainful employment. After twenty-eight years of marriage (with SWMBO), I know a few things about marriage, and after raising two kids (with SWMBO), I know a thing or two about raising kids; my compensation package includes nothing for that knowledge. Heck, I know how to can green beans, how to make beer, how to change the clutch cable in a 76 Vega, the official stance of the United Methodist denomination on the death penalty, how to communicate over amateur radio (even in Morse code), who Indianapolis selected in the 1998 NFL draft, how to smoke a pork butt, how to fly a single-engine plane, what an f-stop is, how to play Shenandoah on the guitar, who the Skipper's little buddy was, where the first marriage in the US took place, the difference between a refracting and a reflecting telescope, and lots of other things . . . but I've no idea what the value of that knowledge might be in the market place.

I could take the things I know, slap them all together in one collection, and make it available for a price. But were you or I -- Mr/Ms Typical American -- to do so, it'd still be tough to find out what it's worth. Most of us don't have a vast marketing engine to drive the collection to the public, to garner the attention needed to find out it's true value, so we will never know what the things we know might be worth. That's most of us. Not all of us.

While it still hasn't been nailed down for the fellow in the photo, at least he has established an upper boundary, a knowledge of how much the things he knows isn't worth. Because at the $1.00 price, with the books in the basement where the deep, deep discount is applied to books that won't sell, there were still boxes and boxes sitting there, moldering away, waiting to become promotional "give-aways," as is the final destination of books you can't get rid of any other way. So it's been determined for this individual that the things he knows are not worth a buck, and is fast approaching the "worthless" tag.

I also noticed it was a slim volume; at a guess, nothing in there covering a twenty-eight year marriage, 76 Vega clutch cables, or canning green beans. And another observation was the store's effort to improve sales by their strategic placement of the discount sticker; were it me, I'd probably take offense to that particular location.

Anyway, based on what I've heard from the guy, it was interesting to see my opinion of the value of the things he knows is being reflected in the purchasing decisions of the general public. Plus, I just found it funny.

What's for Supper? (07-19-06)

Supper was a bit different tonight, as we started to roast a hen in the oven but decided it was so hot we didn't want to put two hours of extra pressure on the AC system. Instead, I fired up the Weber kettle, butterflied and split the chicken into two halves, and grilled them outside. The cooking had three things going against it: 1) I've not cooked a hen like this before, and it was a fairly big bird (around 8 pounds, I think), and 2) I think it was one of those "enhanced" birds, so wasn't sure how that would affect it, and 3) the bird was bought and frozen about six months ago, so could have been fresher.

In any case, it cooked in about an hour and a half and, while pretty, was really a touch tough to eat. It had a great flavor, but seemed a bit "chewy." Overall, not really a success. But the rice pilaf I made from leftover rice was good, and the veggies were cooked in foil on the grill and were fantastic. All in all, pretty good, but I think the hen would have come out better if done in the oven in a roasting bag. Not as good as the smoked chickens I did on the fourth, but better than tonight's effort.

Also just a note that I visited the new Mecca: our new Wal-mart Supercenter. It is, of course, much bigger than the old one and there are lots of choices in the grocery section that haven't been available here. Parking lot freshly striped, shelves new, floors new and shiny, and most noticeable of everything, new buggies that rolled straight. Yes, no flapping wheels or hard pulls left or right, but brand new buggies that were a joy to drive. Won't last, but I'll enjoy it while I can; I'm a "simple pleasures" kind'a guy.

We're a Big Dot Now

Just a quick post to say Rand McNally should be changing the dot-size for our town, as the new Super Center Wal-mart opened today. I'm fairly certain that's what dictates the dot size: no Wal-mart, non-grocery Wal-mart, Super Center Wal-mart, then the multiple Wal-mart dots (2 Wal-marts, 3 Wal-marts, 4 Wal-marts, etc.).



That's my theory, anyway; nothing to do with population.

I didn't make the five minute trip, though SWMBO did; she tells me it is was packed. She also tells me meats are, as expected, the same as the other Wal-marts: "enhanced" (read salty-water injected) crap shipped in prepackaged. But otherwise, lots of neat things that haven't been available without driving to the "big city" (Tupelo). I'll be checking it out soon, I've no doubt.

Of Big and Tall and Buttons

We arrived home late last night from our vacation in the Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge area of Tennessee, and I'll be posting on the trip sometime next week. I've got a paper due in the writing class I'm taking, as well as a mid-term exam due in the my statistics class, and since I didn't work on either while vacationing for a week, I am very much behind. To top it off, we have a family reunion with SWMBO's family and dinner with my parents tonight. But I did want to post a quick something, at least, just to make it appear the site is still alive.

While on our trip, I noticed a tag on a new pair of shorts I bought (actually, SWMBO bought for me), and found it just a touch humorous. I won't go into the waist size of the pants, being somewhat in denial, but I will say that if you are a manufacturer of short pants, when you hit those waist sizes you are being pretty optimistic slapping on a label that says "hiking short." That said, I did put a surprising number of miles on the shorts going up and down the streets of Gatlinburg, and when you are in the mountains, the "up" part can get fairly up. Maybe their optimisim paid off.

But more importantly, I wanted to make mention of something else to the manufactures of clothes for the "Big and Tall" folks. (Ever notice, by the way, the catalogs always have the "tall" guy modeling the clothes, never the "big" guy -- but I digress). When you are working on those big guys pants, please pay extra attention to the front button-sew'er-on'er-person's comp & bennie package.

At a guess, the floor-person doing the manufacturing of clothing isn't generally enjoying a high-paying career, and I don't recall any mention of button--sew'er-on'er on career day those many years ago in high school. I'd also doubt it requires an advanced degrees to handle the job. So perhaps top dollar, CEO level pay isn't the norm for such positions, but while that may be acceptable for the laborer doing the hem or sewing shut the bottom of the pocket, the person sewing on that front button should be the highest paid person at the company.

Thing is, if you remember the denial idea above, most all of us fat folk tend to avoid the necessary move up in size of pants. We'll huff and puff and strain to no lengths to close those things and keep from admitting the need to move up a size, and if that new-purchase denial hits at the same time as the start of a vacation, then these front closure buttons can see stress levels exceeding those of the cables holding up the San Francisco Bay bridge. A critical thread failure after an evening of spinach and artichoke heart appetizer, 14 ounce prime rib, baked potato, chocolate mousse, and a nice cab would not only be embarrassing, but could well do permanent eye damage to the waitperson bringing the after-dinner mints.

So please, with a job this important -- even if it adds a buck or two to the cost of the "hiking" shorts -- make sure only the best of the best put thread to button on those pants. You'll be doing us all a favor.