June 2010 Archives

but today i'm lifting in my old split-leg L's.

it turns out these are an incredible lifting aid, because when I reach proper squat depth, they rip a little, audibly. by the end of my workout I won't have any underpants but at least I'll be confident I'm making depth.

my patch has more soul than a bobby womack concert at a nike factory.

okay, so someone linked to a youtube video of a godaddy commercial where danika patrick takes off her clothes, so naturally i clicked through.

but then youtube wanted me to watch a 30 second commercial -- before i could watch the commercial.

fuck that. youtube is dead to me.

cuz i'm kindof an idiot, you know.

out on the porch enjoying some abingdon in my gourd calabash. a gardener's truck pulled up, i guess to adjust their garbage bin. one of the gardeners said he liked my pipe, asked me where i got it. "the internet", i said, truthfully.

then he asked "you smoke mota in it?"

"nope," i said, "tobacco only".

then, he asked, "oh.. what do you smoke your mota in?"

the correct response being, of course, "i don't smoke mota, especially not in this pipe."

"oh," he said, "me neither, it hurts my lungs."

all right then.

woke up and finished breakfast (prepared for me shanghai-style!) with heightened stress levels. i'm guessing those are going to take at least a week to wear off no matter what measures i take.

my trip to the car dealer today forced me to not dawdle in hitting the weights.

i took it way, way, way easy on the squats: lighter weights than i used for wed's "light day". i was able to do two singles on the press, same as last week, but with more cheating than last week.

and then i pulled a PR single on the DL, 15lbs more than last week, for a total of 1x375, a mere 30lbs away from my goal. on my difficulty-o-meter it was a 7.5 or 8, at the very most. in other words: it wasn't that hard!

unfortunately, i also tweaked something in the back, which is why I didn't try for the double, though that would have gone up too, i am confident. the good news is that it's teh SameOldSameOld back tweak, nothing new, just a reminder to keep tighter next week. i think with stretching, a hot shower, and some rest, i'll be fine. it'll be nice to have an adjustable car seat once more, that should help too.

in any case, this is a hopeful sign. i have a lot of thinking to do this weekend about what my workout plan will be next week: some balance of stress management, squat/bench/press improvement, and progress toward the goal. ultimately, hitting the goal will be the real stress management: once i do that i can relax a little (so long as i don't move my sights up to 495...).

two weeks in to the texas method and i'm overtrained. i committed a huge tactical mistake on monday.

the texas method is, briefly, this (my adapted version, of course):

M: 5x5 Squat, 5x5 BP, 5x3 PC
W: 3x3 Squat (light), 3x3 BP (light), 3xN pullup
F: 1x5 Squat (heavy), 2x1 Press (heavy), 1x2 DL (heavy)

now, this monday I used last fridays 5RM squat for my 5x5. I felt like death by the 3rd set but did two more sets. this was clearly a mistake. I was able to complete the sets in what I feel was good form, but the recovery toll has been huge. since monday, I have had:

- one big anxiety attack. apparently i have a standard set of behaviors for this, which involves lying on the floor by a wall. they were a lot easier to deal with when I was having them all the time. now that it's more like once every two years, I've forgotten my tricks. the best trick is to have someone remind me that i'm just freaking out a little and i'll be fine. back in the days of twice-a-week, i was that somebody (that's a neat trick, too, talking to yourself). hops pulled it off this time.

- major appetite swings. i'm either not interested at all in food, or super hungry. i had a pretty well established eating pattern that is going out the window.

- high stress levels overall.

- the dawning realization that B2W powerlifting is really not a sustainable activity in terms of the life I want to lead. I wish it was but I miss biking and not being tired all the time. okay, this isn't a sign of overtraining, only of clear thinking. but it's a clear departure from the gung-ho yay lifting attitude of just a couple weeks ago. those quick and clear departures worry me. makes me feel flaky, but not like a good spanakopita flaky, more like paint chips blowing in the breeze.

- big swings in mood and energy levels.

- allergies are worse than usual. this seems related to my overall stress levels, whether it's that i'm just fixating on the allergies more than usual, or the stress of recovery is actually bringing them out more. it could also very well be the weather, but my SOP for dealing with allergies has been, for the last couple of years, to bike/run in them 4 times a week. my powerlifting goals have me not biking or running at all, and my underexposure to allergens may be making me more sensitive to them. in my medical opinion, of course.

- the biggest indicator that something is wrong: affinity for my coworkers and interest in going to work.

my problems are twofold: i'm way behind on my squat and thus overeager to bring it up to speed with my deadlift. this caused me to make the idiotic 45lb increment on monday (over the previous monday). i'm also irritated at missing out on summer, and am thus trying to hit my 405DL as soon as possible. this is driving me to do too much too quickly.

experience tells me where this will all lead: pretty soon I'll miss a deadlift and scrap the whole goal complex and program in despair and disgust. what i need to do is figure out a way to persevere, pull my 405, and then figure out a way to harmoniously integrate heavy lifting back into my happy old life. i've already accepted a less glorious version of my goal: 2x405 or even 1x405 will suffice, i don't need to pull 5x405. And I AM making steady progress toward that, I feel mentally able to pull tomorrow's 2x375. But other than my lifting hours, I'm spending the rest of my hours totally hosed in one way or another, or (as i said above, even worse) working hard at work.

anyhow, next week might involve a pulling back, a lighter week of less stress, which will be boring, but hopefully pull me back into the program. rippetoe has a good discussion in PP about the distinctions between overreaching and overtraining. if i'm truly overtrained I'm pretty hosed -- I don't think I'm that far gone -- as it could take months to recover. since i still have a positive outlook for tomorrow, i feel that i'm probably just overreaching.

anyhow, the whole point of the squats in the routine is to introduce heavy stress to induce me to grow stronger. the heavy stress is mission accomplished, as of monday. we'll see if i've grown stronger.

hops and i were staying in room 210 of a beach motel, top floor. the motel was owned by a cigar merchant, and he was away at a conference. he had left us a bunch of cigars, labeled by number. i took one from the box labeled 210, since that was our room number. it was crooked, gnarled, and not particularly straight. when smoked, it tasted like an oatmeal cookie. in fact, the longer i smoked it, the less it began to look like a cigar (which it didn't look like to begin with) and the more it looked like a small, round, lumpy oatmeal cookie.

later the hotel owner sent us a nice paper letter from his conference. he said he hoped we were enjoying the #210 oatmeal cookie flavored incense chunks. no wonder they were so hard to smoke!

:/

then i ate a pound of yogurt.

i feel much better.

since i've hated on shoes.

i hate shoes. i really really really hate shoes and i vowed never to buy any more. last week i broke that vow. the logic is inescapable:

1) i've decided that i'm going to follow rippetoe's advice on weight lifting
2) rippetoe is as clear as clear can be: wear lifting shoes while lifting
3) why would i follow his advice on squat form but not lifting shoes?

so i bought lifting shoes. i wore them today for my 5 sets of power cleans. they didn't particularly affect the lift one way or another (i cautiously used the same weight as last week's 5 sets), but an hour later, my ankle "feels funny". now, it could also have been the 5 sets of squats, but i doubt it.

so i still hate shoes. but logical consistency demands that i stick with these for a little longer before smacking myself upside the head for ignoring what i know to be true: shoes suck.

i just filled out a survey, and got suckered into giving out some personal info for the promise of a $25 gift card. will i get it? who knows.

anyhow, it asked me what year i was born, and in the dropdown, i was able to select 2010. then it asked me how many kids i have. i said 7. then it asked me the ages of each of the kids. each of my 7 kids was older than 13 years.

i'm not sure how i accomplished all that, having just been born this year myself.

It's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x65!

we had one of hops' coworkers over for dinner last night. he's from shanghai, and was in teh US for three months. he's going back to shanghai this week.

since i'd hooked up the SNES a couple days ago, i asked if he'd care to play street fighter 2. i figured i'd have an easy time since i'd played two days in a row. he said he hadn't played since he was very young.

then he proceeded to win 14 straight matches. he told us the reason he wears glasses is that he ruined his vision in middle school playing street fighter 2. i believe it. then he asked where we'd gotten the snes, and i told him we'd gotten it the old fashioned way: bought it when it was new and kept it for 20 years.

he liked the gas grill and said they don't have those in china. i explained that it wasn't just for "barbecue parties" but that i use it all the time for all sorts of things.

dinner was ribs (cooked the day before and reheated - a huge disappointment for me, i dunno how they went over with our guest. he was very polite and repeated that everything was "great", and i dont know him well enough to differentiate the good greats from the bad greats) and some other stuff. what really blew me away was that he didn't know what the ribs were! i thought chinese people ate lots of ribs. i served them as a single slab, and chinese food typically (in my experience!) is served in bite-sized portions, so perhaps he'd had ribs before but never in that form factor? i don't know, he didn't seem any more familiar with them after we cut ribs off one by one.

though he lives in shanghai, he grew up in sichuan, and likes his food very very spicy. i was bummed to hear that since i'd taken the seeds out of the jalapeños that were in the rib glaze. shoulda left them in, not that it would have done much. next time?

he asked about how beer was made (we served him a homebrew) and i explained that as best i could. difficulties arose due to language -- how the hell do you explain yeast? -- and also to the fact that it's been so long i barely remember how it's made. first you boil water, then dump it on your barley, that's like wheat, only it's been toasted or roasted and then cracked. then you dump that water out and it's sweet, and you boil it (again!) and add hops -- those are like flowers, only bitter -- then you cool this mixture and add yeast -- like what makes bread rise, but in beer they eat sugar and give off alcohol -- and in 4 weeks you have beer. easy!

he thought auchentoshan was good, but laphroiag was "great". he said the laphroaig tasted like some herbal medicines in china. you bet it does! i think that last "great" was a genuine one.

i asked him what kinds of things about the US had surprised him when he arrived here. he said that ours was the first american house he'd seen on the inside. this made me sad. this is the end of his second 3 month visit to the US, and we're the only people who'd invited him over? he seemed like a very nice guy, even when he was kicking our asses at SF2. he may go back to china with a bad impression of my ribs, a good impression of hops' hospitality, but I'm afraid he'll think the majority of americans are inhospitable, and it seems hops' coworkers gave him no reason to think otherwise.

Yesterday I had two long chats about weight lifting with two different sets of people. The first set was a serial-yo-yo dieter and a lifelong runner, the latter being in his 60s or 70s with very impressive times for an amateur.

The second chat was with a fellow lifter who has weight lifting goals and intentions completely different from my own.

The first group figured I was risking horrific injuries from lifting, and risking even worse by cutting out my cardio activities. Of course the facts are against both of these assertions, but particularly the injury claim:

Although runners and joggers had the second most number of injuries in 2002 (1.7 million), behind only basketball players, the amount of injuries per 1,000 exposures was very low (0.6). People who used free weights, weight machines, or treadmills had an injury rate of 0.1.

That's just one source, there are plenty of other studies showing that weight lifting is far safer than running, where upwards of half of all runners are injured at any given moment (http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/0123.htm)

Anyhow, In 8 or so years of weight training, I've had one or two injuries that healed up in a couple of days. I've had quite a lot more injuries from biking and running. I take lots of precautions, lift wimpy weights (fixing that!) and obsess about correct form. I'm not worried about injury.

I also find that training in aerobics is not necessary to maintain an acceptable level of aerobic fitness. For day to day stuff like climbing lots of stairs, walking long distances: I'm 20lbs heavier than I was when I was biking a lot, so it's more work, but I'm hardly passing out from the simple effort. My cycling is harder when I do it, but I'm still satisfied with my relative performance.

Speaking of relative performance, fitness can be measured in four ways, more or less:

1) relative to an absolute number (I want to lift X pounds for Y reps)
2) relative to ones own personal records (I want to lift Y more pounds than I did X months ago)
3) relative to some control group (I want to get off my ass X times a week more often than the average American)
4) relative to ones "genetic potential", whatever that is.

In all cases I am satisfied with how things are going on my current routine. I'm steadily approaching my arbitrary goal #, I just set 2 PRs today, and I am certainly more active than the average american, the average person in my company, and on average, more active than half of the weightlifting detractors I spoke with yesterday ;) As to my genetic potential, as far as lifting goes, I've spent a long time avoiding reaching mine.

The second guy perplexed me with his goals, for a reason I couldn't put my finger on until just this morning. His goals are almost all cosmetic: he wants bigger shoulders, lower body fat (which hops and i agree is insane, he's the leanest guy I know and I know a lotta guys), and that's about it. He's not necessarily clear on how his lifting activities will help him towards those goals.

I have a lot of disagreements with that approach, but I understand it completely: I've been there. I understood very quickly that spot training, whether to reduce fat or build muscle in a particular area or body part, is nonsense. What took a very long time to realize was that with my genes, I can't excel in both lifting and cycling/running/climbing/whatever. I have to focus and do one at a time.

Someone asked me what I'll do once I hit my DL goal. The answer: dunno. It pains me to let a summer pass without riding. But the thing that I realized this morning, that put my goals and plans in perspective, was this:

Twenty years from now, given my stated goals, which of those goals will I be proud to have accomplished? Let's pick two just to show the contrast:

- deadlift 5x405
- sport a single chin, manly and well defined, needing no beardly obfuscation

Yeah, the first one. I have the opportunity to make that happen (as does my pal who's worried about his shoulder size and body fat) or I can keep on preventing it by obsessing about how many chins I have -- a battle that my maternal genetics have guaranteed that I will lose.

Today, right now, I can say, "yep, I've biked 100 miles in one day". That's a lot more impressive than, say "yep, I fit into size 32 pants" or "yep, I only ate 600 calories today". Who the hell cares about my pant size (well, hops does because when I'm at the size I need now, it's a pain in the ass (literally!) to find any that fit. If I had skinny emo legs, shopping would be a lot easier) or how many carbs I ate? Not even me, 10 years from now. I know that for sure because although I recall that at some point in the past, I could fit into size 34 pants, but I don't really remember doing so. I can clearly remember biking 100 miles.

I guess in my cranky old age, I've decided that my time is better spent chasing accomplishments than a way of looking, especially when the way-of-looking goals all involve giving up whiskey, barbecue, and heavy deadlifts.

But that's just me. YMMV.

40 cop cars lined up in anticipation of post-game Lakers riot. None for E3. Now, which games promote violence?

sure gets off to a downer start.

didn't see that coming!

Jun 15, 2010 1:34 AM At USPS facility [my town], CA Arrived at local Post Office - Allow one to two additional days for delivery

Jun 14, 2010 6:01 AM Departed FedEx location SACRAMENTO, CA

WHAT?!?!

commentator #2 on my lunch expressed surprise at its diminutive size.

"that's a small lunch for a big guy like you!" he said.

i pointed out that I eat about 5 of those per day.

more smoked tri-tip today. as good as it is, there's room for improvement.

the smoked carrot is nearly "just right" - heavy smoke flavor, but does not taste like a cigarette, as hops observed of the asparagus.

my pitch was that we could watch any of the movies in our netflix streaming queue, which she'd seen the day before, or an unnamed christopher lambert movie that wasn't tarzan and wasn't highlander.

she took the bait and we watched Mortal Kombat. (MORTAL KOMMMMBAAAAAAT!!!! NER NER NER N N NER NER NER NER NEER N N NER NER MORTAL KOMMMMBAAAAAAAATTTT!!!!! etc).

while it was pretty bad, and lame how they didn't have liu kang making bruce lee chicken noises, it wasn't nearly as bad as The Dark Crystal, Spirited Killer (wtf is it with Thai films featuring 15 seconds of Tony Jaa putting TONY JAA on the cover as if he's the star? Seriously, we got burned by the same cheap trick in The Protector, although that movie did feature an extended hilarious sequence with a naked ass and a squirt gun. still, the tony jaa presence was less than would be expected from the big, bright, bigger-font-than-the-title TONY JAA plastered on the movie cover), Game of Death, or "9".

I had to explain why I cracked up when Scorpion shouted "Get over here!"

And again when Johnny Cage punched Goro in the nuts. Har har har he does that in the game, it's his secret move!

I was disappointed by the lack of spines being ripped out, and I had also misremembered that Jean Claude Van Damme starred as Johnny Cage. He did not: he turned that role down to star in.... Street Fighter. Ha ha ha! How lame! Added to netflix queue!

i only had a small cold sample, haven't even had the full lunch portion yet, but i must say: when i do tri-tip, i outdo myself.

my smoked tri-tip recipe is my own invention, more or less. it has the following advantages:

1) it takes about 2 hours including all prep and cleanup. compare to 8-9 hours for pork spare ribs.
2) it tastes friggin great. compare to pork spare ribs : d'oh, no advantage here!
3) tri-tip is leaner and thus healthier than pork spare ribs. okay, another point for tri-tip

most of all, it tastes friggin great and it's easy to prep, easy to smoke. i've been pondering an attempt at a smoker/grill hybrid recipe for steaks (e.g. new york strip steak). it will be a whole lot of work, with a high risk of ruining the steak.

perhaps if i were used to a charcoal grill i wouldn't consider it much work, but i'm a propane guy for steaks.

i'm back on a roll with the smoker. it's smoke smoke smoke from here on out, i can feel it. but first i have to eat some leftovers!

saturday we went to gorilla bbq in pacifica with some new friends. i've never seen a line like this at gorilla before, but i was not surprised:

the view on the inside:

when i asked for minimal sauce (it is always on the side), the owner understood: (paraphrasing from smoked memory) "if you can't eat it without sauce, why bother?" DAMN RIGHT!

I'd describe gorilla's style as masterfully rubbed, perfect texture, gentle smoke, and great sauce -- where it belongs, on the side.

oh, and epic portions. there's a whole pile of pulled pork under the full-size spareribs:

the line didn't get much smaller after we finished:

we left gorilla and headed into the town of pacifica. my first visit to their coastline, after a decade of living in the same area code...

we parked near pacifica ass company.

special care at the beach, where apparently people swimming and wading in the sand have died:

and that was it for pacifica. later that night we ate at teh county's worst burger joint.

the next day was shorts shopping (do these squats make my ass look big? yeah, they do), and a relaxing evening of smoking meats. i loaded the smoker with tri-tip, salmon, (yeah, according to my notes they have the same cooking time, though they favor different woods. the beef was for today's lunch, i haven't tried it yet), asparagus, carrots, and okra.

dinner:

some things worth mentioning: the salmon was rubbed with year old mystery-rub, which apparnetly had, in that time, broken down into basically salt. lots of it. the rub ruined hte fish. scraped off it was tolerable, and smokey, and had the best texture of any salmon i've smoked. but the mystery rub sucked.

the asparagus and okra sucked up way too much smoke. they were not, as hops had feared they'd be, overcooked. they were simply oversmoked, to the point of being inedible. but they might make a good cream of asparagus soup - hops has vowed to find out.

the okra, likewise, sucked up a lot of smoke, but not as much as the asparagus. still, next time i'll do things differently.

the carrots? ask again later. dunno yet.

in all, i've found my bbq mojo again. it helps that i'm in a lifting mindframe and eating lots of meat. it helps that hte weather is nice and i'm a sociable guy and bbqs are a great way to throw a party. more to come.

Robot #1: "Administer the test."
Robot #2: "Which of the following would you most prefer? A: a puppy, B: a pretty flower from your sweety, or C: a large properly formatted data file?"
Robot #1: "Choose!" (Leela and Fry whisper)
Fry: "Uh, is the puppy mechanical in any way?"
Robot #2: "No, it is the bad kind of puppy."
Leela: "Then we'll go with that data file!"
Robot #2: "Correct."
Robot #1: "The flower would also have been acceptable."
Robot #2: "You may pass."

I wish it was properly formatted...

we really do live in a consumer paradise. there's a dingus out there for every need.

i have a beard trimmer, and a shaver. the beard trimmer is great if i want a nice even length all over, like Billy Mitchell.

And if I want to be nice and clean-shaven, i have straight razors, safety razors, and an electric shaver. they'll all get the job done, with varying degrees of convenience, skin irritation, and danger to my life.

but what if i want to look like i'm perpetually stranded on a mysterious island? My beard trimmer doesn't go that close, and my other shavers go way beyond that.

Fortunately, modern technology is way ahead of me. I'd buy it but I'm in the midst of a no-buy-month, which, considering I ordered a bunch of underpants last night, is not really living up to its namesake.

speaking of things that I buy during no-buy-months, ever since I invented the idea, there has been one standard exemption: books.

say what you will about the health effects of smoking, but since I started smoking, I also started reading again. Yesterday I started "The Gunslinger", having just finished "A Canticle for Leibowitz". "Canticle" was most excellent. It was pretty much as bleak as "The Road" but not as relentlessly so. The bleakness was subtle, and the writing was enjoyable, as were the characters (again, all in contrast to the execrable "The Road"). In 1/4th of the pages, it conveyed the epic scope of the entire "Dune" series. Okay, maybe not, but pretty close.

My favorite genre of fiction, be it movies, video games, or books is post-apocapookoo fiction (hence my progression of "The Road", "Canticle for Leibowitz", "The Gunslinger"), and it looks like it will continue, as my amazon queue is stuffed full of more of the same. Still, dear reader, if you have any suggestions, I welcome them.

hops has suggested, and i have entertained the idea of stubble management via the oster sheep-shearers we use to create my mohawk. i suspect they will be too harsh on the old litso, but there's no time like the weekend to find out.

Ship date Jun 7, 2010
Estimated delivery Jun 15, 2010

WTF fedex?!

nobody touches pete's pipes! nobody!

npr station #1: terry gross interviews broadway singer
npr station #2: boring ass interview on making pier 39 "hip" for snobby sf-ites

I AM TRYING TO LIFT HERE

i don't know how i failed to notice this before, and it does not surprise me much, but "The Orb"'s track "72" has one of the most incredibly immersive soundstages I've ever heard.

wow!

is voting for Orly Taitz.

I hope she wins. Orly for president!

i swear to saint norton that the next person who comes into my cube, dawdles awaiting my attention, employs some method of distraction to get me to turn around and acknowledge them, and then finally, once my headphones are off, suggests that I install a device that would allow me to effortlessly notice their presence without all the waiting, stamping, and arm waving, will be met with the following reply:

"why, so that i can throw you a ticker tape parade for visiting me?"

(blog readers are excluded from this offer)

It's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x64!

Now the length of hair is pretty much equal on all parts of my head save for the landing strip.

there they are
for the world to see
the many chins
of old saint T.

ha! it works with my real name, too.

it was time for the old guy to go. to memorialize big red before putting him down, i took some photos of him lifting a small amount of weight. CAUTION: contains chalk and boxer shorts. no wee-wees that I could ascertain.

i really hope the crookedness of the bar is just the angle of the camera. i don't think i'm that crooked, and just last monday, hops told me i was lifting straight up.

one thing seems sure, though: my supinated arm is bent. argh!

truly, your URL guessing skills are beyond compare.

hops: i grew you some strawberries
me: yum
hops: only two, you probably won't even taste them
me: you should cut them up for me
hops: what, you can't do it yourself?
me: if i do, i won't be able to taste them
hops: ?
me: the bitter taste of work will overpower them.

hops was so tickled by that, she cut up the berries for me.

and that was before my coffee!

430 kilograms = 947.987727 pounds

since we moved into the new place last summer, i haven't used the smoker, and it's been a huge bummer. as you may know, when we moved here, there was some confusion about whether it was legal for me to operate a charcoal burning device on the premises, so in addition to clearing it with the fire marshal, I had a rider added on to the lease clarifying that I was going to be smoking. that's how into it I was.

and then for some reason I stopped.

two days ago I biked past a local ethnic market that had a whiteboard in the window that read, "FRESH GOAT". that's when it hit me: FRESH GOAT was a solution to no fewer than four impending problems:

1) my poor, lonely smoker hadn't seen any use in a year, goat bbq would be a great motivation to see if I still had the skills
2) i had two tupperwares full of leftover BBQ rubs, and I could really use the tupperware for more productive things than storing rubs for over a year
3) something to do on memorial day
4) four!

After the bike ride we went to the store. As soon as I came in the store, the shopkeep said, "you're here for the goat." I sure was. He was only selling in units of 1/4 goat, and he was down to his last 1/4, having gotten the goat in on Friday, seemingly in live condition at that point. The 1/4 goat was definitely no longer alive, but it was neatly butchered and trimmed. He cut it up into smaller pieces for me.

He asked me what my marinade would be and I said I'd be smoking it with a rub of brown sugar and probably some other stuff, I've never cooked goat before and certainly never smoked it. His favorite recipe is a curry or stew involving lots of garlic and ginger, but that wasn't the route I wanted to go (see numbers 1 and 2 above).

Eventually we left, and when we got home, I spiked the old rub with some fresh cardamom and cumin. Then we did stuff, a night passed.

The next day was goat smoking day!

I went out to check my gear, and you guessed it: no charcoal. Well, I had some, but it sure wasn't enough. I'm not sure how I managed not to check it the day before. I chalk it up to forgetting the routine.

Three stores had no charcoal, or the wrong charcoal, but at last we located the good stuff at Trag's, a neighborhood grocery that I do not generally favor. Time was running short (I guessed: I had only a rough guesstimate about how long the goat would take), and back home I went.

Here's the goat, partly trimmed:

That's a leg, two halves of one side of the rib, some neck, and a piece of I-know-not-what. It's partially trimmed of fat, the goat was mostly bone and fat. according to the shopkeep it was slaughtered just before it got old enough to start getting "gamey".

the mustard slather:

I'm not convinced of the usefulness of the mustard slather, and in my bong-style smoker it may do more harm than good, hampering crust formation something awful, but I had bbq mustard to get rid of, so I slathered.

now we're smoking!

I forgot to take a pic of the rubbed meat. you'll see it in a bit. the smoker was loaded with a lot of pecan, a lot of hickory, and a tiny bit of mesquite. i don't skimp on the wood, i like my Q smokey. I think (even now that I have more of a yard) that the smoking process desensitizes me to the smoke flavor for the day and I overcompensate, making the meat super smokey for my guests but "just right" in my perception. Until I try the leftovers, that is, and am amazed by how smokey they are. That might be the Leftovers Flavor Concentration Effect, though.

Meat check!

Those are not done!

Now they're done!

What are these things? Your guess is as good as mine:

Here's a hint: they were 170F internally. Give up? Me too.

hops, The Captain, and a bit of well done, smoked, well rested goat. The goat parts were foil-wrapped in a cooler by the table. ghetto style!

paired with smokey baba ganooj, fresh local tortillas (cash only, i had to bring dolares to hops at the restaurant) that i overcooked while reheating, and some wonderful green flash hop head red. see that sauce? it was holding down the tablecloth. sauce is for losers whose Q has no flavor. but if you're such a loser, "bone suckin' sauce" is some of the best sauce you can find to give your pathetic meat some flavor.

The smoking took about 5 hours, and the process did not escape the notice of the neighbors. One set of neighbors are frequent weber kettle grillers, and the dude thought my smoker was cool, and was excited to hear that I was smoking goat, so they came over and tried some, and seemed to genuinely like it.

The meat came out perfectly: it was very, very goat-y. the bones were a giveaway that it wasn't pig, cow, chicken, or even younger versions of those animals, but even in a blind tasting, it would be obvious this was something "exotic". the southern-style rub worked very nicely, the hickory/pecan smoke worked very nicely, and everything was well and fully cooked. the texture was similar to a moist pork butt. there was not a whole lot of meat, but the meat was flavorful.

overall, I'd say it was a big success. i have now smoked a goat, I freed up two tupperwares, I have leftovers for a week or two, and my smoking skills are refreshed. i've scoped out the location for smoking at the new place, and i've reviewed and transcribed my smoker notes from the old notebook to a more bigger notebook. the only downside is that goat is frelling expensive: about 7 bucks a pound. so, someday when i want a special bbq, we'll save up and get a goat, but until then, well... i came across my notes and recipe for mesquite smoked tri-tip...

The Captain brought a cherry cobbler made with cherries freshly picked this weekend from the farm of a mutual coworker of ours:

there was also brandied-cherry juice in there. it was a great finish to a good meal, competently paired with some very nice amontillado.