Reprieve

Our two dogs, the two little furry personalities that are so important to us, are fading. Sprocket is just fading in color. Zeek is fading in a more mortal way, a cancer eating away at him.

Sprocket's fade is merely a matter of his hair lightening from red to orange as a rather odd side effect of the medicine he's taking for Valley Fever, the fungal disease he caught in Arizona last winter. Recent blood tests showed that his antibody count is down by 75%. He still has at least another four months of treatment ahead of him, but the improvement is such great news.

Zeek's fade is that kind of fade. He's recovered from his surgeries, but the cancer is still there. He’s seeming more and more like a worn out old man. We’re squeezing as much fun and adventure as possible into his life, not that that’s very different from his usual fare, but now it has a bit of urgency about it. This needs to be his best… what? Few months? Six months? We can’t know, of course, beyond the vet's prognosis, which was three to six months.



This morning, both dogs woke me up barking at something at 4:30. I needed to be up early anyway so I took the opportunity to go ahead and start the morning routine a couple of hours early. Normally when I turn on the coffee machine, the boys know that it’s time to go out to pee. On this particular morning, however, Zeek was having nothing to do with the usual morning routine. He clearly had no intentions of getting out of bed. Sprocket, however, was right on cue, trotting outside to take care of morning business. When he was three steps out the door, though, that business quickly changed in nature. His nose jutted straight up into the air and he suddenly became very animated, nose to the ground, sniffing vigorously around the courtyard and yard in a way that let me know that he was detecting something out of the ordinary. I grabbed a flashlight and took a little amble through the yard with him to see what was so interesting.

The first thing I noticed was that my floating bog plants in the courtyard waterlily tub were relatively ravaged, tipped over and missing soil. There were muddy five-fingered smears and little scraps of leaf matter all over the edge of the bathtub, wet tracks on the little wooden table that (apparently) allows access to the tub, and I saw no sign of the big orange goldfish that lives (lived?) in that tub.

On to the patio: fresh wet tracks coming from the boys’ fish-hunting tub where there were a mere two surviving minnows, down from a dozen. When Sprocket sniffed at a tall plant stand (which, naturally, allows access to another waterlily pot,) I noticed that the waterlily had been tipped over. Around the base of the third and final waterlily tub, there was a scattering of ripped waterlily leaves, broken flower stems, and the cheesy plastic turtle that floats in that tub had been pulled out and its soft body pulled from the shell.

Further inspection of the non-aquatic parts of the yard revealed signs of a small hurricane having ripped through the raspberry patch, leaving canes smashed, bent and broken. Small branches were broken off my precious apple espaliers and unripe apples were scattered in the grass.

It was a disaster. My first thought can easily be imagined and needs not be spelled out here. My second thought was, “If anything can pull Zeek out of his funk, it's this.”

Back in the house where he was still nestled in a heap of blankets, I delivered, to no effect, a series of what would normally be instantly inspiring, exciting hunting summons. “Zeek, let’s go get it!” “Zeek, check it out!” “Zeek, what is it?” “Zeek, let’s go!” “ZEEK! THERE’S! A! RAC! COOOOON!”

Nothing. Not interested. This was a big change. A sad change. We know he’s fading, but to not respond at all to the very words he lives to hear? This was a first.

Dejected, I went back to making coffee. During the next few minutes, Zeek did rouse himself, oh so slowly, from his warm nest and wandered, disinterested, through the kitchen, finally, stiffly, making his way outside, and BAM! The second he stepped out the door and caught the scent of the garden invader, he lit up! His code exploded and he was on fire! Now he won’t eat breakfast, not because his mouth hurts or because he doesn’t feel good, or because he’s worn out and dying, but because he is way too busy hunting.

Suddenly, he is more alive than he's been in weeks. I have never been happier to have a raccoon ravaging my garden.

In Pursuit of the Perfect Cheese Pastry

First, a brief note as to our absence of late: We're still alive! Still biking, boating, gardening, cooking, camping and generally having fun, mostly. We have, though, in the last 8 months, been sort of derailed a bit from our regular routine of fun, fun, fun and more fun: Zeek had a quarter of his lower jaw bone removed last November because of cancer, and two more tumors of the same type popped up very recently. And Sprocket came down with Valley Fever in March, after our last Arizona trip. Naturally, we've been very focused on taking care of them and getting them through what we hope was the worst of their illnesses. Things are as under control as they can be at this point, so we'll likely have the mental energy to resume more of a presence here, including more on the dog dramas at a later date. For now, the boys are doing a lot of recuperating and just enough playing, and I'm taking comfort in baking while they rest:



In Pursuit of the Perfect Cheese Pastry
by Trina

Greg isn’t really one for planning. He enjoys the spontaneity of winging it and going with the flow. He’ll show up in an unknown country with his bike and some camping gear, pick a direction at random, and start riding. He loves seeing what surprises are in store for him when he just lets things unfold as they will. Plus, planning is hard. I’m 99% happy to wing it as well, and I, too, find that if you leave things unplanned, you are likely to stumble upon much more magical experiences than anything you could’ve conceived of in advance and from afar.

Proceeding in this manner, we frequently find ourselves stumbling upon secret hidden treasures that we would never have known to seek out: unlikely little creeks bursting out of the side of a mountain; bike-able trails that aren’t on any map; vugs in the sparse, arid desert that are full of water and teeming with odd and unfamiliar lifeforms; incredible handmade cheese in the Baja farm country; the world’s best cheese pastry in a homely Mexican café in a mostly abandoned Southern Arizona border town:




…which brings me to the 1% where I’m not willing to risk missing something because I didn’t know where to look for it: cheese pastries.

It doesn’t take much research to find, in advance, the “best bakeries” or “ethnic bakeries” or “gourmet bakeries” or “best cheese danish” in a town, state or country you’re going to visit. Doing this tiny bit of advance planning allows your route to be dictated by the locations of bakeries, and you can still leave all the rest of the (less important) details of your journey delightfully unscripted.

Before we went to Baja a few years ago, I had seen a picture of a pastry that looked like it must be the Mexican version of sfogliatella, which is stuffed with a sweet ricotta mixture, and is divine. The picture was, however, without caption or any other descriptive text – it was just a picture of beautiful handmade pastries at a farmers market – so all throughout our travels in Baja I described the pastry, in my best Spanish, and asked people if they knew it, and where I might find it. My inquiries were fruitless until, at last, eating at a taco-stand-style breakfast shack, seated on sawhorses at the bar, I asked our dining companions about it. They talked amongst themselves in Spanish that was much too brisk for me to follow, and then, with the wide-eyed excitement of having solved a puzzle, one of the men shouted, “O, si, si, si! Se llama La Philadelphia!” Ugh. My must-have authentic Mexican pastry had an English name based on the American brand name product it featured. Bubble popped, I longed a little less for the previously romanticized pastry, and was therefore not heartbroken when we never managed to find La Philadelphia in Baja.

The other place where a great cheese pastry cannot, with any amount of planning or mapping, be found is the culturally-lacking mountain biking Mecca where we currently live. Yeah, the local bagel shop has a cheese danish. It’s lame. It has not enough cheese, an overly greasy pastry and a dollop of highly-sugared fruit-flavored glop on it. For a very brief time there existed in town a little coffee shop owned by a woman who studied pastry-making in France – Good sign! I was excited! – but while her cheese mixture was perfect, she put it on a giant mound of weird, flavorless, leavened dough that really didn’t work.

Recently, I’ve taken advantage of some (unusual) rainy Sunday mornings to stay indoors and see if I could come up with a cheese pastry that might satisfy. Also, we have a burgeoning crop of raspberries that need to be used.



In tackling these two "problems," I ended up with two different pastries, both of which are scrumptious and pretty easy to throw together.



This one is a tart -- actually 12 individual tartlets -- with a pecan shortbread crust. The tart crusts are baked, and then filled with room temperature cheese filling (recipe below) and fruit right before you plan to eat them. If you fill them and let them sit, the crusts will get soggy and fall apart.

The second is a danish, which is surprisingly quick and easy if you use frozen puff pastry instead of making your own, which is a ridiculous undertaking, really, considering that when you need a cheese danish, you need it pretty much ten minutes ago.



Filling (for both the tartlets and the danish):
8 oz cream cheese (Philadelphia brand, naturally)
¼ cup sugar
Zest from 1 lemon, chopped

A couple of handfuls of fresh fruit

To make the danish:
Thaw the pastry according to the instructions on the package. Cut one sheet into four squares and roll them out a bit. (Save the second sheet in the freezer for another time.) Pile on the cheese and fruit. Form the pastry into whatever shape you want. Brush the dough with melted butter. Bake at 400 for 15 minutes.



I also made one with no berries, enough cheese filling and a generous grating of fresh nutmeg. I’m not sure whether my eyes rolled back in my head before or after my socks were knocked off my feet. And really, does it matter?

Blood Moon II

Last week. Another lunar eclipse. Another full moon. Rising near sunset and moving across the night sky. Then, near dawn, a shadow passed across the brightness. The white light faded on red stone cliffs. Until the moon darkened into a red orb. Lit only by sun-fringed earthlight. This time, unlike last time, the moon was near the horizon as dawn approached. And a tricky trail provided a chance to join the blood moon against the brightening sky.

Winter, Or So They Said

photos by Greg

We've turned the astronomical corner into Spring. Leaving the cold dread of winter behind. But riding-wise (and otherwise) it wasn't much of a winter. We did get one day that started like this:



Then changed to this:



And ended up like this:



After that day, we had very little of this:



Before moving on to many, many days of this:



Which, isn't really a bad thing, from a riding perspective. We'll take it. But we'll continue to peer somewhat suspiciously into the future, wondering what spring and summer will bring.