Written by Monkeybrad on October 21st, 2009
I do not normally engage in politically charged subjects here. I like to keep this nice and light, a place for musings that hopefully spread a little joy and the occasional bit of wisdom, but I read something this week that I feel needs to be shared. Since this is one of the few places where I can get away with saying anything I want, I am going to use it to help put a face on a problem our country currently faces. I promise to go back to my usual pictures, recipes and homilies in my next post, but I beg your indulgence and your patience as I look a little deeper into an issue that I had honestly never considered until this week. Click to continue »
Posted in Big Monkey Thinks about Stuff | 3 Responses »
Written by Monkeybrad on October 8th, 2009
Taking the slippery slope into organic gardening...
One of the best parts of Autumn is the harvest of the bounty of summer and the final payoff of all of those long hours in the garden. It is a time when our kitchen kicks back into gear after it’s long summer break, at time for baking and best of all a time for soups and stews. There is little more welcoming than coming home to the smell of freshly-baked bread and a pot of stew that has been simmering all day. One of my favorite Fall dinners is my mother’s Tomato Basil Bisque with a grilled cheddar cheese sandwich on homemade sourdough bread, now that is serious comfort food. Normally, by this time of year we have to rely on tomatoes that we canned earlier in the season, but here we are in the first week of October and we still have fresh tomatoes on the vine, so let’s take advantage of them. Click to continue »
Posted in In the Kitchen with Big Monkey | No Responses »
Written by Monkeybrad on May 1st, 2009
As many of you know, I have a real passion for the game of geocaching, and in my world passion=obsession, which leads to over-achievement and eventual burnout. But I will have to say, my passion for this game has far outlasted most other things in my life, so who knows, maybe I will stick with it. Whether it lasts or not I have had a great time exploring all over the U.S. tracking down these hidden treasures and getting to see some really great locations that I would have otherwise missed and I have met a metric bunch of really great people. As it turns out, if you do something hard enough for long enough, people begin to think that you have some great knowledge or wisdom to impart. I am happy to say that my tendency toward bombastic showmanship is occasionally tempered by my true desire to share and teach, and I have been been asked on several occasions to share the “secrets” to my geocaching success. So I am sharing here, a little piece that I wrote to answer some questions for a “soon to be released” guide to geocaching, and if you make it through that to the end, I promise to share the real secret to successful geocaching.
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Posted in Adventure Monkey Goes Geocaching | 7 Responses »
Written by Monkeybrad on April 23rd, 2009
UPDATE: After voting closed we were lucky enough to be selected as one of fifteen finalists. Our design went on to win Second Prize in this international Green Design competition, pretty cool, huh? I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who supported this project, we could not have done this without you.
I know I should not use this site for my own evil schemes, but since I am asking other people to help support this project, I figured I had better support it myself. So here I am asking for your help, trying to mobilize the Monkey Nation for the greater good of simians and simian enthusiasts everywhere. So what do I need? I need your votes.
Here is the deal. When I am not working on real work or GeoWoodstock or writing this blog or taking pictures or coming up with other crazy schemes, my hobby is working on real-world problem solving, on a small scale. A couple of months ago, my friend, Seth and I were trying to find a way to recycle or reuse 55 gallon drums from my work and hit upon several things, but among those we designed and built some pretty cool chairs.
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Posted in Big Monkey Makes Stuff, Big Monkey Thinks about Stuff | 2 Responses »
Written by Monkeybrad on April 9th, 2009
I got older this week. OK , I understand we get older every second of every day and that I am older now than I was when I last typed the word “I”, but we don’t mark the passage of time that way. We tend to take it in nice sizable chunks, usually years, and we count from zero. So this week, I turned over another year on my internal odometer, which tends to make me more introspective and reflective than usual. It is funny that I am more childlike and playful than I was 10 or even 20 years ago, particularly as I have reached an age where my Peter Pan routine is becoming a little unbelievable, even to me. So as I lay in bed just after dawn Sunday morning, contemplating the last thirty seven years I suddenly remembered the best birthday present I ever received, the one that changed everything…
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Posted in Big Monkey Thinks about Stuff | 2 Responses »
Written by Monkeybrad on March 27th, 2009
Here comes the sun...
Spring is a time to retire the heavy stews that kept away the winter’s chill and celebrate the season of the sandwich and nothing says comfort food like pimento cheese. Now if your experience with pimento cheese involves picking up a pot of the processed grocery store stuff, then I can understand your lack of enthusiasm, store-bought spreads are like the movie adaptation of a book, they often share a name and precious little else. Likewise, if you are reading this north of the Mason-Dixon line then there is a good chance you are unaware of this delicacy and therefore “don’t know what you are missing”. It seems hard to believe, to anyone raised in the South, that this ubiquitous potluck dinner/church social/picnic/afternoon tea/school lunch staple is a “regional” dish. To the rest of you I am preaching to the choir, but stick with me and maybe I’ll find some scripture you haven’t heard yet.
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Posted in In the Kitchen with Big Monkey | 1 Response »
Written by Monkeybrad on March 17th, 2009
When March rolls around and Spring begins peeking at us from behind the trees, I begin to long for fields of green. Soon enough the flowers begin to raise their heads from their long winter naps and the signs of the turn of the season become impossible to ignore. It is about this time that one of my favorite holiday’s rolls around, when everyone gets to put on the green and pretend that they are one of the blessed people, if only for a day. For me, St. Patrick’s Day is not about drinking and carousing, although I have been known to do my fair share of that, it is really about the change of the year, a celebration that we have made it through another winter and that the time of bounty is ready to begin again, the polar opposite of Thanksgiving, if you will. A time to consider what lies ahead and what this new year will bring. Of course, if you would like to celebrate that with a raised pint, well as long as the beer is black and stout, then who am I too judge.
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Posted in In the Kitchen with Big Monkey, Presented in Monkeyvision | 1 Response »
Written by Monkeybrad on March 12th, 2009
A snow angel's view of the world
Big Agnes Encampment +15° Sleeping System
$159.95 @ REI
When it comes to your sleeping arrangements, you can’t be too careful when it comes to climbing into someone else’s sack. This is especially true, out on the trail, where your choice of sleeping arrangements can be the difference between life and death, or comfort and discomfort in my non-mountaineering world. I have searched far and wide for a truly comfortable cold-weather bag at a reasonably backpackable weight and I now own a rack full of failed contenders. They are all great bags, but they fall short somehow. My 6′3″ more than amply padded frame requires more space than most off the shelf bags allow for, so it has been a challenging search at times. Like a trailbound Goldilocks I would go from bag to bag, this one was roomy and warm but too heavy; that one is lightweight but too constrictive and not warm enough. So the search continued until I finally found one that is, just about right.
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Posted in Big Monkey Uses Stuff | 3 Responses »
Written by Monkeybrad on March 5th, 2009
Industrial Grade Creativity from the Mind of the Monkey
It is often said that the best projects come from scratching an itch you have and that is certainly the inspiration for this one. My wife and I love to cook, and we are both gear heads, subsequently we have way more pots and pans than we need, or than our small farmhouse kitchen can store. We considered cutting back on our gourmet accoutrement, but just could not bear the thought of parting with our fajita griddle, extra No. 6 cast iron skillet or monkey-shaped baking pan, so a new storage option was in order. A quick survey of the kitchen revealed that we had some unused space along the wall under our kitchen table so we set out on a quest for a new pot rack. We searched high and low, but could not find anything that used the available space well, except for a $200 dollar model from Williams-Sonoma. So we abandoned that quest and headed over to Lowe’s for some lightbulbs. While picking up a pack of spiral CFL’s, suddenly a metaphorical lightbulb went off and we decided to make our own Pot Rack, custom designed and built for our available space.
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Posted in Big Monkey Makes Stuff | 11 Responses »
Written by Monkeybrad on February 26th, 2009
It's poetry in motion...
My wife was giving me a hard time last week, apparently I have been slacking in the cooking department lately, so I decided to treat her to my take on a recipe she made last week, with mixed results. Since it was Mardi Gras, I decided to revisit a recipe for Cabbage Jambalaya that Mary R. gave us while we were in Thibodaux at the first of the year. My take on the Jambalaya was great, although I did get it a little too spicy, I have learned, though, that making the exact same dish, only better, is probably not the best way to keep peace in Monkey Manor. Which got me to thinking about cooking, following recipes and deciding when to blaze your own trail.
We live in an age where simple cooking is becoming a bit of a lost art. I have friends and family for whom making dinner means grabbing a box out of the freezer or a can out of the cabinet and applying heat to it’s contents. There is nothing wrong with this, I am all for our brave, modern world filled with such conveniences, but it’s kinda like watching the movie instead of reading the book, it is sort of the same only not as good. Grandma is on the other end of that spectrum, she almost always starts with a bunch of raw ingredients and uses her experience rather than a recipe to craft her meals. I settle somewhere in the middle, and here is why…
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Posted in In the Kitchen with Big Monkey | 2 Responses »
