Bill Roper's Journal

Work's done for the week which means it's time to go to work on the hobbies.

There's a in-person Windycon meeting tomorrow afternoon. And there's Halloween decorating to do.

Also, we have to clear a path for the delivery of the new TV on Monday, assuming that nothing goes wrong with that. We *had* been assigned a 3-7 slot for the delivery according to the website, but now there is no marked delivery time. This could mean a lot of things, but I'm hoping it means the set still shows up. :)

Many of the Halloween decorations that hadn't gone up went up this afternoon. A bunch of email correspondence that needed to go out went out. A PayPal payment was made. A second will follow if I can just get the amount. :) Two loads of laundry were washed and three steaks were grilled, much to the delight of Ruby the Dog who got the first of three resulting bones.

This still feels like a case of "The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get." But, hey! I am making progress.

I think.

I went down to the basement with Gretchen today and spent some time shoveling tubs around as we looked for the Halloween decorations. We appear to have found most everything that we were looking for, which is good.

Also, there is now a clear pathway leading to the shelves that have empty spaces on them, which improves the chances of putting more stuff away. :)

(And a bunch of cardboard that has come upstairs for recycling...)

Gretchen organized a family expedition out to the Trail of Terror in Elgin tonight. K had been with some of her friends last week and returned with a favorable report, so Gretchen thought we should give it a try, because things to do that are fun are in short supply for the last six months or so. And it was a good time and traffic was light, so it worked out nicely.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to talk about BBQ sauce.

I have a whole bunch of lovely leftover beef brisket. Some of this will be consumed with no sauce at all, but I would really like to put the right barbeque sauce on it and have at.

Normally, I would just use Sweet Baby Ray's, which is a perfectly acceptable sauce, but I am bored. It used to be that I could get BBQ at T-Bob's and use Ted's sauce; or I could go to Smokey Bones and pick one of the sauces there; or I could go to the Rack House and try their BBQ sauce.

All of those places are closed permanently.

And the places that are open for carryout in my neighborhood don't have a BBQ sauce that is going to become my favorite, especially after I carry the food back home.

So sometime in the next day or so, I am going to the BBQ sauce section at my local Mariano's and I am going to come back with a suitable sauce for some of this brisket. I hope.

You can help!

I am going to eliminate major national brands off the top, so no KC Masterpiece, Kraft, Open Pit, or the like.

This is beef, so I want a sauce that is tomato-based, skewed more to the vinegar than the sweet side of sauce, because a sweet sauce is likely to be too similar to Sweet Baby Ray's. Paprika is fine, but too much capsaicin is right out. I want to taste the meat, not acquire chemical burns.

Oh, and the sauce should not be too thin. I would like it to stay somewhere in the vicinity of the meat.

Yes, I'm very demanding.

What sauce am I looking for?

I have *not* been dreaming of a white Halloween.

The girls had a splendid time for Halloween.

There are pictures, but none of them on my devices. Once I liberate them, I will post them. :)

Halloween was a success, in that Katie and Julie were really cute in their costumes (photos to follow once I recover them from Gretchen's camera) and they collected a ton of candy as we headed around the neighborhood. And we got rid of most of what we started with here, which was also good.

Having coded up the persistence skeleton for another sixteen Java classes today (making the total in this particular package 141 so far), I am now taking Katie and Julie out trick or treating.

The good news is that it is warm. The bad news is that it has been raining off and on all day.

We'll see how it goes...

We had planned to take Katie and Julie out to the pumpkin patch today, but, although it was quite warm enough to want to go, the associated rain meant that everything would be wet and muddy. And since the rain was continuing, we'd be pretty soaked before long.

So we went home instead. daisy_knotwise entertained the girls while I went upstairs to work on the cover for What's a Hoosier?. I hadn't finished when I heard a siren. Oops. That's a real siren.

A quick Google search said that we were under a tornado watch, so we bundled everyone out to the basement for fifteen minutes to wait out the passage of the storm cell. As far as I know, we didn't actually have any tornadic activity in the area, just a lot of straight-line wind, which can be quite bad enough.

So everyone was safe, Katie and Julie got the lesson about what to do in case of a storm emergency, and we went back to what we'd been doing.

Yeah, a good day to skip the pumpkin patch.

And so, after weeks of waiting, Halloween finally arrived and it was time for me to take Katie and Julie out trick or treating.
( Yes, of course there are pictures... )
We didn't get a lot of kids in our neighborhood, but we never do, given that we live on a 18 home dead-end street where not all of the houses participate. Ah, well. We did get more than a dozen groups, I think (daisy_knotwise was handing out the candy and would have a better count), which isn't too bad.