mattie g

Here's a picture of a couple pizzas I made on my Big Green Egg last summer. I like to use the Egg on hot days so we don't heat up the whole house by running the oven at 500+ for an hour or more! Shooting to make pizza this weekend, so I'll try to remember to take some before and after pictures...

Some great looking pizzas in this thread! I've become a bit of a pizza-making aficionado in the last couple years. I used to use the fresh dough from Whole Foods (which is quite good), but a neighbor of mine got me into making my own doughs, as he's also from the Northeast and grew up on real NY-style pizzas. After doing some research, we've found that the most-used flour by NY-style pizzerias is General Mills All Trumps High Gluten Flour, so we tracked it down at Restaurant Depot and have multiple 50-lb bags each. That flour absolutely makes a difference, as does doing a 72-hour cold prove. I have a go-to recipe for both NY-style and Neapolitan pizzas (the latter with 00 flour) that I developed by using the Lehmann pizza dough calculator. That was a flash page, so it's no longer available, but if anyone is interested in another really good calculator, try this one: https://pizza-dough-calculator.herokuapp.com/calculator. You'll need to do a little additional research on dough thickness, hydration, yeast amount, etc. but it's all worth it in the end!

Can I just get a run of dry weekdays so we can get the stoop/walkway demo completed and the build actually started? It’s been a week-and-half of this already!

Yup. It’s just interesting that they don’t really move at all from where they dropped 17 years prior. You’d think they’d at least move a little bit laterally over that amount of time!

I know that they live their lives much like a "regular" insect during that time, but I've never thought much about how and where they might move. What's interesting is that my wife has dug up dozens of them in the last few days as she's been replanting some plants in our back yard under the canopy of our neighbors' huge beech tree, but didn't dig up any as she was replanting closer to the house and not under a tree's canopy.

I actually think about this kind of stuff a lot...and it makes me sad. Just thinking about how many cicadas might try to emerge from beneath the weed mat I laid down last year around the kids' play house fills me with a little pang of guilt. I just hope they can dig sideways to get out from under there.

Sure they aren't peepers? They're definitely still doing their peeping thing in my neck of the woods right now.

And she’s got crampons for fingernails. Perfect!

Decided to take a day off this coming Friday to get the deck sanded and stained. For now, the weather looks great for it and for next weekend, so hopefully the forecast sticks.

Been a pretty glorious last number of days - warmth and enough sun, with the occasional shower (and incredibly close lightning strikes!).

Wife got her second Pfizer at the George Mason Patriot Center today. Apparently they're only doing second shots there, and she said the place was absolutely rocking! Apparently the workers were singing and dancing to Toto and Def Leppard (among other stuff) blasting over the sound system.

Until the day I die, I'll never forget the jingle of the Mister Softee truck that would roll through our neighborhood every day, all summer long, when I was a kid. The kids would flock to that truck like flies on sh*t...

I felt very few obvious effects after my second Pfizer. I got pretty tired about 12 hours after, had a slightly sore arm, and *maybe* a bit of a stiff neck and lower back the day after (which are symptoms I get when I get sick), but even those could have been from sleeping poorly. I got the shot on Friday morning, got banged up that evening, and was doing yardwork on Saturday. Of course, on Sunday I googled whether the lack of side effects from the vaccine meant that it didn't work.

Union fan here. That was absolutely brutal. It's a joke that the ref only issued a yellow card, but that's CONCACAF refs for you. Great win though!

Today, the wife was replanting the plants I dug up in my post above. Each hole yielded 10-15 cicadas reaching skyward. Soon...very, very soon.

Picture of my seedlings taken about 10 days ago. Parsley, basil, and cilantro (indoor-only) on the left with tomatoes and jalapeños scattered throughout. I’m the very front are some later-planted basil that will go outdoors in a few weeks. Im pretty excited to have found a basil that was bred with resistance to downy mildew. Downy mildew has ravaged my basil in the July timeframe the last five years or so, so it’ll be great to try to keep a crop going all summer long!

The lengths that folks in other areas have had to go to in order to get signed up for a shot is pretty crazy compared to Fairfax County. After some early hiccups, everything is really coordinated since the county has taken the lead on its own. Simply sign up online and wait until you’re contacted. In the meantime, you can review the status of the backlog on their dashboard to get a good feel for when your number is called.

Saw my first yesterday, as well, although I found this one about 10” underground as I was digging up plants in preparation for our new porch going in this week:

Good plan. Personally, I never plant tomatoes or peppers before April 25. The relative chill in April doesn't really lend itself to allowing either of them to grow, so I figure there's really no huge benefit to getting them out that early. Come the end of April, though, I think the benefit outweighs any potential cost to doing so. I will say though...the cold last May had me scrambling to cover up all my plants!

15 cubic yards? I think I got 5 cubic yards last year. That stuff sat in my driveway for about 6 weeks before I finally got it all spread about. Going to limit my mulching this year since most of last year's was brand new mulching in new play and landscaped areas, plus we've got the new porch build coming up so we won't have to do any mulching in front just yet. This year will just be topping off those areas we mulched liberally last year.

Indoor tomato and jalapeno seedlings are still going strong. I potted them up and have been feeding them with 1/2 strength fish fertilizer every few days, and they seem to have taken really well to it. They've grown quite a bit the last 5-7 days, so I hope to see that continue before I pot up one more time in the next two weeks or so. I'm eyeing to get them in the ground during the last week of April. I also turned over and topped one of my beds with an extra bag of soil a few days ago, and planted lettuce, spinach, and mache on Tuesday evening, just before the rain. Helps to keep the squirrels from digging up a freshly turned over garden, as the rain makes one bed look and smell like any other (or at least I hope it does!).

Stunning garden!

Pineapple on pizza is a crime, as is any overloaded veggie abomination of a pizza.