two good rides last weekend at parks i haven't been to in a while. 2 laps at rosaryville on saturday and then fountainhead on sunday. we spent the rest of both days getting work done in and around the house. after spending the last 4 weekends away it was nice to get some jobs that have been lingering done.

while heather worked on cleaning up the chaos that erupted in the garden while we were on vacation, i managed to get a ceiling fan put up in the bedroom and new light fixtures put up in the dining room and kitchen, plus i started replacing the old dimmers with newer ones. this weekend we're going to tackle painting those 2 rooms. yeah, i know people normally paint first, but you've got to take inspiration where you can get it. putting up the lights got us thinking about the rest of the room, which got us to finally pick out a color.

on the 4th i started the day with 4 hours on the road bike... probably the longest ride i've done on the road this year. my legs started off slowly, not having recovered well from trying to hang on to the motor-paced goon ride the night before. once i was out into the back roads of MoCo and had some extra food down my legs started to feel better. rode out to berryville road and past schaeffer, then back down in on river road and macarthur before climbing chain bridge road to come back through the city.

had a few people over for grilling and an attempt to see fireworks down the street at takoma park. we grilled 2 racks of ribs and, despite some inattention on my part resulting in some charing, they both turned out nicely. we marinated the first rack with dijon mustard which we basted with soy sauce while it was grilling and the gave the other rack a dry rub and then basted it with a citrus/chipotle barbeque sauce from whole foods. i was a little skeptical of the mustard/soy ribs, but they turned out to be tasty. when it came down to fireworks time we decided to just stay home and keep the fun going. we finished the evening off by putting some peaches and pineapple on the grill (topped with some brown sugar and basted with bourbon).

heather's started a blog... no posts yet, though