bryan wann :: binary fury

The plan was to put in a 120+ mile ride on Saturday. Friday after work I drove down to New Braunfels to do some road recon. The roads through NB were amazingly less busy and better than Google Earth would have me believe. Passing through Gruene was interesting as well.

The problem was, by the time I got home I could not bring myself to get up at 5-6 AM to hit the road. Putting in so many miles so often is really boring. Plus I’m still recovering from a case of saddle sores, ick. Instead I was up until 6 AM catching up on episodes of Sopranos leading up to the finale. I’m annoyed with the ending, but it’s over, it’s done. It rained that morning so I felt justified in not going riding. Later in the morning and on into the afternoon the rain had cooled everything off and it was still cloudy. It would’ve been a rather nice day to go out riding. blah.

Saturday I went back to Gruene, New Braunfels and San Antonio to do more exploring. Turns out the toobing place we went to on the Guadalupe last year is literally across the river from Gruene. I had no idea until Friday. That would’ve been a swell place to go have dinner after spending all day floating. The thing that impresses me most about Gruene and NB is that both towns are very green. Lots of lush lawns, compartively tall, full trees. Around Austin we tend to have a lot of scrubby evergreens.

Gruene, Texas is a charming little tourist area. Unlike Marfa and Fredricksburg, Gruene is tied to a larger city and there appears to be more interesting things to do. You can go hang out in NB, or you choose to spend all of your time eating/drinking/floating/sleeping in Gruene. All of the town’s attractions are all within a half-mile to mile walk to each other on two main streets. The two days I visited, there were tons of people walking around. I had dinner at Gristmill to try it out. They seem built around herding people in and out as fast as possible; the waitstaff seemed pretty jaded and glazed over from routine. The food was pretty good, I’d recommend it.

Rob’s birthday bash was Saturday night, we hung out there until 2:30 AM or so. I slept in until after noon and didn’t do a lot after. Cleaned, drove out to Dripping Springs, and ultimately wound up at Shady Grove reading Drew Curtis’ “It’s Not News, It’s FARK” book. Now I’m on-call again for another week, blah again. Being on-call is officially old. It’s especially old now since my weeks go by so quickly now.

oh man, Burning Man.

Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me. Comedy sketch with lulz. “Do you speak English? No, I don’t, sorry.” I could’ve sworn I linked to this before, but can’t find it.

Tonight I’m trying to master the perfect pitcher of iced tea. Perfect to me is something unsweetened, snappy and refreshing like what I can get at any local Tex-mex place at lunch. It’s not as easy as Lipton would have me believe. I bought some Lipton tea bags the other day, the first pitcher was awful — extremely bitter. The directions called for 2 quarts of boiling water, 2 family-sized tea bags, seep for 5 minutes then chill.

Not really a fan of tea bags nowadays I bought some Lipton loose tea to try. Followed some internet directions, 1.5 liters of boiling water, seeped for 3 hours and chilled. It was cloudy and bitter. I cheated and added some lemon juice; still cloudy and knocked out a bit of the bitterness. Still unacceptable.

Everyone on the internet has their own opinions on what constitutes the perfect tea. Some call for seeping for hours, even overnight; seep for a few minutes, let it come to room temperature; use cold water and set the jug out in the sun for 4-5 hours. I really want to believe restaurants aren’t adding sugar or simple syrup to their allegedly unsweetened tea. If anything, I have plenty of tea and water to keep trying until I figure it out.

At the moment I’ve got two pitchers in the making. One was made with 1.5 liters of boiling water (can we please do away with ‘cups’ and ‘quarts’ and stick with mililiters?), 2 tablespoons of loose tea, seeped 10 minutes, now cooling to room temperature on its own. The other jug was one family-sized (6 gram) of not-for-cold-water tea, and 4 cups of cold water. Interestingly, I had to weigh down the teabag with a spatula because it floated on the cold water. So far after an hour, the boiled water tea is a very dark red and the cold water tea barely has any color at all.

In other news, I discovered some outfit called the “Ultra Marathon Cycling Association” holds a “Austin 200k” once a year in January. Allegedly it’s as tough as it gets around here. The route this year started in Bee Caves, looped around Mansfield Dam, down to Southwest Austin over Lost Creek (some extremely steep climbs), out Fitzhugh Road to Johnson City — and back. This guy claims the route is 127 miles long with 10,000 feet of elevation gain. I drove part of Fitzhugh Road to Dripping Springs today, it’s a shoulderless two-lane country road with lots of rolling hills. That, along with the Lost Creek, Loop 360, and Mansfield Dam portions, I can certainly believe it involves 10,000 feet of climbing.

I never went to sleep last night. Drinking copious amounts of tea kept me wired all night long. This morning at 5:00 I drove downtown to wander around. The Republic of Texas bikers must’ve had one hell of a party, 6th street was covered in plates and cups and other trash. The street sweepers were out vacuuming it all up in huge swaths. I went to IHOP for breakfast, it’s been so long since I’ve had bacon and eggs. Pancakes too, for that matter.

It seems I have two winning solutions to iced tea. The teabag-in-cold water was a nice deep caramel color this morning and tasted nice. Apparently the trick is to let the stuff just sit for several hours. The slight bitterness of the hot brewed tea disappeared too. I’m not sure how I can improve upon these yet, these are certainly acceptable. They go nice on a warm day like today.

So far the winner is 1.5 liters of boiling water, 2 family-sized tea bags, seep for three minutes, then top off the pitcher with ice to chill it rapidly. It only has a hint of aftertaste, best batch so far!

I’ve drank too much during this process, I’m bouncing off the damn walls now.