Driving the Green River Cove Road....

http://old.shelbystar.com/video/John/
green%20river%20cove%20road_0001.wmv

Beer Muffins...

I bake these every once in a while for the office. They may sound a little odd, but I get plenty of compliments and folks seem to enjoy them as they always disappear….

I got a homebrewing kit from my Mom a few Christmases ago, www.mrbeer.com. In the instruction booklet there was a section on cooking with your product, including a recipe for beer muffins:

4 cups biscuit mix
4 tablespoons sugar
12 oz. beer (I like to use homebrew)

Heat the oven to 375 degrees (Fahrenheit) and bake for about 20 minutes or until the muffins get nice and golden. I use the little metal baking wrapper cup thingies that allow them to be distributed like cupcakes….

I’m not exactly sure where I was, but I liked it there.

One of the nice things about Cleveland County is being near the mountains -- a new experience for someone who grew up in the flatlands of North Carolina.

Since I’ve been working at The Star, I’ve actually developed a pretty regular circuit to the west, and I got a chance to make the tour a few weeks back.

You start heading west out of the county, do a little trout fishing near Saluda, head out towards
Brevard and up some great roads through the Cradle of Forestry, past some waterfalls, up to the parkway, grab a meal at the Pisgah Inn, and head on back via Asheville.

On this particular Monday I swerved from my normal straight shot west and drove through Ellenboro, Forest City, Spindale, Rutherfordton and the rest of Rutherford county towards Lake Lure, where I played a round of golf.

Lake Lure Municipal Golf Course was a beautiful 9-holer with blooming trees, great scenery and a big turtle in a pond. It was actually designed by the great golf architect Donald Ross. And it only cost $8. Cheap!

I did pretty well, parring the first hole and not doing half bad for the outing as a whole.

Driving out past Chimney Rock I thought about hopping back over towards Hendersonville, but decided to explore a new twisty road on the way to Asheville. Somewhere this side of the city I grabbed the parkway and turned on down towards the Pisgah Inn. I can recommend the pasta with a nice India Pale Ale.

But the inn wasn’t open yet, so I took a hike up to the top of Mt. Pisgah, more than a mile above sea level. There’s some video on my blog: jderrickstar.blogspot.com.

After enjoying my early dinner and panoramic view at the restaurant I headed back down out of the mountains. My German mother found a pretty good German restaurant in Hendersonville (we have our German food scoped out from Murphy to Manteo) but I gave it a miss and headed on out to Saluda, a little less than an hour west of Shelby, just past a pretty aggressive climb on U.S. 26 that can be a lot of fun.

The thing I like best about the small town a mile or so south of the interstate is the road down to the Green River that stretches north of the highway. It’s some of the best driving I know of in the area and I’ve got a video on my blog….

I was fortunate than evening and caught (and released) a nice trout.

Returning to the river this past week I wasn’t as lucky, but it was the wrong time of day. But
that’s not the point. I enjoy just getting down in the little valleys and exploring, pushing my rather unassuming sedan through the twisty, climbing roads and getting off the beaten path.

This past Monday instead of making a right turn I usually take on the way to Saluda, I took a left… just to see what would happen.

Then I took another left, turned around, another left, a right, turned around again….

… and I found a place where the Pacolet River has carved a gorge, with the road hung from the mountain on one side and a hundred foot cliff rising straight from the other.

Climbing down into the rapids the rush of white water drowned out everything else, cool river air flowed down across me and dozens if not hundreds of butterflies took turns filling the air and resting.

I’m not exactly sure where I was, but I liked it there.

A hike up Mt. Pisgah

http://www.shelbystarprojects.com/John/pisgah_0001.wmv

"North Pole students suspected of plotting to kill"

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/
04/22/alaska.plot.ap/index.html

Darn elves….

One Click Feeds the Hungry for FREE

Oh, but rarely in life does a win-win-win situation arise that can actually save lives.

Heres one. Its free for you, takes only a click of your mouse, makes some advertisers happy, and it feeds the hungry.

www.thehungersite.com

Heres how it works:
You click the button to feed the hungry around the world and right here at home. Takes half a second. Then you see links to the advertisers who sponsored your donation. Yay. They get publicity, you get that warm, fuzzy feeling inside and hungry folks get to eat. No bad, eh?

For example, I just donated 1.1 cups of some staple food to somebody. Thats enough for a meal.
Thats enough to help keep somebody alive and you can do it EVERY DAY FOR FREE. Just bookmark the site and add it to your daily routine.

While youre at the site, you can also check out links to similar webpages helping out literacy, child health, animals, the fight against breast cancer, rainforests (I just preserved 11.4 square feet of land) .

Please, forward this around. Its easy, its free, its good.

Darn Terrorist Tourists....

I was speaking to someone today who was with a group of camera folks in downtown Charlotte recently. They were there in the big pretty city to take some pictures, but were told by several cops that they had to put their cameras away – no photos, security.

I can understand restrictions on sensitive areas of military bases, random folks just wandering in for photos of the interior structural components of private buildings, doing a doubletake of Osama bin Laden walking down Tryon Street with a camera around his neck….

And I could attack restricting the public’s rights regarding public views on public lands and roads.

But how about this….

As someone who has a lot of experience with cameras of various sizes, and some experience getting shots rather inconspicuously, if I want to get a picture of something from public property, I will. With a camera under a jacket or a cell phone camera or a camera hidden in a tie pin, if someone really wants a picture of Main Street, USA, they’re going to get it and you’ll never know it happened.

So though I agree that we need to protect our homeland, cuffing every vacationer in Bermuda shorts taking a snapshot of the Mint Museum or the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building isn’t the way to do it. You’re not nailing the right people and by violating such basic rights you’re letting the terrorists win.

Of all the murders and rapes and chaos going on in Charlotte on any given day, the authorities are hunting tourists?

Wow. I feel safer.

Cairn on Mt. Pisgah

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairn

"... shards of the sharp stone flying...."

Learning a new skill is a lot of trial and error. For me, mostly error.

I’ve figured out why I was having so many problems getting my flintlock to fire. There are a variety of modern, "fake" explosive compounds used in black powder firearms. But these new fashions of gunpowder have some properties, such as a higher ignition temperature, that make them poor substitutes for the real sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal stuff when it comes to some rifles, such as my flintlock.

This leads to a lot of misfires and long delays between the "click" and the "bang," also producing a variety of other words less fit for print.

Some folks didn’t even think I could fire a flintlock with the powder I've been using.

But the real stuff is hard to find.

But there's a store in Cherryville....

"Anvil1231" on Muzzleloadingforum.com (I’m screenname "jderrick") clued me in to the store where I was able to get some of the real, flintlock-friendly, stuff.

Check out the blog for a video: jderrickstar.blogspot.com. With the right powder and good flints, the rifle fires more reliably than some modern weapons I’ve shot. Everything you’ve ever heard from me or anyone else about flintlocks being difficult is a result of something not being done right. Correctly operating, the machine is willing if the shooter is prepared.

In terms of accuracy, I’m still working through the various variables of patch and lube combinations and such, but getting 7-inch groups at 50-yards I was pretty happy.

But I went out yesterday and my shots were all over the place. It was a mess.

I was trying a new vent liner with a larger passage between the pan and the main charge. Based on some advice on the forum, this was supposed to help the weapon fire even faster.

I’m not sure that yesterday it wasn’t throwing my shots off somehow – it was tearing up plenty of other things. The blast out the vent as the main charge went off was tearing the corners off my flints and sending shards of the sharp stone flying.

That’s why I wear safety glasses over my regular ones.

Funny, I guess. Actually, the entire hobby has a great deal of humor to it – especially sugestive names of the tools and parts of the gun that I have to carefully edit out. I try not to take it too seriously. Life’s a comedy when happening to someone else; a tragedy happening to ourselves.

Or, as quoth Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die….

Taking a moment or two out of a day and writing a column about it helps give a little perspective on the humor of it all.

Ear muff hearing protection always gives that Princess Leia look.

Isn't it incredible...

... how the catching of one Green River brown trout seems to validate one's entire existence?

We have ignition!

There are a variety of modern, "fake" explosive compounds used in black powder firearms. But these new fashions of gunpowder have a some properties, such as a higher ignition temperature, that make them poor substitutes for the real sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal stuff when it comes to some rifles, such as my flintlock.

Some folks weren't even sure you could fire a flintlock with the powder I've been using: http://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/
fusionbb/showtopic.php?tid/192368/

This leads to a lot of misfires and long delays between the "click" and the "bang."

But the real stuff is hard to find.

But there's a store in Cherryville....

http://www.shelbystar.com/video/John/fl040706.wmv

:)

Cookies!

Well, I baked these today and folks liked them, so here’s the recipe from the Better Homes And Gardens New Cook Book, 10th Edition.

Thanks, Mom!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup margarine or butter
2 1/2 cups flour
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. Vanilla
1/2 tsp. Baking soda
1 12-oz. Package of semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup of whatever else nuts or chips you want

Beat the shortening and margarine/butter in a mixing bowl. Add half the flour, the brown sugar, sugar, eggs, vanilla and baking soda. Beat thoroughly. Beat in the rest of the flour. Add in the chips and whatever else you want.

Drop dough on an ungreased baking sheet and put in a 375-degree oven for 8-10 minutes or however long it takes.

Enjoy!

"Shooting softball, flinter"

I like 31-day months.

I feel like I’m getting better value.

That’s not really related to anything, especially not this column, but I thought it was a pretty clever line that I came up with and just wanted to get that in here…

But really, I’ve got a pretty good racket going.

Because of my job and relatively active lifestyle, I get in a suitable amount of moving around and exercise.

And because it’s cheaper to keep people healthy through exercise than fix them when they’re broken, my health insurance company sends me some sort of goodie about every month for being as active as I would be anyway.

I respond very well to positive reinforcement/bribery/carrots.

You do 30 minutes of any sort of activity one day, enter it on the Web site and that’s 10 points. 250 points is a little prize. Get to 500 points, you get to choose a little bit cooler prize...

"02/06/2006 – Monday: Shooting, maybe to Y or golf later... walked to Joe's and back a few nights ago."

It’s really pretty clever of them. They get traffic on their Web site, some cheap PR, a few materialistic lazy folks off their bums…

And it winds up serving as a sort of journal of my activities… walking to church and back, shooting the CrossWalk, shooting all sort of things at GWU, climbing, some golf at Royster …

I got a small TV once. I took a photo of it with the camera they sent me and put it and more info on my blog, jderrickstar.blogspot.com.

"03/17/2006 – Friday: Shooting softball, flinter"

Some of the little gifts (which I guess I’m paying for one way or another, but denial is cozy, so bug off…) are better than others.

By now I must have gotten a half dozen little multi-function pocket knife/pliers/screwdriver/scissors thingies. But I keep getting them because they’re incredibly useful and you can always use an extra for the tacklebox/car/shooting bag…

"03/19/2006 – Sunday: Raking leaves w/ Marilyn at Maureen's..."

I’ve gotten some little first aid kits, I’ve gotten a pretty good tent, a tool kit in a nice bag I use for muzzleloading gear, a few wireless heart rate monitors... I can only use one of those at a time. It lets me know if my heart stops. Important.

Sometimes I wind up getting stuff I don’t even want, but can give to others. A sweatshirt for some charity through my church, a small foosball table I sent over to a buddy in Iraq…. I coulda sent over a "Turbo Action Hockey" set. I bet that’d really confuse some little Iraqi kid.

"03/23/2006 – Thursday: Shooting .45s... I was great... swam 30"

Yes, the Derricks just had an Insurance Company Christmas – small screwdriver sets for everyone, Mom!

Speaking of my Mom, you may recall we’re in a friendly competition to swim more lengths at the pool…

04/03/2006 – Monday: Swimming at Y, 36 lengths

Your turn, Mum…

from www.bcbsnc.com, tried using my camera from these folks,

but the software was on my old harddrive, which died....

Cross Walk in KM last week....

"ML'ing" Links....

www.possibleshop.com

www.dixiegunworks.com

www.muzzleblasts.com

www.howstuffworks.com/flintlock.htm

www.chuckhawks.com/flintlocks.htm

And the master list, on www.muzzleloadingforum.com, http://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/fusionbb/
showtopic.php?tid/13140/

I’m learning that the vast majority of the difficulties I’ve had with my flintlock are due to the powder I’m using. It’s a new replacement for the real thing and it has some different properties that don’t match well with flintlocks. But I’m having a hard time finding the real stuff….
I’ll keep you posted…