Although I'm nearly as skinny as ever I am only about 2 months on my way back up from the rock bottom of "Worst shape of my adult life".  This climb was inspired by my pending beach vacation to St. Lucia and accomplished mostly by doing a few pushups and yard work.  Last week I got a love note from our neighborhood association stating that a $5/day fine was on its way to me if I didn't stop ruining the neighborhood and plant my two required street trees.  On one hand I suppose I did agree to all 800 pages of restrictions when I bought this land and on the other: busybodies, have you nothing better to do than shake your fingers at delinquent neighbors?  We are getting married and subsequently leaving the country in 7 days, not the best time for items requiring surpise time and expense.

This weekend I bought the two largest autumn blaze maple trees I could find, which apparently only barely meet the necessary restrictions and set about digging holes.  The wonderful Kettle Moraine soil is mostly clay, sand, and rocks.  Lots of rocks.  My back is well-worked, I can barely sit up to write this post.  Despite planting one tree each day and doing a ton of other preparation work I still managed to clean my garage and cook two pretty good meals.  Saturday was steak au poivre with gorganzola sauce, using the Cook's Illustrated skillet to oven method and my own worsteshire and butter skillet technique and addition of chives to the gorgonzola.  Ate this with the pan-roasted asparagus that has become a staple of our diet and roasted red potato.  Today I mequite smoked a ginormous rack of ribs on the grill with a sweet dry rub and took half of them to Jen at work.  That woman will never know how good she has it unless she divorces me and subsequently lives entirely on mac 'n cheese.  I need to take some more pictures of some of this stuff but I'm working on my photographic technique.

I'm going to try to get a very long article out tonight, June will likely end up being a light month for writing due to the goings on.