Second note: this takes some time, so either do it in two parts (filling one night, ravioli the next), or make it a group activity.

And now: the food.

Ravioli filling:
3 oz pancetta (or 3 slices bacon)
2 T olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 large butternut squash, peeling and cut into 1 inch cubes
3 cloves garlic, smashed and diced
1 T sage, minced
2 t thyme, minced

Ravioli (from Bob’s Red Mill Semolina package recipe):
1 1/2 cup semolina flour
2 eggs, lightly beaten (make sure you listen for the safe word!)
2 T water
2 T olive oil
1/2 t pepper
1/4 t salt

Brown butter:
5 T butter
20 sage leaves, julienned

Scallops:
Just, y’know, get some. 3 to a person should be good.

Make the filling first; you can do this a day ahead. In fact, you should do it a day ahead, so all the flavors can merge and melt and oh my God give me some of that squash and bacon…

Sorry. Got carried away there. First thing you’ll need to do is lightly cook the pancetta so it gives up its fat. Get yourself an oven-proof skillet (cast iron, if you’ve got it, and, really, you should got it), put the pancetta slices in it, and turn the heat to medium. As the pancetta starts to sizzle, stir the slices around until they’re a little crispy. Take pancetta out of pan, dice it up and set aside.

Caramelize the onions in the pancetta fat, adding 1T oil if needed. Put the heat just a hair above medium and stir away. This flavor is one of the key points, so take your time with the onions. You’ll want them a deep, rich brown and smelling like a pan full of awesome. It takes me about 30 minutes, so your time may vary. If anything starts to look (or smell) like it’s burning, turn the heat down. Remove any onion flakes that are scorched.

When the onions are done, turn the oven onto 425 F. Add the squash and 1 T of oil to the pan, and turn the heat up to medium high. Stir the squash around, making sure it gets coated in oil. When the oven is ready, stir in the garlic and put pan in the oven for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. After 30 minutes, add pancetta, sage and thyme to pan and cook for another 10 minutes. Mash squash with potato masher and set aside to cool.

Roll out the pasta according to your pasta machine’s instructions. If you don’t have a pasta machine, you’re in for a hell of an upper body workout. Roll out sheets to second thinnest thinness. If you’ve got a ravioli attachment, you’re set. If not, cut the pasta sheets into 3-inch squares, put a teaspoon of filling onto a square, dab water along two of the edges, and seal the beasties shut like wontons. Put a napkin on a cookie sheet, dust the napkin with flour, then put the finished products on the napkin. The best result is to put them into boiling water immediately, though you can pop ‘em in the fridge, too.

When it’s getting time to eat, put a pot of water on to boil.

Yesterday was the CBR finals, and I got dropped like a bad habit on the second lap. I was in the front with the mighty Ian Grimstad and tried to get a few wheels back, and I just couldn’t muscle my way into a gap. I wasn’t dead last, but I certainly wasn’t in the middle of the pack. Same thing happened at Brentwood, and my ITT time was 1:06.

On the other hand, I now have enough starts to upgrade to category 4, which is supposed to be smoother sailing. And I’ve got all winter to train.

Right now, I feel completely shagged out from this morning’s ride (and still a little squicked out by the elderly Irish gentleman who sat near us; he started out by talking about cycling and Oscar Wilde, and then began downloading his life story of travel, illness, and celibacy, including his longing “to hold a nude woman to my penis,” which he pronounced pennis. There are some things man was not meant to deal with before nine in the morning when the coffee hasn’t had a chance to kick in), and I’ve got a mountain of work to climb (starting with editing Windswept; now that it’s time to wade into it, I’m a wee bit frightened). The tomatoes have given their last fruit, and the weeds are threatening to make inroads in the roses, and I still have no goddamn idea what kind of creature is laying these monster turds by the composter…

And that’s a season. And this is a life. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Except a morning free of that Irish dude. shudder

I’m not perfect. I don’t always edit, and I let the occasional comma or capital letter slip away, and I feel like a lazy dumbass after I catch my mistake. However, I am still fully qualified to write the following to the person who left me a drive-by trolling last night:

Dear Adam Smith-

Thank you for your email and congratulations on your nom de web. I’m assuming you’re writing me in regards to my various Tweets and Facebook messages about my personal boycott of Whole Foods in light of John Mackey’s editorial about health care in the Wall Street Journal. Using the name of the father of economic theory in a drive-by flaming about economics? Well done!

However, my joy was short-lived when I saw the various grammatical mistakes in your email. I write, so words and the way they’re used is very important to me. I wanted to give you some corrections so you’d be able to express yourself clearer in the future.

First, it should be “cock-breathed liberals.” Note the dash between “cock” and “breathed”; it turns those words into a compound adjective, which is what you intended to do.

Second, you meant to say “You are such losing cock breaths,” not “cock breathes.” Since your implication is since that liberals engage in fellatio on a regular basis, the whiff of one’s partner’s penis is always on one’s exhalations (see the first correction above). What you wrote here implies that the penis is a respiratory organ, which would be a neat trick. My backstroke would greatly improve if I could use my cock for a snorkel.

So, if we put those corrections in, plus a few more for punctuation, capitalization and missing words, your email should have read like this:

Dear Cock-Breathed Liberals,

Fuck off!
Adam Smith

See? Clear, concise language. Granted, it still doesn’t make any sense, because my understanding of the Great Liberal Conspiracy was that liberals worked hand-in-hand with unions to bring down said successful business owners. But, hey, baby steps. We’ll work on thesis statements and backing them up next week. Good luck!

Love and kisses,
Adam Rakunas

(I do very much want to see Melissa Auf Der Maur’s Out Of Our Minds on Friday night, and I know Jetse de Vries and Daryl Gregory will be holding forth on some Very Cool Stuff. But otherwise, I’m going to try and soak in as much of Montreal as I can while making sure Andrew Tisbert doesn’t destroy my liver.)

Saturday
1500 Leave Montreal-Trudeau
2100 Arrive LAX

Sunday
0745 Rock the Brentwood Grand Prix with the Triathletix 4/5s
0830 Collapse

A few weeks ago, I finished my first novel. The other day, I finally got Bach’s Minuet in G. Yesterday, with Ian pushing and Jamie and Paul pulling, I stuck with the main pack of the Riviera Ride for two out of three laps*.

All three of these things were right at the edge of my current upper limits. The first draft was about twice as long as anything I’d written before. The Minuet only has one little position shift**. I needed Ian literally pushing me up Amalfi, one hand on my back as I pedaled like hell to keep up. These are things I can do, and I can probably do them well at this level of intensity and focus.

But I want to do more.

I want to lead the Riviera Ride for a lap. I want to play Bach’s cello suites (and Piazzolla’s tangos and Paganini’s Caprice and Zappa’s symphonies and whatever else there is). I want to write novels that entertain and sing. And all of these things will take work, a kind of work that I’ve never thought I could (or would want to) do before.

Here’s a secret: college was the first time I bumped up against my natural limits, and I wasn’t willing to do the work, which is the reason my diploma is from Cal Poly and not Harvey Mudd. I never got promoted at any of my video game gigs because I didn’t want to spend my off-hours learning how to crunch vectors in my head. These aren’t things to be ashamed of; they’re just facts (and, to be honest, I don’t regret the vectors-in-the-head thing. When you get down to it, learning how to Lindy hop and talk to girls are much more fulfilling).

It’s not the risk of failing that’s kept me away. It’s inertia. It takes energy to overcome, to build, to surpass those limits and build new ones. Yes, there’s going to be a point where I hit a hard wall (ie, I’m not going to ride like Contador, write like Moore, or play like Casals), but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my damnedest to find out where those walls are or how well they’re built. Before yesterday’s ride, I really thought I was giving it my all, but, no, I found I could dig a little deeper. I’d never written as much as I did on Windswept. And I was pretty sure I’d never get that tricky bit with the triplet and the hand shift. I bloody well got them, and I want to get more.

You do something, and then you stand on the edge of a cliff. Sometimes you fall, sometimes you die. And sometimes, you fly. So what else can you do but jump?

Today, that’s what I’m going to do.

* The Riviera Ride is three laps down San Vicente Boulevard to the bottom of Amalfi, then up through the canyons to Sunset and back to 26th and SV. You do this three times, and you do it fast.

** Actually, this is pretty self-explanatory: your fingering hand has to move up and down the finger board to get all sorts of higher and lower notes.

Jeff Urban, when he’s not racing with us, takes very cool photos. When he is racing with us, his wife Jen takes very cool photos. One of them took this one of me climbing to the top at Ojai last week.

Please note: by the time this photo was taken, I was about a zillion miles behind the field. I was not working this hard to catch up; I was working this hard just to finish.

This is the biggest thing I’ve ever written, and the end is barreling down on me like a freight train packed with high explosives, saxophone-playing ninjas and intelligence-enhanced dinosaurs (none of which are in this novel, but, dude, wouldn’t that rock?). It’s going to be a bit of a relief to knock this whole thing out and let it mellow, and…oh my God, it’s going to suck.

I know that I’ll be ironing out all the creases and puttying over the cracks in the second (and third, and fourth, and on and on until the nth-until-accepted) draft, but this is still scary, man. I’ve been working on this thing since July of 2007, though, really, I haven’t put my ass in the chair with regularity until April (yay, underemployment!). It’s been good and hard and frustrating and fun getting these words out and driving this train to the end of the exploding, musical, dinosaur-laden line.

But what if what I’ve written sucks? What if I can’t save it? What if I’ve been wasting my time?

The only saving grace is that I’m pretty sure everyone who’s ever written anything has felt the same way. I can’t be the only one who looks at a draft and gets the pants scared off him. I know not to put the cart before the horse. I know, I know, I know.

That doesn’t make it any easier. Fortunately, that’s why God invented pie.

…are you fucking kidding me? Honda’s Asmio robot spells our doom? Seriously?

Never mind the nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs above our heads, or that it’s suspended with the Rope of Intolerance from the Incredibly Shaky Beam of Environmental Collapse? If we’re not nice to our thinking machines, then we’re doomed? Man, frak that.

The coda was a let down. A long time ago, Rick Wadholm said in a critique session that he didn’t trust ghosts, and now I know why. Ghosts are cheating. Angels and demons and all that crap: they’re just narrative devices, and they’re a reminder that everything we’re watching is a lie. The emotional endings that Roslin and Adama and everyone earned, all undone by Ghost Baltar and Ghost Six and Our Blessed Savior Starbuck. No dice, man.

Just as well that SciFi is undergoing its metamorphosis, shedding its skin to become the marketing bastard that is SyFy. Like Derek said on Twitter, “In like a lion, out with a meh.”

I’m glad I saw this. I’m glad I saw it through to the end. And now I want nothing more than to get to work on Windswept so I can read an ending that doesn’t piss me off.

P.S. If you’ve come here through Twitter or Facebook, please keep any discussion here. We can hide spoilers behind the cut for everyone who’s still catching up.

I want every single parking sign in my neighborhood to have an RFID tag. I want them to ping my car during the hours there are parking restrictions. I want my car to ping me before the street sweepers arrive, so I can move my car and not give the City of Santa Monica my hard-earned money.

Keep your smartphone. I want smart parking.

This morning, the year of the bike got its official start. I took my new rig, Vita (named after that first ride because she has vitesse and vitality), down to Long Beach for the first in a series of criteriums, and I got spanked. Not as badly as in the first two crits I did, but enough to get pulled after sixteen minutes in a thirty minute race.

Still, I improved in a few small ways. First, I actually worked with a group of guys for the first time in a race, which is really the best part of bicycle racing. I dig time trials, yes, but getting into a paceline and hanging on for dear life is fun. I think I did my share up front, too, though I’ll have to look at what my Powertap recorded to confirm that.

Second, I didn’t feel all that freaked out in the mass start. In fact, I should have just got to the front of the line and let the rest of the peloton overtake me rather than spend sixteen minutes trying to catch up. It wasn’t as much a matter of fitness as it was nerves, and I’m working on tamping those down.

Third, and this is going to sound so incredibly stupid to everyone who’s ever raced, but, dammit, it’s not like you get a manual with your USAC license (and, if you do, where the hell did mine go?) that says, “Hey, if you want to corner more efficiently, start on the outside of the lane, cut across the inside, and pop back out on the outside.” After watching the Masters and Cat 4 races and seeing how their peloton lines made these beautiful arcs instead of hugging the curb all the way around and tapping on the brakes, I get it. Stay loose, stay in control, and let physics do its thing.

Dominguez Hills is in two weeks, and Valley of the Sun is right after that. Let’s see if I can get it together before then.

* By triumph, I mean that I finished under seventeen hours, and without throwing up.