EclecticGuy

This is my favorite chili recipe. It is great on a cold, rainy autumn day with some cornbread and a bottle of Blue Moon.

Ingredients

• 2 tbls olive oil
• 2 medium onions
• 2 tbls garlic, crushed
• 2 red bell peppers
• 1 can of corn (drained)
• 2 large cans red kidney beans
• 2 butternut squash
• 2 cans chopped plum tomatoes
• 2 tbls cumin
• 1/4 tsp allspice
• 4 tbls chili powder
• 2 tbls red pepper flakes
• 2 tbls oregano
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup red wine

Directions

Cut the necks off the squash, then cut each piece in half length-wise. Scoop out the seeds. Slice the squash in to 1/2″ wide strips lengthwise.

Peel the skin from … Continue Reading

The manuscript for my book on reel making, The Reelsmith’s Primer is finally done! I will send a copy of it to my publisher, The Whitefish Press, tomorrow. I feel really good about it and learned a lot in the process. Early on, I created a reelsmithing community and used it to solicit ideas, provide feedback, and sanity check my writing and instructions. It was a huge success!

One of my goals for the book was to make it practical for … Continue Reading

I found this 19th century treadle lathe a couple of weeks ago. I finally got the leather drive belt material so I am ready to getit up and running. Although a lot of the plating is missing, mechanically the lathe is quite functional.

There are more photos here: Boley Treadle Lathe

You should see a Google Wave here. It is configured to be a public Wave so everyone can see it and post to it.

Testing complete so I REMOVED the embedded Wave.

Richard, one of my early reel customers and as it turns out, a neighbor, fished one of our local streams yesterday (Sunday). In fact, this is the stream that this reel model is named after – the Squannacook. Richard had a successful day and sent me two “family portraits” of his reel with a nice Rainbow and with the Prince Nymph he caught it on.

My second article in PowerFibers was a collaboration with Peter Dallman. It is our story on how we got started building reels and how I met Peter. It is in the newest issue but here is a copy of just the article: Its_Reely_Pretty_Easy_PowerFibers_Issue_37

This is good timing as my book “The Reelsmith’s Primer” is nearing completion!

The current issue can always be downloaded here: http://www.powerfibers.com/html/current_issue.html

Over the summer, my publisher, Todd, called me to tell me the great news that he had been asked to create a fishing exhibit for the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site. He immediately assembled his team of craftsmen to create this display of mid 19th century fishing equipment, I am one of them. Todd calls us the Van Buren Boys and there are 5 of us all together. The National Park Service has asked us to document our efforts so I have set up a blog for the group to use. The Van Buren Boys Blog will … Continue Reading

My publisher has a fantastic fishing/history blog – Fishing for History. Every Friday he posts a Video of the Week. This week’s music video is so funny and so good I just have to share it here! It can be found on YouTube too.

Cheers!

Over the last few years I have produced a number of fly fishing related items out of personal interest. Surprisingly, I get a fair number of inquiries to purchase these items – including tenkara flies, several other fly patterns, ice fishing tip-ups, hand-made brass fishing reels, horsehair fishing lines, Walton’s Engines (aka twisting or furling engines), and custom rods – all by … Continue Reading

I pre-ordered Snow Leopard from Apple to have it delivered first thing on its release date – August 28th, 2009! Apple came through, the package arrived by 10am and was waiting for me when I got home from work. The package is a single DVD installer. Simply insert the disk and double click the installer, it does the rest (no rebooting from the DVD). It took about 55 minutes start-to-finish to install on my 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with one automated reboot during the … Continue Reading