Hawkeyes and a birthday

We spent the evening at son Ben's house where we watched the Hawkleye football game with Minnesota. This is an old rival between these schools. They have a travelling trophy called Floyd of Rosedale, that is a bronze pig.

That's right a big bronze pig, in a wooden trophy case. It has a lid and handles and weighs about a million pounds. The winning team runs over to the other side and hoists the pig above their heads. Or at least the big linemen do. It does weigh several hundreds of pounds. Iowa had it from winning the last several years, and they indeed kept it again tonight.

They beat Minnesota by 55-0. It was an unbelievable game that went totally in Iowa's favor. They seemed to not be able to do anything wrong. Sometime in sports you have one of these games, but on other occasions, you have an opposing team that has one against you.

This makes Iowa 8-4 for the season and we should get a fairly good bowl.

Also we celebrated yours truly's birthday which is tomorrow. 61 of those wonderful years. Or should I say that this is the 61st time I have had a birthday. But really it is the 62nd since your first birthday is really number zero.

I haven't got any presents, but tonight I was able to hug all four of my grand children, and that is present enough for me. And a year from now I will be able to hug five grand kids as we have another on the way.

I made crockpot spare ribs from the RV-Dreams cookbook, to take to the party. I had to modify the recipe to make them no sugar so I could eat them. Rather than make the home made BBQ sauce that the recipe calls for, I used a bottle of KC Masterpiece sugar free, mixed with a can of Ro-tel tomatos. Since it didn't have the sugar for a base to thicken the sauce, I used some corn starch to add the normal body the sauce should have.

I could have boiled off much of the liquid, but I wanted plenty of sauce, so I only boiled away half of the water, and thickened from there.

The ultimate complement is when there are none left, and that was the case except for some of the remaining sauce.


Football can be so rewarding, when it turns out your way. And such a let down when it goes against your team. Minnesota is a better team than 55-0 would indicate, so I am sitting here in amazement that it turned out that way.

This is why the BCS and the computer matching system can never replace the playing of the game. We need a tournament. Somehow!

Retired Rod