Rogueworthy

God Bless You, Mr Vonnegut

2011-11-26T11:04:00.001-08:00

Putting this here so I don't lose it again.

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

The First of Many (I Hope)

2011-04-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

With it being my day off and the weather being so beautiful, I took Heidi for a true ride on the bike today. She has been out with me before on the bike, but those were short little rides around town. They were nice and all, but I wanted to see how a long ride would go. I switched out seats on the bike and moved the top luggage attachment back to make things more comfortable a couple days ago. It had been deemed a successful adjustment already.

After I brought Heidi home from dialysis (and then some futzing around with the clutch switch) we were off. We took off through town and out Rt 6 enjoying the sun and wind, well I was at least. The wind was making her a little cold, so she put her hands inside her sleeves. We rode out to through Tiffin, Oxford and Homestead and then north into Amana. I go out to Millstream Brewery whenever I get a chance, so we stopped there. I tried their newest Brewmaster series beer, a rye helles dopplebock. It was very good. Since we had the luggage on the bike, I bought a 4 pack to bring home.

By this time Heidi was very hungry so we rode south through Homestead, South Amana and then into Marengo to check out Fat Daddy's. Unfortunately for us, and for Fat Daddy's, they are not open for lunch on weekdays however. We decided on the Landmark Restaurant in Williamsburg instead, so we took off back through Marengo and then south through Conroy (where I bought the old bike) and into Williamsburg. We almost stopped at Fireside Winery, but I know how hungry Heidi gets after dialysis, so I decided it would be better to get her some food instead. Lunch was fairly good, a patty melt for me and Heidi got a favorite of hers, a hot beef open-faced sandwich with potatoes and gravy. After a piece of fruit of the forest pie (every fruit they have in one pie I think) Heidi started looking pretty tired though.

We decided to skip the winery and just come home. I could tell Heidi was really tired because she agreed to come home on the interstate, which kinda scares her on the bike. The wind was a little stronger on such an open road, but I just took it easy, keeping it at about 65-70, and just let traffic pass us. It was an easy 25 miles home. Once we got home, Heidi managed to take the dog for a short walk before falling asleep in the easy chair.

Thank you hon for an excellent day, and I hope a glimpse of some of what we will be doing once the kids are out of the house. Next time I will try to get out on a Tuesday so Heidi isn't so wiped out from dialysis though. That way we can leave earlier and trek out further. Now I think we may be taking Syd to see Soul Surfer, which is alright by me too.

Hit Somebody

2011-03-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

This is not mine. This is Kevin Smith's from here. It is part of a scene he is writing for Hit Somebody. (The part of Blue Jay is being written with John Goodman in mind.) I'm posting it in case it does not make the final film because I think it deserves to be preserved. So, much like the case with the American Gods 'I believe' post, it may not be roguish but it is highly quotable:

BLUE JAY (CONT’D)
When you’re an adult, life’s not very fun anymore, kid. They expect productivity. And the pressure that comes with expectation of any kind - the stress and the anger and the jealousy…
Over a lifetime?
(mimes a heart attack; then)
But that doesn’t happen to hockey players. Know why?

Buddy shakes his head. Blue Jay points to the barn.

BLUE JAY (CONT’D)
Hockey players are allowed to beat people up.

Buddy’s taken back by this. Blue Jay nods.

BLUE JAY (CONT’D)
They take out their troubles on the ice. They take it out on the puck, or some sumbitch ain’t got his head up. For two minutes, all that stuff us mere mortals gotta deal with as thinking organisms on a cold rock in space that doesn’t care whether we hang on or spin off into the Milky Way? The stuff most people call “real life”? For two minutes , a hockey player gets to skate it all away. You can’t drop gloves on life, kid - but in The Game? They’ll cheer you if you do. Because they all know what a struggle… what a fight life can be. And when they see you take a swing - with your stick or a good right hook - they feel like you’re taking a swing for them. And lots of people will tell you that ain’t right. But brother?,
(whispers)
There ain’t nothin’ righter.
Blue Jay winks and smiles widely at Buddy.

Well said... ttfn

Maibock, or Long time, no post

2011-03-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

My blogging tends to wax and wane with my brewing, and since I am blogging I must have started brewing. Yesterday was my first brew day of 2011. With the nicer weather I got out on the deck and got the brewing equipment all set up. (It occurs to me just now as I am writing that I forgot to empty the spent grains from my mash tun, dammit!)

It was a day of firsts as a matter of fact. I brewed my first lager yesterday. I am not a very big lager fan. I usually prefer ales, but I really like maibocks. A maibock is a helles lager brewed to bock strength. So it's as strong as traditional bock but is lighter in color and with more hop presence. It is a fairly recent development compared to other styles of bock beers, frequently associated with springtime and the month of May. Color can range from deep gold to light amber with alcohol content ranges from 6.3% to 7.4% by volume. The flavor is typically less malty than a traditional bock, with a mild spicy or peppery quality from the hops, increased carbonation and alcohol content.

My grist bill was simple with 13# of pilsner malt and .5# of CaraHell malt. In brewing this I did a step mash for the first time. I did a 20 minute protein rest at ~122°, a 30 minute beta amylase rest at ~148° and a 30 minute alpha amylase rest at ~155°. I skipped the mashout because I briefly considered topping the mash with more malt and doing a Belgian tripel as well, but changed my mind as it was getting later in the day. I added 1# of rice hulls to avoid a stuck sparge and it's good that I did because my ghetto/DIY grain mill still grinds too fine. I got about 70% efficiency but I used a bit more water than I should have with the step mashes. This means I came in about 5 gravity points lower than I had planned, so a long boil and a half pound of DME got me up to 1.062, just a tiny bit lower than I planned. This should put it at about 6.3% ABV, so it will still be within the specs for the style.

I did a 90 minute boil as you should when using pilsner malt. I added 5 drops of Fermcap-S at the start to help avoid boil overs. It did pretty good until I walked away with about 10 minutes left to get the carboy ready. A tiny boil over happened as soon as I turned my back. Hops additions were fairly simple. I used 1 oz. Mt Hood (5.2 AA) for the bittering charge for 60 minutes. I used 1 oz. Hersbrucker (3.5 AA) for aroma and flavor additions for 30 and 15 minutes each. I also added Irish moss at 15 minutes remaining to help with clarity. Cooling went quickly, getting it down to 75° within 25 minutes with my immersion chiller. I then transferred to the carboy and stuck it in my fermentation fridge that has a temp controller set at 54° (thanks for the controller for Xmas mom!) for final cooling over night.

This afternoon it was at a nice 55° so I pitched 3 packets of Saflager 23 dry yeast and shook the hell out of it to aerate it. Hopefully it will be bubbling nicely in the morning. When it's done in about 6 weeks I plan to keg it up. In the meantime I have 7# of pilsner malt and am itching to get a Belgian ale going as well. I think I need a 2nd keg...

Change of Seasons

2010-10-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

Fall has turned pretty hard here. When I woke up and it was below freezing this morning. I'm glad we took Yomoma (the pickup truck) in to the shop yesterday. I don't feel like riding the bike in this cold. Over the last couple weeks we have done some other things to get ready for the winter.

We had the fall trash amnesty day at the beginning of the month. A lot of crap got thrown out. There was such a huge pile of stuff that our neighbors kept asking if we were moving. I explained that it was a biannual chance to throw away anything big and not pay extra for it, so a few of them went to hurriedly do the same. The week after that I cleaned out the garage, which took a whole day. Of course I came across a number of items I wish I had thrown out the week before. I will try to reverse that order in the spring.

With the broken (post-flood, free) couch thrown out, we rearranged the living room with chairs instead of a couch. We already had one recliner, so I brought up the recliner that was down in Ian's room and brought down the bent-wood chair from our room. We even found a tv tray, so the old folks living room effect is complete.

I took down the hops and cleaned up the back yard some. The English hops got a lot of root system developed this year, but no yield to speak of, though I could have gotten maybe a half ounce of Goldings if they hadn't have grown in with the Cascades. The bigger root system will be good I hope for when I transplant them to the south side of the garage in the spring. Ian is planning to have a little get together out by the hops beds with the fire pit and some friends now that it is clear.

With the hops down, the birdfeeders went back up. It took about a week but there is much activity out there now. At the birdfeeders this morning: house and gold finches, cardinals, dark-eyed juncos, chickadees, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers, and of course the rats with wings - house sparrows. Commonly we have mourning doves and once in while a hairy woodpecker. Some new ones have stopped by recently though, the carolina wren (that peachy colored bird as Heidi calls it) and the tufted titmouse. It's pretty relaxing to sit here and watch the birds out on the deck.

I made up a couple of beers, one for the season and one just to experiment a bit. I made a spiced pumpkin ale for the holidays. It's a bigger beer with a hefty dose of pumpkin and spice to it as well as some dark brown sugar to round it out some. I just moved that into the fridge to cold crash it before I bottle it next week. The other is a cream ale that I made using the same recipe as the one that I won at the state fair with, except I substituted 2 pounds of air popped popcorn in place of some of the malted barley. I am pretty excited to see how this comes out. Once I get some room in the fridge after these two are done, I think it is time to try a lager and a belgian beer. I have 20 pounds of pilsner malt standing by for those.

Heidi seems to be doing well with dialysis. She's gotten more accustomed to the early mornings, meaning I'm not the one waking her up anymore. She still get terrible muscle cramps on the days she does dialysis. Hopefully some medicine changes will help with that. She does have more energy and seems to be more of herself lately. It is really good to see her eyes brighter and her smiling more than she has in a long time. Next week is her transplant reevaluation, so here's hoping it all goes well.

Syd is busy with Girls on the Run and next week hockey will start back up. She also has started going to a church group called Awana Club. She really seems to enjoy it. Ian is still job searching and gearing up for driver's ed. He went to school as Silent Bob today. Heidi straightened his hair last night and he looked so different. We will be leaving soon to bring Syd her gangster girl costume and cupcakes for the class. It's kinda sad that this is the last elementary Halloween party (or the politically correct termed Autumn Parade) that we will have with our kids. They are getting so much older.

Anyways, that's all for now I think, except I found a Quotable Rogue:

"A friend to the locals who dabbled in crime.
He'd give you a job and he'd give you his time.
He wasn't a crook, but he couldn't be conned.
John knew the difference between right and wrong."
- Ken Casey, Dropkick Murphys - Boys on the Docks

P.S. Two things:

All Hallow's Read, a cool idea, especially for kids,

Also there is a Live Benefit Concert for Kai Patterson-Stark a freshman cheerleader at West High that suffered a spinal stroke on September 9th leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. After four weeks in the hospital and rehabilitation, she has returned home, but has a long road ahead of her.

Where does the time go?

2010-09-13T07:10:00.001-07:00

Seventeen years ago today I was eagerly awaiting the birth of my son. I was just getting off of weekend duty (the midwatch no less) on Old Ironsides. I was on the quarterdeck and got the call that the doctors could not wait any longer, they had to do an emergency C-section before my wife's kidneys completely shut down. Within 20 minutes I was signed out on leave and flying down Storrow Drive at literally 90 miles an hour.

When I got to the hospital I was given some scrubs by a nurse and shown to a room to change in. She said they would be back to get me as soon as they were ready for me. I changed very quickly and sat down to wait. I was asleep within 10 minutes. (Did I mention that I had the midwatch the night before?) In their haste to get my son out, the doctors and nurses forgot about me until they were well underway. They only remembered after my wife asked where I was. They quickly came and woke me up, and brought me into the operating room.

I don't think I can adequately describe the feeling of walking in and seeing my wife's insides tied up and held on top of her chest. I had a very primal urge to slug the doctors for doing such a profane thing to my wife. However I went to her side and held her hand as the doctors wrestled with my son trying to get him out. My wife was not taking the whole thing very well and really started yelling in pain. The anesthesiologist attempted to be helpful. He first tried to calm her by comparing what the doctors were doing to playing greased watermelon. (For you midwest folks, this is a rugby-like game played in the water with a watermelon that is greased up with Crisco. I hear it is similar to a greased pig contest, though not as dirty.) This analogy had the opposite effect on my wife however. Her eyes went wide, and she started screaming in earnest. At this point the anesthesiologist pulled out his last trick in his arsenal and gassed my wife with nitrous. This muffled her screeching fairly effectively.

I try to tell this with some humor now because at the time it was terrifying. I am sleep deprived and in a room with my wife opened up. Her blood is pooled on the floor. She is screaming in pain, and I am powerless to help her. All I can do is pray that she is going to be okay, and I have never been much of a praying man. At this point my son is still an abstract thought.

Finally they pull him out and I see him taken over to a separate table. I tell my wife but she is still getting gassed at this point. He is here, but it doesn't seem real yet. After a few minutes they bring him over and put him in my arms. The ever helpful anesthesiologist stops gassing my wife and takes a snapshot of me all bleary eyed as I try not cry looking down at this small bundle in my arms. This is when reality crashes down and I realize I am a father. All my hopes and fears for my wife are multiplied now by my hopes and worries about my son. He has these big bright blotches on his head and body. My wife later calls them angel kisses, but being young and a man I have no clue what that means. I am just hoping they are benign. He is huge, swollen with water weight from my wife's gestational diabetes, but absolutely beautiful.

It seems like just yesterday to me right now. We have gone through a lot with him, but 17 years has flown by. This is his last birthday with us as a child. This is really stinging me now. I hope I have been at least half the father I hoped and tried to be. You are a great kid Ian Jacob. You have shown a lot of character that I never had at your age. Though I will miss my little fishing buddy, I look forward to you becoming a great man. Happy 17th Ian Jacob

Parti-gyle

2010-06-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to doing the parti-gyle I had planned to do last November. Originally I had planned to make a porter and a mild. I have had some rye malt and flaked rye sitting around for a while now as well though. After having a rye porter by Peace Tree Brewing here in Iowa it really motivated me to get on this project again but with a rye twist. With this in mind I set out to make a rye porter and a rye pale ale.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, we'll see when it is finished) I lost count while I was weighing out the Maris Otter, so I ended up with 2 extra pounds of grain. I also got amazing efficiency from a very fine grind so the porter ended up becoming an imperial porter. This means instead of being 5-6% ABV as I planned, it will end up 8-9%. My only real worry with this is that I may not have enough hops bitterness to offset the maltiness of the beer. We'll see how it works out. This was just the first of many errors though.

This was my first brew in my mash tun in over a year. I have been doing a lot of brew-in-a-bag sessions where there is no worry about doing a sparge. I also had a very fine grind and rye malt itself tends to pack pretty tight, so the cards were stacked against me getting it to lauter or rinse effectively. The grains packed down tight forming what brewers dreadfully know as a stuck sparge. I had to dig down into the grain bed to allow for the sugary goodness to reach the drain. This is not ideal since it can cause lots of particles to pass through into the boil. Over all though I was happy with how the wort (sugary tea-like mixture that beer is made from) tasted so I pressed on.

In order to make a big dark beer and a smaller lighter colored beer from the same batch of grain, all the dark grains had to be steeped separately after I had gotten the first run off collected. I added a muslin bag with all my dark malts to the kettle with my first runnings to steep while I started the second mash for the smaller beer. I got busy with milling a few extra pounds of grain for this second run and went and just kicked the burner on full blast under my boil kettle. I forgot however that the bag of dark malts was still in the kettle. Luckily I went to stir it just before it got up to a boil. I just started thinking 'what the heck is this big thing at the bottom of my kettle?' and almost simultaneously answered, 'damn, the steeping grains are still in there!' I managed to pick the bag out and continue on without too much damage I hope, again.

Speaking of damage, I tried something I have not done since my first 2 batches. I used Coralville tap water for this batch. I will disclaim this however to say that I did boil it all first to drive off the chlorine in the water. I was worried about this enough already before I noticed a lot of precipitate falling out of the water and a bit of a hard water film that was formed by this. I decided to take Charlie Papazian's advice: Relax, don't worry, have a home brew. These are works to live by.

The boil for the big dark beer went very smoothly, and I got it started cooling with my immersion chiller as I tinkered around with my now re-stuck sparge on my second mash, so the porter was cooled to 80 degrees long before I was ready to mess with it. I put the second beer on to boil as I brought the first inside to transfer to it's fermenter. I set the kettle on the table with the carboy and funnel under the kettle's spigot, opened it up and just let it run while I went to check on the second batch on the deck. By the time I came back in the kettle was empty. I had forgotten the filter that goes into the funnel to keep all the hops and other debris from getting into the fermenter. I then had to sanitize a third fermenter and decant the five gallons off all this debris, losing about a half gallon of beer or so in the process.

The second beer's boil went better than the first even, and it was transferred to the fermenter with no issues. I did however manage to drop a hydrometer into the fermenter with the second beer, so there it will stay until the beer is done. Not a big issue, as I have a backup hydrometer, but it meant I could not shake it up to get a real good aeration on that one prior to pitching yeast. To make up for this I decided to do a quazi-open fermentation on both beers by just covering the mouth of the bottles with aluminum foil so air can move in and out, but particles won't fall in. This may end up being a mistake in itself, but so far so good. As a matter of fact, I checked them both tonight and I have a nice krausen (yeasty cake on top of the beer) on both beers.

Lots of lessons learned here, like using rice hulls if you even suspect that there may be a stuck sparge. I will say a 6 hour brew day for double the output was a very good benefit to the parti-gyle. A second beer from only 3 pound of additional grain was another huge benefit as well. I am very curious to see how these beers turn out. I am going to order an extra tag for my state fair entries just in case they do turn out good. Overall if I am doing a bigger beer, I think a parti-gyle would be a frugal opportunity for a second beer. It just takes more planning. Brew-in-a-bag still seems to be the way to go if I am just making a smaller non-lagers, for me at least.

Rye Porter:
OG:1.078
Grain/Extract/Sugar
12.00 lbs. Pale Malt(2-row)
1.00 lbs. Rye Malt
0.75 lbs. Crystal 20L
1.00 lbs. Flaked Rye
0.75 lbs. Special B Malt
2.00 lbs. Munich Malt(6-row)
0.50 lbs. Black Malt
0.50 lbs. Black Patent Malt

Hops

1.00 oz. Goldings - E.K. 5 min.
1.00 oz. Goldings - E.K. 40 min.
1.00 oz. Northern Brewer 60 min.

Rye Pale Ale
OG: 1.037

added 3 lbs Maris Otter

Hops

1.00 oz. Fuggle Pellet 4.00 3.3 5 min.
1.00 oz. Willamette Pellet 4.90 24.1 60 min.

For the Birds

2010-05-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

It's been a crappy week or so. Instead of rehashing the crap I am going to do something completely different for this blog post.

We have a couple bird feeders out on the deck. Syd and I enjoy watching the birds that come into the yard. Lately Heidi has taken to trying to get good pictures of the birds at the bird feeder.

Below is a list of what we've seen in the yard so far this year:

Mourning Dove, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Pileated Woodpecker, Blue Jay, American Crow, Black-capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, American Robin, Cedar Waxwing, House Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, Northern Cardinal, Indigo Bunting, Common Grackle, House Finch, American Goldfinch

Those are the ones that are around often enough to identify. The cardinals and the goldfinches are the most numerous at the feeders, but the house finches are starting to come around more and more. The indigo bunting and northern flicker are the most striking and most rare. We switched out our birdseed so the damn flying rats (otherwise known as house sparrows) would not come around anymore.

There is something very relaxing about coming home, putting my feet up as I sit down with a homebrew and watch and listen to the birds. In fact I think that is how I will spend as much of this rainy day off as possible.

ttfn

For Boston

2010-05-11T22:19:00.000-07:00

Good job to the Celts, now lets just have the Bruins finish off the Flyers!

For Boston, for Boston,
we sing our proud refrain
for Boston, for Boston
'tis wisdom's earthly fane
for here are all one
and our hearts are true
and the towers on the heights
reach the heavens own blue.
for Boston, for Boston
'til the echoes ring again

For Boston, for Boston
thy glory is our own
for Boston, for Boston
'tis here that truth is known
and ever with a right
shall our heirs be found
'til time shall be no more
and thy work is crowned
for Boston, for Boston
thy glory is our own

Suggestions for the New Brewer

2010-05-10T17:49:00.000-07:00

I recently was asked for some advice about starting brewing so I figured I would post it here for future reference.

In my opinion the best book period for starting out is The Complete Joy of Homebrewing (third edition) by Charlie Papazian. He has a really relaxed point of view and walks you through everything from step one. This is where I learned the basics.

For a more scientific approach there is How to Brew by John Palmer. The first edition of his book is online for free at howtobrew.com

Next up is Basicbrewing.com. They have a ton of audio and video podcasts for free about different aspects of brewing. They also sell an introductory video that is okay.

As far as suppliers, if you have a local homebrew shop, I strongly suggest you support them if you need to buy stuff. (Look at http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/pages/directories/find-a-supply-shop for what shops are in your state.) You can start off cheap by using bucket fermenters and enamel pots if you don't have anything you can use already. Both of the books above will help you figure out what you need. If you do not have a local shop, northernbrewer.com has flat rate shipping for most non bulky items. Midwestsupplies.com has good prices but no flat rate shipping. Finally morebeer.com is pretty good as well.

My suggestion is to start off with an extract kit for a beer style you like (make an ale though and stay away from lagers at first) and see how that goes. Two other tips: be patient and cool your wort down to at least 70F if not 65F before adding the yeast, and have a way to keep your fermenter from getting too warm or cold, keep it around 65-70.

Hopefully that gives you a good jumping off point.

Oatmeal Cookie... Beer

2010-04-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

Heidi has been asking about an oatmeal cookie beer ever since we heard about one on a podcast. Today I got around to making this one for her, not that she will end up drinking much of it, LOL.

In order to brew this up though I had to get the blonde ale off the cal ale yeast in the fermenter. At 8:30 this morning I started bottling up that batch. I was very pleased with how my sample tasted. I ended up with 52 bottles of 5% ABV blond ale and a very nice cake of yeast.

I had done a little research, formulated a recipe and then figured out workarounds for what I had onhand. So I came up with this recipe:

7# Maris Otter
.5# Crystal 90
.5# Special B
.5# Biscuit Malt
1# Rolled Oats toasted at 300F
1# Brown Sugar

.5 oz Spalt
.25 oz Perle

I was going to do a traditional mash for this one. Once I looked at how fine my grind was, I was worried about getting a stuck sparge though, so I broke out my brewing bag and did a brew in a bag session.

I must be getting better at this because I got around 85% efficiency this time from my mash. I did go lower with the temperature and tried to mash between 150F and 153F. I don't know my exact temp though because I have broken my good thermometer.

Everything was going good until about half way through the mash. This is when I realized I had not bought any hops for this brew. I started rummaging through my brew box and found the hops I listed above. They are left over from the hefeweisen I brewed, last summer that is. I am not looking for a lot of hops character, just a little bittering, so hopefully it will work out well. It tasted pretty good before I pitched the yeast. I was originally at 1.060 so I added some water to bring the OG down to 1.054. After I pitched the yeast slurry it was 1.050. I hope the lower temperature will make this ferment out a bit more than my last two brews did.

It was a very good day. I started at 8:30 bottling and finished cleaning everything up at 15:00. That makes it only 6.5 hours for everything and about 3/4 the time it normally takes me to do both operations. Yehaw.

Blonde Ale

2010-04-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

I did another brew in a bag session today. This time it was a blonde ale that I made. Overall I am happy with the process, but I have decided that my kettles are too small and my boil is too vigorous perhaps for this method, so I will use my mash/lauter tun on my next brew day.

Recipe:

5 gallon batch
6 gallon mash

9# Maris Otter
1# Cara-pils
.75# Wheat Malt

1oz EKG @ 60min
~.5oz home grown cascade @10 minutes

After the mash there was under 5 gallons in the brewpot, so I added enough water to get back up to 6-6.5 gallons. This dropped my gravity too low, so I threw in .5# of pilsner DME.

After the boil I had about 4.5 gallons of wort, so once again I added some water, this took me from 1.051 to 1.048. Not too bad, but I was gunning for 1.054. I think I will get some foam control too so I can start my boil closer to 7 gallons from now on. I had one small boil over today that wasted some wort...

My starter looked and smelled great, so I threw the whole thing in to the fermenter and it is down in the basement now and should be fermenting at around 63F.

I really like the time savings that brew in a bag offers, but I just do not have a big enough set up to effectively brew above 1.050 with this method. Since most of my beers tend to run 1.050-1.065 I think I will go back to my cooler mash tun.

I have had the heather ale in the fridge in the garage cold-crashing for the last day and a half and look forward to bottling it tomorrow.

ttfn

April Fool's Day

2010-04-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

My son picked today to miss the bus, so I got up and drove him to school. Since I was out and about early and it is payday, I decided to get my errands run early this morning. By the time I got back home it was over an hour from when I left.

Heidi was wondering what took me so long at the school. I grumbled a bit and then started into a story about how I had been pulled over by the police. I told her that when they looked up my address that the database had our old neighbor that was arrested a few weeks ago as our address and had alerted them that it was a suspected drug activity area and that they had detained me for suspected drug activity and I had to wait while they searched my truck from top to bottom. Then they had let me go after they found nothing. She was looking at me with a very worried look on her face and before she could ask too many questions I told her, "Happy April Fool's Day hon."

Judging by her comments I am apparently still an asshole.

Happy April Fool's Day to you all.

Brewing notes to follow later.

Quotable Rogue:

“There must be some kind of way out of here,”
Said the joker to the thief.
- Bob Dylan

BIAB Heather Ale and Mead Too!

2010-03-19T18:09:00.000-07:00

Happiness is 5 gallons of ale and 10 gallons of mead fermenting in my basement...

After being stumped and stopped at every turn yesterday, I had a great thought while out buying water for brewing last night. I picked up a bag to do brew-in-a-bag. Brew in a bag is a pretty neat thing that the Aussie home brewing community came up with as a super cheap way to do all grain brewing. For 5 bucks you can buy a bag big enough to line your boil kettle. Then you just mash your grain in place and lift out the bag and squeeze out any remaining water/wort from the grains.

At 10AM I put the bag inside my kettle and started up the flame. At 10:57 I started the mash. I mashed at 155F for 60 minutes. I had a moment of clarity and wrapped the kettle with the electric blanket, so I only had to reheat it once at 45 minutes in, and I probably could have skipped that.

While I was setting up the mash, I heated up the honey for my second batch of mead. While I was heating up the mash to mash out temp, I racked my first batch of mead over to secondary and put 4 gallons of water and 4 quarts of honey on top of the leftover yeast. Hopefully this will be a nice low cost, low maintenance method for making a second batch. My gravity on this batch is pretty low, 1.070, so will be adding fruit to this at some point to help boost it up.

At 1:04 the boil started rolling and I added an ounce of UK Golding hops and an ounce of heather tips. I didn't have much of a problem with boil overs thanks to a little bit of breeze. AT 15 minutes left I added irish moss and the immersion chiller to sanitize it. At less than 5 minutes I added the remaining ounce of heather tips. It all went along pretty well. After flame out I started the water running through the chiller. It only took 20 minutes to cool from boiling to 65F.

One thing I seriously underestimated was how much the heather would reconstitute in the boil. The bottom 2-3 inches of the kettle was all hop debris, heather tips and trub. It took forever to run the wort into my carboy because both the spigot on my kettle and my siphon kept getting clogged. In the end I came in 9 points short of what I was shooting for at 1.041. This should still net around a 5% ABV beer.

Three things jump out as lessons learned. Use a hop bag with heather tips, they are like little wort sponges; Crush grains finely for BIAB, it should really help with efficiency; Do not attempt to make a mead in the middle of brewing a beer.

I started at heating strike water at 10AM and I was done with cleanup by 3:15. That makes a 6 hour brew day, which is about normal for me. I did basically 2 brews in that time however. I like the brew in a bag method, but I still want to try a parti-gyle in my 10 gallon mash tun cooler.

Pics:

The bag with the grain inside a basket hanging over the kettle.

Me squeezing the grains

Mixing the mead

Brewing Issues and 1st Heather Ale

2010-03-18T14:48:00.000-07:00

One function of this blog is to be a sort of brew log for me. That's where this post is coming from. I was planning a big parti-gyle brew today, but that has gone by the wayside as I will explain below. I instead am going to make a heather ale tomorrow.

Recipe:

8lbs Maris Otter
.5lb Biscuit Malt
1lb Crystal 80L

1 oz old EKG hops at 60 min
1 oz heather tips at 60 min

1.5 oz heather tips between 5 min and flame out.

WLP001 Cal Ale yeast

Mash notes:
3 gal mash
5.5 gal sparge
~6.75 gal for start of boil
~5.2 gal to fermenter

I am going for a very clean beer, few esters, so I can see just what the heather does. It will have a nice malty/caramel character somewhat similar to a Scottish 80 shilling hopefully. I may even cut back on the EKG hops. They are old so there is not much of a bitterring charge to them. We'll see.

As for my attempted brew day today...

I got a corona style grain mill so I would be able to brew whenever I wanted. Unfortunately my hand-held drill that I was planning to power my ghetto-wonderful grain mill that I built is not powerful enough. So not only did I have to alter my monstrosity to finish it by hand, I also now cannot stir up the honey and water that I had planned to put on the yeast from my mead to get a second batch going. (My aeration stir paddles run off my drill too, and it is currently recharging.) The moral of this story is that you should buy a good drill. The good news is that it looks like I got a good crush out of the set up. That at least is encouraging.

So I am going to finish off my specialty grains here in a second and figure out how much water I will need for tomorrow, probably around 13 gallons if I tackle the mead racking too. Anyways, wish me luck.

ttfn

Quick Hits

2010-03-09T06:28:00.000-08:00

Just posting a couple quick things.

I tested the mead I made a month ago yesterday. I have completed fermentation in one month. I am very happy about this. It started off with a specific gravity of 1.083 and was at 1.000 when I tested it. This makes it right at 11% ABV. I will rack it off the lees and let it age for a few months now. This will give the yeast that are still in suspension time to finish off the acetaldehyde to tame the green apple taste and mellow the alcohol taste since it is kinda hot right now. I think I may put half of it on fruit too, but finding quality fruit at this time of year is tough, so I may have to wait on that.

Hockey season is over. Syd's team won their final game. I missed it due to work, but I hear she had a good clear out during the game. All that is left is the year end banquet and the game against the parents, which I will not be participating in. Syd has been talking about playing softball, so we'll see if we can't get her into a league.

Ian is still excited for the choir trip. We are in a holding pattern pretty much until he leaves for DC. Once he gets back his priority (other than his grades) will be finding a job. I have not informed him of this yet however, LOL.

I need to sit down and pull the video off the camera that I have of Ian's choir and Syd's hockey. It just so tedious I have not been able to motivate myself to do it yet.

The soda making was a pretty good experience. We put 8 two liter bottles of cherry soda and 2 two liter bottles of grape soda into the fridge in the garage. Should be ready to try next week.

I saw this quotable rogue and am posting it here to save it, though I think I may already have it somewhere:

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
- Honore de Balzac

ttfn

20 questions

2010-03-05T08:37:00.000-08:00

Just a little test that I want to save. I will do more with it later.

I don't like being told what to do by people who are less capable than I am.
I like challenging myself.
I like to win.
I like being my own boss.
I always look for new and better ways to do things.
I like to question conventional wisdom.
I like to get people together in order to get things done.
People get excited by my ideas.
I am rarely satisfied or complacent.
I can't sit still.
I can usually work my way out of a difficult situation.
I would rather fail at my own thing than succeed at someone else's.
Whenever there is a problem, I am ready to jump right in.
I think old dogs can learn — even invent — new tricks.
Members of my family run their own businesses.
I have friends who run their own businesses.
I worked after school and during vacations when I was growing up.
I get an adrenaline rush from selling things.
I am exhilarated by achieving results.

Bravery

2010-02-18T08:35:00.001-08:00

It has been quite a while since my last blog, and a lot has happened for the Toye household.

I am not going to get into particulars on my wife's declining health because that is more a matter for her to disclose as she chooses. I will say that we have had a lot of bad news sprinkled with a little chance of good things happening for her. She has been more active in taking care of herself lately though, and that makes me happier. Also, I want to urge everyone (including all 5 of you that read this blog) to become organ donors and to make sure your family knows about your wishes in this regard.

Syd continues to play well and enjoy hockey. They have a record of 12-2-1 I believe right now. They have won both tournaments they have been in so far, and will be receiving a sportsmanship medal for their outstanding display of sportsmanship during the 2010 Winter Iowa Games. Syd is still clearly behind the other players on her team as far as her skills development goes, but she continues to gain ground on them. As long as she is having fun and continues to improve, I am happy.

Ian recently had his Masterworks concert. This year it was Requiem. It was an amazing performance. I am glad he has stuck with choir as it is about the only extracurricular activity he does. He is excited for the choir trip to Washington, DC in April. I am glad he is going to get to go out there 'on his own' so to speak. Both Heidi and I went to DC in High School and I think it will be good for him to see there is more to the world than Iowa and New England.

I was reading Amanda Palmer's blog and a passage in there really touched a nerve with me, so I wanted to put it here so I could remember it, not so much for myself, but for when my kids ask me such things:

i know a lot of younger people read this blog and i have constant contact with teenagers who are always asking me:
“how do i get brave?”

a lot of that answer lies in situations like these.
when you are forced to sit down, reckon with a situation, listen to people screaming that they hate you, take stock of what you’ve done, look everyone in the eye, tell them what your intentions are, and know that they will either hear and understand you or they will walk away.

and then your job is to not run after them.
your job is to stay calm. your job is continue on with your work.
and the hardest thing, sometimes, is to continue on with your work in a spirit of love, without letting other people’s hate and anger getting the best of you, and turning you into bitter, angry and jaded fuck.

it’s so easy to be afraid. to do nothing. to not make your art, to not follow your calling, your passion, your impulses, to not take any risks for fear of people cutting you down and misunderstanding you.
most people are CONTROLLED by fear, because they’re convinced they’ll do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, write the wrong thing, sing the wrong thing.
those fears are founded. you can see that, here, now.
shit happens, you can upset people.

and you need to do your work anyway, because the world needs you to.

that, i think, is how you get brave.

I know from past NaNoWriMo atempts I catch myself starting to shy away from areas that the writing was taking me because of how I imagined they would be perceived, especially by those who know me. I think that this kind of courage is a great deal of what separates an artist from a craftsman. Thank you Amanda Palmer.

(For the record, I am one of the Neil fans. I am in the 'very happy for the both of them' camp however.)

I have started in on 2010's brewing. Last week I made a couple starters for a beer I had hoped to make this week. Since I have not milled any grain nor purchased hops, it looks like this waits until next week. I did however brew up 5 gallons of dry to medium mead at the same time. Yesterday I did a little test on the mead. About a third of the sugars have been fermented so far, making it 3.6% ABV right now. It tasted very very good, even with the strong acetaldehyde (green applish solventish) taste from the early fermentation activity. I am very hopeful for this since I have the materials to make another batch as soon as I get this out of primary.

That's all for now...

13 Simple Rules for Hockey Parents Everywhere

2009-12-16T18:03:00.000-08:00

This is not mine. I got in an email today and am sharing it with you all

My 13 simple rules for hockey parents everywhere

By John Buccigross
ESPN.com

1. Under no circumstances will hockey practice ever be cancelled. Ever. Even on days when school is cancelled, practice is still on. A game may be cancelled due to inclement weather because of travel concerns for the visiting team, but it would have to rain razor blades and bocce balls to cancel hockey practice at your local rink. It's good karma to respect the game.

2. Hockey is an emotional game and your child has the attention span of a chipmunk on NyQuil. The hockey coach will yell a bit during practice; he might even yell at your precious little Sparky. As long as there is teaching involved and not humiliation, it will be good for your child to be taught the right way, with emphasis.

3. Hockey is a very, very, very, very difficult game to play. You are probably terrible at it. It takes high skill and lots of courage, so lay off your kid. Don't berate them. Be patient and encourage them to play. Some kids need more time to learn how to ride the bike, but, in the end, everyone rides a bike about the same way.

Your kids are probably anywhere from age 4-8 when they first take up hockey. They will not get a call from Boston University coach Jack Parker or receive Christmas cards from the Colorado Avalanche's director of scouting. Don't berate them. Demand punctuality and unselfishness for practice and games. That's it. Passion is in someone, or it isn't. One can't implant passion in their child. My primary motive in letting my kids play hockey is exercise, physical fitness and the development of lower-body and core strength that will one day land them on a VH1 reality show that will pay off their student loans or my second mortgage.

4. Actually, I do demand two things from my 10-year-old Squirt, Jackson. Prior to every practice or game, as he turns down AC/DC's "Big Jack," gets out of the car and makes his way to the trunk to haul his hockey bag inside a cold, Connecticut rink, I say, "Jack, be the hardest, most creative and grittiest worker ... and be the one having the most fun." That might be four things, but you know what I mean.

5. Your kids should be dressing themselves and tying their own skates by their second year of Squirt. Jack is 67 pounds with 0 percent body fat and arms of linguini, and he can put on, take off and tie his own skates. If he can, anyone can. I don't go in the locker room anymore. Thank goodness; it stinks in there.

6. Do not fret over penalties not called during games and don't waste long-term heart power screaming at the referees. My observational research reveals the power-play percentage for every Mite hockey game ever played is .0000089 percent; for Squirts, .071 percent. I prefer referees to call zero penalties.

7. Yell like crazy during the game. Say whatever you want. Scream every kind of inane instruction you want to your kids. They can't hear you. In the car ride home, ask them if they had fun and gently promote creativity and competiveness, but only after you take them to Denny's for a Junior Grand Slam breakfast or 7-Eleven for a Slurpee. Having a warm breakfast after an early morning weekend game will become one of your most syrupy sweet memories.

8. Whenever possible, trade in your kids' ice skates and buy used skates, especially during those growing years and even if you can afford to buy new skates every six months. Your kids don't need $180 skates and a $100 stick no matter what your tax bracket is. They will not make them better players.
9. Missing practice (like we stated above) or games is akin to an Irish Catholic missing Mass in 1942. We take attendance at hockey games very seriously. Last week, the Islanders' Brendan Witt was hit by an SUV in Philadelphia. Witt got up off the pavement and walked to Starbucks for a coffee, and then later played against the Flyers that night. Let me repeat that: BRENDAN WITT WAS HIT BY AN SUV ... AND PLAYED THAT NIGHT! Re-read that sentence 56 times a night to your child when they have a case of the sniffles and want to stay home to watch an "iCarly" marathon. By, the way Philadelphia police cited Witt for two minutes in jail for obstruction. Witt will appeal.

10. Teach your kids not to celebrate too much after a goal if your team is winning or losing by a lot. And by all means, tell them celebrate with the team. After they score, tell them not to skate away from their teammates like soccer players. Find the person who passed you the puck and tell him or her, "Great pass." We have immediate group hugs in hockey following a short, instinctive reaction from the goal scorer. I am proud of my boy for a lot of things, but I am most proud at how excited he gets when a teammate scores a goal. He is Alex Ovechkin in this regard.
11. There is no such thing as running up the score in hockey. This is understood at every level. It's very difficult to score goals and unexplainably exhilarating when one does. Now, if we get to 14-1, we may want to take our foot off the gas a tad.

12. Unless their femur is broken in 16 places, Mites or Squirts should not lie on the ice after a fall on the ice or against the boards. Attempt to get up as quickly as one can and slowly skate to the bench.

13. Do not offer cash for goals. This has no upside. Passion and love and drive cannot be taught or bought. I do believe a certain measure of toughness and grit can be slowly encouraged and eventually taught. Encourage your kid to block shots and to battle hard in the corners. It will serve them well in life.

Enjoy the rink. Keep it fun, keep it in perspective and enjoy the madness. In this digital world of electronics, you may find hockey to be the most human endeavor you partake in. Cell phones run on batteries. Hockey players run on blood. Blood is warmer. Welcome.

Happy Guy Fawkes Night

2009-11-05T06:30:00.000-08:00

A rhyme in honor of the day:

Remember, remember the fifth of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason, why the gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot!

A stick or a stake for King James' sake

Will you please to give us a fagot

If you can't give us one, we'll take two;

The better for us and the worse for you!

I will not be building any bonfires tonight however - Syd has hockey.

Fall Plans

2009-09-25T04:59:00.000-07:00

So I am getting together my plans for this fall.

Let it be known that October shall be beer making month. I am planning on brewing a parti-gyle batch in the beginning of October. Parti-gyle just means that you make two beers with the same grains in the same mash: one a high gravity beer from the first runnings and the second runnings make a lower gravity beer. I will be making a spiced winter warmer as the high alcohol beer and an ordinary bitter as the session beer. Both are fairly English in character. So as soon as I can spare some funds to buy 22 pounds of Maris Otter, I will be a-brewin'. I also hope to get a porter or stout made later in the month, so maybe I should just get the 50 lb bag and be set for a while. I also want to make an ice beer at some point, but this can be an extract batch. You make a high alcohol beer like a barleywine and then quasi-distill it by freezing out some of the water content. This takes a 10ish percent beer and concentrates it to around 20ish percent. The result (due to the lack of carbonation and higher alcohol mainly) is supposed to be more like a spirit instead of a beer, but it is totally legal to make at home.

I want all this done by Halloween because I will need all of November if I hope to do NaNoWriMo again this year. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Basically you begin writing November 1st with the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel (about 175 pages) by midnight, November 30. It is a very tough challenge. I didn't even attempt last year since we had just moved in and were still getting over the flood. The furthest I have gotten in the past was 18,000 words which got me to chapter 6. Last year 119,301 people made the attempt and 21,683 completed at least 50,000 words. My friend Ben completed it as well, so I know it can be done. From my past experiences I know that the toughest part for me is not proofing and editing as I write. I really need to just spit out everything I am thinking onto the page and leave the editor hat on it's peg until the month is over. At this point I have no idea what I will write about, but it will probably end up as contemporary fantasy.

So I now have goals for this fall. Hopefully I will get them done

V Speech

2009-09-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to have this somewhere. One is a little big for a Quotable Rogue, but I make the rules here, so screw it:

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."
-V

"Oh, heavens, no. Stealing implies ownership. You can't steal from the censor; I merely reclaimed them."
-V

"But on this most auspicious of nights, permit me then, in lieu of the more commonplace sobriquet, to suggest the character of this dramatis persona... Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition... The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous... Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V."
-V

Extended Weekend-ishness

2009-08-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I made that word up. I have Thursdays and Fridays as my days off from work. Due to some schedule juggling, I ended up with 3 days off in a row and have been enjoying it very much.

Yesterday I spent a bunch of time catching up with some online friends I hadn't talked to in a few years and putzing around in game. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed hearing how everyone was doing. It was a very nostalgic day in general. This worked out well since my back was acting up and a day of just relaxing online was just what the Doctor ordered as far as I am concerned.

Today was not as restful. Syd and I have a plan. She has done Girls on the Run (google them to see what they are about) for the last couple years. She really enjoys it. I have been on a diet for the last 4 weeks and have lost a total of 12 pounds so far. In keeping with my general goal of getting in better shape, Syd and I decided to start jogging in the morning with the goal of me being her running buddy in her next 5k. We are starting small, only 20 minutes, but we'll work on increasing it over time.

After I got out of the shower after our jog it was time to take Ian to get his braces off. Its been a 2 year journey with the hardware in his mouth and he was very happy about them coming off. There is not as much of the white marks that come come from not taking care of your teeth well as I had thought there might be, so that was good. He has very good teeth now, as he should for as much as it cost! In that regard I guess it is good in case he ever decides to go the TV meteorologist route.

I decided after lunch to take a ride on the bike because it was too damn nice not to. I got out on route 6 and ended up out in Amana. Since I was out there I decided to grab an oatmeal stout at Millstream Brewing. I really like that beer, their Schild Brau Amber lager (I generally tend to like ales, not lagers, so that should tell you how good that one is) and their Hefe-R-weissen. The brewer looked very busy so I didn't bother him. I just enjoyed my beer in their Hopfgarten. I was a little jealous though because they have some hops cones almost as big as my thumb! As I was walking back to my bike I saw a huge tote of spent grains on the back dock, so I figured out why he was in such a rush. I know mashing is the most stressful part of my brew days by far. I like Millstream, but they tend to be more German in influence and my tastes tend to run more English/Irish.

After I got home I had promised Sydney that she could try to teach me to ice skate. So we hopped on the bike and went over to the mall. I must say that I did pretty good for over 20 years since I was on the ice, and I couldn't skate for crap back then anyways. I managed to not fall on my head, though I never got more than 8 feet from the edge of the rink. After 5 laps my feet were hurting, so we called it quits and headed for the farmers market, then the library. Overall a very nice afternoon with my girl.

Well I am being called for supper for the third time, so I will put this post to bed now. Pics of growing hops cones and pumpkins to come soon.

Happy Anniversary

2009-08-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

Heidi and I have been married 17 wonderful years today. In honor of this here are some facts about 17 (thanks to wikipedia)

In mathematics

Seventeen is the 7th prime number. The next prime is nineteen, with which it forms a twin prime. 17 is the sum of the first four primes. 17 is the sixth Mersenne prime exponent, yielding 131071. 17 is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1.

17 is the third Fermat prime, as it is of the form 2^{2^2} + 1, and it is also a Proth prime. Since 17 is a Fermat prime, heptadecagons can be drawn with compass and ruler. This was proven by Carl Friedrich Gauss.[1] Another consequence of 17 being a Fermat prime is that it is not a Higgs prime for squares or cubes.

17 is the only positive Genocchi number that is prime, the only negative one being -3. It is also the third Stern prime.

As 17 is the least prime factor of the first twelve terms of the Euclid-Mullin sequence, it is the thirteenth term.

Seventeen is the aliquot sum of two numbers, the odd discrete biprimes 39 and 55 is the base of the 17-aliquot tree.

There are exactly seventeen two-dimensional space (plane symmetry) groups. These are sometimes called wallpaper groups, as they represent the seventeen possible symmetry types that can be used for wallpaper.

Like 41, the number 17 is a prime that yields primes in the polynomial n2 + n + p, for all positive n < p - 1.

Consider a sequence of real numbers between 0 and 1 such that the first two lie in different halves of this interval, the first three in different thirds, and so forth. The maximum possible length of such a sequence is 17 (Berlekamp & Graham, 1970, example 63).

Either 16 or 18 unit squares can be formed into rectangles with perimeter equal to the area; and there are no other natural numbers with this property. The Platonists regarded this as a sign of their peculiar propriety; and Plutarch notes it when writing that the Pythagoreans "utterly abominate" 17, which "bars them off from each other and disjoins them".[2]

17 is the tenth Perrin number, preceded in the sequence by 7, 10, 12.

In base 9, the smallest prime with a composite sum of digits is 17.

17 is known as the Feller number, after the famous mathematician William Feller who taught at Princeton University for many years. Feller would say, when discussing an unsolved mathematical problem, that if it could be proved for the case n = 17 then it could be proved for all positive integers n. He would also say in lectures, "Let's try this for an arbitrary value of n, say n=17."

Similar to Feller, Prof. Vadim Khayms of Stanford University is also known to use 17 as an arbitrary value during lectures. His Computational Mathematics for Engineers course includes 17 lectures.

17 is the least random number[3], according to the Hackers' Jargon File. There is a proven theorem that 17 is the value most likely to be picked as a "random" number when such is needed in journalism which is derived from the Feller number.[4]

It is a repunit prime in hexadecimal (11).

It is believed that the minimum possible number of givens for a sudoku puzzle with a unique solution is 17, but this has yet to be proven.

There are 17 orthogonal curvilinear coordinate systems (to within a conformal symmetry) in which the 3-variable Laplace equation can be solved using the separation of variables technique.

17 is the first number that can be written as the sum of a positive cube and a positive square in two different ways; that is, the smallest n such that x3 + y2 = n has two different solutions for x and y positive integers. The next such number is 65.

In science

* The atomic number of chlorine.
* The Brodmann area defining the primary visual processing area of mammallian brains.
* Group 17 of the periodic table are the Halogens.

Age 17

* In the United States, the age at which one may purchase M-rated video games according to ESRB ratings.
* Also in some of the states in the United States, seventeen is the age of consent.
* In most states of the United States and the UK, the age at which you may donate blood.
* In many countries and regions, the age at which one may obtain a driver's license.
* In the United States, the age at which one may rent or purchase R Rated movies by himself/herself according to MPAA film rating system.

In culture

Music

* 17 is a number of obsession used by horrorcore rappers, Insane Clown Posse. The song "17 Dead" off their first EP "Belverly Kills 50187" uses the number frequently. Many of their songs reference the number 17 and most of their LP's contain 17 tracks.
* "(She's) Sexy + 17" was a 1983 Top 10 hit for Stray Cats from the album Rant N' Rave with the Stray Cats.
* "At Seventeen" was a 1975 hit by Janis Ian.
* "17", a song recorded by Rick James, in the album Reflections.
* The ratio 18/17 was a popular approximation for the equal tempered semitone during the Renaissance.
* "Seventeen" was the original name of The Beatles song "I Saw Her Standing There"..
* "17", a B-Side by Shiina Ringo on the "Tsumi to Batsu" single.
* The title of the song "17" by the Smashing Pumpkins. It is 17 seconds long, with no vocals, but comes with a poem which read at a standard speed will finish at the end of the song. This song is also a musical allusion to another Smashing Pumpkins work called "Blissed and Gone" which references 17 in the lines "Sweet 17, sour 29" and "I had no cause, just 17 days of rain".
* "17", a song recorded by Winger.
* "17", a song by yourcodenameis:milo.
* "Seventeen", a song by Ladytron.
* "Seventeen" by Jimmy Eat World
* "Seventeen Ain't So Sweet" a song by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.
* "17" a song by Kings of Leon.
* "Edge of Seventeen", a song from the 1981 album Bella Donna by Stevie Nicks.
* "17" by Milburn
* 17 Hippies, German band
* "Seventeen Forever" a song by Metro Station (band)
* Seventeen Days, 3rd studio album from American rock band 3 Doors Down.
* Dancing Queen by Abba features the line 'You are the Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only 17'.
* "All Summer Long" by Kid Rock features the line 'She was 17 but she was far from in between'.
* "Strawberry Wine" by Deana Carter features the line 'Strawberry Wine, 17, the hot July moon saw everything'.
* "God Love Her" by Toby Keith features the line 'The way a girl gets when she turns 17, kinda crazy'.
* "Sheer Heart Attack" by Queen features the line 'Well you're just 17 and all you want to do is disappear'.
* "Seventeen" is the sixth song on the album Give Me a Wall by ¡Forward, Russia!
* "Hello, Seventeen" by 12012
* "17 Again" is a song by Eurythmics as featured on their 1999 album Peace
* "Seventeen Seconds" is the second studio album by The Cure, released in April 1980 by Fiction Records.

Film

* Number Seventeen (1932), directed by Alfred Hitchcock
* Stalag 17 (1953), directed by Billy Wilder
* In 2004, Volatile Films released a feature length film titled The Significance of Seventeen starring Cindy Taylor; one theme addressed by the film is the high incidence of the number 17 and its function as 'the most random number' as described by MIT.
* In the film Three Days of the Condor, the title character played by Robert Redford works in section 17 of the CIA.
* In the Halloween film series the number 17 frequently reappears. Primarily with the age of people Michael Myers kills. Judith Myers is killed at 17 in the start of the first film, and Laurie Strode (the main character of the first films) is 17 when Michael Myers starts hunting her.
* 17 Again (2009), directed by Burr Steers

Print

* The title of Seventeen, a magazine.
* The number 17 is a recurring theme in the works of novelist Steven Brust. All of his chaptered novels have either 17 chapters or two books of 17 chapters each. Multiples of 17 frequently appear in his novels set in the fantasy world of Dragaera, where the number is considered holy.
* In The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the symbol for Discordianism includes a pyramid with 17 steps because 17 has "virtually no interesting geometric, arithmetic, or mystical qualities". However, for the Illuminati, 17 is tied with the "23/17 phenomenon".
* In the Harry Potter universe, 17 is the coming of age for wizards. It is equivalent to the usual coming of age at 18.

Religion

* According to Leon Kass, 17 has some significant meaning (as yet not known exactly) in the book of Genesis.[5]
* In the Yasna of Zoroastrianism seventeen chapters were written by Zoroaster himself, these are the Gathas.
* The number of the raka'ahs that Muslims perform during Salah on a daily basis.
* The number of surat al-Isra in the Qur'an.

In sports

* The most famous Ford number in the V8 Supercar championship, Driven by Dick Johnson to bring 5 Australian Touring Car Championships to his name. Now driven by son Steven Johnson.
* NASCAR driver Matt Kenseth's car number.
* The retired jersey number of former baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean.
* The number of former Chicago Cubs first baseman Mark Grace.
* The number of retired hockey player Wendel Clark
* The number of ice hockey player Chris Chaney
* The number of ice hockey player Rod Brind'Amour
* The number of ice hockey player Ilya Kovalchuk
* The number of ice hockey player Petr Sykora
* The number of ice hockey player Jeff Carter
* The number of ice hockey player Milan Lucic
* The former number of Right Winger Jean-Pierre Dumont when he played for the Buffalo Sabres
* The number of Hall of Fame basketball player John Havlicek
* The number of New York Giants' Wide Receiver Plaxico Burress
* The number of Cleveland Browns Wide Receiver Braylon Edwards
* The number of Toronto Blue Jays third baseman Kelly Gruber, and current first baseman Lyle Overbay
* The number that footballer Marc-Vivien Foé wore for the French clubs Lens and Lyon, retired by both clubs after his death from heart failure during a semifinal match in the 2003 FIFA Confederations Cup. Foé also wore the 17 shirt for the Cameroon national team at the time of his death.
* Real Madrid striker Ruud van Nistelrooy's shirt number
* The number that Cristiano Ronaldo wore on the Portuguese National Team, before switching to number 7 after the retirement of Luís Figo.
* The number of Carolina Panthers Quarterback Jake Delhomme.
* The number of Washington Redskins Quarterback Jason Campbell.
* The number of Colorado Rockies first baseman Todd Helton.
* The number of Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Brandon Webb.
* The number of NBA Championships won by the Boston Celtics.
* The number of Tuncay Şanlı in the Turkish national team while scoring against Greece in the 1-4 match in Athens.
* The number of Ken Griffey Jr. while playing for Chicago White Sox.
* The number of Ateneo Blue Eagles and GMA Network tv - host Chris Tiu
* The number of former Collingwood Football Club Captain Scott Burns when he played from 1995 until 2008.

Seventeen is:

* Described at MIT as 'the most random number', according to hackers' lore. This is supposedly because in a study where respondents were asked to choose a random number from 1 to 20, 17 was the most common choice.
* The number of laws of the game in Association Football
* The number of guns in a 17-gun salute to U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine Corps Generals, and Navy and Coast Guard Admirals.
* The number of flames emanating from the grenade cap-badge of the Grenadier Guards.
* During the Second World War, the four-engined heavy bomber as flown by the USAAF and other Allies and known as "The Flying Fortress", was also known as the B-17.
* A mild swear word in Swedish. The origin is debated, and is commonly used as "sjutton också!" ("seventeen, too!"). It can roughly be translated to "Darn!". It is of course also used for the number 17.
* The maximum number of strokes of a Chinese radical.
* The number of syllables in a haiku (5+7+5).
* In the Nordic countries the seventeenth day of the year is considered the heart and/or the back of winter.
* The designation of United States Interstate 17, a freeway in Arizona.
* The designation of U.S. Route 17, a highway that runs from Virginia to Florida.
* Seventeen, also known as Lock Seventeen, an unincorporated place in Clay Township, Tuscarawas County, Ohio.
* Seventeen was the former name of a yacht prior to being commissioned in the US Navy as the USS Carnelian (PY-19).
* The number of special significance to Yellow Pig's Day and Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics.
* In Italian culture, the number 17 is considered unlucky. When viewed as the Roman numeral, XVII, it is then changed anagramtically to VIXI, which in the Latin language it translates to "I have lived", the perfect tense implying "My life is over." (c.f. "Vixerunt", Cicero's famous announcement of an execution.) The Italian airline carrier, Alitalia, does not have a seat 17. Renault sold its "R17" model in Italy as "R177." See Cesana Pariol in the sport section about the name of curve 17.
* Android 17, a fictional character in the metaseries Dragon Ball.
* Some species of cicadas have a life cycle of 17 years (i.e. they are buried in the ground for 17 years between every mating season).
* The number to call Police in France.
* The number that symbolizes the soul.
* Force 17, a special operations unit of the Palestinian Fatah movement.
* The number of the French department Charente-Maritime

Green Thumb Revisited

2009-07-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

I spent quite a while on my deck early this afternoon enjoying the mild, sunny day. As I was eating my sushi and drinking one of my last home brewed hefeweissens (see the pic below), I realized I hadn't posted any updates about the garden. I then grabbed my wife's camera and snapped a few pick of my limited successes.

My Cascade hops have done well. The partial crown that I was given is doing really good, growing about 30 feet so far with a lot of cones starting to form. In fact that bine is growing about 2 inches a day! The Cascade rhizome I bought and planted is about 20 feet with slightly less abundant cones forming. My other two varieties (Goldings and Willamette) did not take off very well, neither has gotten over 6 feet tall and I don't expect to get any yield from them.

The rest of my garden except for one pumpkin plant pretty much died off or was eaten by rabbits during our vacation out east. It looks like we will at least get 4 of 5 pumpkins off the lone survivor though.

Syd has been pretty enthusiastic about helping out. She is always wanting to water the plants and today she helped my prune the lower part of the two hops plants that are doing well. Hopefully she'll be there when I hit the garden with compost and potting soil this fall! (Not to mention when I harvest the hops)

Anyways, it's getting late

30 Things You Wouldn't Think To Ask.

2009-07-30T07:01:00.000-07:00

1. Have you ever been searched by the cops?
Yes, both searched and searched for, but it's been quite a while.

2. Do you close your eyes on roller coaster?
nope

3. When's the last time you've been sledding?
last winter with Syd.

4. Would you rather sleep with someone else, or alone?
Someone else

5. Do you believe in ghosts?
Yes, but I believe it is a very very rare phenomenon. I think many people attribute
'ghost' sitings to explainably natural things or are psychosomatic projections. I guess I am more like an agnostic in regard to this.

6. Do you consider yourself creative?
Indubitably

7. Do you think O.J. killed his wife?
Seriously? duh

8. Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie?
Jennifer Aniston

9. Can you honestly say you know ANYTHING about politics?
Quite a bit actually

10. Do you know how to play poker?
play, deal, etc.

11. Have you ever been awake for 48 hours straight?
Many many times

12. What's your favorite commercial?
I can't think of any to tell the truth.

13. Who was your first love?
Trina Austin

14. If you're driving in the middle of the night, and no one is around you, do you run a red light?
Very often. I used to be a duty driver in Boston after all!

15. Do you have a secret that no one knows but you?
a couple.

16. Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees?
Red Sox of course!

17. Have you ever been Ice Skating?
yes

18. How often do you remember your dreams.
Just my waking ones, and not always.

19. What's the one thing on your mind?
Why does every Thursday have to be XM country music day at Biolife dammit

20. Do you always wear your seat belt?
Usually

21. What talent do you wish you had?
It would be nice to be able to dance with some shred of talent

22. Do you like Sushi?
I love sushi. I think I will have a Boston roll for lunch now as a matter of fact!

23. What do you wear to bed?
Usually nothing

24. Do you truly hate anyone?
A couple people, but they deserve it.

25. If you could sleep with one famous person, who would it be?
Famous? hmmm, I used to have a really big thing for Janeane Garofalo

26. Do you know anyone in jail?
Not for a while now.

27. What food do you find disgusting?
green beans but even worse - wax beans - they smell like a paper mill!

28. Have you ever made fun of your friends behind their back?
Yes, but to their face usually too.

29. Have you ever been punched in the face?
Yes, it's not as bad as a 2 x 4 to the back of the head though

30. Do you believe in angels and demons?
See my answer to the ghost question

Green Thumb

2009-06-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

We planted a little garden this spring and it is starting to take off. With our yard it is tough to find a sunny area, so we went with the easiest place to plant, which was under our deck. This has made the peas and broccoli a little hit or miss as to how well they are growing. The peas are kinda good while the broccoli is not doing as well.

The really good thing about being under the deck is that I can trellis my hops to the deck above. I have 2 cascade plants, a goldings and a willamette planted. The cascades are growing great and the goldings just started climbing the string 2 days ago. Both the english varients (goldings and willamette) have been slow going though so far.

Overall it is very rewarding to go outside each day and see the progress they have made each day. My son freaked me out by telling me that he saw some deer out sniffing at them last night though. They are not something that deer would want to eat, but then again deer aren't the smartest creatures either.

Here's some pics of my hops. I'll post some more from time to time.

2 months?

2009-05-22T04:42:00.000-07:00

I didn't realize it had been almost 2 months since I posted anything over here until I was helping a friend set her blog up with Facebook. That is one of the effects of Facebook and twitter though. I post lots of short updates and it eliminates or makes redundant what i would normally blog about.

Lots of things have been going on in the last few months. The express tour is as follows:

Heidi got a job. She works at Zio Johnnos here in Coralville. She doesn't seem to hate it, so that is a bonus.
I got a motorcycle (and accompanying license). It's cheap, old, small, but also fun and easy to ride. Looking for a sissy bar so Heidi isn't afraid to get on. Syd LOVES to ride.
Brewed my third batch of the year. It's a hefeweissen, a german wheat beer, that came out soooo good. Just waiting for it to carb.
We are getting ready for our summer vacation out east. We had wanted to go to Washington on the way out, but it looks like time may be against us. We'll see. Should be a lot of fun anyways. My 20th class reunion is going on while we are out there.
We(I) planted a small garden under our back deck. We have broccoli, peas, watermellons and pumpkins planted. The broccoli and peas are doing pretty good.
I also planted hops rhizomes along the edge so I can trellis them up to the deck above. I have 2 cascade plants going along with a goldings and a willamette that finally came up. It will be fun to watch them grow up the trellises this summer. I don't care how much of a yield I get as long as I get enough for at least 2 (one cascade and one english) batches of beer.

Anyways, that's all for now. Hopefully I won't be another 2 months between posts.

Quote

2009-03-25T19:55:00.000-07:00

Posting this so I don't lose it. Just quotable, not rogue:

"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right" we whisper, "I'm here, I love you." and we lie: "I'll never leave you." For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad." - Neil Gaiman from Hellraiser #27, "Hold Me"

Second All-grain Batch

2009-03-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

I will get to blogging about things other than brewing soon. However, one of the things that I use this blog for is as sort of an electronic, wherever-I-may-be, brewing log. That means that today I will be writing all about my latest batch.

After a very late start, I got to brewing again today. I had an Irish Red recipe kit that I had ordered at the same time as the first batch's kit. Irish Red is typically red, malty, lightly hopped with caramel notes. After tasting the wort that I took out for testing, I have to say that it should be just that!

I started off the day grabbing some water over at the HyVee in Iowa City. Coralville's water has a history of being pretty funky and I like how the water I used last time worked, so I got some more today. I also had to get a digital thermometer because of the fun I had with temps last time. So off to the Coraville HyVee liquors this time since they have about the only brewing supplies around here. I still used the big graduated thermometers so I could see when I was getting in the ball park and while I was cooling the wort, so they still came in handy. I also picked up some amber dry malt extract in case I did not hit my expected gravity out of the mash.

Everything went fairly well mashing. I used a little too much water I think. The mash tun is still too big too, so my temp didn't hold as well as I'd like. I only hit about (1.035ish) 60% out of the mash, so I had to use a pound of dry malt extract to get back to my target (1.043) gravity.

I also had to play with the hop bill some as well. Once again this kit had my hops too high for the style, so I held out the Willamette (4.4% AA) bittering hops until 55 minutes and held back the flavoring/aroma E.K. Goldings (5.4% AA) until 15 minutes left.

Also at 15 minutes left I put my new wort chiller in with the boil to sanitize it. It was a bit of a fiasco getting the hose up to my deck, but eventually everything was hooked up and right after flame out I started the hose. I cooled that down to 82 degrees in about 25 minutes. I will be adjusting my immersion chiller so it sits higher in the kettle. I will get much better cooling that way. Overall I was very pleased with my chiller's operation. I just need to watch where I have the outflow pointing next time so I don't soak my pants.

My biggest mistake this time was leaving the wort to cool those last 5-10 degrees without shielding it from the fluorescent light. It sat in the carboy, with the top stoppered, but I forgot to cover it with the dark Tshirt I use to keep light off it and forgot to shut out the fluorescent light before we left for the hockey game. It sat in the light for about 4 hours of so. I hope it will not have any ill effect. After we got home the temp was down to 76, so in went the yeast. The first bubbling has just started, so all looks good so far.

Brewing Video

2009-02-26T21:19:00.000-08:00

Here's some video of the krausen running out the tube and the airlock once the krausen started to fall :) I wish the churning would show up when I was focused on the carboy. It's kinda cool to watch.

It's still bubbling away.

First All Grain Batch

2009-02-24T21:50:00.000-08:00

So tonight I got a wild hair up my ass and decided enough procrastinating, I am just going to go ahead and brew this cream ale recipe. I fired up the propane burners, rinsed out the mash tun and got to it.

My recipe called for a 20 minute rest at 133, so I added my grains to roughly 3 gallons of water at 140 in a kettle. I couldn't keep temps very well all day. After 20 minutes I turned up the burner and got the mash up to about 160 and then transferred the whole thing to the mash/lauter tun. about half way through I checked temps and it was down to 145ish, so I threw in half a gallon of nearly boiling water. That brought things back up to about 155. After I drained that into the boil kettle, I sparged with 4.5 gallons at 170ish for 10 minutes. I was about 1.040 out of the mash, so I hit target! I will figure my effeciency later, but rough guess is 75%. Not too shabby for my first time out.

I noticed the hops were kinda high alpha for a low gravity cream ale, so I boosted the OG about 8-10 points with a pound of DME so my starting gravity is 1.052. Looks like it will be around 5% ABV. Strictly speaking, this and the high hops bumps it from a cream ale up to a blonde ale, but no biggy. We'll see how it turns out after fermentation :)

Notes for the future: 5 gallon (instead of 10) mash/lauter tun for normal gravity beers, better thermometers - 2 of them, a cooling system, and more planning/less spontaneity.

Overall a fun time, but makes for a late night. I am still waiting for it to cool enough to pitch my yeast. Thankfully it's cold enough outside to help me out with the cooling.

Recipe:

7# 2 row
.75# honey malt
.25# Biscuit malt

1 oz cluster hops 60 min (7.7 AA)

Wyeast 1056

25 things

2009-02-18T07:29:00.001-08:00

The 25 things application seems FUBAR, so I am posting mine here:

1. I've been shot twice, not bad, just stupid. First time (.22) grazed me between the legs (just missing the boys, thus my children) second time a farmer shot me in the ass with rock salt, very painful.

b. I was arrested for the first time at 15. Once again not bad, just stupid. I was released with no charges.

iii. I hate fads, that's why I resisted this list thing until it had died down somewhat. In keeping with this, I will tag no one in this if the application will allow it. Since it will not, I will tag only my wife. Okay, they are totalitarian in their tagging requirements, so prepare to be tagged dammit!

17. I like to make beer. I am just starting into all-grain brewing.

xiv. I was second in my state and went to nationals for the Citizen's Bee. It's like a spelling bee only with American studies/history questions

d. All the competitions, special tests, contests, etc. that I entered in High School were primarily excuses to get out of class. I just get really competitive once I am actually in one. In the abstract I could usually care less.

8. In spite of being an avid punk/heavy metal/alternative music lover, I like James Taylor's music. I blame my parents

XX. My children are my single proudest achievement in my life

25. I am a liberal democrat but find myself drifting towards libertarianism at times

f. I think every person in America should be required to go to Boot Camp, not necessarily be in the military, God no. The lessons from Boot Camp are life altering (in a good way) however.

1a. I abhor mistreatment of the flag through negligence or apathy, but defend the right to burn the flag as a form of protest. Yes it seems a juxtaposition but really it is about respect. Don't make me knock your hat off when the flag goes by during a parade.

E(b16). I am a member of the American Legion, the American Homebrewers Association, the Democratic party, the RPGA and AMVETS

Twelve. I originally decided to become a dealer (part-time, lol) just to help my poker game. I rarely play anymore.

__. I used to have my own freelance web design business. I find that I tend to dislike clients, so no more of them, thank you.

VII. I was a paid writer for the MMO game Shadowbane as part of the Herald program.

j. I worked for the IGN network for a short time as a paid writer

9. I once did a consultant job in LA for a firm looking to bring Asian MMORPGs to the American market

1101(b2). I love the new Dr. Who (and some of the other BBC scifi series) and am working hard at fostering this in my children. I am only batting .500 so far.

cc. I met my wife on a blind date. I think I used a normal man's lifetime quota of good luck in one day that day.

23 I believe in pretty much everything; ghosts, UFOs, etc. I think people are too easily influenced to believe that they have experienced these things however. I think they are far more rare and have much different explanations than we are coming up with right now. If that doesn't make sense, I don't care because it's my believe not yours.

eighteen. I like odd sounding words and word combinations: Fuck-knuckle, Koumpounophobia, Tristadecaphobia, Irish Wristwatch, etc.

21 I am over half Irish. My mother is 3rd generation full-blooded Irish in America and my father, from what he's said, a very small part Irish. I love the Irish language: Póg ma thoin

xxii. My favorite number is 52. It has been that since I was 6, even before I knew how many cards were in a deck or could play cards.

h. I still carry my lifetime crew member card for USS Constitution and a copy of my DD214 in my wallet to this day.

25 I miss having art in my life. I used to paint and draw a lot and was even thinking about pursuing design/fine arts in college. Life just gets so full sometimes. My one surviving painting hangs above my fireplace now.

With the Quickness

2008-12-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

No one will get the title for this post. It was something that one of the guys in my boot camp company used to say. I tend to be something of a non sequitur at times, but I was originally just going to post a quick link. More about that later.

About a year ago, I posted how I had lost the spiritlurkers.com domain due to a billing snafu. Today I am glad to announce that I have regained the domain name and have it pointed back at my site. The site is extremely broken right now, but I will be working on it over the next few weeks off and on.

I gave the neighborhood a good show this morning getting into and out of the garage. During the -22 windchill nights of the last week, the spring for the garage door snapped, so it takes a monumental effort to open and close the door. My back just cannot take any more attempts. In a fit or retribution after getting hit on the top of the head for the second time, I broke out one of the windows in the garage door earlier this week. Today I climbed in through this window to investigate whether I could fix the door.

In order to do this, I had to get up on the deck chair and squeeze through to my waist. I then had to pivot with my hips on the sill so that my head inside the garage was down while my feet outside were now up in the air. Using my hands to walk forward on the garage door I eventually was able to wriggle in. This whole process was repeated in reverse to get back out. With any luck, no one actually witnessed my break in.

Part of the reason I was out in the garage was to look over the mash tun I built and get some measures. I ended up getting 2 turkey fryers for Christmas. Between these and the mash tun I made, I am going build a three-tier brew sculpture. This is why the measures were so vital!

It's pretty icy out and I am enjoying the fire, which was built using boxes/trash from the unwrapfest and wood gathered from my foray into the garage. Hope you all are safe and warm tonight.

Oh yeah, here's the link about our Christmas that was the reason I started this post in the first place.

fin

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T07:06:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas today, so merriness and blessings to you all out there. We had our annual unwrapfest this morning, but more about that later.

This fall I have not blogged much at all. I didn't even attempt NaNoWriMo. It's been really tough around here. After Heidi's strokes in October, she has had a series of hospitalizations due to her continued poor health. She has been diagnosed with coronary and renal artery diseases. Her blood pressure had been going through the roof and her EKGs had been becoming more irregular. Finally almost 2 weeks ago they put a stint in one of her coronary arteries. This seems to have given her a boost in energy. At least she hasn't been getting winded just trying to go upstairs to bed.

This has made things in a stressful house even more so. With Heidi unable to work Christmas was looking pretty bleak. For the first time ever we could not even buy anything for the kids. Luckily there was a church in town that was looking for flood victims to adopt during Christmas. It turned out 2 separate groups had adopted us. The Regina kids and the Chick-Lits. These groups took what was sure to be the worst Christmas and turn it into one of the best ever, especially for the kids. I'm not an overly religious guy, but sometimes prayers are answered.

I don't care about getting stuff. As a man though you feel like a failure if you can't even get your kids a toy for Christmas. Those worries are all over though now. My kids got electric guitars, doll houses, video games and pretty much everything they wanted. My mom really made my daughter's day by giving her an American Girl doll (that has a hockey jersey, stick and puck) of her own to carry around. She's just beaming.

Grandma actually got to see us in our early morning bleariness via webcam this morning. It was pretty cool actually that she could sit there in Vermont, but also be in our living room here in Iowa.

This year has been a real trial, but today sure helped put a better spin to it. I hope you all have a happy, healthy Christmas and New Year.

Update on Heidi

2008-10-08T19:49:00.000-07:00

Well it turns out the doctor yesterday did not have the full story. Heidi did not have TIAs, she had an actual stroke. She has a few lingering issues. Her face still has numbness and a very slight palsy to one side. She has a bit of speech difficulty as well due to her face/mouth not functioning correctly. We are hopeful that these will resolve at some point, but we don't know at this point.

She's home tonight, and I got out of work early to get home with her. I built us a nice cozy fire and she is drowsing on the couch.

Thanks to all who offered their support. It means a lot to both of us.

We'll see what tomorrow brings us.

Bursting Bubbles

2008-10-07T14:35:00.000-07:00

Obviously I must have been too happy about how things were going last week, because this week sucks.

Heidi is in the hospital again. She has had at least 2 TIAs which are known as mini strokes. On Saturday she complained her face was numb, she had tunnel vision and felt dizzy. These are not unusual complaints of hers, however she usually doesn't have all three together, so I told her to lay down and rest and see if that made her feel better. She did and seemed a little better later on. I even mentioned to her that I didn' think it could be a stroke because I remember my grandfather's strokes and he had amnesia and weakness on one side along with what Heidi was feeling. Well while I may have been technically right, I told her just the wrong thing to do.

A transient ischemic attack (TIA, often colloquially referred to as “mini stroke”) is caused by the temporary disturbance of blood supply to a restricted area of the brain, resulting in brief neurologic dysfunction that persists, by definition, for less than 24 hours; if symptoms persist then it is categorized as a stroke. So a TIA is what Heidi had. Patients diagnosed with a TIA are sometimes said to have had a warning for an approaching stroke. If the time period of blood supply impairment lasts more than a few minutes, the nerve cells of that area of the brain die and cause permanent neurologic deficit. One third of the people with TIA later have recurrent TIAs and one third have a stroke due to permanent nerve cell loss. This is pretty scary.

Heidi has high blood pressure and diabetes, two big strikes against her in the stroke risk factor category. On Monday morning she got really bad again and was slurring her speech along with the other syptoms. Her sister took her to the hospital since I was at work and they admitted her.

I really don't know what I can do for her at this point, but for now she seems to have no permanent effects from this episode. Still the doctors have to find the source of these blockages or effective blood thinning agents to help prevent more or worse occurances.

I wish I could take this on for her!

Anyways, she's at the University of Iowa Hospital, one of the best places in the state, so I have to trust her to these folks, which is tough as hell for a guy like me, for now. I will update again when I know more.

This Week in Coralville

2008-09-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy week at the Toye homestead.

I finally finished my mash tun construction project. A mash tun is a vessel in which crushed grains and hot water are combined to convert the starches from the malted grain into sugars which the yeast will be able to ferment. It took 4 trips to the two hardware superstores in town because neither could manage to carry all the parts I needed. So after getting the braided hose, barbs, fittings, washers and valves and after 2 leaky tests, I now have a vessel that I think will work! This is in anticipation of my switch from extract to all-grain brewing. Next I need to procure a 7-8 gallon pot to boil the wort that is made in my new mash tun and a burner to heat it with.

I organized the garage, for the most part. This involved a lot of making shelves out to the roof joists and putting stuff we won't use much, like all the Xmas decorations and the camping stuff, up there. I also went through a bunch of boxes and found a few things that I thought we had lost forever, so that was very encouraging. I wish I could say this was just because I decided that the garage needed to be clean, but I wanted things that could be ruined by water/melting snow up and off of the floor. I also wanted the place cleaner so that when it does get to be brewing time, I have less work to do. I am banished from the house due to overwhelming fumes reminiscent of green bean and whoppers when I brew. I also fixed the window that I broke while breaking in the weekend Heidi drove off with the garage door opener for 2 days. I felt productive at least!

I also got a chance to go out with Heidi on Saturday night after work. We went up to Cedar Rapids to catch an Inch 75 show. Actually I would not have gone except Heidi got there and the doorman wouldn't let her in without ID. So she had to trek all the way home and by that time I had gotten a chance to eat and change. It was a good time and Chris and the guys always put on a good show.

Tonight though was a proud papa night. Syd has hockey every Monday night and she has been really reluctant to let go of the chair and skate on her own. She was one of two last time and tonight still using the chair. Tonight however was the first night that they actually had pucks out there. Syd looked as though she decided the security of the chair was not as important to her as the fun of knocking around a puck. She made me really proud tonight and given the chance to use the chair again later on she said she was done with it. Go Syd! I am going to try to attach a crappy cell phone video of her tonight below.

This is not the only proud dad moment. Ian came home and he had a 100 on his Algebra midterm and a 96 on his American Studies midterm. He really seems to be happier in High School and his grades are much improved. Go Ian!

Video hopefully:

New Place and the Kiddos

2008-09-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a long and trying summer. We spent a little over a month living at my sister-in-law's house. It's a three bedroom duplex. We had our top mattress that we would put down and stand up kinda like a Murphy bed in her office/spare room. Syd slept in CT's bed. Ian slept on the hide-a-bed in the couch in the living room and CT and Bri slept in Bri's bed in her room. We managed fairly well but I really had hoped to be out before school started, but that is mid/late August here in Iowa, so it was 2 weeks after school started before we finally moved in here.

We are lucky to have found this place. I spent most of August scanning the papers and craigslist for open 3 bedrooms in the Iowa City area. Every time we went to look at a place there were like 3 or 4 other people looking there too. Rents jumped at least 100 bucks this year as so many displaced people were looking for new places to live. Add the college kids coming back to town and it was starting to look nearly impossible. We decided to take a Thursday (one of my days off) and drive around town and stop in places and look for 'for rent' signs. We had no luck all day and as we were headed back to Bri's house we saw a sign in this sleepy little neighborhood. We said what the hell and pulled in and gave the number a call.

The lady that answered said the duplex we had stopped at was available as was another down the street. She came right up the street and showed us the 3 bedroom. It was nice but the bedrooms were kinda small. Then we looked at the 2 bedroom. It had a finished basement and the master bedroom was huge. The carpets look like shit, but Ian has basicly the entire "basement" room to himself, which is a walkout to the backyard. There is a storage room, laundry room, fireplace, dining area, deck off the living room and patio outside Ian's room and 2 big closets in the master bedroom. There is also a one car garage.

The neighborhood is nice. It's a cul-de-sac with a little playground. Tons of kids around Syd's age. It borders on Brown Deer Golf Course and is in the same school district for Ian's high school but a nicer elementary (Kate Wickam) for Syd. Win, win, win, especially after spending the last three years in the crappy 'hood we were in. It is much more expensive than the last place but worth every damn dime. I love this place.

The biggest downside (other than the carpets) is that we had to give Tulip up for adoption. FEMA is supposed to do a story about her and hopefully she is placed with a family that can give her the room to run that she deserves. For all her pain in ass moments, she was a good dog and has gotten the worst out of this flood of all of us.

Ian seems to be be thriving in High School. All his teachers had great things to say about him at back to school night. Syd is struggling academically still, but much happier in her new school. There is a serious lack of thug kids to bother her here. She's still too little for the snobby girls to bother her yet I think, which is the problem she'll face here I think since it is the richer area of town. She's already mentioned some prissy girl who flaunts all the newest and greatest things her parents have bought her and put down other kids for not having them. Syd's not bothered by it though, she thinks the girl is a jerk to act that way.

Syd started hockey last week and had her second session tonight. I will be uploading pics to picasa in a little bit. (Pics are up here.) I am so proud of her!

Ian turned 15 yesterday. That makes me feel freakin old. We got him tickets to see his favorite band, Avenged Sevenfold, because it was all that he asked for. We gave them to him last Thursday and they announced on Friday morning that the lead singer strained his voice and the band cancelled all their shows for the rest of this year at his Dr's suggestion. There are 3 other bands on the bill though and he still wants to go, so we'll be treking out to the Quad Cities tomorrow night.

He and his mother made a trek out to Des Moines at 3am on his birthday to wait in line for Metallica tickets that went on sale at 5am. Most of the group there got tickets like 15 feet from the stage. The old lady he got stuck with misheard him and his ticket is for a section further back, but I think he'll end up being up with us since he actually braved the rain and crud to wait in line with Heidi and our friends.

Anyways it's getting late, and I am going to wrap this up. With us getting settled in I should be able to update more often.

ttfn

Mini-post: Contest

2008-08-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

Those of you that know me know that I am a big Neil Gaiman fan. There is a contest running at Fashionista Piranha with some fun prizes if you are interested as well.

Short and sweet

2008-08-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

The main reason I am posting is because I saw a quote today. It has been a very long month that I am not ready to talk about yet, so don't look for a substantive post for a little while yet. Without further ado - (as opposed to the commonly misused adieu...)

Quotable Rogue:

MAC gave me 55 lipsticks to test. These are the same lipsticks I got caught stealing by the police when I was 15. How ironic.
-Eddie Izzard

A little breathing room

2008-06-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

I am sitting here writing this from my sister-in-law's home. Since I last wrote we have basically moved in with her temporarily. It is far from ideal for everyone, but it beats the hell out of hotels!

Wrapping up flood related BS, over the weekend I had the joy of trying to find things to salvage from the wreckage of our apartment. You can see the pics of the mess here. It was not very fun. In fact it was probably one of the most depressing things I've ever done in my life. I was especially upset seeing as I had to make a frantic drive from Des Moines back to Coralville. It seems the building inspector people were off by a couple days on when people would be allowed back in. I did however find a good chunk of Ian's coin collection among the few things that could be salvaged in the muck. Seeing him happy was worth the trip and the expense.

We have completed all the necessary forms and are waiting to hear back from the SBA about a loan to buy our household back. It's not that big a rush since we don't have anywhere to put stuff. To that end, we are taking what we were able to put up on the second floor into storage tomorrow. We are renting a 10x10 space that should hold it all, plus they are letting us use their truck. It will be a load off my mind having that stuff safe.

Speaking of keeping things safe, do not let my daughter near anything technological. In the past 5 days she has drowned my cell phone in the clothes washer as well as delivering a death blow by Gatorade to my wife's quite expensive digital camera. That SBA loan will come in very handy indeed.

On to brighter news, I finally got to try my batch of beer that I had bottled just prior to the flood. I am calling it Flood Mud to mark the occasion. I though it especially apropos due to the color of the beer and timing of this all. It is more of a brown porter than the robust porter that I had envisioned, but it is such a wonderful tasting beer that I don't mind. The bourbon is very faint and subtle in the back ground while the vanilla is nice and strong up front for now and should mellow nicely with age. Absolutely no odd tastes in there at all. It is a little light as far as mouth-feel and ABV go, but I don't mind a dark beer that I could drink 4 or 6 of on a hot day!

No quotes for now, I am lucky enough to have a 30% signal off someone in this neighborhood, so I am not pushing it to just idly surf.

ttfn

Before Video

2008-06-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

To contrast the flood video of yesterday, I have posted a video from less than 24 hours earlier below.

We dropped off our dog at the humane society shelter the other day. It was pretty rough on the kids, but it should be good for Tulip. She will get her shots caught up and a checkup and all.

On a good note, we got our temp housing assistance from FEMA today. It will help a ton in making ends meet in the short term here.

Vid:

Flood Video

2008-06-18T20:17:00.000-07:00

Here is my video of my place all flooded. It has taken me forever to get a connection that could handle the upload.

Vid:

Floods

2008-06-17T16:36:00.000-07:00

We are currently flooded out of our home. All spring I have been concerned about the amount of rain and the generally high level of the river by our house, but that all came to a head last week.

I took off from work early on Wed and we started packing things up. On Thursday I moved most of the stuff that absolutely could not be replaced and other important items up to a vacant apartment on the second floor of our building. About 4 or 5 in the afternoon we checked into the Baymont Inn to wait out the flooding. Everyone kept saying it was not going to amount to much, but I had told everyone that anything below the window level in our apartment should go up higher. There just was not enough time to move everything and we had to get out eventually.

It's a good thing we did. Thursday night the water came up 2 feet in 2 hours. It went from ankle deep to knee deep Thurs night to waist deep on Fri morning. Just before my son and I helped sandbag the local tattoo shop Thursday night, I went back and got the animals out. Later during the night Thursday people on my street had to be rescued by boat. Friday morning, after the water had come up so high and was being forecasted to go another 3 -5 feet, I dodged cops and national guardsman to go move stuff up to the landing between the 2nd and 3rd floors. I also grabbed our wedding album which we had forgotten was put up high in our apt. The water inside was up almost to my neck. Our apartment is a half in the ground apt, so it makes it worse for flooding (but better for tornados)

It was a mess inside. The couch and entertainment center were floating in the living room. My son's TV was floating in his room along with his dresser. My daughter's room was a mess of floating objects since none of her toys made it upstairs. This is where one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life occurred. My daughter is not too materialistic. Yes she likes to get things, but she isn't big on keeping things. She gives away a lot of what she has as well. She has one doll in particular that she treats like a real baby - Gracie. It's a baby shoo shoo doll. It is somewhat expensive, but a really life-like doll in the true size of a newborn. She carts that doll everywhere. Well she had rushed help in packing up her room and it got tossed in with all her dolls in a tote. That tote was floating around in her room mostly full of nasty flood water.

When I came back and told her it was probably gone in the flood, she lost it. All throughout this she and my son have been great, but that just crushed her. It still makes my heart hurt to think of it. She is always so willing to help everyone and give people whatever she can and the only item she really cares about is gone. It just isn't right. God bless her though, she hasn't dwelled on it and everyone has been great to her since. She's had some bad dreams since though and we brought her over to the FEMA councellors. It seems to have helped.

Speaking of our kids, my son has really impressed me throughout this entire time. He had been volunteering with different sandbagging operations since the Monday prior to this. Not many 14 year olds would do anything, much less ask for a ride to go sandbag. After some initially grouching (and what teen doesn't) he really buckled down and did an awesome job getting things up higher in his room and helping with the whole process. He hasn't bitched or whined about being put out. He also suffered a pretty big loss. His currency collection was definitely under water when I snuck back in. He is very anxious about it, but like my daughter, he hasn't been dwelling on it. He been pretty damn stoic in fact. He even wanted to sneak in and help me move things when I went back in on Friday, though there is no way I would let him get in that nasty water. I think we may have done some good things in raising him. He has really made me proud this last week.

I am all set with new shots though. We are in the Baymont 'til Thursday. We'll probably spend a night in the shelter on Thursday night and then head to Des Moines for the weekend or something. The casino is going to cut me a deal on a room for a few days and hopefully by the middle of next week my sister-in-laws road will be dry enough that she can get back in and we'll stay with her for a while I guess.

Until something like this hits, you just don't realize what and who you are truly thankful for. We have so many truly heartfelt thanks to all the folks who have been so great to us, and for all the offers of help. We will probably be taking you up on many of them in the coming weeks. If you've been hit by the floods, our prayers are with you as well.

We love you all.

Linkage - pics and some vids:
http://picasaweb.google.com/zalaster/Flood4
http://picasaweb.google.com/zalaster/Flood302
http://picasaweb.google.com/zalaster/BriCam613
http://picasaweb.google.com/zalaster/FloodPics

My Day Off - So Far

2008-06-05T11:25:00.001-07:00

I spent this morning cleaning the kitchen in preparation of bottling my bourbon-vanilla porter. I started at 8 am. After washing and sanititing 2 cases of bottles (and running out to the store for carbonation drops) I was finally bottling by 10:00. At 11:30 I had 4 bottles shy of 2 cases bottled! I lost one whole bottle to a capping mishap. (Somehow I squeezed so hard on the bottle that I crushed a neat line all around the top of the bottle, effectively removing the entire top 1 inch of glass.) I lost at least a couple more beers to spillage, so I was almost dead on for two full cases. Yehaw!

My wife even got adventurous and decided to help towards the end of the process. She wanted to go to the end of the year picnic at my son's school and I think was getting nervous about how long it was taking me to get things done. Then she really shocked me by trying the porter from the half full end of the run bottle. She often says things like - they always smell so good, but then taste so bad - about dark beers. This time however she told me that this beer would taste good once it was cold. Thats about the best I've heard about anything I have made so far.

Before I put everything away I re-sanitized my racking equipment and racked the lilac wine to a one gallon carboy. Heidi thought it was a ridiculously small amount for all the work that went into it, but I explained that it will make about 4 bottles of wine when it is done. I of course did a taste test as well as suckering Heidi into trying it. It's very cidery and vinegarish right now, but there is potential there. I can taste a little of the sweetish white wine flavor underneath. I will probably have to rack again in a month since I got a good amount of sediment this time. I should have paid more attention while I was racking.

By noon I had everything cleaned up and we were out the door by 12:30. Not too shabby.

As a total non sequitur I came across this yahoo list today of the best 25 alternative bands of the 90's. Talk about a load of crap! No Pixies? (They didn't break up til 92-93.) No Jane's Addicition? No Front 242 or Ministry? No Soundgarden? No ska at all? Those are only a few of the omissions. The only Boston bands are Dinosaur Jr. and maybe the Breeders - but only one Bostonian does not make it a Boston band - just look at Weezer. Putting Nirvana at #10, not to mention Sonic Youth at #23? WTF is this guy smoking? It must be a total reactionary piece, just to get people pissy enough to comment or pass it along to others... if that is the case Mr. Rob O'Connor, you have succeeded. Otherwise it is a travesty of musical criticism.

Anyways, thats all for now. It's 2:00 and the kiddos will descend upon me and shatter the peacefulness I am so enjoying in a few minutes.

Final notes on Bourbon-Vanilla Porter: ABV ~ 4.3 - 4.5%; clean, clean, clean taste; 44 12 oz bottles; carbed with coopers carbonation drops; nice vanilla note without being overpowering - the porter character still comes through nicely; no hot alcohol taste at all.

Too many interests, not enough time

2008-06-02T17:27:00.000-07:00

So I have a problem, but it is not such a bad problem to have. I have more interests than I have time for. I know we all lead busy lives, but it seems to be more and more true as the years go by.

I would like to brew at least once a month if not every other week, but thats a good few hours out of a Saturday and Saturdays seem to be pretty booked by others in my household. Plus I try to do it when my wife and daughter are not home as they are not fans of the brewing smells. (I however actually enjoy the aroma.) After I brew, at some point there is racking to secondary and/or bottling as well, so there is a chunk of (usually a Thursday since it is my other day off) morning as well. It is time I am glad to spend as the results have been improving. As I contemplate a transition to all-grain brewing I look to add at least a couple hours to brewdays for mashing and sparging and clean up, etc. Still worth it I think.

I am a voracious reader. My google reader must have a couple dozen feeds at least. This and email alone occupy an hour of my day. I am reading one book (and listening to another during drive to work time) at most times. I just downloaded all the D&D 4th ed books, so that will be a good amount of fairly critical reading. On top of all this I have a good number of books on Ireland and the Irish language, PHP, CSS and a ton of other subjects that I never seem to get around to. In the same vein, I love to write, but time always seems to slip away before I get around to it. I do however manage to get each week's gaming prep in, even if it is during breaks at work, which are thankfully plentiful.

I have at least 3 podcasts I like to listen to on a weekly basis and 2 video podcasts as well. My ipod time is usually spent on my audiobooks however. Oh and there are a few movies I have ripped to my ipod as well that I have never seemed to get around to watching.

Lastly there is fishing. The water has been far too high for my favorite fishing hole so far this year, but as the waters recede I will be out there fairly often. Since this is usually late at night and/or by myself, it is also a good time to listen to or watch things on my ipod though. Here's hoping the catfish get really big this spring and really hungry this summer - at least on the weekends that we aren't going to wine tastings and other events.

This isn't a whine post. I am glad to have this issue actually. This last weekend I actually had a great time with my daughter. We went to the farmer's market, to a yard sale with lots of irish things to buy and then I took her ice skating and to the children's museum. It was all stuff she wanted to do so nothing so much for me, but at the same time it was if you know what I mean. So how do you all manage your leisure time? I'll just be off over here buying friends as pets online and reading forums for a bit.

Quotes

2008-05-15T21:44:00.000-07:00

As soon as I make a post saying I haven't seen any quotes lately, I am sure to run across some, so here goes:

Quotable Rogue-

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
-Voltaire

Toward no crime have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
-James Russell Lowell

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
-Aristotle

This week

2008-05-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

Overall it's been a great week. Got my stimulus check and was able to buy Heidi a nice Mother's Day present as well as send some flowers to my mom. I however failed once again to get my brother something for his birthday, so I think I will pick something up and send it out as a combo housewarming/birthday present.

It is lilac season here in Iowa, so I went out and picked some for Heidi as I was walking the dog one night. The next day Heidi went and picked a ton more, enough so the whole appt smelled like a lilac thicket. After listening to a podcast about dandelion wine, I checked up on lilac wine. It seemed like a simple enough, though long, process. Needless to say after hours of tedious picking out lilac blossoms, I have just over a gallon of lilac wine starting fermentation right now. It will be a minimum of 6 months before it's ready, but so what, it will be a nice fall/winter treat I hope. I am feeling a lot more confident now that my blonde ale is carbed and pretty darn tasty, if I do say so my self.

Ian had his last eighth grade choir concert this week. I have been proud of his continued interest in music. He has taught himself guitar somewhat, can play piano a little and really does enjoy singing. (He sure doesn't look like he's enjoying himself during the concerts though, LOL.) It was a little bittersweet thinking that this is one more last thing before High School next year. He also got his headgear last week. He hates it, and I can't blame him for that at all. I wouldn't want to wear it either. At least he only has to wear it at night and not to school or out in public.

I am going to dive back into my books. I picked up the Shadow Rising on audiobook/mp3 and a couple WotC books this week.

Next Batch Idea

2008-05-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

15A. Porter, Robust Porter

Extract

Color

Stats

OG	1.055
FG	1.014
IBU	37
ABV	5.3 %
SRM	35

Style Comparison

	Low		High
OG	1.050	1.055	1.065
FG	1.012	1.014	1.016
IBU	25	37	45
SRM		35	30+
ABV	4.8	5.3	6

Fermentables

% Weight	Weight (lbs)	Grain	Gravity Points	Color
70.6 %	6.60	Amber Malt Extract Syrup	43.2	10.8
5.3 %	0.50	British Black Patent	0.8	52.3
5.3 %	0.50	American Chocolate	0.9	31.8
8.0 %	0.75	American Crystal 40L	1.5	5.5
10.7 %	1.00	Light Dry Malt Extract	8.2	0.4
	9.35		54.6

Hops

% Wt	Weight (oz)	Hop	Form	AA%	AAU	Boil Time	Utilization	IBU
25.0 %	0.50	Simcoe	Pellet	12.0	6.0	60	0.045	26.8
50.0 %	1.00	Northern Brewer	Pellet	8.0	8.0	15	0.013	10.2
25.0 %	0.50	Cascade	Pellet	5.5	2.8	1	0.002	0.4
	2.00							37.4

Botlling Fun

2008-05-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

I bottled up the blonde ale tonight. It has turned a little darker over the last week and with the addition of the priming solution, but damn if it didn't taste good. I think the sharpness I had detected earlier this week may be coming off of my testing tube. I added chili peppers to 9 bottles, including one 22 oz. bottle, so well see how that goes. This leaves 34 bottles of non-chili blonde ale. Woohoo!

I really want to make a porter (or a dry stout if not) next but finding Munich extract is next to impossible, and partial mashing at this stage does not sound like something I want to do.

It is just about time to pull my dinner out of the oven, but I saw a good quote today, so I am including it here. Quotable Rogue:

It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are.
- O. Henry

~Post-script~

I am on Twitter now as Zalaster, so follow me if you want!

Some Data

2008-04-30T07:03:00.000-07:00

Here is some finished data on the blonde ale:

OG	FG		OPlato	FPlato
1.062	1.012		15.20	3.07

%ABW	5.335203		RE	5.261799
%ABV	6.800033		AA	0.79835
			RA	0.654008
	Calories	206.4312

Still looking to bottle this week sometime.

I tasted the first batch. There is a distinct medicine-like taste to this that is likely due to pitching the yeast while the wort was too hot. The plain portion may calm with age, but the cherry extract portion is just far too much like robitussin. Lesson learned on that one. The plain portion will be okay I think, and even if not, it will make good beer brats.

I tasted the blonde ale last night after final testing and it is a little sharper than last time, but I am really looking forward to how it tastes after carbing and also to see how the chili experiment works out.

Sydney's 5k River Run

2008-04-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

My daughter has been participating in Girls on the Run this spring. This is an empowerment program focused on girls and healthy choices. As part of it, they train to run a 5k. Syd enjoyed the fall session so much (even though that 5k was during an ice storm in Dec) that she wanted to do it again this spring.

Today, or yesterday as I finally finish this post, she ran her second 5k. This time they did their 5k during a big event here in town, the annual River Run in Iowa City. It was pretty chilly at 9AM this morning, but all in all it was a nice day to run. Her and her running buddy started off at a decent pace and at an official time of 55 minutes (beating her time from Dec by at least 10 minutes) Syd crossed the finish line. She had a beaming smile that just showed just how proud she was of what she'd accomplished. I have to say that I am too!! Here are some pics from the run:

Starting Line

Finish Line

Second Batch Testing

2008-04-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

I decided to use a secondary fermentation on this batch and I think it was a great idea. My SG was 1.013 when I racked it over a week ago. Today it was at 1.012. This means that the blonde is at 6.5 to 6.8% ABV. The more important thing is the taste!

It is smooth with a dry finish. Not a big hop taste or bitterness to it, but a nice hop aroma though. This one is not going to need much conditioning at all I think. Carb it up and it will be ready to go. I am going to do a chili pepper experiment with like a 12 pack I think and see how that turns out.

Off to find a SG scale by temp formula to tie up what my exact OG was.

I Believe

2008-04-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

So I have always loved this passage from American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I am adding it here, even though it is not appropriately roguish.

~~

"Who did kill those men?" she asked.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"I would." She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a cabernet right now.

"It's not easy to believe."

"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."

"Really?"

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.

Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, "Okay. So if I tell you what I've learned you won't think that I'm a nut."

"Maybe," she said. "Try me."

Second Brew

2008-04-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

Since my testing boosted my confidence last night, I decided to brew up my second batch today. I am making a blonde ale that may or may not have a portion become chili ale. It depends on how the ale itself comes out.

Anyways, the recipe thusfar: 5 gal batch, 4# Dry Light Pilsen Malt, 2# Dry Light Golden Malt, 1# 20L Crystal Malt, 2/3# cane sugar, 1 tsp Irish Moss, Safeale US-05 yeast.

Hops: 1 oz. Cascade 5.8 AA at 60 min, .5 oz. Cascade 5.8 AA at 3 min.

My OG is at 1.061 which is exactly in line with what online calculators predicted, so I seem to have done everything right. It's gone fairly smoothly so far, just waiting for the wort to cool so I can pitch the rehydrated yeast.

First Test

2008-04-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

The bubbles on my beer have slowed to once every few minutes now, so I decided to use that as an excuse to test it. (Secretly I really just wanted to taste it, but the testing is important too.)

I had to rig something for removing the stopper since I had pushed it too far down inside last time, so I boiled a bobby pin bent up like an anchor (the wall type, not the sea type) and tied it off with dental floss, this allowed me to push the stopper inside the carboy without dropping it down into the beer. Yay!

I siphoned out a little bit of the beer into my testing tube. The aroma was strong, slightly astringent from the greenness of the beer and a bit of hops to it. The color was only slightly darker than I had hoped for, sort of a caramel shade. This was a pleasant surprise since it looks so dark in the carboy. I took the gravity and got 1.020. This means that the beer is currently 6.93% alcohol by volume. I'm only expecting around 75% attenuation so it has about 1-2% left to go.

It's flat of course - lacking carbonation - and it definitely tastes green. There is a bit more bitterness than I had planned for, but that's to be expected with my hopping mistake. There's a hotness to the alcohol too. Both of these improve with aging, so aging will do this beer some good. There is wheat note to it, but not as strong as say a boulevard. There's no off flavors that I could detect at this point, but I don't have the most refined palate. Overall I am very happy so far!

Maybe I'll start the blonde ale this weekend!

Pics

2008-04-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

Here are pics of the carboy

First Brew followup

2008-04-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

Fermentation really took off shortly after my last post. I had to set up a blow off tube in fact. The krausen has settled now and the airlock is back on and I have nearly constant bubbling. It is fascinating to watch the beer churning in the carboy!

Here is my recipe. (Note the rockin' 7.1% Alcohol by Volume, LOL)

17D. Wheat Beer, Weizenbock

Extract

Color

Stats

OG	1.074
FG	1.019
IBU	33
ABV	7.1 %
SRM	12

Specifics

Boil Volume	2.5 gallons
Batch Size	4.5 gallons
Yeast	75% AA

Style Comparison

	Low	Mine	High
OG	1.066	1.074	1.080+
FG	1.015	1.019	1.022
IBU	15	33	30
SRM	7	12	25
ABV	6.5	7.1	8+

Fermentables

% Weight	Weight (lbs)	Grain	Gravity Points	Color
38.4 %	3.30	Light Malt Extract Syrup	24.9	1.5
38.4 %	3.30	Wheat Malt	28.6	1.2
11.6 %	1.00	Light Dry Malt Extract	10.0	0.4
11.6 %	1.00	Belgian Candi Sugar Amber	10.0	16.7
	8.60		73.5

Hops

% Wt	Weight (oz)	Hop	Form	AA%	AAU	Boil Time	Utilization	IBU
50.0 %	1.00	Willamette	Pellet	4.6	4.6	60	0.048	22.2
25.0 %	0.50	Willamette	Pellet	4.6	2.3	40	0.038	8.7
25.0 %	0.50	Willamette	Pellet	4.6	2.3	5	0.009	2.0
	2.00							33.0

The final attributes make it more of a Wiezenbock (bitterness is a little too high for it though) than the American Wheat I had envisioned at the start, but all in all a great learning experience and I am looking forward to my next beer already.

I think I will bottle half of it with Cherry extract and see how that works out.

Brewsday

2008-04-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

I managed to finally get a batch of beer brewed. It was a long process and I made quite a few mistakes, but overall I think it went okay.

I decided to make a wheat ale. I have a 3.3 can of liquid wheat malt extract, a 3.3 Light LME and about a pound of golden light malt extract added to 2.5 gal of boiling water. I added 1 oz. of 4.6AA Willamette hops at 60 minutes left. After this I made my first mistake, I added the next .5 oz of Willamette hops at 40 minutes left instead of 30, not too major but a boost to the bitterness. Right after this I realized that I had not added the 1 pound of belgian candi sugar, so at the 30 min mark, it went in. This broke the boil for a minutes or two. To make up for the early hops I added the last .5 oz of Willamette at the 5 min mark instead of 10.

I took the OG and it was 1.072 which is pretty freaking high. I probably didn't need the DME or the candi, but I had read some things that they added to this style well, so we'll see.

Next I pitched the yeast as the wort was cooling. My starter from the previous night had fizzled, so I hydrated some dry active brewers yeast but misfollowed the directions slightly. I don't think it damaged the yeast though.

My major mistake is that I added my yeast soon after this, forgetting to take the wort temp. I figure it was in the high 80's when I pitched it, which is not very good. I really wanted to wait until the low 70's. I may have killed off some yeast there.

I originally had a blowoff tube attached to the bung on the carboy, but it was too cumbersome to set up in the space I have. When I was switching the blowoff tube to an airlock though, I almost pushed the cork all the way down completely through the neck into the beer. I still dont know how I am going to get it out, but it is bubbling every 15-30 seconds or so now.

One last thing though, it is considerably darker than I had hoped as well. We'll see if some of the color mellows during fermentation. I tasted the wort. It was pretty good actually. We'll see what it's like after I rack to secondary.

April Fools

2008-04-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I got myself this year. I mistakenly thought that I would receive my profit sharing check today since it is the first day of the quarter. April Fools! It's not coming til the 10th. After some calls this morning we managed to get the automatic payments put off so I don't bounce things, whew.

Then I got home and there was no cable, not even a signal. It turns out that the cable guys were here today to disconnect the apartment upstairs, but instead they disconnected the whole building. April Fools! I managed to thoroughly convince the cable rep that they screwed up and they needed to fix it tonight, instead of tomorrow like they told my wife. An hour later - wallah - cable and internet. Otherwise I would not be blogging right now.

So this year, the joke's on me.

I found a qoute today that strikes me as roguish so here -

Quotable Rogue:

Virtue is its own punishment.
- Aneurin Bevan

WTF/AFK?

2008-03-31T19:01:00.000-07:00

I just spent about a week with very limited internet, so I am glad to be back!

Not too much has been going on. We got out for a little while this last weekend. It was nice seeing folks that I hadn't seen for a bit. I went through my drawers some and uncovered some long lost t-shirts. Otherwise it was a quiet weekend.

I am getting more excited with the warmer weather. I have had visions of fishing and grilling. It should be a lot more fun this summer with Heidi's sis living so close to us all. That reminds me that I have to go get my fishing license though!

I have also been really itching to try brewing my first batch of beer. I have been waiting to buy ingredients until I had a little bit of cash, which may not be anytime soon unfortunately. I think I am going to make a cherry wheat the first time out and hopefully it doesn't suck. If I manage to not kill it I will try a specialty for my father-in-law's birthday.

Speaking of homebrewing, I saw this article about archeobrews. I must admit that the Midas Touch sounds interesting. I have been sampling a lot of different types of brews recently. Schell's Maifest is probably the best of what I have sampled lately.

On the weightloss front, I am hanging at a solid 20 lb loss right now. I think I may have hit a small plateau, but it has only been a week, so i am not going to worry yet.

I hope everyone enjoys April Fool's Day.

Quotable Rogue:

KLEPTOMANIAC, n. A rich thief.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

Another post!

2008-03-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

This makes two posts in one month! Time to celebrate... Actually, I found a couple of good quotes and wanted to add them but figured I could do some updates as well.

I picked up the brewing equipment yesterday and OMG! The fine family that responded to my freecycle post are my favorite people in the town of Tiffin now. I got everything I need except for sanitizer and a few of the actual ingredients. I am very excited to give it a go now. I think I am going to try an easy wheat beer for my first go, and split it up into regular and cherry in secondary fermentation. I don't have any great expectations, but I am very much looking forward to it.

I can't say enough good stuff about Freecycle. It saved me at least 50 bucks in equipment and if I were to buy a similar kit it would be over 100 bucks easily.

Anyways, gotta get ready for our D&D game tomorrow, so here are the Quotable Rogues for today:

Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
-Oscar Wilde

He that first cries out stop thief, is often he that has stolen the treasure.
-William Congreve

Happy St. Partrick's Day

2008-03-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

It's been a month since I blogged and a lot has happened, but for now I want to say "Slainte!" to all my fellow (and faux) Irishmen out there. I have always been proud of my Irish heritage and this is one of my favorite days of the year. In a break with tradition I am actually not knocking back a few the year.

On that subject however, I am going to try homebrewing. I have been reading up on it a lot actually thanks to the Sam Adams ads for their brew challenge. Thanks to Freecycle I have procured much of the needed equipment. (I actually pick it up tomorrow.) Now I have to decide what to brew first.

In other news, I have been sucessful in going back on my diet. I have lost 20 lbs. so far! I have taken over as DM in our Thurs night sessions. Since I have been slacking on my writing it is a good creative outlet.

No quotable rogues for today, but I will keep an eye out for more.

Erin Go Braugh for you Irish supporters and Póg mo thóin to those who aren't.

On a serious note

2008-02-17T08:14:00.001-08:00

On a serious note, my soon to be ex-brother-in-law assaulted my wife friday and it made the paper. I dugg it and am trying to bring as much attention to this asshole as possible, so if any of you want to digg it too feel free.

http://digg.com/people/Aunt_saves_boy_from_endangering_father

Short Cuts

2008-02-07T05:29:00.000-08:00

Saw this and had to post it

Quotable Rogue:

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
- CP Snow

TimeFlies...

2008-02-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

It's been a month since my last post! I just realized that after talking to a friend online today. I am not doing so well on my writing goals it seems. To be fair though I have been doing better with the workout area, so I am not going to beat myself up too much.

Speaking of, I very much overdid it at the outset. I worked my arms and triceps the first day. It felt a little sore that day, but the following night I could barely straighten out my arms. My triceps were so tight that I had to continually stretch them for the next 2 days. Needless to say I learned my lesson and took it easier on my following sessions.

We have a busy month coming up. We are headed to Des Moines the weekend after valentine's day. There is the Rick Springfield concert with friends coming out 2 weeks after that. I am also toying around with the idea of entering the heartland poker tour event out at Meskwaki at the beginning of March. So lots of fun to be had!

ttfn

Today's quotable rogue:

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.
-George MacDonald

and since its been so long, a bonus quote:

Many a man is saved from being a thief by finding everything locked up.
-Edgar Watson Howe

Caucus Night

2008-01-03T20:29:00.000-08:00

So I went to the caucus tonight. The less-organized, democratic flavored one of course. This was a new precinct for me from four years ago and my what a difference. I am glad that my 14 year old son decided to wander in and attend with me as well. It is a very good introduction to the greatness and sadness that is democracy.

The gymnasium was nearly at capacity, which was a good sign. 303 people in all were registered. I walked in with Obama and Edwards as my leading candidates. Immediately I noticed the number of Obama people was larger than I thought it would be. I decided I would wait and see how the groups shook out before choosing a camp. With a few minutes before the start, the Obama group had about overtaken half the gym and Edwards had hardly grown, so I went to the Edwards side. It was touch and go for a while, but Edwards finally got enough people to be viable and we nearly pulled enough people over to get a second delegate.

It was great that Ian got to see how a caucus works because next time around, he will be eligible to participate. He seemed genuinely interested in how things worked and picked up the basic gist of things. It was sad because he saw how crushed some people were that their candidates of choice were not viable. One woman was even crying openly. Hopefully he takes it as a lesson in how passionate people can or should be about the political process.

I'm glad Obama and Edwards came out on top tonight. I am happier tonight than I was 4 years ago. Most of all, I am glad that the phone calls and visits to my door will end!

Happy New Year

2008-01-01T15:07:00.000-08:00

It's now 2008. Whoohoo.

So anyways, I have decided in addition to writing more, I will read more. This is not just my own idea. I had read Steven King's On Writing. One thing he talked about was listening to (unabridged versions!) audiobooks, especially while driving. I saw an ad for Audible.com that offered a free download with a trial membership, so I signed up.

My initial download was Darkly Dreaming Dexter. I had seen the first season of Dexter on Showtime and really wanted to check out the book. Since I am terrible at returning anything like movie rentals or library books, this seemed like the perfect, not to mention cheapest, method for me. I have to say that while Audible.com is a clunky at best site to navigate, I thoroughly enjoyed the book once I finally had it onto my ipod.

I very much enjoyed the plot differences between the series and the book, and Lindsay's exploration of the Dark Passenger and his dark comedy were the high points of the book for me. This is especially brought out in the internal dialogue of Dexter. The shifts between first and third person are also very deft and not jarring as they are in some other books I've read.

I was so happy with being able to fit an extra book into my schedule by using my drive time to work that I decided to renew my membership when I got a special half price offer. Here is where Audible let me down. I punched in dexter in the search and navigated to the other book that was offered for Jeff Lindsay. Unfortunately, this is the third book of the series. The second book is not even offered on the site! Also, their bandwidth has really taken a drastic hit lately, making the download process almost literally painful. All said though, I am really liking the new Dexter book I have.

I have about 3 weeks to research my next download from them, any suggestions?

Non Sequitor - Comic: The Ungift, Part One

Results

2007-12-26T20:58:00.000-08:00

I started this blog to get me writing more. I failed to make more than a single blog in November however. I blamed this on NaNoWriMo, and at first that was a good reason. As the month continued though, it was my lack of progress on my novel that kept me from writing even here. I did manage some spits and starts to get about 6 chapters written so far. That is something of an accomplishment, though far less than I had set out for.

For the New Year, I am going to make dual resolutions. If you know me, you know I take these seriously. I quit tobacco cold turkey on a resolution. I went on atkins and lost over 100 pounds on a resolution, so I know I can do things if I truly set myself to them. I will do the following: Stick to a workout regimen, Continue my writing.

Those are pretty nebulous. I am going to see the fitness folks at work and sign up for the new incentive plan. That will give me concrete criteria to meet. In my writing, I will get 3000 words a week. That sounds pretty paltry, but I am not a full time writer, I have 8 hours of work, my new workouts, kids, etc. I think that sounds like a reasonable weekly goal. Ideally this will allow me to finish my novel, but a short story or two a month is cool too.

Awesome day today at work. Major tipping on the craps table, not to mention I got to sit box all day. On the other hand, I have definitely gained weight. My uniforms are getting tight and not so comfortable. After dinner tomorrow night, back on the diet for real.

No quotable rogues over that last few days... ttfn

Merry F-ing Christmas

2007-12-24T17:01:00.000-08:00

Okay it's freakin christmas... You know, the time when people freak out because there is no more time or those lucky few who could care less and freak out about everyone freaking out. I am in the second group. I am glad to be sitting in my cozy chair with my supper and a beer. Now to be fair, I did very little of the Christmas prep. That fell to my wife. That of course puts her in the first group, setting up the ideal dynamic for Christmas eve histrionics. So instead of fueling the fire, I decided to blog :)

I am frankly sick to death of how commercial Christmas is. All that gets thought of is presents. People ask me what I want for Christmas and I have no good answer. I don't really want any 'things'. I want situations. I want to spend time with my wife and kids, much more time with my wife later, ho ho ho. I want people to not worry about having to get me anything. I especially want people to not get me stupid ass stuff - ideas like sweaters come to mind for this. Mostly though, I want less stress and less bullshit. If its gonna be a pain in the ass, then skip it, Christ! - no pun intended.

It was actually a good day at work for being a holiday day. Not too many people were in the casino and the ones that were there were in a generally generous mood. One dealer in particular really made my day. I had been complaining about the fact that I had few dealers that I preferred in my section, just her and one other. Well she said would it make my day better if she kept blowing me kisses. I laughed and she kept it up all day. Well it really did make a difference, so I came home in a fairly good mood.

So to anyone who might actually be reading this, have a happy christmas and I hope you have someone to blow kisses to you too!

postscript - another quotable rogue -

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
- Honore de Balzac

Ho Hum

2007-12-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

Posting this before I forget. Get this book for Ian!

Little Brother (Hardcover)
by Cory Doctorow (Author)

Not the king of my own domain

2007-12-21T06:31:00.001-08:00

I did it. I changed my credit card during the year this year. It was a simple process, but one that had terrible repercussions. I use GoDaddy as the registrar for my multiple domains and GoDaddy apparently does not believe in emailing you when your billing fails. Thus my spiritlurkers.com domain slipped into redemption. I called the nice people at GoDaddy and explained the situation. A very polite representative explained that for the paltry sum of 80 dollars I could redeem my domain name. I decided to wait the remainder of the 30 day period and then just re-register because foolishly I have children and Christmas and eighty dollars was just too much for Nov-Dec for me.

I was so wrong yet again. Mr. Jason Falk of Salt Lake City, UT now has my domain name. I have not yet written him to see if I can buy it back. Hopefully after the holidays we can come to some arrangement.

On a better note. Tulip has survived the chocolate poisoning. It has been a learning experience all around.

ttfn

Hell-o

2007-12-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

So last night I stood deathwatch over our family dog. It seems that an entire batch of chocolate cookie batter was thrown out in the trash. I had taken the full trash out of the closet we keep it in as I had been doing some cleanup. Meanwhile, the children had failed to feed the dog last night. The combined result was the dog ingesting about double the lethal dose of chocolate.

6 rounds of dog puking (about the entire batch came up) and nearly a dozen trips outside insued. About 5 this morning I passed out in the chair. This morning the dog is better and we have not had loss of motor control or convulsions, so the prognosis is guarded. It takes up to 24 hours for the full spectrum to present, but normally less. She has been very tired, but did try to chase down squirrels this morning, so I am taking that as a good sign.

Thanks to Digg I saw this on YouTube and just had to give the link for it here. Yngwie has not aged well but still blisters! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpDblDia5TE if the link won't work for you)

Oh, saw a great quotable rogue, so I am going to include it here so I don't lose it -

The big thieves hang the little ones.: Czech Proverb

ttfn

HOW THE FIGHT STARTED...

2007-11-20T19:00:00.001-08:00

I rear-ended a car this morning.

So there we are alongside the road and slowly the driver gets
out of the car . . and you know how you just get sooooo stressed and
sometimes life-stuff seems to get funny?

Yeah, well, I could NOT believe it . . . but he was a dwarf.

He storms over to my car, looks up at me and says, 'I AM NOT
HAPPY!!!'

So, I look down at him and could not help myself. I say, 'Well,
which one are you then?'

And that's when the fight started . . .

NaNoWriMo and Bullies

2007-10-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

November 1st is looming close now, and quite organically the seed of my novel idea is sprouting. I have 2 characters pretty well in mind. Unfortunately they are side characters. I have a hazy, incomplete idea for the plot and a couple of themes I want to present. I have differing ideas on setting, though I suspect Boston will win out. Most of this gelled over the last week. Some of this has been inspired by some conflicts going on with one of my wife's relatives.

This brings me to another point - bullies. I have always absolutely hated bullies. I see this as encompassing all those that subjugate through intimidation. So yes, the schoolyard bully earns my condemnation, but a special place in hell is reserved for wife beaters and rapists. I have always believed that it is the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak. Now I know we are all supposed to be enlightened these days and not think of women as the weaker sex, and in many ways I don't. Domestic violence is a very unfortunate fact of life however.

I have seen this relative become subject to threats and harassment on a continual basis. No one should have to live like this. It's not the first time I have seen this with someone close to me, and I fear one of these times I will lose control. (I am normally not a violent guy. I am far the opposite actually.)

Enough with such depressing subjects. Just suffice it to say that I have some dark inspiration for this upcoming project.

Hospitals

2007-10-20T18:48:00.000-07:00

I absolutely loathe hospitals. It doesn't rise to the irrational abhorrence I have of nursing homes, but it's bad enough on it's own, trust me.

So my wife is sick. She is in a lot of pain that I cannot do anything about. So in turn, I was a raging asshole at times yesterday. This was mostly directed at medical professionals. (Not to the nurses though, God knows they get the worst from both ends.) So yeah, I am very happy to be home and away from that place, though I hate my wife being there alone. So in my frustration at this dichotomy, I am sitting here blogging.

Oh, and not only that, but my phone is out and mediacom is taking forever to fix it, so I can't call her. I am not a very fun individual right now. In fact I think I will wrap this up now.

A Warlock from Boston

2007-10-17T22:07:00.001-07:00

According to various quizzes from the vastness on the internet, the Halloween monster I am is a warlock (the decidedly non-pagan/wiccan warlock that is) and the city that I am is Boston. Both sound fairly on the mark at least. A question did occur to me however. Have you ever noticed just how much time gets drained on tangential web bullshit?

My wife is out of town tonight, so I find myself with a good chunk of uncontested time to use the computer. I set out tonight to connect with a few folks that I haven't talked to in a few days, and the next thing I know, I hear the door closing sound from yahoo when they have signed off. I wasted the night with blogspot quizzes, forum threads that I'll never respond to and stupid videos! All this information at our fingertips and what do we do with it?

I did see a blog while aimlessly drifting today that put the rise of the internet in perspective:

When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook." He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark." As soon as Caxton invented the printing press, we were using it to make pictures of, hey, naked bottoms! We have turned the Internet into an enormous international database of naked bottoms. So you see, the story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms.

I can't see as I completely object to that characterization.

Last night I was much more productive. I wrote half to most of a short story, yay me! Then I tried installing Ubuntu Linux on the crappy laptop. After an hour or so I finally gave up on the install. I am just going to have to break down and take it in somewhere I think, or find a different solution for internet connection. It's still very useful for writing though I have no way to get my writing from there to my regular computer right now. I have the whole day off tomorrow, maybe I will get something done with it then.

Tattoos

2007-10-12T19:57:00.001-07:00

So what is it about tattoos that does it for me?

It's a number of things. I like the feel of getting them. Even the ache for the next couple of days is fine by me. Yeah, I know I am somewhat of a freak in this regard, but you should keep in mind that I am also the kid that went out for goalie because he liked the sting of the ball as it hit his hands. I have come to terms with my oddities. If you can't, too bad.

I love coming up with the design. I will never understand the folks that go in and look at the flash and just pick something. To me that is as original as shopping at Walmart. I am overstating. It's not that you can't find anything worthwhile off the rack. Personally, I'm after original craftsmanship.

So I spend literally months or years thinking about, planning of and yearning for a new tattoo. The sacrifice of saving up for it is another factor. Consulting with the tattoo artist is a fun process too. You may have this picture in your head, but this guy (or gal) is a pro that knows what will work on your body. It is a fun talk with a kindred soul. After this, you eventually get the endorphin fueled release of getting the work done. The lasting image that you get to share with the world or cover up and show to a privileged few is the metaphoric afterglow. I enjoy the whole process, not just the end result.

Not everyone sees it this way, but that's my take.

Write it already

2007-09-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I used to write all the time. I would spend hours and hours writing (when I wasn't doodling or making caricatures of my teachers) in High School. But then something happened. I won a couple writing contests. I then started to expect so much from my writing that my internal censor kicked into overdrive and shut down all output. I had a brief period after I met my wife when my endorphin levels were at obscene levels that I could write. I also had a good run of RP posting, but that was not me writing so much as the character coming to life. Anyways, I am not a big talk about myself kinda guy, but I figured I had to start somewhere.

I'm a mid thirties married guy. I met my wife on a blind date, no shit, and have never looked back. She is my better half. Many men say that as a hackneyed cliche, but I mean it. I was lost before I met her and haven't been since. I have two kids who are truly my life. My boy is so much like me that I feel bad for him sometimes. I know the mountains that I put in my own way and I hope he can avoid that habit. My girl hasn't had it easy either. She was born early and had a seizure disorder for her early years. Due to her early birth and the disorder, or perhaps the barbiturates she was on at such a young age, she has had a number of learning difficulties. One thing that girl has never done is make excuses. God bless her for that.

Anyways, I have decided to start writing again - as in creative writing. As a precursor to this, I figured I could start warming up with this blog. The emphasis is selfish, I admit it. However this is not to be a whine-fest and I will try hard to keep any rants to a low roar.