Monthly archives for June, 2007
Geekery and beer
I can’t decide whether the fact that I want an iPhone means I’m a burgeoning Apple fanboy or just a general high technology whore. Either way, I wasn’t standing in line Friday afternoon to pick up an 8 GB iPhone. I just bought a new phone about six months ago, for one thing, and secondly even if it was time to get a new phone, I don’t think I’d want to pay that much for a phone and get locked into a two-year contract with AT&T. I guess I’ll wait a couple of years when I can buy an iPhone that works with any carrier and I don’t have to get a contract. Plus, there’sa decent chance that by then Apple will be releasing the next revision of the iPhone and I can get one with a bit more storage. I have an 80 GB iPod that’s less than half full, but my music library that I sync still outweighs Apple’s largest iPhone storage capacity about four times over.
In truth, the iPhone will be good for the cell phone industry. For all the minor problems that Apple tends to have with their product, they have some of the best designers and engineers in the industry. The simplicity of the interface on the iPhone is long overdue. I’ve always hated cell phones and how they use deep menus and obscure placement of functionality. My Sony-Ericsson cell phone I bought this year is definitely the best phone I’ve ever used, but its menuing is still obnoxious. There’s functionality to create shortcuts, but I can’t shortcut to any of the programs installed on it. WTF? I have Opera Mini on it, but I can’t put a shortcut to it anywhere, so instead I have to browse to Files, then Applications (which makes no sense on its own), then Opera Mini. Just let me assign a button to it, for Pete’s sake.
Someday.
Hanne and I threw together my second batch of beer last weekend, the first I’ve done from scratch. I forgot to add bittering hops, though, so I’m a bit of a dummy. I did add hops about 30 minutes into the boil, another set of hops at the end, but it’s going to be mighty malty without the bittering hops. I bought another 2 oz. (how such a little amount can bitter 6 gallons of beer is amazing) to use to dry-hop my beer when I rack it into the secondary fermenter today, though, so that ought to offset some of the lack of bitterness. Dry-hopping is when you add hops into the fermenter as the beer is finishing, and it nicely bitters the final product. Different kind of bittering than when you add them to the boil, but hey, I’m just trying to create something drinkable here.
I’m thinking next weekend (assuming my car’s fixed by then) I may take all my stuff over to my Dad’s and give him a brewing demo, have a few bottles of something with him. Plus, I kinda need his temperature-controlled house, so it’s win-win. He and Gramma get to spend the day with me, I get to use his house.
This week was particularly hellish at work, due to a poorly-timed and relatively poorly-implemented software upgrade as well as some other stuff. Well, mostly just that. I’d prefer not to write about it, though, both because I’ve done enough bitching about work the old fashioned way–person to person–and because there’s always the off chance that someone from work reads this and become offended.
I have a little bit of a headache today. Too much tequila, not enough food. I went out with Hanne and a bunch of people from work last night and had a few rounds, but I neglected to really eat any dinner. I guess I didn’t hydrate myself enough, but in the grand scheme of day-after side-effects this is pretty minor. It’ll clear itself right up when I have some beer tonight, though I’ll make sure to actually, you know, eat tonight.
We few, we idiotic few
Some of the nice things about running on what I call the Bridge Loop downtown (Hawthorne to Steel Bridge and back) is that it’s scenic, there are plenty of people to look at, and it’s relatively short as far as runs go (2.5 miles from start to finish). The bad thing is that once you’re on the east side of the river…BAM…your shade is all gone. On 84 degree days such as today, that’s the difference between “Gosh, I could use a drink of water,” and “What, am I an idiot?” It took me the better part of an hour and a long cold shower, but I finally cooled down and stopped sweating. The 45 oz. of cold water I drank didn’t seem to help, either. I was probably just refilling my body, anyway.
By now the cat’s out of the bag amongst my family. My big secret that I did an excellent job keeping from them was that I did my first batch of homebrew beer after nearly two years of “planning,” which is my vernacular means “procrastinating.” So with some gentle nudging from Hanne, my first batch was brewed just in time to bestow my first two bottled gifts to my Dad on Father’s Day.
As a quick aside, Father’s Day was interesting. The whole family went out to Vincente’s Pizza, making the roster myself, Hanne, my mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother, and my great-aunt and -uncle. Let’s just say that eight people don’t fit so well into Vincente’s while there’s a private party going on in the main section with all the tables. We made it work, but it was a bit crowded for awhile. It was also far cheaper than I expected it would be. I spent more money just going out with Hanne to Noble Rot and the Jade Lounge last Saturday night, even with two pizzas and three pitchers at Vinentes.
Anyway, back to my homemade beer. I figured since my Dad’s been bugging me about it for…well, two years, he should get the first bottles. Well, besides me. I consumed the first bottle on Saturday, and since I hadn’t had lunch I got a little tipsy. I tell you, getting tipsy (and perhaps someday, subsequently drunk) off my own beer is a little strange. I mean…I made it. There’s always a sense of satisfaction that comes from consuming meals you’ve made from scratch, but I made that beer. I didn’t grow the hops or barley, but I combined them with water and yeast and alcohol resulted. Awesome.
I’m taking a few bottles to a work BBQ this weekend, too, to show off. I have enough empty bottles collected already to make batch #2 this weekend. My first batch was a British style IPA, meaning it’s not as hoppy as American IPA, but still very tasty. I’m thinking straight-up pale ale the second time around. Brewing is a lot of fun, and a lot easier than you might think. A lot of sitting and waiting, and certainly a lot of sanitizing (just in case), but largely it’s pretty easy. The things I wasn’t looking forward to–mostly the siphoning from fermenter to fermenter–turned out to be really easy, and the hardest part turned out to be what I thought would be the easiest (sanitizing).
No one mention the siphoning from the primary fermenter into the secondary fermenter for awhile, though. I’m still a bit sore about it, though Hanne got a good laugh out of the rubber stopped going through the neck of the fermenter and sinking like a rock into the not-quite-fully-aged beer. It took me close to 30 minutes to get it out again. I did manage to eventually pull it out using a combination of chopsticks and needle nose pliers…but I wasn’t happy.
All in all, it’s a lot of fun. I think it’ll save me a fortune in bottled beer in the long run, even if I gain weight in the process. I don’t think of it as a beer belly–rather, a carb-induced unwanted weight gain. But let me put it this way: I’m willing to exercise to support my lifestyle. I like beer. I don’t like being tipsy. I don’t like being drunk. I just like drinking beer. It’s fizzy, it’s tasty, and it’s never the same.
Work is…work. I’d prefer not to write about it, but I’ve talked to several people about my thoughts on my workplace and my future plans there. I do have the afore-mentioned BBQ this weekend, which should be a lot of fun. I’m still carless at the moment, though, so I’ll have to negotiate with Hanne to drive using her Flexcar time. Perhaps I can reimburse her for a few hours of driving time. They just put it a Flexcar right across the street from me, making 3 cars within a 7-block radius of me, so it’s not like it’s out of her way to get a car.
Speaking of Hanne, the Dragon Boat races, while a lot of fun to watch, were quite wet and miserable to attend. The day of the Dragon Boat races and the Rose Festival Parade was in the upper 40′s to low 50′s temperature wise, and it poured all day long. I thought maybe I could squeak out a run, so I put on my running gear, tied a hoodie around my waist, and ran down to the tents. It sprinkled for most of the way there, but right after I crossed the Steel Bridge it started pouring. I don’t mind running in the rain so much, but I pitied the racers out on the water. Yuck.
Long story short, I spent around 5 hours downtown with Hanne, pulled as far into my hoodie as I could go, lamenting I hadn’t brought pants, too. It turned out OK in the end, and I ran home after Hanne’s last race during a break in the weather. Needless to say, we were both wiped that night, her having rowed in two of her three races and me having run around 5 miles.
It’s been so long, I just don’t have any more interesting stories to tell. Homemade beer’s the big one. Things with Hanne are going quite well, indeed. That’s about all I can think of, and Hanne is expected to join me here at Barley Mill shortly, so I’ll sign off there.
A short summary
When you wait a long time between posts, there’s a lot of things you forget to write about.
So let’s start with the things currently on my mind. My car’s currently unavailable thanks to a transmission refusing to shift out of park. Fortunately the car itself is parked in a nice neighborhood, albeit on the street. Just not my street or neighborhood. Much longer of this and I think I might have it towed to my own driveway just so it’s close by, even if I can’t use it. I don’t think I should have to take it to a garage just because the damn gearshift won’t…well…shift.
Hanne went back to the east coast for the weekend to see her brother’s high school graduation, leaving me with enough time to get a taste of freedom before she came back to take control of my life again. I spent the time extremely productively, drinking beer, eating pizza, and watching TV. I think I might have vacuumed at some point, done the dishes once. Freedom!
Today’s the 63rd anniversary of D-Day. Rock on. Three years ago I was sitting–where else?–in a McMenamins with my sister, talking about what was going on at that very moment exactly 60 years before. It’s not as interesting when it’s not a “round number,” but nevertheless I got in some interesting discussions today on Fark.com where people made some extremely ignorant armchair historian comments. And just some downright idiotic assertions, like that the Allies won every battle they fought against Nazi Germany.
Uh, hello? Operation Market Garden, anyone? That’s just off the top of my head, too. People are idiots.
Beef cubelets over Memorial day weekend were delicious, and Hanne approved of them. She didn’t like them cold, though. I don’t know if she and I have a future if that’s the case.
For some reason, I just don’t have anything else to say. I wonder why that is? I’ve been plenty chatty lately.