On the phone with Dell to get a server drive replaced. It had to be the Exchange server, didn’t it? Blah.
Monthly archives for April, 2008
Monday musings
My video ended up coming out about as well to be expected from an amateur filmmaker, and it required a great deal of practicing my lines, a reshoot or five, and cutting some of what I thought would be the funniest lines. I ended up filming scenes at John’s Marketplace, Belmont Station, Roots, Lucky Lab, Barley Mill, Green Dragon, Jace Gace, and with a pizza from Vincente’s and a sandwich and chips from Zupan’s. ‘Twas a lot of work, though I’m pretty proud of it in the end. I overnighted it to New York on Thursday, and I’m just waiting to hear if they like my video (and me) enough to fly me out there to meet with the bigwigs.
Hanne’s parents were both in town this last weekend, and it; was good to see them both and go out a few times. On Thursday we met for dinner up at the Laurelwood Public House in NW, Friday we did a chianti wine tasting at the local wine shop and then had dinner at Nostrana next door, Saturday we had lunch at ther Green Dragon, and Sunday we had brunch at Simpatica. What a rich weekend of food. Ooog. Too much good food, you might say. Hanne’s Dad will be staying out here for awhile on a job in Hillsboro, and Hanne’s Mom will most likely come out to Portland for the summer, possibly longer.
Hanne’s remarkably calm about her parents both moving across the country and living a short bus ride away, but she assures me they’re not the drop-in type. Not that I mind it per se–after all, they’re very generous when it comes to picking up the tab when it arrives–but on the other hand, maybe I’m just drawing on my experiences from my own family, which in small doses is wonderful but en masse becomes a real adventure.
I bottled my first two batches of beer from 2008 this weekend, and both was that fun. You know, sarcasm really doesn’t translate well into writing, does it? Bottling beer is always a real pain in the ass, and doing two back to back with very little help is just asking for trouble. Personally, I don’t mind the actual bottling part, but it’s the setup and then cleanup that always get me. It’s just…messy. I’m looking forward to tasting them in a few weeks when Hanne and I have our housewarming, though. I think they will both probably go over well along with my lager.
Hanne’s still busy studying–in fact, as we’re sitting here eating she’s studying–but in two weeks she’ll be free as a bird. Good for her, being 2/3 done with law school.
And me? I have nothing else of consequence to report.
Lead faces and whatnot
I couldn’t remember when I’d written last, so I had to look back to see what my last entry was. Oh yes, my evening at Green Dragon with Beer Valley Brewing in attendence. That was quite an evening. As Hanne couldn’t join me, I went by myself, armed with my laptop and a desire for good beer. What I got was one of the best evenings I’ve had in a long time. I ended up drinking a lot of excellent beer, and I sat at a table with a writer of the PDX Beer Blog, a writer of the Portland Tribune’s Guest on Tap, and Fred Eckhardt, a Portland beer legend. What a great evening.
Of course, I indulged in the brews a bit too much, and I ended up feeling the whole next day like my face was made of lead. I was happy that I was back there the very next evening celebrating my Mom’s birthday, however, and I was ready for another beer by then. I don’t swear off beer long, even when it makes me have a miserable day after a great evening.
Between then and now, it’s been mostly situation normal. Hanne’s been busy studying for the most part, and I’ve busied myself with whatever to keep myself occupied while she ramps up for finals. There has been one piece of big news, however. Around April 1, I came across a posting on one of the Portland beer blogs about a summer intern for the Sheraton hotel corporation needing a summer intern for their Chief Beer Officer, which they made a big PR deal about hiring last year. This guy’s job is to go from brewfest to brewfest, brewery to brewery, and pick out beers for the Sheraton hotels to serve on tap. I think it’s a fantastic job, and it’s probably the cushiest thing I could ever imagine doing, but not “soft” that way.
So, he needs a summer intern. I thought it was a joke at first, but on a lark I threw together a cover letter, tossed it on top of my resume, and submitted it. I didn’t hear anything, and I actually forgot about it for awhile. Fast forward to last Friday, and I get a call from someone with Sheraton telling me that I am one of the 20 finalists from the thousands of submissions they got. I was speechless! I had no speech. I did hve an assignment, though: I had to make a video telling why I would be the best person for the job and sbmit it to them by this next Friday. So, my weekend was spent filming and drinking beer and more filimng. I have most of my 5-minute video filmed, and all I have left is my introduction, my conclusion, and a reshoot of my scene from the Green Dragon. I decided I didn’t like what I filmed there, and instead I’m going to have my Dad stop by tomorrow night for the Meet the Brewer night and snap some pictures, which I’ll use with a voiceover in lieu of actual video.
My whole point of the video, though, is that Portland is such a spectacular town for both beer and the community that’s formed around it, it’s tough not to get swept up into it and become a beer lover. I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as passionate about beer as I am today if I lived elsewhere. I just hope I show myself off while I’m showing Portland off. The four finalists they pick will fly to New York to meet with the company execs and the Chief Beer Officer, and their video (or excerpts from their video) will go on the Sheraton website for people to vote for, along with profiles of the finalists. So…I’m trying not to mess around too much and make it as serious as I can with one week’s time.
I haven’t told my boss, either, but I did go and talk to the firm’s executive director. She was supportive and said that she’ll back me with whatever I choose to do, but since it’s a part time summer-only internship, I can’t imagine that there will be too much of a conflict of interests. It’s a paid summer internship, too, so if I got the job I could look forward to a bit of dough to pay down my student loans. Booyah.
Yeah. I had some trouble sleeping last night, needless to say. Until I get this damn video done, I’ll probably have a sleepless night or two more. Good thing I don’y do video production for a living. Of course, being without any formal training, I think I’ve done pretty well with a DV cam and my MacBook.
So…wish me luck.
Sitting in a boring Microsoft …
Sitting in a boring Microsoft presentation
My face feels like it's made o…
My face feels like it’s made of lead. Oog.
Punishment for doing right
I’ve been pretty lax about running in the last few weeks ever since Hanne and I joined the Portland Rock Gym. In fact, I’ve been running exactly once in that time, and that was on a treadmill at the gym, so I’m not sure if that really counts. Hanne was getting back later than usual today, I had time to kill until I came to the “Meet the Brewer” night here at the Green Dragon, and so I thought why not?
Literally a block and a half from the apartment, it started to rain. And not just that lightish spitting rain, but it started pouring. I thought to myself “Hey, I still see blue sky, I think I’ll weather this out and see if it lets up.” Turned out the blue sky was going away and not towards me, and so five miles later I was soaked to the bone and frickin’ cold, even after a five mile run. That, my friends, is determination.
And naturally, once I got home and hopped in the shower, I looked out the window and saw nothing but clear blue skies. Did…did I imagine the whole thing? Oh no, I still feel kind of wet, and I’ve showered, dried, and I’m in bone dry clothes. You just don’t lose that feeling for awhile. I figure the whole thing was just punishment for…something. I clearly did something or didn’t do something and offended some higher powered who took offense to me running this afternoon.
So, now I’m doing pennance of sorts and I’m drinking a mug of Highway to Ale beer from Beer Valley Brewing out of Ontario, OR. I love this beer. I really do. It’s not quite a barleywine, but it’s not quite an ale. The brewer is here at the Green Dragon tonight, so I’ll make sure that I wander over and give my praise.
Lamentations
Funny, I often feel like I don’t write enough, and occasionally when I have both the opportunity and the motivation, I just have nothing to say.
This, of course, being said at a McMenamins with a beer nearby,.
Weekend brews
While Hanne was busy all weekend with homework, I spent my weekend primarily dealing with brewing and brewing-related activities. The first two batches of 2008 went off (largely) without a hitch, and both are happily fermenting away in the relative darkness of the entryway to the apartment.
I say “largely” without a hitch only because I taught myself a lesson in carbon dioxide and how rapidly it expands. To get a cleaner brew and faster fermentation, you take your yeast and you make a starter, exactly the same way you would with sourdough bread, though for beer it’s a liquid starter and not dough. One lesson is to aerate your beer on occasion to continue oxygenating the yeast so that it can continue to eat the sugar, and generally the rule is to gently swirl the starter. Swirl the starter.
90 minutes of boiling, 30-45 minutes of cooling, and I have 4.5 gallons of cooled wort in the fermenter, ready to have the yeast pitched in to begin fermentation. Two hours of work, and what do I do? I pull the airlock out, cover the stopper with my thumb, and I shake the yeast starter. Yeast + sugar = carbon dioxide. The container was full of it, and there were lots of bubbles that still contained it. Ever put your thumb over a champagne bottle and sprayed it? This was pretty much what happened, except I wasn’t expecting to spray it over a winning team. Instead, it geysered up and out much to my surprise, and instead of pouring it gently into the wort I ended up cleanign it off the ceiling and just about every other exposed surface in the kitchen. Fortunately, I didn’t lose too much of it, but it was a bit frustrating to make such an idiotic mistake on my first batch of 2008.
That batch was a really hoppy amber ale which will likely be fairly similar to what I’ve made before, but Sunday’s batch was really the more interesting one. I remade my porter from last year, tweaking the base recipe very slightly and then expanding upon it by adding two tablespoons of organic cocoa powder for that nice chocolately taste and then dumping three chopped chilis de arbol directly into the primarly fermenter. I was after a sort of Mexican chocolate experience (without using Mexican chocolate since it would be too subtle in the beer), where the chocolate is sweet when it hits the tongue and then a little spicy and you can feel some heat when you swallow. Like good hard liquor, in a way. It’s a huge gamble with five gallons at stake, but I figure that either there won’t be enough chili in it and the heat will either be undetectable or underpowered, or it’ll be too strong and I’ll five gallons opf marinade and base for chili. I used three chilis that have a Scoville rating of between 15,000-30,000 units compared to a Habenero’s 300,000 rating, and since I found a recipe that called for 1-3 Habeneros, I think I’ll be on the underpowered side of things.
Saturday night Hanne and I wandered over to a friend’s house to have some snacks, drink some expensive hard liquor, and play around with a stand-up arcade cabinet he has that has the ability to play any number of around 4,000 different arcade titles. We played some blasts from the past and generally had a good time. I want one, but there’s just no place I can think of to put one like it in our current apartment. Curses!
Oh well. Someday. Someday….
Seattle and back
I feel somewhat guilty that I’m sitting here drinking coffee and writing on my website while Hanne sits a few feet away and slaves over her schoolwork, but what can I say? I didn’t pay an ungodly amount of money to continue my education and instead I can enjoy my weekends. Hanne’s approaching finals, though, so it’s to be expected for the next month and a half that she won’t have time for much outside of schoolwork, work-work, and practice for the Dragon Boat races. Fortunately for me, we’re not in the middle of any TV shows and we finished up all the shows that we’d been watching. I have a feeling once her finals end, we’ll return to some of the classics and begin season 2 of “The Wire” and muddle our way through season 4 of “Nip/Tuck.” I informed her last night that we were going to move into “Doctor Who” territory for our requisite scfi show, and she seemed ameniable to that.
Last weekend was a hell of a lot of fun, involving a train ride, a fair amount of alcohol, and flying salmon. Hanne and I have been talking about going to Seattle for quite some time, and we finally just decided to go ahead and plan it. Originally, I was supposed to go up to Seattle with my boss so we could tour the Seattle office and talk to them about some of their software packages we’re looking at deploying, and then Hanne was going to join us. When that fell through, we went ahead and made the trip anyway, omitting the office stop.
We took the train up on Friday afternoon, and I gotta say, of all the times I’ve been to Seattle, the train is the way to go. I hate driving to Seattle. Once you hit Tacoma, traffic pretty much just…stops. It’s horrible. The train takes a little longer, but I’ll trade that and $30 so that I can move around, use a restroom, and pretty much not have to pay attention. I played my Nintendo DS all the way up, Hanne watched a movie and read, and before we knew it we were pulling into the Seattle station. We’d booked a hotel downtown that wasn’t too far away, so we just hoofed it.
Now, depending on who you ask, the Seattle trip had different goals in mind. Hanne was there for the touristy stuff and wanted to see the Space Needle, the Experience Music Project, and Pike Place Market. I was there because I had beer to seek out. I came up with this big intricate plan for Friday and Saturday, and I think it turned out well. First scheduled stop was Elysian Brewing up on the hill. I’ve had some of their beer in the past (their Avatar Jasmine IPA is particularly interesting), and I like making pilgrimmages to places who’s beer I enjoy. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the pub, though. Service was bad (I sat there with an empty glass for about 15 minutes while our waiter passed us by several times), food was expensive, they were out of a couple of beers on the menu (no Imperial IPA? Blasphemy!), and they didn’t even have any pint glasses in stock to add to my collection. Bollocks. Still, it was worth the hike up Pike.
Next stop was, predictably, a McMenamins. Seattle is home to three, and my goal was to get to all three and surpass my Dad’s McMenamins count. The Six Arms McMenamins on Pike was McMenamins #45 for me, and Hanne and I met a couple of people there for a few drinks and some grub. Service was, as McMenamins go, pretty standard. The whole trip and putting up with McMenamins service was worth it for my standard “Guess where I am?” call to my Dad. I had seen him for a few beers just a couple of days before, and it took all my strength not to tell him and rub it in his face beforehand. The call went something like this.
Me: “Guess where I am?”
Him: “A pub somewhere, I’d imagine.”
Me: “Yes. Guess.”
Him: “I don’t know.”
Me: “I’m at the Six Arms McMenamins.”
Him: “Six Arms? Where’s that?”
Me: “It’s on Pike Street.”
Him: “Pike Street? You’re in…Seattle?”
Me: “Yes.”
Him: “Well, that’s cheating.”
We bailed after a few rounds and headed to our next destination, Pike Brewing Company right in Pike Place Market. I’ve had several of their beers in the past, but my experience with their beer has been…mixed. I had a bottle of their Tandem Double Ale once upon a time and thought it was oh-so-delicious, but two subsequent bottles I purchased had gone bad and turned to vinegar, prompting a call to the place of purchase so they could return the bottles to their distributor. Now, bottles I’ve had since then have been fine, but never quite as good as that first bottle. Maybe it had aged? Regardless, my experience with the pub was similar: expectation based on previous experience clouded my judgement and it was a letdown. Again, don’t get me wrong–the beer was good, but Pike was very sports bar-ish, and that’s not typically the environment I like knocking back a few rounds. Plus, seriously? An $18 Reuben on the menu? Shenanigans. I’ll pay $10 for a good sandwich in an upscale pub, but that was ridiculous.
But yeah, the beer was good.
Saturday morning Hanne and I had a ridiculously expensive breakfast at the restaurant of the hotel next door (blueberry French toast for me, granola for Hanne) and then set out for Seattle Center, where we wandered around underneath the Space Needle and surrounding attractions. It was about 11:15 when we’d crossed the plaza, so we found ourselves migrating towards the Queen Anne McMenamins that’s a block north of Seattle Center. A glass of beer and a call to Portland later, we were on our way to catch a bus up to the Freemont district to visit the third McMenamins.
I thought I had our bus route all planned out, but it turned out that we got off the bus too late and had to trek a half mile or so to the McMenamins. Needless to say, we got some excellent use out of the built-in Google Maps feature of my iPhone last weekend, as well and the web browsing feature to look up bus schedules. The unscheduled detour and late bus disembarking turned out to be unintentionally good fortune, as on our walk to the Dad Watson’s McMenamins we passed the Freemont Troll under the Freemont Bridge, which I’ve seen in pictures and other media before, but never in person. What luck!
And thus ended the great McMenamins voyage of 2008. Well, the first at least–still gotta hit Eugene and Roseburg. My count stands at 47 of the 55 McMenamins visited, which is within just a couple of my Dad’s count, though neither of us are entirely certain in which direction.
The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around Pike Place Market, gorging on food, watching fish be thrown, marveling at the available produce and food, and pretty much killing time until we were picked up by some friends of ours who were also in Seattle that weekend. As it turned out, a bunch of Hanne’s friends from school were all up there, so we had people we knew and a place to crash at our disposal. We didn’t really crash per se, though. The father of one of Hanne’s friends lives right on Lake Washington, so we had a huge house, lots of wine and beer, and a Dungeness crab dinner all set up for us. I’m not a seafood eater in general, and my past experiences with crab in particular have been mixed, but I felt that I probably wasn’t going to encounter a similar dinner at any point in the near future where live crabs are tossed in boiling broth anytime soon, so despite being mostly full from our journey through Pike Place Market, I indulged in a few crab legs and some of the rest of the spread. I didn’t dislike it, so that’s a start. I wasn’t bowled over like some of the other guests were, but as I told the host, not disliking the crab is a big thing for me.
Sunday was a mellow day. Hanne and I went back into Seattle with two of our friends and went through Pike Place market (again, for us), but we thought ahead and picked up stuff for a special dinner. On the menu was four peppercorn pasta from the pasta vendor, fresh cherry tomatoes, fresh basil, pancetta, and olive oil that cost way the hell too much for my cherry tomato pasta sauce. We planned on making all that Sunday night when we got back, but we got back a bit too late for that.
Our last stops in Seattle were the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame that share the same building. I really enjoyed the EMP, but I’d want to go back and spend some time there when it’s not so busy. The SciFi Museum was…underwhelming. I might have been a bit jaded, as I was tired from so much walking and I wanted to go home, but our friends were (rightfully, I might add) taking their sweet time. Hanne and I aren’t really museum people, and we tend to skim exhibits. Fortunately for both of us, our friends drive fast, and we were home in less than two and a half hours, which just might have been a new land speed record.
Our special all-Pike dinner was made on Monday night, and thus ended our trip to Seattle.
I’ve been very tired this week, and I’m not sure why. I took the day off on Thursday I was so tired, plus, my head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. A wiser person might think that sounds like a thinly veiled excuse for a hangover, and while it was true I’d had a few beers the night before when I’d been out at Hopworks, I had felt like that the previous night, and so I knew that couldn’t be it.
This weekend got off to an excellent start, and I’m hoping it finishes just as strongly. Last night was a banquet for the Environmental Law Review people at the Portland City Grill, and so I accompanied Hanne as her “plus one.” We knew it was just going to be appetizers, though, so we stopped by Saucebox before we arrived and had a couple of drinks and some snacks. The big surprise of the evening was that of all the people working on Law Review, Hanne was dubbed “Sourcechecker of the Year” by the managing editors. She got a little certificate, a tiara, and a bag of chocolate. That’s my girl.
Today will be made up of a trip to the homebrew shop to buy ingredients for two batches of beer–one today, one tomorrow–then a trip to the liquor store, then brewing a batch of overly hoppy beer (which isn’t something I’d ever do, you know), then a quick climb at the Rock Gym, then we’re headed over to a friend of mine’s house for cocktails, conversation, and video games. There’s a strong chance that last part will be just my friend and I, but Hanne can entertain herself with his wife while they laugh at us making asses of ourselves as we drink and play games. Tomorrow will be another brew and hopefully a nice meal here at home.
Hanne will be studying pretty much the whole time, but I think that’s a nice way to round out a weekend that began with Hanne’s compatriots dubbing her the most diligent person on the staff of Law Review.
Off to plan my brews.
I <3 YouTube. All their fr…
I <3 YouTube. All their front page videos are RickRolls.