I got a little package in the mail this afternoon with a blue box of wires inside. It’s a Johnson Controls A419, and it will keep my beer ~38° without slushing. After putting Finn to sleep, I hooked it up to the freezer, fed the sensor inside, read an inscrutable instruction sheet, and plugged it in. Within about five minutes it was hovering comfortably at the target temperature, so I cleaned out the inside, dropped the rest of my bottled beer in on the shelf, and closed it up for the night.

I’m going to try and shoot for brewing my next batch of ale this weekend in order to get another batch ready by the middle of February. Brian forwarded me a weblog post featuring a homemade hot/cold temperature controller, which he’s going to be using for controlled fermentation, but which could also be used for kegeration.

Meanwhile, I’m a mess. My neck, which has been giving me problems for a few months now, is in the advanced stages of stabbing with icepicks, made all the more painful after curling up next to Finn Wednesday night to ward off bad dreams. And being away from the keyboard for a couple of days has wreaked havoc on my wrists; I feel like they’ve been sat upon for a couple of hours and then thrust into chilled water. Apparently the neck thing has something to do with an orthopedic pillow and the vertebrae being pinched, so I need to consider some PT at the little Polish guy down the street and a special pillow for sleeping.

All of this leads me to my next problem, which has been how to fit time for regular exercise into our family’s schedule. I’m acutely aware of my age and the fact that I’m living on borrowed time—given the history of heart and circulatory problems in my family tree, I want to add 1/2 hour of cardio to my daily routine. The issue I have is that I need to get it in either before Finn wakes up or after she goes to sleep, and it has to be quiet so that I don’t keep her up. And therein lies the rub.