As detailed in this exhaustive thread, there’s a pretty black bumper on the back of the Scout today. I have a little more work to do to tie up some loose ends, but it’s installed, the license plate is lit, and the spare tire is ready to be mounted.

Our weekend was good, and busy. I spent a bunch of time away from the girls to build and install a new Mountain Lion server for a friend, which went smoother and easier than I’d hoped. Apart from a balky web script that blew up in PHP 5.2, I had everything up and running in a few hours. Yardwork around the house got caught up on, so it looks less like we abandoned the place and more like we just forgot about things (the back lawn hadn’t been completely mowed in about a month). I ran a bunch of errands with Finn as my copilot and got caught up on a pile of small things around the house; going into the fall things are going to get busy around here so I’m trying to prepare as best I can.

My batch of Surly Cynic is in the keg and it’s delicious. It needs a final day or two of carbonation, but that hasn’t stopped me from drinking it. I should also have an IPA kit in hand by Wednesday. Over the vacation, I set up a strong brewing table in the basement next to the kegerator so that I can ferment and transfer beer without moving it bringing it upstairs, and have a place to keep all the brewing gear. Eventually I’m going to move some lumber out of the basement (and possibly the table saw too) and into the garage, after that gets reorganized for the seventeenth time. What the garage really needs is a set of custom-built shelves, but I don’t know if that’s in the cards until wintertime.