Jen cleaned and hung the crystal for Finn’s light fixture last night, which means all that needs to be done in her room is some cleaning and decorating. I spray-painted my two Pottery Barn shelves and hung them over her bed and dresser to complete the look. It’s a completely different room now; she calls it her “big-girl room”, which makes the three of us happy.
I kegged the IPA last night and I’ll be carbing it like crazy to get it ready for the parade. It shakes out at about 4.5% ABV, which is just right for a hot day. The Hefeweizen still has about two weeks to go, so that’ll be ready by the time we get back from the beach. Then I’ve got to figure out what’s next (I’m expecting the IPA to be gone by the end of Friday).
At some point today I should be getting a delivery from Amazon containing a rack for the back of the CR-V so that we can bring bikes to the beach; I’m going to pack Finn’s bigger bike and the trailer bike so we can possibly even teach her how to ride on her own.
Well, the great circular wheel of sickness has made about five full revolutions in the last week, so that Finn was sick and then got well and now seems to be sick again. I’m still fighting off the cold that’s been keeping me coughing and blowing my nose for two weeks, but it hasn’t knocked me off my feet yet.
I’ve taken delivery of a beautiful new 13″ MacBook Pro at work, and I’m in love with the Retina display. It’s difficult to go back to a standard LCD after looking at it. The machine itself is a marvel of power and beauty in a tiny little package, and I’ll be happy to carry it to and from work instead of a larger and heavier 15″, although I still have to spring for a pricy Thunderbolt dongle to get a wired Ethernet connection.
The designer who was working with me at WRI celebrated his last day on Friday, so the search for a full-time replacement is in high gear. I’m still working out how to handle file sharing and storage with the new designer based in the D.C. office; I inherited a Dropbox account which holds all of our current files but there’s no method for sharing any of our legacy files. I do have several external hard drives with tons of other legacy files written by people who left years ago, but I’d like to find some kind of simple managed server solution. It may be that I have to cobble together a shared drive in the tower until I can justify the purchase of a server license or a Drobo.
It turned out that I didn’t need any scripting help to count weblog categories after all; WordPress offers a counter in the categories dashboard. I dropped the data into a graph to view the spread, and it’s pretty much what I imagined: not counting Shortlinks, which is the category I use for sidebar links, House comes in second, followed by Photo (which I use for every post that includes a picture), Housekeeping (posts that concern changes to the site and technical details) and Geek. I did think that Finn would rate higher, but she’s also working against eight years of posts that predate her.
Meanwhile, on my main website, I made the first major update to the homepage in something like seven years. It’s really simple right now, but I’ll be adding and tweaking and updating it over time. The big issue right now is trying to find a way to serve random images out of my Flickr feed without using Flash to display them. I first tried an old Flash based product to pull images from a subdirectory on the site, but it appears Flickr has disconnected its RSS feed for Sets, which destroys pretty much any good way of pulling curated images. So, I looked around some more and found a very simple jQuery plugin to grab tagged images and cycle through them. I have to work out some of the responsive breakpoints, but it’s live.
Mr. Scout dropped by on Friday night and dropped off my new Blichman kettle, which is about as hard-core a piece of equipment as I could ever own. It came with a layer of crud at the bottom from the last batch of wort, but five minutes with a scrub brush and some baking soda and the stainless was gleaming again. Now I just need to kick this fucking cold so I can brew a new batch.
Some kind of crazy front is blowing through this evening, sending the temperatures down from an agreeable 65˚to somewhere in the low 30s. What the hell, man? Just when I was thinking I could leave my winter coat on the rack. We went from having the windows open to shutting the storms down to keep the heat inside. Oh, well.
Grandma and Renie are coming down this weekend to visit, which has us running around cleaning the house in preparation. It will be great to see them for the first time since Christmas, and I know Grandma is probably levitating off the floor with excitement. Hopefully the weather will warm back up so they don’t have to suffer a wet March weekend in Maryland.
The CR-V is at the shop with new ceramic brake pads waiting to be picked up tomorrow morning; I bought rotors and pads last weekend with the intention of changing them, but when I got the grindy side up on the jack, I couldn’t get the caliper to release the rotor. Instead of bashing it with a BFH, I wisely decided on calling in the pros, and they got it done today, no muss, no fuss. Certain things I’m willing to take on myself, but any monkey business with important systems like brakes I’ll happily farm out.
I kegged my latest batch of IPA, called Sinistral Warrior, on Sunday, and it’s carbing in the cooler this week. I’ve pulled two glasses from it so far, and it’s tasty–and strong. I have to remember to throttle back my intake because it tends to hit me rather quickly. Next up is getting some time to bottle the pumpkin, which has been sitting patiently since the end of December, and ordering a session IPA from Northern Brewer for the next batch. I also cut my 4″ shank down to 3″ last weekend. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be–maybe 5 seconds with a metal blade on the miter saw, and 2 minutes with a file to clean up the threads. Now, when I install tap handles in the front of the kegerator, the tubing and inlets won’t be in the way. Half the fun of owning a kegerator seems to be hose management.
I haven’t looked at Facebook in about two weeks. I popped on there this evening to answer a question (I get alerts in my mailbox, but rarely respond to them) and lost a half an hour; nothing much has changed. I talked about creating more and consuming less at the beginning of this year, and haven’t done much to change that yet. I could come up with lots of reasons why, but the truth is I just haven’t.
I have a lot of things to work on this spring; that is only one of them, and the least important.
This week, Mr. Scout found a deal for me: a Blichman 8 gallon brew kettle with a thermometer and ball valve built in. I was considering buying a thermometer and drilling a hole into my existing pot, but this was too good to pass up.
It’s about 10° outside today, which means we’re all in our PJs at 4PM. I have had no motivation to do anything today other than straighten up the house, swap my AppleTV out with a new Roku, and help Finn put her final Christmas LEGO set together. She’s now got about eight vehicles, two horses, and a bakery, as well as five of the LEGO Friends characters, and she’s quickly become a pro at assembling the kits.
Down in the basement, I have a new IPA kit fermenting happily; it’s called Sinistral Warrior and it contains the most hops I’ve ever added to a batch of beer (6oz.). It smells delicious down there, which means it’ll be a long six weeks until it’s ready. The pumpkin I brewed a month ago is doing well but needs a kick in the butt for flavoring; I’m thinking Mr. Scout’s method of rum-soaked vanilla beans along with some pumpkin pie spice will help liven it up (it’s heavy on pumpkin but low on flavor). I also know what the next batch will be– a session beer, something lighter and flavorful with a lower ABV. I happened to run into the father of one of Finn’s friends on the train before Christmas, and he expressed an interest in learning how to brew, so I set him up with a beginners’ kit for his Christmas list, and we have tentative plans to get together in the next week or so to get him started.
Elsewhere, there was a shooting at the Columbia Mall this morning, and three people are reported dead. I’m glad we habitually don’t get moving until the afternoon, and that we had nothing to go out for today.
After years of spending hundreds of dollars at chain eyeglass stores, I’m giving this Warby Parker thing a try. I sent away for five try-on pairs of two frame styles, which should be here sometime this week. I’ve seen a lot of hipsters wearing WP frames and they all look big to me–like “I was too young to actually have lived through the 80’s and even though frames were big then I bet they weren’t this big” big. Hopefully they will fit my face and not resemble safety glasses from seventh grade shop class.
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Austin Homebrew has been offering free shipping on beer kits since the spring, and they are drawing that promotion to a close tomorrow. I ordered a pumpkin ale this afternoon so that I can include one of the batches of real pumpkin Mama made before Thanksgiving. I’m so happy with how the Irish Stout aged after four months, I’m going to brew up the pumpkin and sit on it for a long while before bottle conditioning the whole thing and waiting until the fall of 2014 to crack it.
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I’m slowly gathering footage to use while learning how to use Final Cut Pro at work, but I’ve already learned my first painful lesson: I failed to back up about 20 minutes of raw video, moved the project files around, and deleted them without realizing what I’d done due to FCP’s odd file structure. It appears they are gone permanently. Using a mixture of GoPro and DSLR footage I’ve still got something interesting to work with, but I really need more to be able to cut something together.
Update: Found them! FCP is so strange…
Pique the cat, after a long dry spell, has been two for two vs. our household mice this week. On Monday he dropped a very dazed adult mouse on the floor in front of Jen as she lay in bed; I was able to trap it under a glass and release it (well, honestly I flung it) on the lawn of the church across the street. Tuesday evening he did the exact same thing at the same time of the evening, and I trapped and flung this one further away from the house. I don’t think they were the same mouse, but I’m hoping the extra distance and Frederick road dissuaded the two of them from coming back.
After suffering through spotty wireless connectivity at the house (and the attendant expensive cellular data bills), I used some money from my first paycheck to purchase a new Airport Express, which should be here today. At that point I’ll shut the wireless built in to our FIOS router off for good and hopefully we can save some money.
Last weekend I got the IPA kegged with Finn’s help and got it set up for gas; unfortunately I lost the better part of a Co2 bottle and about 4 pints to a faulty dip tube in the Dubbel keg, so I had to drag Finn to the homebrew store for some gasketry and supplies. I still seem to be having issues with the one-way valve I installed on the gas line, and I need a new shank for my second tap line, so I’ll have to go back out this weekend for another trip. But the IPA tastes very good!
Last night I started cutting sheets of MDF board down for new speaker cabs, based on new calculations and the hardware I’ve got. I have to replace the original the tweeters I bought in 1992, one of which has died mysteriously, so I found a new inexpensive set that should be easy replacements. I’m cutting the wood down on a table saw and making everything with 45˚ joins, which will help make these cabs much more aesthetically appealing than the last ones. I’m also going to be buying premade ports and tuning them specifically to the cabinets, as opposed to roughing in ports made from wood, rubber feet, and new binding posts for the wiring.
Busy week here. We took Finn to some friends’ for a Halloween straight from a greeting card: well-lit streets full of happy children, friendly houses, and great costumes. It made me proud to see my girl walk down the street holding hands with one of her best friends.
Leaves are in full swing here in the ‘Ville, and the streets are beautiful. It’ll take a week or so for all of them to drop and collect on our front lawn, clogging up the downspouts and rustling underfoot.
I got my final paycheck from idfive with an added quarterly bonus, so I splurged a little on some kegging equipment; a new gas block has replaced the two-way brass splitter I inherited, and now I’ve got a dedicated third line for carbonation installed with a one-way valve to prevent any backflow. The valve body is bolted to the edge of the surround and the gas lines are all cleaned up and out of the way.
I also picked up three sheets of 3/4 MDF board in preparation for building new speaker enclosures. I’ve run my woofer specs through some new online tools (I was using a poorly printed graph in a book in 1991) and it looks like my original calculations were pretty close. The tweeter I used in one of the two speakers seems to be on the fritz, so I’ve got to track down the issue and see if it needs to be replaced. The new speakers will also get different porting tubes and hookups, but the next big thing to source is a way to cut a clean circle for the woofers.
One of the items I inherited with the new job is a GoPro Hero 3, essentially a tiny HD videocam with a wide-angle lens and a waterproof housing, bolted to a giant suction cup. I tried it out on Sunday in some different situations, outside and inside the Scout as I drove out into Ellicott City and back. The built-in editing software is intuitive and powerful, but it’s going to take some more time to sort out how to get the best possible footage encoded in the right way.
There’s something about brewing and kegging beer that makes me think of Top Gear BBC, probably because it’s very easy to set up my laptop and stream it through Netflix while I’m working. Last night I ventured out into the rain to dump water out of a tub of empty bottles I’ve been soaking, and then scrape the remainder of the glue and paper off them. It took a bit longer than I was expecting–I started at 10 and finished after midnight–but they’re all cleaned, washed, and ready for beer. If I get time this evening, I’m going to transfer the Irish Stout into a bucket, bottle the batch, and let it sit for a few more months. With any luck, it’ll be perfect for Thanksgiving. Now, to design and print some labels…
The Belgian Dubbel I brewed last weekend is happier now that it has fresh yeast; as it turns out, I bought the kit all the way back in last October so the original yeast was long past its due date. Thankfully I bought fresh steeping grains for it a month ago. I’m going to let it sit for another couple of weeks and then transfer to the secondary, and it too should be ready by Thanksgiving.
Finally, I’m ordering a third beer from Austin Homebrew for general sipping. Something not as heavy as the stout or dubbel, but with more flavor for the winter months. I’m looking at their Viking IPA, which is lighter than most of the IPAs I’ve brewed, or their Texas Red Ale, which would be a little hoppy but more of a malty selection. Decisions, decisions…