Archive for November, 2011
I have a comet bearing down on my chest. The pressure is incredible. Worst of all? I set the body in orbit to begin with, so it’s my own doing that I’m screaming inside my head. The pressure will dissipate tonight, but that is only the end of this particular cycle. It’ll slowly build [...]
So, I had mentioned a couple of variables I was fiddling with in this last stovetop batch. I wanted to try priming with maple syrup instead of corn sugar, and I also didn’t use Irish moss, unlike every other brew to date. I can report my findings now.
I primed it with maple syrup against my [...]
I have a little story for you–a trivial yarn about meaningless things. But it is 100% true. I am writing it because it serves as much to be something to write about as anything else, and with all the craziness happening here in the US (much less abroad) I thought it’d be an interesting indulgence [...]
The Sidhe (my partner of ten [10!] years) has been harping on me for ages to get into Fringe. I pick my TV carefully, because unlike her, I find myself engrossed in whatever is on–even if it’s drek. So if I’m going to sit down in front of the TV (or laptop) for passive entertainment, [...]
I was going to bottle tonight because Thanksgiving is next week. I even picked up the last element of my brewing kit today at the 5th Season gardening store–the Thief. But I didn’t get my bottles into the oxyclean bath yesterday, and looking at them today they were sufficiently funky that caution is advisable. (It’ll [...]
But it’s what I’m doing right now anyway. It’s the end of the semester, and everything is due. And I feel like a completely incompetent failure. The only way I got through my final semester in undergrad was by essentially crashing and burning; I had run out of meds that spring, and rode out the [...]
Since leaving the clinic in mid-October, I have been left without a regular schedule. My classes are in the evenings, and with the wedding I had no shortage of things to pester me at all hours. But as the semester comes to a close, I find myself languishing in the apartment. This is a bad [...]
The krausen on my stovetop amber fell while I was out and about in northern New Jersey. There is still a ring of foam, but the center of the beer’s surface is more or less free of yeast. (I did some reading, and apparently US-05 can be quite bubbly for quite some time, so the [...]
This weekend has been an exultant blur. Everything about the wedding lined up right–the well-planned schedule, the things that actually coincided with it, and everything else that was off-course but still managed to be right. I am proud to be an official participant in generating documents of historical record as signatory witness to Rob Carlson’s [...]
Today I set off on another grand adventure. I am bound for northern New Jersey to participate in Rob & Caitlin’s wedding, but I have many stopping points both on the way there and on the way back. First stop is my mother and her fiancé, where I’ll finish labeling the beer and have dinner [...]