Pursuing Calefaction

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 fall semester on guts and my flagging inertia. I went into this semester without meds (much, anyway), and it’s telling. I should not have done this without a larger base of support. Meds, one class at a time, a job so I’m not freaking out about money in addition to everything else…

Sorry, folks. I may be failing. But I’m not quitting.

On the plus side, I don’t bite my nails anymore. So there’s that.

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 combination with a tendency to be interrupt-driven. Without forward momentum, the inertia builds and I will increasingly sabotage my chances to move into professional education. I need a routine–I need a job.

Time to shake off the funk, get my shit together, and get busy living again. Today is the day to not give in to the monster in my head.

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 long-lasting krausen is less of a concern now.) The temperature seems to have held pretty steady at 67F, and the airlock smells pretty good. So I’d say we’re still on the right track. I don’t see any ropey strands or huge film-covered bubbles on top of the beer that might indicate infection. The only way to know whether a beer has completed fermentation is to take a gravity sample. But because I’ve only got about 3 gallons in the fermenter, I’m going to let it ride and check the gravity when I bottle it. The extra week will give it time to clarify (hopefully) and taste better (definitely), and I won’t be wasting 100mL of beer on science. I suppose I could get a refractometer, in which case I would just need a drop or two, but the cost is not supported by the calibration issues I would face. (Apparently alcohol messes with refractometry, and while there are formulas to correct for that, I prefer the more scientifically rigorous hydrometer at that stage of production.)

So things are looking on track to bottle in a week. With luck, the beer will be carbonated by Thanksgiving day, though it may still be a bit “green.” I doubt we’ll complain. When I’m bottling, I shall also make my first attempt at washing yeast. Each packet is about $3, and while that’s not a great sum, I am also currently jobless, and it will allow me to reuse the little guys instead of consigning them to hell after one cycle. The main trick is to make the next batch a bit stronger and darker, basically continuing in a given direction along the style spectrum. So I’m planning an American Molasses Brown Ale with it. Will post the recipe when I finish formulating it!

Further on down the line, I have a friend coming into town in March who has issues with gluten, so I’m planning a gluten-free batch for January. I got some BriesSweet White Sorghum syrup, and I’m reading up on how to best balance the sorghum’s pungency. Looks like I can go one of two ways. I could accentuate the citrus/”sour” character by picking a suitable style, like an American Pale Ale or a Belgian, or I could try to drown it out with other flavors. I’m thinking a bit of brown rice syrup and molasses, and using earthier hops like Chinook and Tettnanger. I shall probably try both ways, of course, and document my efforts. I will take a few notes from the Gluten Free brewing blog (linked in my blogroll), and heck, I might even have something to offer in return!

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 marriage. I helped make it legal. And 200 years from now, barring societal collapse or natural catastrophe, my name will still be in there along with the excellent Jenn Haltmann (Maid of Honor), blushing bride Caitlin Mahoney, the worthy Rob Carlson, and his father, William Carlson. OK, it’s small potatoes. But as a historian, it means something to me

Some observations and a hairy story follow below the cut!

Read more…

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 with them. Crack o’dawn will see me on the road again to South Plainfield for the rehearsal, wedding, and aftermreception, and after brunch on Sunday I’m headed south again. But not straight back to Raleigh! I first get to do a lunchish thing with a dear friend in Trenton, and then I’ll crash at my sister’s place (The Icehouse) in Ellicott City. THEN I get to go home to my loving family.

I am bringing a total of 9 full cases of beer to the wedding. I had ideally projected 12 when in the throes of production, but I only ended up with 11 actual cases with beer in them. It turns out not all the boxes were full, so consolidation brought it down to about 9.5 cases. And after “quality assurance testing,” that brings us down to just a few beers over the line. But I am not worried. I have made enough beer to get just about anybody just as drunk as you please.

Grad school panic has dissipated in the short term; I’m registered for the spring, and my projects are all coming together. My mind is now solely on what I need to do to make this wedding a raging success. Off to pack the car, shower, and get moving!

P.S. I’m still doing NaNoWriMo. I have a massive word deficit, but I ain’t giving up! I’ll post about that when I get home next week.

The amber ale has more or less finished primary fermentation. The frothy mess at the top (the krausen) hasn’t yet fallen, but CO₂ outgassing is down to one bubble every twenty seconds or so. I am not in the habit of transferring to secondary, as I haven’t done any dry hopping, and there’s no need for this batch either. I had fun keeping it at 66F; my swamp cooling has proved effective. Thank goodness we have a tight closet–the technique is useless in a big open area unless you have a monster fan.

Now I can more or less ignore it until a week and a half before Thanksgiving. The major takeaway from this batch: I desperately need to make a displacement measurement stick for my kettle. I dumped the gallon of top-up water in the fermenter before racking, and only after I had gotten the yeast pitched did I realize that I might have diluted it too much. And most of my estimations thereafter point to that likelihood. I’m not upset–it’ll still be beer. But it was bad science. Had I taken the time to make a measurement tool beforehand, I would have known with certainty how much water I should have added to hit my OG.

I just took a 24-hour computer holiday. On the plus side, I got lots cleaned in the apartment. On the down side, writing for the two projects I have due did not fare as well. On the oh-shit side, I have a nice to-do list of things to do for the wedding instead of sleeping tonight.

I discontinued use of the major social media outlets, i.e., Facebook & Twitter, about three weeks ago. I did this last year in the spring, and it was a healthy thing, but it made me feel like I was checking out of the social contract somewhat irresponsibly. My motivation for doing it again remains the same, though. I feel like I don’t talk to anyone anymore, and I feel like it’s because of the wall of noise. I have no ability to watch and engage at the same time. It’s easy to lurk and then just respond to the thing that grabs my eye at the moment rather than actively work on matters of substance with people who I know actually want to have an extended dialog with me. So by going dark on the broadcast channel, I remember who I am again.

This blog is my home, and I need to start treating it like that. The social media are just the teeming masses of people; it’s cute one-liners and pithy stances that don’t invite critical response. This is where that needs to occur. So here’s to a more frequent and more substantial presence on the Internet.

So many things rushing up to be due at the same time. I am, as ever, down to the wire on several fronts. As I get older, it gets harder and harder. I have begun to accept failure. Maybe I am growing weaker–or maybe my perception of the past is rosier than it merits.

I must label all the bottles of beer. (I must finish making the labels.) I must finish two projects, due Wednesday evening. I must actually write the draft of my speech for Rob’s wedding, not just keep bouncing the major themes around in my head. I must register for classes in the spring. Oh, and NaNoWriMo begins tomorrow.

But I must sleep. And I must clean, because my partner works full time.

So, I guess I’ll forgo sleep. Time enough for that when I’m dead.

Is very hard.

I feel like I have been built to fly, but my wings are stunted and deformed such that I can only waddle around and look up at my fellows who are soaring in the air around me. “Why don’t you join us?” they ask. “You have wings just like us!” And so, in desperation, I search for a suitably high place to jump off so that, when I am engaged in the act of falling to the ground from that high place, I can delude myself into thinking that I can fly.

Metaphors aside, ADHD is crippling, and I can’t afford to get the drugs that help me deal with its symptoms. I’m even enrolled in grad school, but because I am in all distance education classes, I am not allowed to sign up for university health insurance. So it’s just me wandering around, acting like I am a normal human being, doing maybe half of what someone normally does (on my best days) because I’m too distracted the other half of the time. Most days I pick one thing and manage to get it done. Yay.

On the other hand, I must celebrate such victories as I am possessed of:

• I have brewed beer for a wedding. Not just a batch, but enough for three beers for everyone in attendance. And it’s good beer.
• I am in grad school–not UNC, but I’m also not still working at the vet clinic too many hours for not enough money.
• I have not bitten my nails, on meds or off, for very nearly three years.

More, I’m sure, but I’m on a writing sprint. So there you have it–the dilemma of someone with ADHD. Life is exciting! Except when it’s not. I wish I could just “get up” in the morning as some of my friends say. I wish I could just focus. I make lists, I scratch off a couple things, and then I make new lists with all the things that occurred to me while I was doing the couple of things on the first list. Transfer over, repeat. Then I look at the fifth iteration of the list and realize that several of the items are either nearly due or overdue, and panic sets in.

That’s life, I suppose.

I brewed the third in my series of stovetop batches tonight. I shot for an American Amber, and you can download the recipe in XML from my wiki. It uses US-05 yeast, a variety that produces pretty straightforward American ale, and Centennial & Cascade hops, both signature American cultivars. The malt body is the same as the first two batches: amber malt extract, molasses, and some demerera sugar to boost the ABV. Still not sure what I’ll name it, but I’m already smacking my lips thinking about how delicious it’s going to taste.

Read more…