Antics Roadshow

This was from a tv station in the UK and I have no idea how long it will stay up. I missed it on Youtube when I saw it posted in one of the feeds I follow, but found the Vimeo video that I am sharing below. Interesting information on civil (and some less than civil) disobedience assembled by Banksy. If you believe in the power of activism then this is some food for thought, if not here is video of some nutcases disrupting society.

Channel4 - The Antics Roadshow [compiled by Banksy] from Christian Ziron on Vimeo.

The Power of Vulnerability

I saw this on Lifehacker the other day and everyone that I shared it with thought her story telling was great, I found it to be tiring but either way the meat of it was interesting enough to share. As a person I can say that I feel isolated in a lot of ways, and I have often attributed it to my jaded mind so her echoing something I've felt for a long while backed up by research is validating and sad. Maybe I should find one of those therapists she went to see? Either way I think this is worth the 20 minutes even if it starts with about 5 minutes of her talking how amazing and smart she is.




Did you finish? Good for you, She would never have made it as an Ignite speaker. Ignites motto is teach us something and make it quick. I believe you have 5 total minutes for you talk. Sometimes brevity glosses over too much for her it might have been about exactly right. It's social studies here lady, you could have presented the data and a small blurb about how you gathered it and that would have been fine. 20 minutes was a little much, but then again you did speak at a TED talk and they are nothing but ego trips for the rich and privileged so I suppose you fit in nicely.

End in Sight

So it begins, twice a week my wife will be in the hospital watching the little guy grow for the next 8 weeks. We knew that there was going to be a major time crunch at the end of the pregnancy when we started with a high risk clinic, but twice a week with one appointment scheduled to be 3 hours each week is going to start to get old for my wife. The good news is she can read and watch movies during the time, and she is a pretty happy go lucky person so hospital time is actually ok for her. Couple that with the nurses and Doctors are there for her benefit I think she likes and appreciates the attention given to our soon to be here son. We are hoping that we won't need the services and that this is all just precaution, but man that is a lot of time in the hospital for her.

I don't know that most people have the commitment that I'm see in her right now, not once during this whole thing has she complained about inconvenience, or blinked at requests to change anything. I'm pretty sure at this point there is very little she wouldn't do or give up to have this kid in her arms.

As for me, I'm glad it isn't me in the hospital as I have a low tolerance for my time being wasted.

Vanilla Bourbon Porter Update

The porter is not dead yet, and I don't see any funk floating on top of the beer yet so there may be hope for this beer yet. When I racked from primary to secondary I lost almost another gallon to all the grain that had settled out. I did my best to strain the left over grains and managed to get about 40 ounces into a growler that I will ferment and keep separate. The grain was boiled so it should be sterile and not introduce any of the natural Funk yeasts that live in the husks of grain. I put bourbon soaked oakchips in both of the containers and when I tasted the bourbon that was left over from soaking I finally learned what people are talking about when they say adding oak flavor. I may add some of that to the 4 gallon container, if the bourbon or oak flavors aren't strong enough for my liking, but it's going to be a wait and see.

I looked several places but couldn't find vanilla beans that where remotely reasonably priced so I will likely do extract for this batch. Given the way it is going I've decided to not waste anymore money on this batch so if the extract doesn't give it a nice flavor I'm not married to this batch anymore. I will give it a chance, but in my mind it can be poured out at anytime.

If it isn't one thing

So the pregnant wife is not comfortable in the heat of late so I pulled out our portable air conditioner to cool the bedroom off for her.  We have used this thing a grand total of about 20 days in the 3 years we have had it.  It wasn't exactly cheap and we read several reviews on several competing models and choose this particular one because it was generally believed to be a high build quality.  We have only used it for cooling or the fan and have never used the heater function but it apparently has been leaking like a sieve for the last 2 days on my carpet.  I left it running yesterday is the "dry" function that condenses moisture from the air so you can dehumidify a room, well all of that moisture is now in my carpet.

Awesome.

I put down towels to sop up the worst of it and then got out our carpet cleaner to try to soak up as much water as I could.  In two ours I had filled the thing 4 times and there was still a lot of water left in the carpet.  I worked on it until my arms where shot and will probably have to deal with it some more tonight.  I assume something is obstructing the drainage line inside the unit, but won't know more until after the carpet is dry and I start to take the AC unit apart.

Hurray for lowest cost manufacturing.

Coworker

So my coworker is leaving in a short while and the stress of the departure is kind of starting to mount for me.  Next Thursday will be his last day and I plan on changing a shitload of passwords while he is in his exit interview.  The thought of what I'm talking about undertaking is literally keeping me up at night and frankly leaving me the tiniest bit pissed off at him.

In reality it's really a good thing that he is leaving, as he just never got on the same page as me and the boss man.  To make it worse not two weeks before his departure he managed to completely piss off our current President.  Enough that our boss was called down and yelled at, so had it not been his last two weeks it might have turned into being his last two weeks if you catch my meaning.  I'm sure that I'm going to get spotty here as the workload of making sure that a system admin is really gone once he leaves these doors comes into a clear picture.  Day to day we split the workload, but he had been given some tasks that I will have to familiarize myself with, and hope that there are no services that are running as him.  

Flemish Red Tasting

Ignore my dinner cooking in the background and lets look at another Belgium beer, Monk's Café Flemish Sour Ale.  As you can see it looks like burgundy in the glass, and pours with a lot of fluffy white head that dissipates fairly quickly.  In the nose it seems like this is going to be quite sour, but in your mouth it comes across more tart, maybe even sweet.  It didn't really have much in the way of mouth feel, as the beer is a little thin but I think it is an approachable sour.  If you've never drank a sour beer and don't want to contend with more complicated Lacto and Brett flavors this is a beer for you to get a smell and tiny taste of the sour.

Another way to gauge how interested you might be in the sour beer experience is to go find some salt and vinegar potato chips.  In the US the Kettle Brand chip is the one that in particular made this association for me.  It has the pucker, a similar sourness to what sour beer gives.  Give it a go, you might just be surprised.

Fare thee well little office mascot

So for the last few days my office has been all worked up because of a small 4 legged creature of the scurrying kind.  That's right a mouse is dancing around in our office and given that I sit in an area with 5 ladies and 1 other guy that is never at his desk I've been the designated man for looking under stuff for these ladies.  Yesterday out of annoyance for this disruption we cleaned out under a table that the little guy has been known to frequent.  The ladies bravely stood on chairs (I shit you not) and behind cube walls while I calmly looked through boxes to see if there was evidence the little guy had visited them.

After all the clutter was removed we laid out glue traps and eliminated hiding places.  I didn't bother checking glue traps this morning, it just didn't occur to me.  I was sitting at my desk still listening to music eating my breakfast when one of the ladies cursed loudly and yelled for me to come deal with the little fellow.  He met a glue trap and that was the end.  Custodians came and fetched the trap and hopefully so ends our little multi-day adventure.  I know that one of the ladies has been looking a little harried since the whole thing started last week, she looked down and it was just chilling under her desk watching her.

Get off Jobs dick

So this festering pile of shit article lit my fuse this morning.  An ode to how nothing was ever made nice before Steve "Aka God" Jobs descended to earth and made them nice.  My first problem is that Jonathan Ive designs Apple products, seriously look at the mans resume.  If you want to jump on someone's dick there is the man that makes these things look the way they do.  Period.

Next point Compaq before it was subsumed and defiled by HP made this product, now for the fan boys at Gizmodo that literally picked every ugly tablet that existed and ignored the best of class product for the time frame before iPad's existed I say I loathe your failure of an editorial process.  Now the downside it had a Transmeta processor, and as much as I would love for that company that paid Linus Torvold a ton of money to basically not work there to have put out a great product, it wasn't a good processor.  The revision that boasted an intel mobile processor was much better and share basically the same design.  Omitting this from your little glamour shot was shitty.

Long ass day....

Jeebus, I'll probably take forever to digest all the shit that went wrong today but I think once and for all I've proven that I am not smarter than the people that have taken the time to write brewing software.  I haven't calculated it yet, but my results are going to be terrible, like maybe 50% efficiency.  I have a few ideas of what went wrong, I know there where several mistakes on my part that made the day more stressful for sure, but I'm not positive what I did wrong.  I started the say with nearly 27lbs of grain and ended the day with just at 5 gallons of beer that was 1.0985 OG.  How I boiled 4 gallons off in a 90 minute boil is a little beyond me why I only had 9 gallons in the pot is a little mystery of shit math and poor planning.  I should not have brewed today.  I intended to brew tomorrow, but my wife wanted to go day tripping tomorrow so I compressed my day of planning and supply gathering and ended up screwing up.

Mistakes I made.  I had 25lbs of grist to work with my 5 gallon painters bags are not big enough to handle that.  They really cannot handle 13lbs very well but it is doable.  I only had 1 of 5 gallon painters bags.  I should not have pressed on at this point.  I should have stopped and rationally dealt with it.  I did not.  I ended up going and buying more bags anyway, but I not before over filling one and dunking it into the water.  This was an absolute fuck up.  I ended up with grain floating around in the pot that I took to boil and consequently in the finished wort that I tried to transfer to my fermenter.  The free floating grain was a major headache and I violated so many cold side rules that have kept my beer from getting infected with outside contaminates that I am not sure if there is any hope of it coming out ok.  I am at this point praying that brewers yeast can out compete and kill any potential infections but at this point I have mentally readied myself for throwing it out.

Reading that sentence turns my stomach, but I think it needs to be open as an option if I sample this and its infected.  I need to be ready for it.  The only thing that gives me a good deal of hope is the steady bubble of the airlock next to me, and the taste of the "failed" Mac & Jack's I'm drinking.  This beer needs to be my mascot for the night.  I missed on this beer in terms of the style and flavor I envisioned when I brewed it as my first "sour" beer (pro-tip it isn't a sour beer and that's why I failed) but it is a nice beer in its own way.  Little on the low gravity side with only 4.6% but still a nice beer when you want a light body amber.  When I bottled it I swore up and down that I was going to have to pitch it but the beer is fine.  Not the best I've ever done, but fine.  I'll tear apart the day tomorrow, but I started the brewing at noon and finished washing everything and putting my garage back together at 11pm.  I'm tired and feeling a little beat down.

As a sick the universe warned me, my horoscope told me not to spend my financial windfall, and as it would not turn out as I hoped.  Well fuck you horoscope, and superstition in general.

Big Beer

I've been talking about it for a while now, I'm sure the people around me are sick of hearing about it while salivating wildly about the possibility of drinking some of it.  I believe this weekend is the weekend of the big beer.  Vanilla Bourbon Porter time.  I need to work on the particulars, and I'm marginally working on loosing my mind in my devious and weird ways I want to fracture and experiment with multiple strains of the same beer from one brewing.

The huge kettle lets me be a little more creative, I can take 13 gallons to boil and end with 10 gallons at the final strength.  If I make it huge and potent with an OG of 1.1 I could do 5 gallons full barley wine strength and dilute the remaining 5 down to a more reasonable 1.085.  The trouble here is that I now have 3 fermenting vessels and the ambient temperature is low enough that I could have all 3 vessels going with a total batch of 13 gallons to start cellaring with.  None of this means anything to several of the readers but for general reference if you start at an OG of 1.1 depending on the final gravity I'm talking about an almost 11% ABV beer, 1.085 is closer to 9%.  This is a big in your face beer to start with and I'm talking about giving it complex additives like raw vanilla bean, and bourbon soaked oak chips.  Based on the rough math I'm working on it's going to take 40lbs of grain to get this bad boy done.

I'm actually kind of giddy about the prospect of what I'm doing here and I think that tells me all I need to know about if this hobby is for me, I'm looking forward to hours of work, and months of worrying over this stuff.  I believe I will have to con someone into loaning me a carboy for a period of time so I can rack off of the yeast that won't be able to take the higher OG beer all the way to the higher alcohol percentage.

Indoor Ikea farming

After the gardening post yesterday I thought about ways to pull off indoor farming.  I don't know that this will work for my space so consider it concept art for the moment, but here you go.  I found this on Ikea hacker the other day and Loyal reader A Beer for the Shower might appreciate this as an upgrade to his "drug dealer style" garden.  As a plus side it also has an aquaculture feature for some slow delivery of fish.  What is the maturation rate on fish any way?  Don't most species take a few years to yield anything useful in terms of Biomass?

So for the people that have read deep into the archives of this old ass blog, or just noticed the tag feature know that I've written about this type of thing before.  This particular post happens to be somewhat practical in the sense that it was designed around objects that exist in the real world and implements principles that are actually on display at Disney World.  It is in a boring section of Epcot, and clearly a sign that the hippies where accidentally allowed into the workforce some how evading the extensive counter-counter culture hippy genocide that must have happened to explain the 80's.  I'm surprise I haven't seen more literature on what must have been quite the feat of quiet genocide here in the US for all of the chanting hippies to have disappeared almost overnight near the end of the 70's.  My current theory is the CIA created a huge (like 1 million gallons or so) batch of tainted lsd and Quaaludes and some how distributed it across the country all on the same week or so miraculously killing all of the hippies.

I kid of course, but seriously think about. ;)

Setlzer water

I've seen a few articles about homemade seltzer water in the last little bit, and the grocery store that I go to has one of those SodaStream kiosks now.  I don't know if it's just the universe is tired of paying for the crazy prices of Pepsi and Coke or what, but it seems like these is entering the popular consciousness enough I thought I'd see if anyone else is noticing this?  Because I am kegging beer at home now I have a CO2 system so I could do the Seltzer water at home if I had even a passing interest in it, but I'm just not sure if I care to experiment with this.  I made Root Beer last year just before going down to visit my family for Salsa week, and was very sad that I didn't  give it enough time to carbonate properly for the week we where there.  In general I have yet to make a beer that is bad, but I would be frustrated if I made a large batch of soda and it turned out crap.  If I had a smaller keg maybe I would be interested in this, but until they make a CO2 gas hookup for these little 5L kegs that isn't $90 I don't think I'll be doing soda at home.

As a total side note has anyone else seen those Soda Stream kiosks?  They are motion activated little televisions that run an infomercial in the store.  I only have to tollerate it for the time that I am standing in the checkout line for groceries, and it bothers me in that short amount of time.  I have to imagine that the clerks are loosing their minds, the infomercial go on for like 10 minutes about making sugar water at home and saving the environment in a shrill voice over an awful and tinny speaker.  Just when it finishes if someone walks by it starts again.  I would be pissed if I where employed at this grocery store.

Terrible year to try a garden

I don't take it personally, but in the PNW this has been the summer that wasn't. and my attempt at a garden has been pretty mediocre due to the total lack of sunny days.  In spite of all that, I have seen some growth there in the back and may actually get some green beans before snow starts to fall.

Gueuze Tasting

Over the weekend I found some special beers that I was interested in tasting.  I've gotten interested in making sour beers for some reason or another and wanted to give a few a try to see which style made sense for me to try.  I found Lindemans Gueuze Cuvée René at a local grocer, and thought I would give it a try.  Geuze is a Lambic beer made in Belgium, all true Lambic's have to be made in Belgium otherwise they are a Labmic Style beer.  Most Lambic's rely on spontaneous fermentation and the particular yeasts that are in the air of Belgium make these beers what they are.  What makes a Geuze different from other styles of the Lambic is it is a just a blend of an old (2-3year aged) Lambic and a young (6 months-1 year) Lambic with no fruit additives.

If you read about Lambic's and sour beer in general you will hear about various flavors that sound somewhat off-putting.  The hops used for Labmics are supposed to be aged for about a year and have a cheese "funk" to them, the yeasts used produce various flavors known as horse blanket and barnyard funk.  Having drank it I can see why people call the flavors by these names, but I cannot understate that they are not unpleasant in the way you would think they might be.  Above all the souring process gives the beer a crisp tartness that is the flavor you notice the most.  It leaves your mouth with a clean flavor, and has a very refreshing quality to it. I don't know how better to describe it, but if you like sour candy and know about that pucker you get.  You know how you cannot get enough of it, even after you have eaten enough it hurts your mouth?  That is the sensation that this soured beer gives you, and makes it very drinkable.

In case you couldn't guess from the way I'm writing about it I liked it.

Modular Headphones

This came from Make Magazine's blog

I love this concept for headphones, I frequently have one headphone get a loose connection and end up throwing out the headphones because of it. The connectors where the stress points are would be pretty boss for those of us that are little hard on headphones.

What do you think, would you be down for headphones that where modular?

The Demise of guys

Video post today, but it is something that I have been pondering for sometime. In the new world we hear so much about women succeeding, and the importance of making room for women to succeed that, I don't hear that effort being spent on making successful men. I think that the assumption was that men would figure themselves out, and that the fraternity of man was so institutionalized that it wouldn't crumble in a few short decades. I'm not trying to diminish the need for engaging women, just suggesting that men are in need of some order to help us define ourselves as men. I've considered joining some of the now aging Men's clubs in an effort to find that myself. Shriners , Masons (upon reading just now I see that the Shriners are Freemasons), hell most anything. Like most of the other men I know I rarely go out and do things with other guys, I interact as a part of a couple, otherwise I pursue my own hobbies in isolation. No I'm not complaining about my hobbies or how I choose to spend my time only that I feel disconnected and I think that is germane to what this Ted Talk is talking about.



Cross post from a blog I follow called Geeks are Sexy. The guy that runs the show over there helped me early on to keep blogging when I was still in the hundred and under post range. Is this just a US thing or do other guys feel it to?

This getting old is weird

So sometime this last year I apparently hit the age that makes me look like I am a nice and knowledgeable enough person to ask directions from. It happens almost every time I walk outside, someone or a couple of someones will ask me how to get somewhere.

If only they knew, growing up I was never aware of my surroundings. I literally got into an argument on a cellphone with my mother about them(the royal them?) moving a freeway on ramp (pro-tip the freeway on ramp was located where they believed it to be located). It was in not moved so much as I had turned the wrong way (miles before) and no where near where I was telling them that I was. Since High School I have learned how to navigate the city in a much better fashion, and more importantly I am able to visualize the layouts of cities, make connections and generally pay attention where I am going. I take note of street names, notice businesses and am getting to the point I've told people I could make it from Federal Way to Lynwood on surface streets (no highways or Freeways). For those that don't live in the area, it is well south of the city of Seattle to well north of the city of Seattle. It would take forever, by freeway at normal speed it takes about 40+ minutes to do. By surface street I expect it would be about an hour and a half, maybe longer.

Wow that was tangential, but I'm curious what type of people do you look for when you are considering asking someone for directions?

Check your bills

I've been told enough times that I should know better, but I learned the hard way the check your bills, and double check the line items. In my neck of the woods you have your choice of network providers Comcast, or Qwest (aka usworst). Comcast has its own issues, and Qwest would have had my business if they weren't the worst company on the planet. I'll save that rant for another time, because the source of my misfortune is Comcast.

The other night I woke up in the middle of the night and was totally unable to get back to sleep. No problem I tell myself there is always the internet, that's pretty handy for passing the time. I get downstairs, log into Xbox Live and join a match. I play literally 5 minutes and I get disconnected from XBL. I assume (like a normal person) that my xbox is trying to go tits up on me and work through about 20 minutes of chasing my network bits around, rebooting the xbox, and generally troubleshooting everything to figure out my dlink cable modem (keep this in mind my dlink, not Comcast's cause I paid cash to not rent that from those f*ckers). I get Comcast on the horn at 3 in the morning to let them know that I was very disappointed about the state of my internet and come to find out that they where charging me for my cable modem. I tell them politely to stop gouging me for shit I own and the rep just gives me a partial credit for that month. Fast forward to the next months bill and the charge is still on there. I check back as far as their online billing department decided they want to limit their liabilities to (1 year) and figure out they may well have been charging me an equipment rental fee all along. For the last 5 years factored at $84 a year mean I'm feeling short about $400. I did what any sane person would do I called their 800# and tried to see how much free shit I could get out of this.

All told I got $70, got the charge removed from my bill going forward, and got my internet speed boosted to 12mb/s for the next 6 months. I'm not sure that we are done with this matter or not, but it is an excellent reminder for you all.

Check your bills, it can save you some cash in the long run.

What a lovely shade of ouch you're wearing today

SeaFair came, beer was poured and I forgot that the sun wants to kill every living thing on the planet with its fierce stabbing sun rays. You could say that I'm a lovely shade of ouch, or was yesterday. Today it more of an uncomfortable shade of itchy. I'm somewhere between proud and surprised that for about 10 people (several of whom brought and drank nothing but bud light) we managed to finish the 5 gallon keg, and the 3 growlers of Naughty Scotty that came aboard as well. I'd say go us, but given the 14 hours I slept when I got back to shore I'm starting to think I'm getting old.

Hope everyone's weekend was more fun and less sunburned than mine.

The things the US government wastes time on

So if you are like the rest of the world, you are probably not surprised by the stock market taking a dump with all the three ring circus over the debt ceiling we've been having for the last several weeks. In that time Congress failed to keep the FAA open (way to go you stupid f*cks), introduced the Internet snooping Bill and even passed it in the house.

In short if you live in the US, I'm not in favor of either party right now and the lack of a 3rd (or 4th and 5th for that matter) party is letting this power consolidation go on unabated. I am proposing we choose to not re-elect a single US Representative or US Congressman. Not one, I think the message needs to not be one or the other side is right, but that you all are a bunch of dicks and need to work together or we will not re-elect you.

SeaFair!!

I am getting a little giddy, two more days until SeaFair! Beer, sun and Hydro racing; mostly the first two. Our benevolent host has seen fit to limit one of the more irritating people to one day on the boat, so Sunday (aka the day of debauchery) should be twice as much fun.

For some reason Saturday is "family day" and Sunday is when the party gets started. I predict (Johnny Carson style with the envelope to my head) that Monday is going to be rough. The Diamond Knot not so pale ale will debut next to my beer nerd friend's Naughty Scotty Scottish ale. Here's hoping 10 gallons of beer gets us through the weekend. If there was a way for me to just skip Friday and jump straight to the weekend I would. Don't mind me I'll be over here dreaming about beer and the weekend.

As always a big F*ck you to the great state of Texas, the person I'd most like to share a beer with might get one air mailed to her. I think it is illegal, so I still working on the details of this thought. This is America, I literary cannot believe there isn't a way to mail booze to your friends!

Work Conflict

It must have been something in the water, but yesterday was filled with conflict. Me and an accountant are going to find our selves in fisticuffs if she doesn't cool her heels, especially since it looks like the whole source of our conflict is really someone else's fault. I'm not shy about conflict, and I would dismiss it if that was the only conflict to be had yesterday. After she got me all riled up I went to a meeting (that I didn't want to attend) and my boss got a little lathered up talking to the CFO about a silly bit of training they wanted to get. While I agree that our users should learn how to use office on their own (literally they wanted training for how to use the ribbon interface) it is really unlike my boss to get so animated over something. Must have been a full moon or something, but man there was a lot of conflict (by my standards) yesterday.

Not so Pale Ale

So the Diamond Knot is finally done fermenting and was ready to be put into keg and bottles on Saturday. I'm getting really efficient at cleaning bottles and randomly figured out that my dishwasher makes an excellent and fee bottle drying rack that is conveniently located right next to the sink. (Seriously as a homework assignment I want you to go drink a case of beer or hard cider and try to see how many bottles you can fit into your dishwasher). While I the beer was fermenting I had the presence of mind to snap a picture, but didn't even think to get a picture of the bottling process. The picture you are about to see is the beer at its most violent point in the fermentation. The stuff you see suspended in the liquid is yeast doing its job.

As you can see it is a very vigorous fermentation. The only gripe I have so far is it is not a very "pale" pale ale. I missed the style by a fair margin I think, but since I'm not going to take this beer to competition it doesn't matter much. I let it ferment a little too long according to my chart with a final gravity of 1.011 and a healthy 6.3%ABV. Based on my thinking I needed to double plus some on my main grains and leave the color grains at the original values. It is a little bit of a forehead slapper moment to realize duh, double the grain that adds color in grain and the beer will be twice as dark. I think it will have to be called a copper ale, just because of the color. The good news is the wife thinks it smells good, and for someone that doesn't like beer she has a great nose for it. This is going to be one of the Kegs on Tap for Seafair this coming weekend. My beer nerd friend is making is Naughty Scottish ale, 10 gallons of beer ought to get us through at least Saturday. I'll do my best to get pictures of the beer as it is poured, but no promises 'cause I'm going to be drinking it as well.

Such a great weekend

The summer in the Pacific Northwest has mostly been known as the summer that wasn't. We've renamed the months as they come to better represent the weather that we have gotten. Junuary, and Julytober, (Augvember is on deck) but what little summer we have had keeps showing up on the weekends.

For this I am grateful.

This last Saturday was everything that makes people fall in love with the Pacific Northwest, it was about 68°F by 9AM, which was when we decided to meet another couple (also pregnant) to pick the "early" blues at a Blueberry farm up near our homes. In about an hour we had both managed a little less than 10lbs each and made our way to pay. The you pick berries are only $1.80/LB so it was less than $20 bucks for my 8.5lbs of berries and we got to spend time out in the sun before it got "intense". I air-quote intense because the day only got up to 83°F by the end of the day, but it was hot for us. After blueberry picking we followed the couple on an errand and then dropped the berries off at home to be cleaned later and went out to lunch.

Lunch was a quaint little Italian joint with outdoor seating and excellent food for being in the tiny ferry town. On a sunny day eating out on the patio was such a treat, and made it actually feel like summer. After lunch we walked the pier to an ice cream place and watched people fishing and crabbing for a while. In classic Northwest style one couple came out onto the pier for wedding pictures. In all it was a great afternoon. Now if you've ever been pregnant or know someone that was you would know that the pregnant ladies would be nappy after walking in the sun and eating so we went our separate ways for a nap and to clean our berries and other chores and they were coming back later for dinner.

While they were gone and my wife napped I managed to get my beer bottled and kegged (I had one batch that was fermenting in two vessels one for the keg the other for bottling). After that I got to play an hour of Modern Warfare 2 before it was time to cook dinner. Dinner was pork carnitas with fresh Pico de gallo. Just as we were finishing up dinner more friends started to arrive for S'mores. We rolled out to the back yard lit a fire, drank beer and roasted marshmallows while the sun went down.

It was a great day, I deeply with someone in Texas could have been here to experience it.

Thank you to all the new followers

I realize its a low number but Yeah for breaking 50 followers. I just wanted to remind a few of you if your profile isn't filled out I have no way of finding your blog. This would be a message to Magixx in particular, but a few others too. Thanks everybody.