Kiwi

Pictures from the Sky again

If you’re having trouble loading the pages from Pictures in the Sky, try reloading the page a few times, apparently they’re getting hit with a ton of traffic.

Manny’s Red Ale

I came in this evening after work to the wondrous smell of grains steeping on the stove.

Yes! Manny was making beer.

With the Porter safely bottled away, it was time to start on the next batch.

Manny had made a trip back to the Cellar over the weekend and brought back the ingredients for a red ale. Today was his day off so he was able to get an early afternoon start on the brew.

One thing you quickly learn, unless you’re brewing with kegs or doing big batches, you’re still going to have to buy beer.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the three of us combined drink a six pack of beer a night on average. That’s 72 ounces a night, 504 ounces a week. A five gallon batch of beer is only 640 ounces and that’s a lot of work for less than ten days worth of beer.

Actually though, that’s OK with me. I don’t want to give up all of great beers we have up here in the Northwest.

Here, Manny is in the midst of steeping the grains:

WTF??

I was watching TV this evening when someone made an offhanded remark that reminded me of the fact that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists were from our ‘ally’ Saudi Arabia. Not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not Iran, nor Syria. Not even North Korea. Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, Egypt (ally), United Arab Emirates (ally) and Lebanon.

I already knew this but I guess I bury it in my brain because it’s so damned disturbing.

What in the hell is going on?

Pictures from the Sky

Some amazing pictures. My favorites are the Kamtchatka Volcano and the island/glacier in Maelifell, Iceland.

There are a lot of large pictures on the page so it may take a bit for all of them to load but it’s worth it.

And you didn’t think juggling was cool

Turn up your sound.

Barack Obama

Clips like this have to haunt the Hillary Clinton campaign. (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan)

In truth, I know little about Mr Obama. His oratorical skills and intelligence have been very apparent from the first time I heard him speak but beyond that, I have to confess ignorance.

That said, from what I have seen, I am impressed. I have no idea if I would support him in a run for the presidency but at the minimum, I am happy he is running, if only to advance the quality of the debate.

Victory Porter

The beer is done!

Last night, Michele, Manny, Brook and I cracked open a couple of cold bottles and it tasted great. It’s got great color and a nice creamy head. Delicious stuff!

The beer was bottled a couple of weeks back the night before the Superbowl. My least favorite part of bottling is the cleaning and thankfully, Brook and Michele were nice enough to take care of that step. Fortunately we have an old slate sink in the basement that made the job a lot easier.

Along with Brook and Michele, Hawey was also over for the bottling party. Besides some minor confusion with one of the pieces of tubing, it was a painless project (and later, when I got online to figure out the weird tubing, I learned that the way we finally decided to do it was actually the right way). Overall it took about around three hours but we weren’t really in any hurry.

After we bottled it up, we put them in the closet above the basement stairs. They sat undisturbed for a couple of weeks until last Friday when I opened one to see if it were ready. It tasted good but it was pretty flat. I suspected that the closet wasn’t getting warm enough to get the yeast going. So I moved the bottles to Alli’s room, putting them on the floor surrounding a heater vent and covering them with a blanket. I think it helped because a week later they opened with a satisfying hiss of CO2.

The recipe is from The Celler Homebrew up at 145th and Greenwood. I’ll definitely try it again.

Since the beer was bottled the night before the Superbowl, I am naming it in honor of the Indianapolis Colts. It’s the Victory Porter.

Cheesy, yes, but not as cheesy as the labels I cooked up last night.

And defintely not as cheesy as this picture of the bottes around my signed Edgerrin James football.

(Special Note: The idea to put the bottles around the football was mine but I had an assist on the overall design from one Manny Hamburger, cheese display designer and Patriots fan. “Hills and valleys, Joe. Hills and valleys.”)

Waiting in Line

On my way into the office on Tuesday morning I noticed a couple of kids hanging out in lawnchairs at Niketown on the corner of 6th and Pike. As the week went by, more kids showed up until it looked like this on Friday morning:

I finally walked over to the kids at the front of the line and asked what they were doing. It turns out they were waiting for the release of the newest pair of Nikes which were ‘released’ at Midnight Friday.

Wow. Waiting in line for the newest shoes. When I was younger I waited in line for concert tickets a couple of time but that’s because (obviously) the best seats go to the people in the front on the line. I can’t imagine that the people in the front of this line get any better shoes than the people who wait until 9:00 am the next morning but maybe I’m wrong? Could be that the first hundred pair give their owner amazing powers like flight, the ability to walk on water or super hearing. Who knows? And while waiting in line for shoes isn’t my thing, well, to each their own. They could be spending their time in a lot of worse ways.

After I talked to the kids in line, I turned and waited at the cross walk for the light to change. A lady who had seen me talking to the kids in turn asked me what they were doing. When I told her she said something like, “Well my goodness. I just assumed it was some kind of protest against Sweatshops.” (This is Seattle after all).

Did I mention that every kid I saw in line was of Asian origin?

The irony is delicious.

Captivate Network

I was on my way up in the Elevator when the old Captivate Network captivated me again with yet another amazing piece of breaking news. Turns out there’s a new medical study out of Turkey that shows that drinking Peppermint Tea several times a week can affect Hirsutism in women.

Problem is, the doors opened at the Sixteenth Floor and I didn’t get a chance to read the entire ‘article’ to determine if the tea actually decreases or increases hair growth.

So now I’m wondering, for the sake of Michele and all our female friends, if I should throw out the Peppermint Tea that’s hanging out in the cabinet.

Damn you Captivate Network. Damn you.