On New Years Day we got up before dawn and went over to the Town Forest to see the sunrise through the trees. The lighting was spectacular.
It was very peaceful although somewhat chilly.
It is nice to know that this is in our own town.
Happy New Year to all.
I ride the trains in and out of Boston to get to work. To do that I have to go through North Station.
Today, it was a rainy, stormy day, and everyone’s shoes were wet. On the way into the Station there was this classy door mat they put down to wipe our wet shoes on.
It’s a roadkill cardboard box. Take a closer look.
Classy!
Where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain,
And the wavin’ wheat can sure look beat,
When the wind comes and there ain’t no rain….
I am back from Sunny Oklahoma. The airport there is so small that the gate numbers are just small numbers.
Don’t need no stinkin’ C39 or A27 gate numbers here. Hey. I wonder what happened to 3. I guess somebody got lost countin’ up.
But they do a good job, and the security lines are shorter. The hikes between the gates are shorter too.
They do have a bit of the Big City about them if you crave a muffin. The last time I went through there I paid $5.80 for a muffin the size of a thumb tack at the Route 66 Grille….. and it was slimy and unappetizing. I usually don’t slam small businesses on this blog, but c’mon, $5.80 for a dollop of grease?
On this trip, I took food with me and walked on by the “Grille”.
OK this is starting to crack me up. This morning I put up 55 bottles of beer (on the wall).
After I put the bottles in the crates I found a piece of glass on the chair where the crates had been.
That is a chip of brown glass off of a beer bottle. So I went through all the bottles (you always find it in the last place you look, you know) and I found this.
What is with all these bottles breaking?
I don’t know if that bottle is sealed or not. It kinda looks like it is.
I put it with the others to see if it will carbonate, but I don’t think I want to drink the beer because of the possibility of glass shards inside. But if it has sealed, then all of the breakage was probably on the outside. Right?
But then, how do I know that any of the bottles haven’t done this same thing on the inside?…. leaving shards of glass in my beer?
This could keep a rational person up all night worrying about it.
(I will probably sleep like a baby).
So many questions; so few answers.
Stay tuned.
This weekend we opened a couple of the October beers to enjoy with our subs. One of them was totally flat. No head. No bubbles. No nuthin’. Just flat.
So I took a look at the bottle and found this.
Another cracked bottle.
What are the odds?
I think it was the sunspot.
I think there’s something going on in that bucket. When I came home from work, it smelled like beer in the closet…. so I lifted up the cheap, plastic beer cup to see what is going on….
Ewww. Beer snot all over the place.
At least it smells good.
I put the cup back on and continued with my evening.
Since we are running out of my previous batch of Honey Porter, I started brewing a batch of beer today. If you remember last time, the Big Hose showed me no happy bubbles at all. I figured that all that gas was just leaking out of the seams around the bucket and not going out the hose. So there was little point in putting all that hosing together. The beer came out OK anyway, so instead of using all of that hose, I made a new kind of airlock that is just a Big Hole in the top that the gas can leak out of.
Some commercial beer is brewed in open vats with no top at all, or with a piece of cloth across the top to keep out the critters and the dust. So my new airlock, which is little more than a Big Hole, should work OK. Here are the parts that I started with.
Those plastic parts are electrical conduit parts. The pipe is an offset pipe with a kink in it. It is used to connect two sections of conduit together that were not properly aligned (probably invented for my electrician… just sayin’), so it has a bend in it. It isn’t a very big bend; it’s just a little kinky.
Anyway, it ought to work as a Big Hole, so who cares if it’s kinky?
The pipe goes into a piece that goes on the outside of the lid. I sealed the thread of the outside piece with a rubber O ring. I don’t want any gas leaking out around my big gas-leaking hole. Hmmmm.
OK. I’m not sure where that’s going.
But just to complete the foolish consistency, I pushed the threads through the hole in the lid and sealed them with an O ring on the inside too. So there!
The inside plastic piece is the same one that held on the hose barb the last time I attempted to invent something.
Now, on the outside, I have a piece with no threads in it instead of the hose barb.
The pipe just fits inside of the hole with a friction fit, so I jam it in there.
Finally, to keep the dust and bugs out, I grabbed a cheap, plastic, disposable beer cup (it seemed appropriate).
I turned the cup over onto the pipe, and we are good to go.
It looks stupid, but it ought to work. You can see that I put my stainless steel bolt back into the small airlock hole too. We can’t have any leaks around that Big Hole.
The brewing went fine, and after I pitched the yeast and stuffed the bucket into the closet, here is what we have.
It looks a bit strange without Dad’s Beer Bucket, but hey, ya gotta move on, know what I mean?
I did it! I finally clicked the scary Update button!
I think it worked.
WordPress has been nagging me for months to upgrade from 3.3.1 to 3.9.2. The blog had stopped working with the latest PHP at the host, so I had to force the host to use the old PHP code. But I can’t avoid the updates forever, so I upgraded the WP and then set the host back to using the new PHP.
I think it worked.
Amazing.
Usually what the Update button does, is it makes a little “Pffffffftt” sound and then the blog goes away forever.
But, if you are reading this, it worked.
Now I can blog agai..#@ ***,,,, _____
Dang!
We are back after our short trip to Maine. The weather was grand, so we did a lot of hiking. On one trek, we ran into this fellow sitting in a tree.
That is a porcupine.
Cute and cuddly, huh?
Don’t even think about it.
It has been two weeks since I bottled my latest batch of beer, so I grabbed a bottle from the basement to see how it is coming along. In the bottle that I took at random, I found this:
The top of the bottle was cracked. When I popped the bottle open, I found that the beer was totally flat. No head; No fizz. It appears that the fizz sneaked out through the crack.
I pitched the beer from that bottle.
That is the second bottle that has cracked on me since I started doing this in 1996. Don’t know if I can take this! (kidding)
I grabbed a different bottle, and that one had some fizz in it. The beer tastes OK, but it will take a bit longer to get conditioned, so I will leave it for a few more weeks. At least it hasn’t gone sour.
