Baby Room and Wine Progress-

All the joints have had at least one coat of mud put on them in the baby's room. Now it's a dry / apply / wait game.

I spent all day on Saturday prepping the wine for bottling and starting next years batches. I don't think I'm going to have time to clean and prepare all the bottles I need for this years batches- I'm almost out- so I'm very screwed and pretty annoyed, but that's the risk I took while waiting. This year may only be 36 gallons of Riesling wine (the 45 gallons of Chardonnay from last year is still sitting in the tanks).

Unless I can get some free time or slave labour there won't be any 2008 Chardonnay. Sigh. I do have some smaller carboys- perhaps I should just do a couple of gallons in those... ?

Hot Pepper Hell

We borrowed a food dehydrator from a friend yesterday and Liz started to dehydrate her peppers.

The house started to smell of hot peppers- that tangy, green burning hell known as spice.

At 6am when I got up the house reeked of peppers- she was happy, I was eager to leave. They dried in about 10 hours.

Next up- basil and sage and tons of hops....

Beer: Barley Island, Noblesville IN

Barley Island

A dated post to be sure- but while attending my Grandfather's funeral we ran across a brewery in Noblesville , IN, named Barley Island. Mind you the entire clan had gathered for a 'tea party' and the males were in desperate need of reclaiming their masculinity.

So it was in search of a bit of refreshment that we found ourselves entering Barley Island. I should note that Indiana has not banned smoking in bars or breweries- so unfortunately I wasn't enjoying myself as much as I'd like.

While there they had several beers on tap and a cask conditioned ale- all delicious and well priced. Sampler cost was picked up by my Uncle but I believe it was around $7.50.


Belgium - Strong belgium (duhhh) characteristics- was as good as a beer overseas. Not much aroma (but was that due to the smoking? I don't know)- 1/6/6

IPA Cask Conditioned Ale- Great hops, some off taste due to the cask- good room temperature. A little while later as it sat out and I made my way through the rest of the beers I tasted it again- and it was even better! 2/8/8

The Brown Ale- They said they added more hops in this batch but (I felt) it was wasted. There also was not much malt character- 2/5/7

The Pale Ale- Great Hops, great floral and bittering- 2/8/9

Wheat- Once again, I'm not a wheat fan, but this was very good. Practically no aroma to speak of, 1/7/7

I'd recommend stopping in for a pint- I was sorely disappointed by the lack of stouts (new production coming online after losing a boiler) but I'll get that the next time I'm around Indy.

Home Again

Back home, from Indiana DC, and time to cut the grass.

Un-pissing off a friend-

So how do you un-piss off a friend that got so angry at you he storms out of a bar, screaming obscenities at you- after a night of bashing every other group out there. I don't know how to fix it.

Fixing the microwave

A few days ago the microwave broke. This isn't your normal broke- kick to the curb short circuit but instead a simple design flaw- the handle broke off. Given the relative strength of plastics I'm very surprised that such a thing could happen- that is, until I tried to line up the broken pieces and realized the bottom half of the two part handle was compressed very tightly- so that repeated cookings under the grill must have stressed it to the point it broke.

Googling "spacesaver GE microwave broken handle" returned millions of hits, all bitching about how expensive the replacement part was- 60$+, and that if you needed to replace the front half of the door (plastic holding in the glass) you were looking at nearly the cost of a new microwave.

Great Fix, GE- I'll contribute to the comments by saying your microwave design is a POS and that, with thousands of customers pissed off at your crappy design, you'd think you could come up with a better design. May I suggest

1) An addition screw access hole to the front of the microwave.
2) Anchoring the handle to the metal internal frame instead of the cheap plastic front
3) reducing the 2 piece handle to a 1 piece handle with
4) ribbed / textured grip underneath that can expand/contract better
5) picking a better plastic to use that is less sensitive to heat
6) swapping out the handle with metal.
I chose to take a piece of spalted maple I had planed in the garage back when I was tearing about wood pallets and feeding them into my thickness planar / jointer / table saw. I had a nice piece about the right thickness to take a screw and be strong, and if worse came to worse I could always put a finishing screw on the outside, go thru the metal frame and washer / lock washer / locktight / nut the inside. Either way it would look good, be functional, and I wouldn't have to buy another bloody damn microwave at this point.

And it won't be a GE either.

Baby Shower

Today is the baby shower- I'm staying as FAR AWAY as possible from my inlaws house. They've loaded up on presents and items and they're excited- so I'm here.

I figure there's enough work to do with house repair that I don't need to go there... and that means I can eat pork here too :)