Brewing: Liberty Cream Ale

I realized I'd never posted pics of brewing before. So now I have!

This is me chilling down the wort (what will become beer) before adding the yeast.


Here I'm moving the wort to the fermenting bucket.


All sealed up and ready to ferment:


In a week I'll transfer it to a different container for secondary fermentation. Then a week after that I'll bottle it. And two weeks after THAT I'll be drinking delicious, delicious Liberty Cream Ale. Woo hoo!

New music toys

I got some new music equipment (a.k.a. toys) recently, and they're pretty cool. Last weekend when we went to Groth Music I picked up a couple of Irish tin whistles, one in the key of C and one in the key of D. Here's how the D whistle sounds; I'm playing the intro to Haul Away Joe.



The C whistle has a harsher, less woody sound to it, but I don't have a sample right now. The whistles are fun, but yesterday I bought something that's even more fun. A guy I know was selling a used didgeridoo. It's not an authentic Aboriginal one or anything, but hey, it sounds okay and it only cost me ten bucks, so I'm pretty happy. Here's what it sounds like:



I have lots of fun playing it. The kids love it, too. Oh, and my wife is very embarrassed by how goofy I am in that video. :-)

Turns out that playing the tuba in high school was fantastic preparation for playing didgeridoo. Can't wait to get better and play some more!

Serious lack of pics lately

I've been terrible about posting pics lately. (I've been only slightly better about posting words, but that's a different subject.) Anyway, here's a current pic of Caden and Rohan. Dina took them and Griffin to the Children's Museum yesterday, and Dina's friend snapped this pic.


If you can't tell, that's Caden on the left, and Rohan on the right. It amazes me that some people still can't tell them apart!

Layoffs

I came in to work today, and my boss took me aside and told me "layoffs are happening today." My job is safe, but a third of the people who work on my team are gone. Things are going to get tough now, because we lost some very skilled people. It sounds like there are quite a few layoffs from all teams here. I'm thankful I still have a job, but I feel pretty helpless for the people who no longer do.

The farewell emails are starting to flow in; I hate days like this.

Twitter

So, I'm trying out Twitter. For anyone who's interested, I'm @coreynash. You can see my feed at http://twitter.com/coreynash. I'm still trying to figure out the balance between Twitter and Facebook, so we'll see what happens as time goes on. I'm guessing I'll use Twitter more once I have an iPhone (which looks like May at this point).

Captain Trips

Wow - the illness that my family had was not yet over after my last blog post, not by a long shot. I ended up working only one day last week. Even though I was feeling better, my family was not. We're still not out of it, we all have residual coughs, and Griffin still had an upset stomach as of yesterday. At times during the whole ordeal I was thinking about the superflu Captain Trips from The Stand. Luckily it was nothing so fatal...

So the weekend was an interesting one. On Friday and Saturday Dina had a Creative Memories regional convention, so I was in charge of the boys. I got barely any sleep on Friday night, but there was no vomit, so it was a win in my book. The twins slept great on Saturday night, so that was very welcome. I also got in a good, long nap late Sunday morning. Dina got a great photo of Caden and Rohan laying in bed with me, one laying on each of my arms. (Of course, I'm writing this blog entry at work and have no access to photos. Blarg.)

Sunday evening Dina and I went on a double date with Lundo and Amy to Fogo de Chao in downtown Minneapolis. For those who don't know, Fogo is basically an all-you-can-eat meat restaurant. It's expensive, but the cuts of meat are all perfection. You sit at your table, and servers bring various kinds of meat to your table on skewers; if you want to try one they cut off a slice and you put it on your plate. Absolutely delicious. We were all stuffed silly when we left. I literally could not eat another bite.



That night I was going to get together with the Flock of Kobolds guys to play some Irish music at Lundo's place. However, the location was changed, which added a lot of drive time for me (but saved a lot of drive time for others), so I decided to stay home, be there for my family, and catch up on stuff I needed to do after being sick. I'd still love to play along on some of the tunes, but there's no more time for rehearsals before St. Patty's day due to vacations, so that's a bummer. But I did get some stuff done and got another good night's sleep last night, which is exactly what I needed.

This morning, my car didn't start, because it was too cold. My car's been having way too hard a time starting when it's cold...I may need a new battery. I tried to start the van so I could jump my car, and it had a dead battery, too. Frakking machines! Blarg. We ended up calling AAA to jump the van, and then I jumped the car from that. It was far too exciting a morning for a Monday. But at least I got to work.

Busy. Then sick.

If it seems like I've fallen off the face of the planet lately, it's because I basically have. For the first two weeks in February, my wife had jury duty. She was just on call-in for a while, but then she did get called in and assigned to a case. She was part of a two-day trial. She was excited to be part of the process, but with her being the main caretaker of our kids during the day, it meant a combination of working from home and taking vacation days for me. Luckily Uncle Guy came over to help out while Dina was gone.

Then, after Dina was done with jury duty, she got sick. Shortly thereafter, of course, the rest of us got sick. Today is the second day I've taken off work due to sickness. I'm starting to feel better and am hoping to be back at work tomorrow, but it depends on how much better the rest of the family gets. It's tough for Dina to take care of three sick boys when she's not feeling well herself.

Well, I should go continue recovering. Until next time!