New Year's Day IPA

I spent New Year’s Day brewing beer. 

The equipment

I hadn’t planned to spend New Year’s Day brewing beer. It all came about when a long-standing wish of mine met up with an early birthday present from my Mom, a generous gift certificate to the Austin Homebrew Supply store. Wifearrific and I ran down there, picked out our equipment and the ingredients for our first batch, then came home and were all “OKAY! WHEN ARE WE DOING THIS THING?!” To which the calendar responded, “Uh, well, looks like you’re free on New Year’s Day, assuming you’re not too hungover.”

Amazingly enough, some of our brewing friends (that’s right, I’m lucky enough to have brewing friends - plural) agreed to spend their New Year’s Day brewing beer with us. I thought for sure the requisite hangover would have everyone down for the count, but such was not the case. 

Not hungover, as far as I can tell

Which is great, because frankly, the process involves a lot of standing around, waiting on things to happen, waiting on the timer to tell you it’s time to do the next step. And what a better way to stand around waiting on stuff than with your friends, all of whom brought beer along with them, because really? You’re going to not drink beer while you brew? Pshaw. 

At one point, the kids called us inside the house to show us a play they’d created and had been rehearsing. I doubt that happens at most breweries. That's a whole 'nother rabbit hole I'll have to jump down later.

After an afternoon of rich smells and thick concoctions, we closed up the whole works and shoved it into the pantry where it’ll ferment for the next couple of weeks or so, after which, it gets to age in its bottles for a while, and only then do we get to find out if we did it right...or right enough anyway. 

And now it just sits, in the closet, next to the dogfood

It’s odd, you know? Doing all this work to create the perfect environment just to let nature take its course, then sitting back and taking a mostly passive role, like some sort of non-interventionist God that just pokes his head in every now and then, “Everything going okay in here?” then pops back out. Sure, there’s more work to come, but our part in the actual making of the liquid is all but done.

I was talking to one of my oldest friends about our plans to brew on New Year’s Day, and he said it sounded like the start of a great tradition, an idea that I liked right away. I like traditions. Or no, scratch that. I actually kind of hate traditions, but that’s because when I think “tradition,” I think of some tired old ritual whose inconvenience has come to vastly outweigh its purpose, whose original meaning is long forgotten, and that only gets repeated because that’s the way it’s been done since before anybody can remember. No, I don’t need that. I like traditions I can be part of. And as is the case here, I like traditions that I can be in on at the start.

Mark your calendars now, because January 1, 2013 will be the second annual New Year’s Day Holmes-brew.

Wifearrific with beerarriffic

Badass Ice Chest of Badassery

Normally when I think about a badass ice chest, I think of the one that my friends Bill and Aaron bring with them to parties. These guys are serious beer drinkers. They don't like to worry about the selection and quantity of beer that will be at the party or whether there will be enough room in the fridge to store their stash, so they just take care of both problems themselves. Whenever these guys come rolling in, you can be sure that one of them will be pulling their badass ice chest along behind them (it's got wheels, yo) and that it will be packed with an ice cold assortment. Theirs is a badass ice chest indeed.

But that's not the badass ice chest I'm talking about here.

My wife started out the new year by letting some doctor cut open her shoulder and saw on her bones. Her shoulder had been hurting her for well over a year or something, and it's still hurting her now, except  now it's hurting because it's recovering from surgery and not because her shit's all fucked up. At least that's the hope. That's what we're paying you for, Dr. Shoulder Scraper.

To help manage the pain of her recovery, our insurance was kind enough to pay for this neat little ice chest contraption that, while not wheeled or filled with beer or even very large, is pretty badass in its own way. Its sole purpose is to pump ice cold water into a pad that can be placed atop an injured area of a person's body. Check it out in action:

"The fuck are you doing?" was the question I had to answer of my wife right before I took this picture. "Don't worry, I won't include your head," I assured her. It's not that my wife is not beautiful because she is, but a period of surgery recovery is not a person's most attractive time. You're all tired and drugged and worn-out and slow-moving. An attitude of "fuck it" pervades all but the most essential hygiene-oriented tasks. You're doing good to get a shower. Flannel becomes like, the most wonderful fabric ever.

As you can see, this ice chest would not hold a lot of beer, but it does hold significant powers of pain relief. For the first few days after surgery, I was filling it and refilling it with a fresh load of ice and water several times a day, along with fetching pills, keeping everybody fed, reasonably clean, clothed, entertained. Oh, and trying to get some work-work done. Yay for working from home. Lucky for us, we've gotten a lot of help from family. Somewhere in there I turned 35. I had a brief episode of depression inspired by feeling like I haven't accomplished enough with my life, got mostly over it, then went and made dinner.

Here's hoping this is the most pain we suffer all year.

Oh Yes, Mistakes Got Made

Earlier this week during my internet travels, I ran across a rather entertaining article about a 1995 Newsweek article wherein the author editorialized on the many reasons why the internet was doomed to go the way of Betamax. In a nutshell, his case boiled down to a belief that the state of the internet at that time was about as good as it was ever going to get, and its state, as you may recall, was not so great.

Obviously, things have improved, and pretty much everything in the article turned out to be wrong. Even the author himself, an astronomer and writer by the name of Clifford Stoll, has commented on how very incorrect his predictions were.

I feel for this guy, I really do. I seriously doubt he was the only one back then who was too preoccupied with the internet’s wackness to stop and think about its potential dopeness. He just happened to be one of the ones ballsy enough to put his thoughts into print. And then the internet got all big and amazing and his thoughts went from print to digital and got spread all over the very medium that he predicted would have been long gone by now. I don’t know Clifford Stoll personally, but I’m going to guess that this article presents one of the most inaccurate declarations of his lifetime. And there it is one the internet for the whole world to see and pass on. Shit, I put it on Facebook myself, along with who-knows-how-many other people. But hey, if you’re going to go playing Nostradamus, it probably helps to have a taste for crow, huh?

Stoll’s blunder may be more public than most, but he’s hardly alone in having made big mistakes. So in that spirit, I thought I would share some of the things that I myself have been wrong about, right here on the internet. And I’m limiting this to mistakes that occurred in my adult life because everybody’s stupid when they’re a kid. 

Mickey's Fine Malt Liquor is good drinkin'!
Holy hornet balls, could I ever put that shit back. I fucking loved it. I drank it from the widemouth grenade bottles and I drank it from the 40 ounce bottles and I loved every drop. Now? I’d have to say it qualifies as swill. Plus it’s made by Miller, a brewer I'd rather not support any longer. Please note, however, that this admission of error with regards to the quality of Mickey’s is not a statement of regret with regards to my tattoo of the Mickey’s hornet on my calf. I’m still pretty good with that.  

Vaccines are scary and bad!
When we were pregnant with our first kid, we started running across all these articles about the link between vaccines and autism. Mercury in a needle! Being injected into our precious baby! I’ll admit it, we got ourselves good and freaked out. But then we learned a bit more and realized just how ridiculous the whole facts vs. nonfacts controversy surrounding vaccines really is.  

My 1st marriage will last forever!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAA!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!!! Whew! All right then, moving on. 

I want to become a counselor and help people!
When I enrolled in a master’s program with the goal in mind of becoming a licensed professional counselor, I really thought I had found what I wanted to be when I grew up. I learned a lot, but after a few semesters, I figured out that mental health was not the profession for me. 

I will never be an atheist!
And yet here I sit, an unbeliever. 

I will never put a LOLCat on my blog!
Doh! Actually, I think I've probably already messed this one up.

Blogging is dumb!
This isn’t really too far off from Mr. Stoll’s statement about the internet as a whole. I remember when I first started to run across people’s online journals, many of which were anonymous. I perused a few here and there and found it to be the whiniest bullshit I had ever read. I got it in my head that a bunch of people just writing about whatever the fuck they want to and putting it on the internet was a stupid idea. Then not too too long after that, my friend Tim created the individual blogs on the Loaded Gun Theory site, and lo and behold, I became a blogger.   

So there's just a few of my mistakes for y'all to chew on. I wracked my brain trying to think of some more, but these are honestly the only halfway-interesting ones I could come up with, and that's stretching the definition of "interesting." For those mistakes that I'm unable to recall at the moment, hopefully I at least learned a lesson from them.

So then she drops a drill right on his face!

I paid a visit to my dentist yesterday, and they did something new and weird and different. Once my mouth was all numb and they were about to go in to start tooling around, the nice assistant lady broke out a pair of sunglasses and affixed them to my face in the usual sunglass position. "This is nice," I thought. "A little protection from the blinding rays of that 'Flight of the Navigator' light that they shine into your face." As they get to work on my teeth, the dentist starts telling the story behind the glasses. Turns out he had run into a dentist friend of his -- I was surprised that dentists are actually friends with other dentists, but there you have it -- and this dentist friend of his told him this hee-larious story about how his assistant had dropped an instrument right into a patient's face! Ow! Fuck! He didn't specify which tool, but they're all metal, and many of them have sharp points, so chances are it probably hurt like a sumbitch. So he's telling this story to both me and his assistant while they're working on my mouth, and he proceeds to tell us how he asked his friend, "well what'd you do to the employee?", and his friend tells him he didn't do anything to her because she was his wife. "What's he gonna do, fire her?" At this, my dentist laughs a hearty guffaw, his assistant sort of titters nervously, and laying there with my jaw open like Pac-Man on a binge, I can clearly see the message that he is conveying to her, perhaps even clearer than he does: I ain't put no ring on your finger lady, so if you fuck up, I'm free to send your ass packing. I felt just the slightest bit awkward being an unwitting third party to his unconscious passive aggression.

I picked up the boys and still managed to beat The Ash home. When I saw her car in the driveway, I walked out with Simon to meet her. She was carrying a single plastic bag, out of which she triumphantly pulled a 24 ounce can of Budweiser, A.K.A. a tallboy. The explanation? Cheap American beer kills slugs, and slugs seem to be having their way with some of the plants in her garden. But it doesn't take 24 ounces of fine American lager (that's what it says on the can, it must be true) to kill a few slugs, so guess who washed down the rest of it? I immediately felt like I was tubing down the Guadalupe River in the summer time. It was like a gross-tasting Calgon moment.

And while you're at it, have a happy 5th and 6th too

Hope everybody had a great 4th of July. I know we did. And this little dude's definitely feeling it today.

Flower Child

He did this himself. For real real.

The boy has discovered the joy of plastering stickers all over everything. Y'oughtta see The Ash's pregnant belly. Covered in stickers! Maybe she'll post 'em.

This is perhaps a rather unceremonious way of bringing an end to a lengthy blogging hiatus, but ceremony is often a rather rotten plank to stand on. Suffice it to say that I've been busy. Not just the writing, but the blog reading and commenting has waned. Which is kinda sad seeing as how it was NaBloPoMo and all. I've decided that since participation in NaBloPoMo was a non-possibility for me, I'm going to make January into Holmes Blog Posting Month, or HoBloPoMo for short. It ain't my fault how dirty that sounds. Why January, you ask? For one, we'll have a new baby, which is sure to provide fodder for at least one, maybe two whole posts. Secondly, my birthday happens in January, which makes for at least one post where you can all leave comments of a happy birthday nature. Third, um, yeah. January is HoBloPoMo. If any o' y'all got any free time on your hands and want to design a HoBloPoMo logo for me (that is not completely X-rated), I'll be your best friend.

I don't mind telling you, this has been a challenging semester. Not only has the coursework been challenging, there was also this interesting interplay between the two different disciplines, the strictly secular psychology on the one hand, and the theology on the other. They pulled my brain in different directions...which is not to say that they conflicted, but rather that they inspired and required very different types of thinking, both in form and content. But interestingly enough, they intersected in some unexpected ways. They both ask questions about concepts like "natural" and "freedom." They both ask questions about how we can help those in need. And arriving at an absolute in either one is a sure sign that there is something you're probably missing.

But I finished my last paper about thirty minutes ago. The shit ain't spellchecked, maybe I'll remember to do so before I print it out, maybe not. I'm just sitting here enjoying my Anchor Steam Christmas (thanks again, Whit) and relishing the fact that I'm about to hit the Publish Post button for the first time in weeks.