Happy birthday, Dennis!

Happy birthday, Dennis!

Stuff and such

We got some firewood delivered today. Pretty exciting, in more ways than one. I ended up posting an ad on Craiglist - I wanted a half cord of firewood for about $100. Most places were selling half cords for around $130, and I was just lookin' for a deal. Some guy responded saying he could help - I called and we set up delivery for 6:00 tonight. Well, 6:00 came and went, and at around 6:45 I had Jay call the guy ('cuz I'm scared of stuff). He said he lost the address. So he said he'd be here in 45 minutes. He showed up an hour later. We had him drive into the backyard to unload it. His headlights were off as he repeatedly tried to back his truck up into the backyard, coming very, very close quite a few times to hitting the fence. He unloaded the firewood, took his money, and booked it (without his headlights on) around the house and through the fence and onto the street. Yeah, I said through the fence. Granted, it a part of an old fence that was falling apart anyway, but come on, dude! Jay thinks he was high. We had a nice laugh. I guess we have a few more pieces of firewood now...

A while back I had lost everything on my PDA after it decided to freeze up. For a long time the program to hotsynch my PDA with the computer wasn't working, which is why I hadn't backed stuff up in months. So last night I decided I needed to figure it out so I wouldn't lose all the new stuff I had put on there. When I plugged my PDA in and performed a hotsynch operation, it actually worked! I didn't have to do anything! So all the old stuff I thought I lost (minus a year's worth) is now back on my PDA. I have Bee back! Bee is my absolute favorite game! It's the stupidest thing in the world, and I love it!

I was just going through some old pictures (you know, the kind that you had to develop) from college and the few years after. I was looking for some good pics of Cuddy, thinking I might make some sort of collage or something for her going-away party. It's weird to look back at old pics - I was so skinny! And hyper! And I dressed in a ridiculous manner! Maybe I'll go through some old videos Friday...

I know that was a random posting of random things, but it's what I was thinking about.

Gonna do some gardenin'

So I'd been talking about it and thinking about it and mulling it over and all that stuff, but I finally decided to actually take a class. Not a for-credit class or anything, just a basic gardening and landscaping class at Assabet Valley Tech's continuing ed program. It starts at the end of September and goes into November, and I'm pretty darn excited! It'd be nice to actually work on the yard and try to make it look nice and know what I'm doing for a change. We'll see how it goes.

I hope everyone can make it to Cuddy's going-away party this Saturday! I'm lookin' forward to it.

Last weekend we finally found Ashland Town Forest, which we initially read about in Ashland, one of those history-of-a-town-type books with lots of photos. There was a (very poor, old) picture of a cave that people escaping from the Salem witch trials would find shelter in, hence called "Witch's Cave," and it said the cave was in Ashland Town Forest. We didn't know there was such a thing, and we didn't know where it was. We assumed it was the state park. But a few weekends ago, Jay was test driving a Rav4 from Bernardi Toyota and we drove past this sign:

Cool sign!, I thought. And we had found the elusive forest! The walk was very nice - there was only one other person we saw (a very nice old woman that told us to keep the place a secret). Actually, Jay figured out that the forest was the place where he fell out of a tree back in college and started getting attacked by bees. He saw the tree and a flood of memories came back... You'll have to ask him to tell you the story. It's a funny story.

And last weekend we visited Matt up in Lowell, and we got to hang out in the Alley for a while. I took this picture that I like 'cuz it reminds me of an owl:


Today we went for a short kayak trip to Hopkinton State Park. We've been to the park before, but never to kayak. It was nice. There were a lot of other people out on the water in sailboats and kayaks and canoes because I think they rent all that kind of stuff out. We took Abe. Abe does pretty good in the kayak. We paddled over to a little island that was pretty much a huge mountain of dirt with trees on it. It was a very, very steep hill. But Abe walked right up it as he created avalances of dirt and rocks, and he disappeared for a while. We then heard rocks and dirt falling from a cliff next to us, and Abe was perched right at the edge wanting to jump off, so we had to pick him up so he didn't break his neck.

Now I'm on the Internet and I'm going to bite the bullet and order firewood. We like to have fires outside, but we end up having to go in the woods right next to our neighbors and snap branches off trees for wood, and that's just not going to cut it. I don't think they like loud, snapping branches right next to their house at 11:00 at night. But maybe they do, who knows?

I've conquered my fear!

Is that how you spell conquered? It doesn't look right...

Anyway, I have been trying to actually accomplish things in the past few days rather than mope about how I always want to do stuff and never do it, so the first step was to actually get out of the house, go to the homebrew store, buy ingredients for a batch of beer, take them home, and make the beer. Well, I shopped for the ingredients on Sunday (which meant getting out of the house and following through with buying them - big step!) and didn't have time to brew the beer. This is usually where the story would end. I would usually buy the ingredients and then leave them to sit for months and months and go stale, only because I usually do things on a whim and my whims never pan out fully.

However, I kept the ingredients closeby, and swore to myself that one of these nights, I would brew the damn batch. Tonight was that night, folks. Oh, sure, I didn't get home until around 7pm, but I was freakin' determined. (This batch of beer is specifically for Cuddy's going away party, so I actually needed to brew it at least 10 days before the party.) So I just dove into it. (Not literally - that would be very sticky.) I just started boiling some water in my brewpot, I put the necessary grains into the necessary muslin bag and steeped them while the water boiled, and by then I was committed. The house filled with the long-ago-familiar smell of brewing beer... and it was good.

I planned ahead and sanitized all the necessary equipment to complete the batch (floating thermometer, strainer, airlock, fermenting bucket), I prepared the dry yeast (let it soak in warm, not hot, water for 15 minutes, then stir right before pitching), I added the necessary ingredients into the batch of boiling wort (more hops, more extracts, some Irish moss and gypsum salt), I put 5 lbs of ice and 2 gallons of cold water into the previously sanitized fermenting bucket, and I completed the task.

I didn't even make that much of a mess, like I usually do. Perhaps many months of not brewing allowed my brain to comprehend and organize the various steps involved in brewing a batch of homebrew to meld together and form a cohesive idea of what I need to do in order to brew. Maybe not. But all that matters is that I now have a bucket of beer in the corner of the kitchen that will be ready to keg come Aug. 25th.

Preparing for this batch has made me excited about brewing more. Who knows? Maybe this will be the only batch I brew for a while... but I like to think that's not so. It's not so tough to do. But I guess when it comes time to actually make the contents of the bucket of beer consumable, I might have a different perspective. To bottle, to keg? Oh, the options...

Anyway, I hope everyone can make it to Cuddy's going away party so that they can try my (hopefully) tasty batch of pale ale that I've brewed up. Oh, and to say bye to Cuddy. There's always that motivation. (By the way, if you're coming to the party, bring a friend or eight. The more, the merrier!)

This and that

So life is pretty much back to normal, what with Jay being fully recovered from his Lyme Disease incident. Thank you all for your well-wishes and such! Jay's first day back at work was today, and he seems in good spirits and energetic. (I'm actually here at work with him - I have to help give him his IV antibiotic at 6pm every day.)

So I haven't posted much about much other than, y'know, that Lyme thing. But in the meantime, we did purchase two very exciting things for our house. We bought two Telechron clocks! Telechron was a company that was founded by Henry Warren, who invented the first electric clock, and the company's home was Ashland. So we've been looking on Ebay for some cool-looking electric clocks made by Telechron. We found one that advertised Telechron clocks, which is kind of postmodern, and we figured Telechron clocks that advertise Telechron clocks have to be pretty rare. Plus it looked cool. That model was actually featured in a scene from Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? in the background. So we got that... and then soon thereafter, Jay found yet another Telechron that advertised Telechrons! So we got that, too. Our first anniversary is coming up, and it's the clock anniversary, apparently, so hey, we splurged.

Jay's also been thinking about buying a car, either new or used. We go back and forth between wanting a really low-emissions, economical, great-gas-mileage vehicle and wanting a big truck or SUV-type thing that we can lug things around in. We might hold off for a bit until we decide... but we definitely want to get something, as Jay's Mazda 626 blows.

And for all I neglected to email, we're going to have a little get-together to say farewell to Chris Cuddy as she embarks on her journey to Chicago comedy. It shall happen on Sat., August 26th, at our house. Feel free to tell anyone you might know that might be interested. I might even brew beer. (I say that every time and it never happens, so don't get too excited, chump.)

Did I forget to tell you?

I guess I forgot to say that Jay's out of the hospital. He got out on Sunday, and he's doing so much better now. Thank you everyone for your thoughts :) Now he has to get antibiotics until Aug. 24th, and hopefully there won't be any complications at all from the Lyme Disease. Okay. Bye!