Brews you can use

I’m being mercilessly held down by this:

so I might as well blog, even though I have only one arm free, on the opposite side of me from the computer. Pqrdin tge typods.

We got a new kitten today, and of course a few cuter pictures than the above. She still doesn’t have a name. We’re kind of trying to get Grace to name her, but she’s not interested. Kitten looks a little like our cat Max, and the math geek in me wants to name her Minimax (or Minnie for short). The computer geek thinks max should have a corresponding Min. The part of me who shut out exactly the wrong parts of the 80s also contributed “Number 5“… (That part of me has resigned to spend more time with its family and pursue other humor opportunities in the future.)

Need more input…. <bang> <bang> urrrgghhhle… <thud>

IMDB has rumors of a remake. God help us all, and damn the perpetrators…

Ah, she awakes! Freedom is at hand!

Oh, false alarm…

The project bike has been sitting in the basement for several weeks waiting for minor tweaks. I swapped out the handlebars a couple weeks ago, and finally got around to re-running the brake cables and wrapping the handlebars (I think I managed about a quarter-assed tape job, but it’s my first try). It’s about where I wanted it, minus:

• re-dishing the rear wheel for perfect chainline (this gets the job done, though it’s about 5mm off)
• putting on a track cog to give fixed gear riding a shot
• getting me in good enough shape to ride single speed.

Now I want to take it on my commute tomorrow.

I’ve only taken the bike to work once so far. That’s frustrating, especially since I haven’t been taking advantage of the beautiful biking weather we’ve had the last couple days (30s, 40s? Toss on a sweater, keep pedaling, and it’s quite pleasant). I did manage a nice mid-20s 20 mile recreational ride on Saturday, though. That was nice. I need to do more rides that don’t begin or end with work :-/

In other news, I think I’m losing my mind:

Exhibit A: It took me almost an hour to send out an already-written word document as an attachment to some people I work with. About 15 minutes to draft a quick two sentence commentary, then 45 minutes of scouring the document, making sure it was the right version, that the previous version had been expunged from change tracking, that no included versions contained disparaging comments, profanity, or said “I made a doody“, and that the word document had not been magically replaced by a pornographic image between the last time I checked it and when I hit “attach”.

I’m seriously in the wrong line of work to be this fscking nervous around computers.

Exhibit B: I’ve been having odd dreams about being dead. Not disturbing, scary, or even really profound dreams, but actually amusing dreams about death. I’m basically going about my day, with everything normal until I eventually figure out that I’m a ghost. I try to pick things up. I think I succeed — the thing is in my hands, but not on the table — but eventually it evaporates from my hand and slowly fades back in at its original location. Aha!, I think, this explains the “ghost paradox” (the effect where ghosts in movies can walk through walls but never fall through the floor).

My brain never tells me how this explains it. I wake up before that part is revealed.

I got a late Christmas present today. Well, not so much a late Christmas present, but a quarter century delayed inheritance.

My Grandpa died almost 25 years ago, and left some nice wristwatches for me and my cousin. I was a kid then, and my cousin was less than a year old, so it’s probably for the best that they took this long to get to us. Mine’s easily the nicest watch I’ve owned, and probably ever will own. I usually go for the sturdy yet disposable inexpensive digital watches, but this is a beautiful mechanical wristwatch made in Switzerland by one of the older Swiss watchmakers. I’ve been wearing it since this morning, listening to its rapid ticking, marveling at the fine mechanisms strapped to my wrist, and thinking of Grandpa.

…

I brewed yesterday, but nothing as odd as I thought I’d need to do. I had the hops to make a decent American IPA, and picked up a few more ingredients to complete the recipe. My last few beers have wound up underhopped, but I don’t think I made that mistake this time — my hops stash is gone now

I also finally got my bike out of the car, assembled, and installed fenders. The weather forecast calls for sub-10°F temps tomorrow, which knocked me out of my bike commuting routine last time. This time around, though, I have a fleece balaclava and a better base layer for the rest of me. I could wait for the higher temps later this week, but I’m itching to get back on the bike…

A couple days ago, I started to understand the appeal of the car-free life.

After digging the car out from being plowed in, I wasn’t able to get it into our backyard parking spot (its snow handling leaves quite a bit to be desired) so I parked it on one of the side streets, across from a sign reading “Night plow route this side of street”. It was towed the next morning when I went to run a few errands.

Turns out that marking one side of the street for nighttime plowing renders the opposite side a daytime plow route; this isn’t marked by any signs, I had to go to a St. Paul web site to figure this out. Having my car towed was a pretty effective hint, though….

Well, I had been meaning to get back on the bike. I more or less stopped bike commuting when the temps dropped to 5° in late November, but the weather this week was pretty nice. I took the mountain bike out for my first ride on slushy roads. Kept it in low gear, took it easy and slow, and … wiped out spectacularly right out of the alley. Only my pride was injured or damaged, and I stayed upright for the rest of the ride to breakfast and then to the impound lot. A mere $240 got my car back, and I packed my $200 bike into the back seat, and went on with the errands.

…
The bike is still disassembled in the back of the car. I hope to get around to reassembling it in the next couple days. I’ll also try to get some fenders on it — I was wearing quite a bit of road salt from that short ride, so I added “buy fenders” to the TODO list. “Buy Nokians” almost made the list, but I’ll save those for later.

The Schwinn is downstairs again, after a couple enjoyable (if more physically taxing) commute rides. I just need to finish installing and taping the handlebars, and either get some 27 inch knobby tires (not as much variety in that size) and fenders or wait for more slick-friendly weather.

I also need to brew something before I go ack to work. I had been planning a pilsner, but the hops have become hard to get. Another experimental Frankenbeer it is, then

Good week this week, and not just because I’ve been off work:

• I brewed on Monday. This is almost getting to be a regular occurrence. I probably won’t get back to the 10 gallons per month rate I had going a few years back, but the chances of me selling off brewing equipment in disgust have dropped quite sharply. The beer? I don’t know what it will be, other than beer. Something dark, mildly roasty, hopefully hoppy, with a bunch of rye. For the moment, I’ve given up targeting styles/flavors/other beers. It’s my beer — I’ll probably like it.
• We hosted thanksgiving dinner. Jess’s aunt took the kids for an evening and we cleaned. Cleaned like we didn’t have to worry about waking the kids. Cleaned till we dropped. We have a reasonably clean downstairs now, and with 4 cats and two kids, that’s precious and fleeting, but quite satisfying.
• Oh yeah, dinner. Good turkey, excellent stuffing and squash, heavenly desserts (five-spice pumpkin pie, chocolate cranberry hazelnut torte, and the cranberry apple pie Jess’s friend contributed), and lots of family and friends to share with.
• Most of today was spent noshing, vegging, and snoozing. After the kids went to bed, I got the project bike set up so that I can feel safe commuting with it, put on some lights, and took it on a late-night test ride. There’s still a bit of work left, but it’ll get me to work and back, I think. It’s still a new and fun ride, so I’ll enjoy whatever portion of the commute it survives

I re-greased and reassembled the headset last night, and bottom bracket tonight. Both are quite smooth now.

Then, since I was halfway assembled, I put the wheels, seat, and handlebars back on, re-ran the front brake, slapped a headlight on, and took it out for a quick test ride. Everything felt quite good mechanically, and it was very pleasant to ride. I’m hooked.

There’s still some tweaking left to do before it’s ready to ride for real, but I’m quite surprised I was able to get this far so soon.

The project bike is now stripped down to the frame and the bottom bracket and headset bearing cups, for the cleaning of the latter. When I finally got the headset apart last week, the races and bearings were in pretty good condition, although the grease looked like it had been in there since the bike was first built. The bottom bracket was even worse, with chunks of grease and foreign grit tumbling out when I disassembled it. All the bearings looked pretty good after a partial cleaning, though, so they should be fine after a thorough cleaning and regreasing. The cups and cones got a good wipedown with mineral spirits, and the races are soaking in alcohol until/unless I think of a better degreaser for the task…

I also purchased a BMX freewheel and substituted it for the old cog set. That may not have been the smartest thing to do just yet — the chainline is off by about 5-6 mm, which is marginal. The only real fix is to get some axle spacers, move the hub over by 5 mm, and (the fun part) redish the wheel to center the tire again so the bike rides straight and the rear brake works. It’ll probably be a while before I’m riding the bike, hopefully in a reasonably straight line

…

Of course, this is all the more interesting because of the lack of bike-mechanical aptitude I demonstrated today. We pedaled the kids to a playgroup at Como Zoo this morning, and I decided to fix my chain’s routing before I left — it had been running around the outside of part of the derailleur cage since I replaced it a couple weeks ago, making riding it quite noisy among whatever mechanical damage it was doing. The chain has a master link so it can be removed without tools. I couldn’t remove it without tools, so I broke out the chain tool, and re-routed the chain by separating it at a regular link.

Less than a mile into the trip, the link exploded…. I had some spare chain, so I replaced the link a bit more gently, but couldn’t get the links to actually rotate around the rivets smoothly. So, Jess and Arlo went to the playgroup, and I limped up to County Cycles with my skipping chain and Grace in tow (her choice — she really wanted the bike ride, apparently, even at ~8mph with occasional loud popping and cursing noises ). Of course the fix was trivial: flex the frozen links side-to-side after inserting the rivet, using much more force than I had tried. They also noticed and fixed the seriously loose headset I’d been riding on for <mumble> months. It took about five minutes, and was quite educational.

So, I still have a bunch to learn to become novice bike tinkerer, but at least I have something to play with without endangering my primary ride. Again :-/

I bought a new old bike Monday, a 1974 Schwinn Varsity for $30 from the fine folks at Capital Deals, a surplus/bike shop in southern St. Paul.

The previous owner had done a rather crude single-speed conversion. They removed the derailleurs and one of the chain ring, ran the chain around one of the rear cogs, and flipped and chopped the stock drop bars, but didn’t deburr the chop, much less plug and wrap the handlebars. The rest of the bike isn’t so hot — it would have been marginally rideable with a brake adjustment, but to be safe, it needs:

1. headset replacement (it currently exhibits “indexed steering”)
2. bottom bracket overhaul or replacement (it’s an old-school one piece crank, which means it’s one of the rare repairs which doesn’t require special tools…)
3. new rear brake cable
4. smooth and plug/cork the chopped handlebar ends

I took a stab at the headset replacement tonight, trying to get the fork out so I could get a new headset to match but (argh) found that my big crescent wrench was about 1/2 mm too small for the locknut, so tomorrow, I’ll try to get a bigger crescent wrench, as well as some copper pipe to drive out the cups somewhat nicely.

All of these repairs should make a rideable hacked singlespeed. If I get that far, the next plans are:

1. replace the handlebars — the current ones were chopped too short, and barely have room for my hands. I haven’t decided between simple drop bars, or fancier moustache or better bullhorns.
2. replace the rear cassette with a single freewheel or track cog, or buy a new fixed/free rear wheel
3. Accesorize.
4. ?
5. Profit!

What a last couple weeks…

Two weeks ago, went on a bicycle pub crawl around St. Paul put on by a friend I hadn’t seen in way too long, despite living less than two blocks away. Lots of fun, good company, and good beer. I had my ass kicked by the legendary Ramsey Hill, and made a few more sour beer fans at the Muddy Pig stop, where several of us shared Cantillon Bruocsella 1900 (a very rare find!) and Duchesse du Bourgogne. Both are authentic Belgian sour ales, in an era where too many Belgian producers are sweetening and pasteurizing.

Shortly thereafter, I left for DC to speak at an anti-spam industry group meeting/conference. I am not a public speaker, but the talk went pretty well anyway. The facilitator mercifully nudged the room into a group conversation, a format which I was much more comfortable with — I never have much to say unprompted, but I usually have plenty to say about what you said. Other than that, I spent the whole trip in the meetings, and the after-meeting socialization where the real work gets done. Didn’t get to the Smithsonian, or even the Brickskellar. I did manage to take a few people to Regional Food and Drink, the Brickskellar’s sister restaurant in DC’s Chinatown, and taste a Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA for the first time (wow).

That was most of the next week. The next weekend, I was back in town, and made it to a neighborhood homebrewer’s party and fundraiser. I brought about a gallon of my own (an old Belgian Dubbel and a my first post-hiatus batch), both of which were well received. Most drinkers found the Brown ale both drinkable and interesting, which is what I was going for; the Dubbel spawned a new (to me) word: “Beergasm”

Finally, last week was taken up by another business trip, this time to Clearwater, FL to be stuck in a hotel meeting room collaboratively editing documents all day, with the beach (and 85°F and humid weather) a mere 100 yards away. Nice venue for that. Meeting highlight: ~30 people spending one hour to draft a 3-sentence note to send to another group. Non-meeting highlight: notching off a drinking goal I’ve had for about a decade.

Since shortly after I could legally buy alcohol, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of drinking a beverage older than I am. Just the thought that somebody started making something before I was born, and I could drink it and appreciate it seemed … intriguing, for lack of a better word, phrase, or paragraph. It never actually worked out. Wines and ports that have been cellared for that long are almost always way out of my price range, and I don’t consider myself a wine expert, much less a port connoisseur. Scotches were the closest — I know a thing or two about the single malts, and enjoy them occasionally, but the 21 year old ones seemed too pricey when I was 21, the 25 year-old ones even worse, and the 30-year ones went out of my price range well before I turned 30.

I checked out the hotel bar my second night in Florida. The area was a beer wasteland — the best beer around was Sierra Nevada at this hotel bar — so I turned my attention behind the bar. I noticed a bottle of Laphroaig 30 year, and asked about the price, out of curiosity more than anything else. While the bartender looked it up, I flipped through the drinks menu, and noticed Glenrothes 1972 vintage. The bartender came back with the Laphroaig pricing (15-yr for $15, 30-yr for $30), I cringed a bit, and then asked about the 1972. He took a while longer checking this one out, eventually determining that it wasn’t in their system, but it was on the shelf, and for sale.

“So,” he said, leaning forward with a mischeivous look (that had me thinking “There is me, that is Alex, and my Droogs…”) “it’s not in the system, so I get to set the price. What do you think is fair: $18?” which I seemed a bit too pleased with, so he raised it to $20, at which I tried to make a better show of hemming and hawing. That was the final price, he handed me a generous pour, and I handed him a generous tip (to which he responded “Ah, so I was still a bit low then?”), and savored a fine whisky several years older than myself for much of the rest of the night.

After finishing and coming back down to earth, the bar scene devolved into the normal business traveller one: a bunch of bored, tired people drinking to delay their inevitable return to a lonely hotel room bed, a bit resentful of the vacationers who were there to (successfully) have fun. I stayed for a few more beers.

Now, at least, I’m glad to be home for a few straight months. Hopefully things calm down on the business travel front. More friends and/or (leisurely) bike and/or beer activities are, of course, still welcome

I have another song stuck in my head. It’s not the annoying kind that runs constantly, but rather the kind which starts up close to breakdown or shut down, like HAL singing “Daisy, Daisy” as Dave removed his cards one by one.

Which is to say, it was running constantly today.

Grace has been requiring two things to go to sleep lately: me, and music. The music for the last … month? … has been Pete Seeger, Children’s Concert at Town Hall, IIRC. Good, classic stuff all around, but what sticks in my head is:

Now that’s the end of him and her
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells
There’ll be no little tadpoles, covered with fur
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells

[chorus]
Here’s to Cheshire, here’s to cheese
Here’s to the pear and the apple trees
and here’s to the lovely strawberries
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells

It’s the last verse of one of the tracks, and the only one I can make out over the fidgeting and chattering of a 4 year old trying to avoid sleep. The furry tadpoles probably have something to do with that.

So, of course I googled for snippets of the song trying to fill in the blanks. The rest of the song doesn’t make much sense either. It’s one of many variants of “Froggy went a’ courting”, an English folk song dating back to 1611 with references as early as the 1580s. In other words, this one’s been running through the collective heads of a decent portion of western civilization for over 400 years. Neat.

It’s also interesting that its a nominally kid-friendly song [Theory: every English-language song over 200 years old has either been forgotten, turned into a hymn, or mellowed into a children's song (if secular)] ending in the deaths of the main characters. It makes me not feel as bad about wanting to have all three little pigs be eaten, because the “smartest” one only had his labor-intensive brick house half-finished before The Big Bad Wolf’s fateful visit.

(Think “Three Little Pigs” as a parable of engineering tradeoffs. No, I don’t tell it that way, although in my version the wolf sometimes heads into town for a ham sandwich after giving up on the fresher pork…)