You'll probably get increasingly mopey posts as this week goes on and I realize how close I'm getting to my birthday. I'm just not quite where I want to be in life. Don't get me wrong, most of the time I don't mind my job, and I'm doing fine financially. It's not that I was hoping to be a hundred-thousand-aire or anything. I wish I had less credit card debt, but I'm reasonably close to on track for my medium term goal of owning a home. It's just...I'd always hoped to have a girl by now. Hell, I'd kinda hoped to be married by now. But I don't even have any prospects. So I'm facing hitting 25, and starting the trek down away from physical prime, and it's just going to get harder from here. It's just another one of those "*sob* *sob* I'm so lonely!" things that you know I sometimes drop into. So bear with me. I'll get back on track eventually.

Labels: life

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, it's been crazy busy. Emo got married last weekend. The wedding was surprisingly short -- I'm used to the pastor delivering full sermons or homilies, but their pastor's message was very short and to the point. The wedding reception was unfortunately short, but otherwise awesome. I joke that we almost had as much toast as we did wedding, but it's not much of a joke. Now, let me level -- I find wedding receptions generally to be horribly depressing things. When you're alone, a thing that's almost endless couples dances isn't much fun. But this time there weren't that many couples dances, and the toasts, which are my favorite part, probably because I like to talk, lasted on and on. It was incredible. I hope that when I get married, all my friends will step up like that and say a few words. And these weren't things like "I wish them happiness in their new life." These were full on speeches, poignant and heartfelt, about the couple. I wasn't the only one blown away by it.

I got my cider bottled. I'm doing still cider this time, just because of time constraints. Well, mostly still -- I primed the bottles a little, not to carbonate it, more just to pressurize the bottle. The CO2 will keep the oxygen off the cider, which I think will help it taste better when it's opened. I got much of my grocery shopping for this comming weekend, my grand birthday kegtap, done. Now it's mostly waiting again.

This was our big server migration weekend too, which wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it'd be. Partly by the boss' insistence that I not do some of the things I'd planned (most notably setting our databases to UTF-8 instead of Latin-1). It ended up only being about five hours of unpaid overtime, far less than the ten to fifteen I'd been expecting. Fortunately, there weren't a lot of major hurdles. We did seem to run into some serious DNS problems though. I learned a few things about our DNS configuration that I didn't know, and I discovered that the registrar (Network Solutions, in this case) caches your name server IPs (which makes a lot of sense to me, since I couldn't for the life of me figure out how it associated nameservers to IPs so it could serve names before). Unfortuantely, I don't know how in the world I'm supposed to change that IP address, and their helpfiles explained doing something that there didn't seem to be an option for. I might email on Monday. For the time being I made "new" name servers with the correct IPs, and I think everything's starting to work correctly again.

Labels: beer, life, work

*cough* Whoa. I don't know if I'm going to get my mouth free of feeling like I gargled kerosene and live coals. I just tried the pepper beer to see if its ready to bottle. Honestly, I don't have a clue. After the first instant of taste, I started choking and my entire mouth turned off as my tastebuds began to smoke. Wow. Yeah, it's spicy like nobody's business. Might give it a shot...It ought to be ready to bottle, or at least very very close.

Got the cider fermenting now. I'm hoping it turns out pretty well. I've got to decide if I want to carbonate it or leave it still. I'm not sure...I might do half and half maybe... Anybody got any opinions on the matter?

Labels: beer

Bottled the boysenberry wheat tonight, and I think the pepper beer is ready too, so I'll try to bottle it tomorrow or so... We'll see what I have time for, since I've definitely got to get the cider going ASAP.

I learned something about boysenberries too. They have all kinds of little bits that really like to clog up the keg tap, making the last eight or so bottles nearly impossible to draw. I ended up doing rather unorthodox things for the last few, so I marked them pretty clearly -- they're probably not going to turn out well, and I'd rather party guests not imbibe them. This whole thing has been a lot of "wait and see." Maybe the pepper beer will actually go well... Though I'm not so secretly terrified of it, since I'll have to taste it to see if it's ready to bottle, and I don't generally care for spicy hot things. *sigh* Oh well. It's for a good cause anyway.

Labels: beer

Well, this is disappointing... The Boysenberry wheat isn't anywhere near ready to bottle. It's been three weeks, so I'm a bit concerned. Maybe it'll be better after this weekend. I really hope so, or I won't be able to have the cider ready in time. It's already going to be a little tight. Fortunately, the books claim the cider will ferment in five days. If that's true, then I can wait for a few more days for this beer to be ready to go.

Labels: beer

Well, I got the cider in today, so it's time for me to bottle the Boysenberry Wheat, so I can start the cider going tomorrow night. I really hope the Wheat is ready to go. It should be, but I haven't really checked it. There's still stuff floating in it, but I don't know if it's yeast or if it's just bits of boysenberry. I suppose I'll find out tonight. So yeah, the goal is to have the cider going tomorrow night. Since the cider should finish more quickly than the others, there should be no trouble in getting it done before my birthday bash. With luck, the pepper beer will also be ready soon, so it can carbonate fully before the party. I'm really frightened of checking that one though...

In surprising news, the Oatmeal Ale appears to actually be carbonating very well. It might just end up being a particularly sweet ale. I'll have to move it to the fridge for lagering soon, or I'll risk bursting the bottles. *wink*

I'm still trying to decide what I want to bake for the party, but I think I'm going to do ribs, marinaded with the pepper beer (assuming it's ready, and it should be). I'm so excited. I hope I can afford all this... With all the weddings and birthdays, this month is going to be kind of tight.

Labels: beer

I've got my spicy pepper beer in the fermentation tank brewing now. We'll see how it turns out. Hopefully it'll be ready with everything else for my big birthday "kegtap" party at the end of the month.

I got some more bottles today. I was hoping that when they came in, I'd be able to bottle the Boysenberry Wheat, but that doesn't look like it's going to work out as quickly as I hoped. This is the first of my beers light enough for me to look in and see the floating yeast. *grin* So I know it's not quite done. But it might only take a few more days, which would mean that I can bottle when I get the cider in (which, as I noted, actually prefers the temperature of my house, and will brew much faster) and then start the cider the next night. I don't expect the cider and the strawberry blonde stuff to come in until the middle of next week, so there's plenty of time for the wheat to finish up.

Labels: beer