Category: daily drivel

  • sknxxx!

    If you thought you heard someone snoring in your house last night, it was probably me. Even if there’s someone in your household who snores, my nose was stuffed up so badly that, more likely than not, I was overpowering them. My snoring was cranked up all the way to eleven last night. I’m pretty… Read.

  • morning quote

    This: When the English stormed the Emerald Isle in the 17th century, they took everything that was worth taking and burned everything else. Thereafter, the Irish had no land, no money, no future. That left them with words, and words became books, and books, ingeniously coupled with music and alcohol, enabled the Irish to transcend… Read.

  • wakey wakey

    ,

    I was up very early this morning. I’m always up very early. I set my alarm for five o’clock when I have to be up on week days but only for backup. I usually wake up before it goes off. I’m not entirely happy about this. It’s not something I would consider a hidden talent.… Read.

  • twists

    It appears that my weekend will begin with a plumbing emergency. After brewing the morning pot o’ coffee, I tramped down the stairs to the basement to check on the two batches of beer that were still happily fermenting away on the work bench. As I passed the basement sink, the dark, wet stain around… Read.

  • fridayfridayfriday

    I couldn’t wrangle a day off from work today so I had to spend Black Friday at the office. Oh, darn. Black Friday is the strangest holiday ever; everybody spends all day Thursday gushing about how they’re thankful for the things they have, and then on Friday they trample each other to get more things.… Read.

  • Thanksgiving

    Ten years ago: I got a new computer at my desk. This happened in a really weird way. I was using the old computer a couple days ago when I reached across the desk and spilled a Styrofoam cup of hot tea on the keyboard, which stopped it dead. This was not entirely a bad… Read.

  • thanks

    Oh yay. Two batches of beer going at the same time: a Belgian abbey on the left and a stout on the right. The abbey is Batch #6, the slow-starter I was fretting over for two days until I finally got fermentation kickstarted by giving it a warm bath. Now it’s got a heating pad… Read.

  • can’t hear the quiet for the trees

    Recently on an Amtrak train, a fellow passenger across the aisle from me in the Quiet Car was involved in an animated cellphone conversation about a real estate transaction. The conductor came through and said: “Sir, I must ask that you refrain from using your cellphone. You are in the Quiet Car.” Annoyed, he looked… Read.

  • bubbly batch

    Same batch, eight hours later: I kept thinking about the head of kreusen building on top of the wort as I was trying to read myself to sleep last night. Finally, I gave up, got out of bed and stuck the blow-off tube down the neck of the carboy. Good thing I did, because the… Read.

  • LIFE!

    LIFE, DO YOU HEAR ME! GIVE MY CREATION … LIIIIIFE! Last time I used this particular strain of yeast it took a little more than twenty-four hours for fermentation to kick in. This time it took almost fifty-four, and I had to baby it. I thought it might be too cold in the basement for… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend