July 4th "Vacation"

Friday was the big day - waiting and watching turned into final product. This is the first of three batches that we will be bottling over the next few weeks. I didn't plan very well for the amount of water that boiled off so this batch is a little low on total volume. It came out to 46 bottles total rather than the expected 50-52. One shattered while Corrine was capping it and thankfully didn't cause any injuries. It was far less messy than when I shattered two full wine bottles across the floor while corking them a couple weeks ago (note: cheap bottles are dangerous). It made the kitchen smell nice if nothing else.

Here I've got about 60 sanitized bottles on the tree waiting to be filled.

Tasty (presumably) beer waiting to be put in its final containers and carbonated.

Sanitized caps soaking in their One-Step solution.

Priming sugar mixture cooking. This is what will give the yeast their last short meal which allows them to produce the pressure and carbonation in the bottles.

All capped and finished. I then moved them to the basement floor which is exactly 70° this time of year. They will need to stay between 65-70° for about two weeks to fully carbonate and condition out the unwanted flavors.

Corrine and I ate lunch at Cordova-Tower park today and we walked some of the trail to check out the extent of the flooding. To my surprise, it appears most of the trail is usable but the water is right up next to it. 

There were several soft-shelled turtles in this newly formed tail-water. We also saw a large-mouth bass and a garr. The turtles were incredibly easy to spook so I never got any pictures of those. 

A couple feet of lake-level increase, and this bridge would be under water. According to Rock-Island, the level is on its way down and we're currently four feet lower than this time last year.

Went for a ride around town later since traffic was almost non-existent. Everyone else seemed to be occupied with the parade - I'll take that.

A small herd of Shriner Isetta cars either starting, or finishing the parade route, I'm not sure which.

Topped off the ride with some ice-cream and headed home. Yes, it does work to eat ice-cream with a spoon while riding a bike.

Long time with no post again, I'll go with "work has been a zoo and I didn't feel like it". There, I knew this picture would come in handy for something. This isn't a real big zoo though, we just have a giraffe, elephant (possibly goring something?), and a bean-stalk. 

Brewing has been going well - this was the third batch and used up all remaining ingredients we had. I now have five gallons each of nut-brown ale, cream ale, and some sort of tarted Belgian ale. There are LOT more steps than wine-making but it all goes so much quicker (no waiting for months and years), plus it's fun to do some actual cooking with it too.

A handy by-product of brewing is the spent grains, which birds seem to be a big fan of. This pile is even bigger now and there definitely aren't enough birds around to eat it. It doesn't seem to be spoiling yet so hopefully it'll last a while.

Plus it just makes you feel good to know that these baby birds are being fed with only the freshest beer grains.  

I have no idea what this fungus is. It's been on our garage for a little while now and if ever I might have seen a magic mushroom, this would seem to be it. 

Got some video of the out-flow from Red-rock this past weekend. It's about 22k cfs here. Should be at 30k by tomorrow I believe. This is still low enough that none of the camp-grounds or roads get consumed. The forecast looks to be somewhat drier moving forward, so that should help.

Corrine and I had a picnic (Arby's) dinner on the beach Friday night. The weather was about perfect and the sun kept peaking out every now and then. It becomes more obvious to me all the time how much I need outdoors and open spaces. Just this short trip really filled me up and made everything feel great again. I need to make a point of getting out away from town more so I can get some photography inspiration going again.