Tonight I’m going to the Jackalope to see my brother in law Layne play drums with Brett Estep . If you’re not doing anything else, come check it out.

In the meantime, check out the wicked feature I just added; a box in the sidebar that tells you what music I’m listening to on iTunes. Now, even when I’m neglecting the blog in terms of posting items, you can at least see what I’m up to musically. Disclaimer; there is no accounting for taste.

Every day, someone has to make sure the chickens have enough food, grit, water. The big chicken outside has to be let out of her coop in the morning, and shooed back into it before dark. raccoons eat chickens, and hunt at dusk, so we have to have her protected by that time of day.

We’re deep in the swing of getting the garden ready, planting and tilling and pushing earth. I built Arthur a sandbox in the back yard (it needs sand, but otherwise it’s ready to go). We have nine chickens, one a full on pullet and the rest emerging from chickhood into a sort of creepy dinosaur looking transitional phase. We inherited a very nice coop from some friends who were no longer using it, and have fenced in a nice big corner of our yard to be a chicken run. Big Chicken is already living outdoors, and the littles are living in a big watering trough in our laundry room. I’m ready for them to grow up and head outside, but it’ll be a while yet.

My father in law and his wife will be in town for the whole summer, out from the East coast, and we’re getting ready for a great summer of Grandparent time, festivals (Country Fair is less than two months away!), and harvesting. I’m hoping to have a pig roast, something we did last summer, and to brew up a batch of Lambic (which won’t be ready to drink for two years. Awesome).

I did some (not much) volunteering for Oregon’s primary, which took place last week. Our commitments to the food co-op continue to keep us busy, and our country fair meeting and planning is kicking into gear.

In terms of brewing, I’ve done two batches since I last posted and I may at some point share the recipes/techniques used here. For now, I’m going to let it be and go back to work.

It is snowing today in Eugene, Oregon. We live around the corner from the municipal golf course, which on our cinqannual (every five years - I may have made this word up) snow days becomes sled central for all the neighborhood kids for the obvious reason that it is a collection of big, open fields and small hills.

We walked up there with Arthur first thing this morning. He loved the snow, loved the feel of it on his tongue, and LOVED going fast down the hill on a sled that some nice people let us borrow for a few runs. Then he got very cold, and we had a hard walk home with him crying the whole way.

All of our other plans have bee alled off today and we’re sitting inside drinking cocoa and enjoying the view out the window of the across the street neighbors building a snow fort pirate ship (it’s got a freaking window in front - they have architectural plans and everything).

The weather report says the snow will keep going through tomorrow. I’m thrilled to the bone.

In bad news, the Nut Brown seems to have been infected by some bacteria or wild yeast or something and has developed a nasty unpleasant phenolic aftertaste. Hopefully a few weeks aging will sort of soak up the bad taste or at least hide it. I’m not counting my chickens.

The Chrisolstikwanukkah blitz is beginning to melt toward the New Year. The stats?

Nearly 15 gallons of homebrew have been consumed by family and friends since Thanksgiving.
Arthur has learned gobs of new words.
Taylor and I have begun an ongoing game of scrabble that may continue into the next decade and beyond.
Obama pulled ahead briefly in Iowa only to fall behind again in the most recent polls. He’s looking better in New Hampshire.
We read A Child’s Christmas in Wales on (and as we do every) Christmas night.

How was that for an introductory paragraph?

The Chest Check IIPA, which was our variation on the Punishment IIPA I linked to in this post turned out spectacular. Most of it is gone, but I laid down a twelve pack to age for a while in the “beer cellar” (actually the eaves of the house). We’ll check it out in a year and see how it’s come along.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an accurate judgment of what the % alcohol by volume turned out to be because I got a bad original gravity reading. What happened was, I left about a gallon’s worth of headroom at the top of the carboy when I went to shake it for aeration. Then I poured another gallon of clean water in, and without stirring took the gravity reading*. Of course, the reading was much lower than I expected because the water I had just poured in was floating on top of the extremely dense wort bellow. So I don’t know what the OG actually was.

The terminal gravity was in the 1.02 range, and the expected OG was going to be up around 1.095, which leads me to believe that the alcohol content was probably approaching 10% by volume.

According to the Beer Tools calculator, the beer should have around 300 IBUs, which seems more than my tastebuds were perceiving but it was certainly a lot. I think we proved what we set out to prove, which was that one truly can not have too many hops.

Not everyone agreed.

The next recipe to talk about is the Nasty Elf, which I gave in a prior post. It turned out well, even without a secondary fermentation which we elected to forgo in the interest of time. Next year, though, I think I’ll make it close to Halloween and let it sit a while and think about what it’s done before sticking it in bottles. Also, I think I’ll use Irish Moss next time. This batch just had too much sediment for me. Part of that was that I wasn’t as careful as I should have been when racking into the bottling bucket. Nothing was ruined, and the Nasty Elf was a favorite. Not as sweet as I’d expected, which was nice.

Sometime around the New Year we’re planning on brewing again. My intention is to design a recipe for a nut brown ale, and to use maple syrup for the priming sugar in hopes of making a maple flavored nut brown ale. I’m not sure whether I’ll add a small amount of Dextrose as well as well as the maple, I have to do some research as to how fermentable the sugars in maple syrup are.

As for the election, like I said in the introduction to this post it looks less and less like Mrs. Clinton is a sure thing for the Democratic nomination (which makes me happy as cake). I like John Edwards a lot. I like what he says about Poverty, and I like that he’s been willing to set definite goals and make clear promises about his priorities more than the other Democrats. He wants to withdraw troops from Iraq within 18 months. Neither of the other Democratic front runners has been as forthright about a timetable. He wants to raise fuel economy to 40 MPG by 2016. These specific numbers mean something. They are election year promises, which means that they should be taken with a grain of salt, but they are at least clear promises which is more than the other contenders are giving us.

The truth is that I like John Edwards, though, not so much for his particular issues or political identity. I like him because he looks like JFK and talks like FDR. To a Democrat with a sense of historical gravitas, there can be no more pious combination of traits. So the secret is out. I vote with my heuristic gut most of the time. I always think carefully and weigh the pros and cons, but in the end I come back to my gut and my gut says Edwards is my guy.

Anyway, by the time the primary train rolls out here the Democrats will have picked their winner anyway. My primary vote doesn’t amount to a hill of Iowa corn or New Hampshire maple syrup.

I think Oregon should hold our Primary for the 2012 election in April of 2010. That way we might have some impact.

That’s all (except for a footnote). Until the next time I find a few moments, I hope y’all internet people find yourselves warm and toasty. Happy New Year and all that cheer.

*what this means is that I sucked some of the wort out of the carboy with my trusty turkey baster and used an instrument called a hydrometer to measure the density of the liquid, which shows how much sugar is in suspension and therefore how much potential alcohol you might end up with.

Am I a total sellout?

Arthur is doing wonderfully well. We just went to see the Doctor, and he officially weighs more than 20 pounds. He’s a happy healthy boy. He loves Strawberries - and we just planed a whole patch so that he can have fresh ones every summer. It won’t be long now before he crawls. He’s up on his hands and knees, rocking, taking a few steps at a time. We’ve got our living space 90% prepared for a crawling baby. I’m certain that there are some things we’ve forgotten, and when the boy starts getting into them we’ll know what they are.

I’ve heard that some of the kid phones (specifically the Disney models, I think) have some parental surveillance features that Michel Foucault would be proud of. Parents can go online to see no only who their kids have been calling, but where the calls were made from. This could be useful in the event of a kidnapping or other such crisis event, but I imagine that parents are using them for much more trivial spying. Yuck.