Tag: yardwork

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Beer Food

Valentine’s and Vendetta

Last Sunday was Hallmark and chocolate maker’s day (aka Valentine’s Day). During the afternoon while Kelly attended a work event, I spent the day working in the yard and cleaning the house. Later that evening Kelly and I went to dinner at Bernie’s Southern Bistro on Alberta (mmm, meatloaf).

Last night I met up with some friends at Vendetta for a couple of pints. Had a great time catching up with JB, T, and MB. Later Kelly met up and we (along with MB) went to 5th Quadrant for dinner (mmm, burger).

Tonight has been a fairly relaxed night at home. And to my surprise, my keg ‘o Guinness wasn’t as empty as I thought it was; I’d expected to pull one or two pints and have so far pulled five. Hooray(!?), except I’ve ordered a new one to pick up tomorrow so I’m hoping the keg blows soon. Otherwise I’ll be in a bit of a quandary tomorrow. Or I’ll just have to keep drinking. I guess there are worse problems to have.

Oh, and the weather has been positively Spring-like the past week. It was 60 and sunny today. It’s mid-February! WTF? I’ve got flowers blooming and Tulips coming up. It seems way too early for this. On one hand, it’s really nice to have some nice, sunny, warm weather, but it’ll mean a very flowerless Spring in my yard.

Categories
Beer Food Science Work

The past month (a slacker’s recap)

I have once again managed to ignore my blog, this time for a whole month. Oops. I was going to post-date a bunch of individual posts, but I’m too lazy to do that, so in true slacker form here’s a recap of the events from the past month.

July 17, 2009 – Portland International Brewfest

Like the past 3 years, several coworkers and I kicked out of the office around 3:30 PM to walk over to the Portland International Brewfest to sample some of the finest beers from around the world. It was very hot that day, so we tried to stick to the shade whilst sipping our beers. I had a couple delicious Belgian ales, German lagers, and an English ale called Combined Harvest which was light and tasted really good for the hot day that it was.

July 24-25, 2009 – Seaside, Warrenton, Fort Stevens

Kelly and I joined our good friends A & R and their two kids for a night in Seaside. They have a timeshare deal, and we got to stay in the new-ish Worldmark resort hotel right at the end of Broadway. I hadn’t been to Seaside in about 10 years, not since the hotel had been built, and it was a very nice place to stay. We went to dinner at the Goose Hollow in Seaside (which is also new since I’d last been to Seaside), and had a delicious reuben sandwich. Later, we all went swimming and hot tubbing at the hotel, and spent the night out on the balcony of our room, sipping drinks and chatting. Spent saturday doing the things you do in Seaside, like eating elephant ears, playing some skee ball and other video games at the arcade, walking down the beach, and driving bumper cars.

We left Seaside and drove to Warrenton to visit my Mom who was out at the coast the same weekend. Kelly, Mom and I spent a few hours wandering around historic Fort Stevens. I hadn’t been there in well over 10 years, and had a really fun time at the museum, exploring the forts and batteries. Loads of info here, if you’re curious.  Had dinner at a local restaurant called Bouy 9 (delicious fish & chips, btw) before driving home and back to the heat. The short vacation was a welcome break from both work and the heat.

You can see all my photos here.

July 29, 2009 – Holy fuck it’s hot!

Heatwave strikes Portland, and holy crap is it hot! I don’t like it one bit. It doesn’t get this hot in Portland very often, but the last couple weeks of July were pretty much unbearable. Fortunately my friend Snooks lent me a window-mounted AC unit, which allowed for the upstairs to be tolerable for sleeping. Glad that shit’s over. At least, I hope we don’t get much more of that nonsense.

Today

Spent my day doing yard work, washing the car, running over to Belmont Station for an assortment of English, Belgian and German beers, and finally blogging. Having a nice relaxing day around the house. As I water the lawn and grill chicken burgers, Kelly is preparing a delicious potato salad that contains loads of onions and peppers. Going to eat well tonight. Hooray!

Misc bits

Got to witness the International Space Station zip across the sky on July 24th, pretty cool, and amazing how fast that sucker moves.

My friend and coworker Icontra found this jem, (and yes, the voice work is none other than Patrick Warburton). All I can think about are delicious hamburgers now.

Categories
Beer General Music Work

May’s Mega Recap

Since I realize I’ve so blatantly disregarded the ‘ol blog pretty much all month, here’s a mega-recap of the month of May.

Most of the month has been spent working some very late nights. This is largely why I haven’t written in so long. Spent several nights designing and coding some prototypes until nearly 2 AM, trying to meet deadlines. It’s been a crazy busy work month.

I finally retired Guinness from my kegerator (which I’d been pouring since October). Got a half keg of Trumer Pils going at the moment. Decent beer for the hot weather that Portland has had for the past couple weeks.

Kelly had her birthday last weekend (happy birthday Kelly!!!) and we had a super small BBQ at our house to celebrate. Really low-key, but a lot of fun. I spent the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend working in the yard for 5 hours, the house for 2, and had the BBQ that afternoon. Woke up Sunday with what I thought was merely a mild hangover. Only it got worse throughout the day. Spent the rest of the weekend with a nasty cold/flu (which I dubbed PigManFlu). My Memorial Day was spent watching TV on the couch with a box of tissues. Hrmph!

Last night Kelly and I went to see this 80’s tribute band show at the Wonder Ballroom. Three bands; Black Celebration (Depeche Mode), The Love Vigilantes (New Order), and This Charming Band (The Smiths). It turned out better than I thought it would. All three bands were competent musicians, and did a fair job at emulating the character of the originals. The clear winner for me were The Love Vigilantes, who were, honestly, better than the real New Order live (who I’d seen only once but are historically not a good live band). Fun night.

Today was yardworkapolooza. I mowed, pruned, raked, trimmed, and generally cleaned up the place. Later, my parents and brother T (and his family) came over for another dinner to celebrate Kelly’s birthday (since they weren’t able to join us last weekend). While they were over (and with the aid of my dad’s truck and chainsaw) I finally pulled the stump of the tree T helped me trim down a few months back. The stump came out easily enough since the tree was so rotted, but it meant a lot more cutting, chopping, and stacking. The upside, however, is that I have loads of wood for the outdoor fireplace.

After the tree carnage (and finally ending a total of 8 hours of me working in the 80+ degree weather), we all ate the delicious dinner my mom had lovingly prepared for Kelly’s birthday. After everybody left the house I took a nice, long shower and planted myself in a chair on the front porch with beer to write this post. Hurrah!

And there you have it. I suspect I’m going to be a little sore tomorrow. đŸ™‚

Categories
Beer Technology Work

Guinness. Yes, again.

Well, I went and did it. I got yet another keg of Guinness. I know I’ve said it before, but I swear this is the last one. I swear! Honest!

Looking through my blog, it appears I’ve been pouring Guinness from my kegerator since October. I think it’s been 6 kegs (roughly one per month), with several little gatherings and nights with friends to help me polish each of ’em off. Worth every penny.

I debated getting Trumer Pils or Amstel Light, but the weather just isn’t quite warm enough yet to warrant such summery beers. Though I suspect that by the time this keg of Guinness runs dry, it’ll be about that time.

Ă˜ther news: Work is keeping me busy

Ă˜ther øther news: Yardwork is coming along, the place is starting to look somewhat decent again. Still a lot to do, but it’s getting there. I’ve also continued my picture scanning extravaganza with my new scanner. Being able to scan negatives rocks, and makes the process so much faster. That’s about it for now.

Categories
Beer General Work

March roundup

Again, I’ve been slacking on blogging duties. Work has been keeping me very busy, so much so that I’ve lacked the energy to blog. Since my last post, Kelly and I hosted a little St. Paddy’s Day gathering. Had a great time (thanks to everyone who made it out), and my peeps did some serious damage to the Guinness keg. So much so that it went dry about 4 days afterwards. That meant the keg was dead in about 10 days. A new record!

Since then, no new keg, just been slammed with work. The only other ‘news’ is that I picked up a new flatbed scanner (an Epson Perfection V500) so I could make some real progress scanning in all my old pre-‘digital age’ photos, and a new video card (a BFG nVidia 9800 GTX+ OC) so my games would run better (and boy do they! Call of Duty 4 looks like a brand new game).

I’ve also continued my yard work, clearing up more debris and throwing down a bunch of grass seed to help replace my balding lawn… now I’m just waiting for it to start growing in.

That about covers March. Next up, today’s hike to some very pretty (and off the beaten path) waterfalls.