Over Seven Days Straight

I think that it has become a sort of a routine or habit to do some form of a cleanse or hiatus each year between my birthday on the 20th of February and the opening day of baseball the first week of April. It started on my 30th birthday when I 'quit smoking' and in order to do so had to as well 'quit drinking.'

For some reason I decided to become a vegetarian then as well. People ask me why it was that it happened and I don't really have much of a response. Part of me thinks it was just to keep from gaining a toni f weight with the stop to smoking. But part of it had to do with a desire to become a locavoire. I think actually the truth of it was that I had been eating less and less meat and more and more vegetables willfully on my own. Stoping eating meat was just kind of the next step.

Last year I was pretty bad with the smoking. I kind of blame it on Nathan and Jay and Eric and all the fun that we were having - but that is just bullshit. We had a tendency to bender. I have no regrets about that but being possession of the knowledge of the health issues my father and grandfather had with smoking, its just ignorant of me to continue on the way that I have been.

So the hiatus. But I am pushing it a little bit farther this year. I decided to cut out gluten and dairy as well as alcohol and nicotine. Combining this with a conscious effort to bike more and rigorously has left me feeling pretty fantastic already. I had a cold right after my birthday so that helped with the initial separation anxiety from the cigs and the whiskey. But now I am two days dairy and gluten free and I feel pretty fantastic.

I tried to do it late last summer and I was kind of amazed with how fantastic I felt. Its a pain to pay that much attention to the things that you eat (see- why I am not a vegan) and when I broke I stayed broke. I need to learn moderation, that its ok to fall from time to time, and that everything does not have to be black or white - all or nothing.

So here we are, reaching the completion of the first week smoke free and on the wagon and I can now begin to feel the dark bubbling, the murmuring of discontent in the underbelly of my soul. This is where the hunger starts to come in and this is where the dark voices whisper. I will reach the crux soon, where the only thing that I believe that will keep me functioning as a human will the be consumption, in post haste, of an entire pack of Camel Lights, 750ml of Jameson - perhaps a bit Coca-Cola to chase.

Then the questions come. The darkness will start to ask of me if this is really what I want in life. At some point I will face the false truths of "Why not just burn yourself out bright with nothing to show?" "Is this really the life that you want to live?" I will push past them, I hope.

Then, in a bit of humor, right before the hiatus ends I will come to that clarity and that realization that perhaps I will just keep on sober, perhaps I will not drink once I have allowed myself to again. I will probably make it a few days past that deadline and then get blackout drunk.

If the great experiment worked, hopefully without smoking.

I guess we will see who wins between the Phillies and the Pirates - but I think we already know that answer.

Songs

I posted a write-up of my favorite 2011 songs that were not on a record that made it into my list - over on the music blog I kind of not so much run with Jules. Check it out.

Residual - 2011

Well...

I am playing with the Blogger iPhone app. To be honest I find it a little silly that I am just now getting around to do this. But I guess that it's better late than never. I am hoping to use this as a means to keep and up to date blog about Carrie and I renovating the new house that we are buying. I guess that we will see.

Apfelwein

Bush Williams sent me a recipe for a German Apfelwein probably six or seven months ago when I first started to try my hand at home brewing. About three months after that I went out and bought the meager supplies necessary to hand make something that would get me drunk - in this case a 6% dry hard cider. For what seemed like almost half a year (especially to Carrie) the five gallons of apple juice and the three pounds of sugar sat on our windowsill until yesterday when I finally broke down and made the stuff.

I ran into trouble almost from the get-go as the recipe called for three one pound bags of sugar, which I couldn't find. Instead I got a five pound bag. Carrie came up with the solution of splitting the bag into five glasses evenly and then only using three. As you can see above I underestimated the volume of a pound of sugar - but it all worked out, at least so far.

The next step involved making a solution of the apple juice and the sugar. Here, again, I messed up. The recipe had called for one gallon jugs of juice and I had only found half gallon jugs. I improvised by forming a partial solution, letting it settle a bit, then adding more apple juice to the jug that had the sugar in it, shake, repeat, until there was almost no visible sugar left in the container. It was a little bit more time consuming, I guess, but it worked fine as a problem fix, I think.

Once I got the solution in the carboy that I had borrowed from Nathan Scott I then added the million other jugs of apple juice. This proved to be a little bit on the tedious side because the funnel that I had tended to glug a little bit more that it should. On the other hand, if Carrie's mother had not given me the funnel I would have been doing the old make-the-paper-into-a-cone trick. Or just hit up gas stations for those paper funnels that they give out for your to put oil in your car. Do they still do that? I remember that from around ten years ago when I had a Bronco that got irish-drunk on 10W40.

The rest was just a little bit tedious as I had to sit on the floor and pour the remaining gallons and gallons of apple juice into the carboy. While I was sitting there, I started to think. I was literally making and alcoholic beverage out of apple juice, sugar, and montrachet yeast. It made me think back to late high school and early college when actually getting something to drink was super complicated. If this turns out to be even the slightest bit potable, it could solve all those problems. Dorm-room hard cider. This recipe requires no boil, and besides the yeast, all the ingredients can be bought at your local grocer.

The stuff takes about six weeks to ferment, so a month and a half, lets say. If a group of very forward thinking students got together, they could get a cycle of carboys going and never be out of booze. If they were even more entrepreneurs they could then sell this homemade brew to cover costs and pay for whatever students pay for when they are not paying for booze. Or whatever.

I kept a quarter gallon of apple juice around to use to rinse the yeast out of the funnel, which means, of course, it's time to add the yeast and let the party begin.

Now once I seal this thing up, those yeast are going to start to consume all that sugar that I put in there, creating alcohol. This is going to take about six weeks and does not require secondary fermentation or 'racking.' Its going to be gluten free as well. I am pretty excited about it. I just hope that it tastes good.

So I took the rest of the apple juice and I rinsed all the yeast down into the mix and topped her off.

I put in the stopper that Nathan loaned me with the carboy and fill one of my own airlocks with some of this super sweet 100 proof smirnoff that Angie Stiers bought for me back in texas a long, long while ago. The purpose of the airlock is to allow air to escape the carboy without letting any sort of bacteria creep into it. Using vodka is sterile and as they said in the recipe - "if you have any suckback, you just increased your cider's ABV."

There is not supposed to be any sort of bubble over due to the style of fermentation happening, but I can't help but prepare for a mess. Some of the beers that I have made in the past have gotten a little messy. So I give my future Apfelwein a scarf and push it over into the corner of the kitchen next to the cat's food bowls because, lets be honest, the look on their beady little cat beaks as they try and figure out what all that bubbling in is actually one of the greatest parts of home brewing. At least to me. Guess we will see in 6 weeks.

The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

Yesterday I brought a baguette to work for a snack. I wish that I could say that it was from La Gourmandine in mid-Lawrenceville, but it was not. In fact it was actually just from Trader Joe's. Irrelevant.

So I was back in the kitchen at work cutting up my not-as-delicious-as-la-gourmandine's baguette preparing to devour it with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and crushed pepper when one of our chefs, Nate, starts watching me.

"You should always cut bread at a bias.." he said.

"What do you mean? Like at an angle?"

"Whats the hardest part of the bread to bite through?" he said.

It literally changed my life. It was true, I was victim to trying to tear through the crust of countless day old baguettes with violence. By cutting at an angle you always have an easy in to tastiness. I think that he thought I was making fun of him with how excited I was over such a small but really awesome concept. I am a dork for these things, I can't help it.

Best of 2011

Hello Friends,

I just posted a list of my favorite records of 2011 over on the music blog I share with Julien Goran...though he is terribly missed as of late. Check it out.

Carrying a Tune: My Favorite Records of 2011

The Empire Dawning

If you know anything about me, you know that I am, as a creator and general human being, very Cartesian in my actions and functioning's. One of my most terrible handicaps is that I usually act in an 'when b = c, d will happen' mindset. Everything about me and my life is usually dependent upon a catalyst. Whenever this mysterious condition is met, my life will be allowed to progress.

I have spent the last weeks, well months really - if we trace back to its inception, attempting to build this social media - online presence thing up from the ground. I had this handful of ideas, and I could see a way that they could be presented, but before I could actually get to work on them, I had to buy the domain names, and then once the names were acquired, I had to get them published to place holders.

Now, with the help of Bush - with a shit ton of help from Bush - I have them up and ready to receive the wealth of my words, opinions, thoughts and perspectives. So there is nothing to hold me back, no conditional modifier to be met.

And here we go.

Ryan

Nanowrimo Pt 1

The first bout with Nanowrimo went really, really well. I dont want to start feeling too confident because I know that before this is all said and done I will probably just shoot myself in the foot and fuck the whole monster up. Or at least that is what I am expecting to happen.

The daily goal that you have to bleed to reach is 1.6k words. I managed, starting at midnight last night to hit the 3.77k mark which remarkably puts me almost two days ahead of schedule. If I can keep just a little bit ahead of where I am supposed to be then perhaps I can actually make up for the moments of weakness that are sure to come and compensate for the travel time that I will have to make at the end of the month.

It is already kind of a blast, even after just the few hours that I was working on it last night. I had a lot of fun doing this last year and was sorry that I did not hit the goal but I planned badly. This time, I feel like I planned better but getting sick really did not help out too much. There is this crazy electricity that goes along with the writing. I always keep a #nanowrimo search window over in my Seesmic Desktop for Twitter and its almost a constant stream of people, all over the place, who are going crazy and doing this thing. I know that it is producing a ton of terrible novels and I am sure that the percentage of them that ever even see the light of day is negligable, but there is something about it that really makes me happy.

46.3k Words to go.

Speaking of...