Spiced Honey Wine: Seven Months

If you can’t tell from the title, today is the seven month anniversary of the racking of a spiced honey wine I made when I was on a spicing kick in my home-brewing; I had a bunch of honey around and some baker’s yeast, so I figured why not?

One reason why not is that, so far, every mead I’ve made–four one-gallon batches–has maintained a very noticeable hot alcohol/chlorine smell that lingers into the flavor.  I’m wondering if I contaminated the water or if I just need to wait them all out, so back in the closet they’ve gone.  This is the first time I have tasted this batch.

This honey wine is fermenting in a Mr. Beer keg, and you can see where all the yeast and sediment has settled out in the bottom of the barrel.  When I lifted it up to the counter there was some agitation, but this is slowly clarifying.  The smell worries me a little: that familiar chlorine heat, a bit of a yeasty bread smell as well, but there is a definite honey sweetness, especially as the wine approaches your mouth.  It is smooth feeling and tasting, and not overly viscous, coating my mouth and throat lightly.  There is some lingering heat on the back end, so back in the closet for a few more months.  I’m excited about this one, but it’s back to the waiting game.

Mom’s Day Out

We usually golf on Mother’s Day, for several reasons:

• It’s something everyone in our family can do and enjoys
• It’s outside
• It means we have to be close together and talk
• It means we have to be together for several hours
• All of this makes Mom happy

And we all know that last bullet is the most important one.  But my knee has been a little gamey since I banged it up working last week, so we headed into Boston and were able to get tickets for the Red Sox game this afternoon.  And we ended up with really good seats- they weren’t as expensive as we expected, and hey, Mother’s Day.  How good were they?  The guys sitting to the right of us were some kind of Red Sox employees or game scouts, and the guy sitting to our immediate left, on the other side of the mid-row section divider, was Peter Gammons.  He looked over at me and my family a couple times as if to say something, and snared my glance a few times, and I had no idea what to say, except maybe, “do you need me to tell those guys something?”

Up and Atom

Shirley woke up a couple hours early, and though I tried, I wasn’t able to ignore her and fall back asleep.

We have a morning routine, which she wanted to follow at 8am, which I was somewhat okay with, but when we got to the park to go for a walk, she was perplexed by the different groups of people and dogs than we normally see.  None of the ladies wanted to pet her, the dogs barked and some were aggressive, not things Shirley responds well to.  We took the widest route possible, ringing the land, and when we got home, she hid under my bed and pouted, then passed out.

Words are Funny

I did a lot of graphic design in my teen years, it’s what I intended to study in school, and one of the most interesting things I learned is that after staring at a word or phrase for a long time, it begins to lose its meaning, the sounds become suspect, the shapes of the letters appear alien; who conceived these forms and their oral translations- I’m just trying to make them look pretty on the screen.*  Let’s stare at a word:

Calendar

Staring.  Staring.  Staring.**  What is this, KAL-en-dar, a Marvel super villain?  A lost city from antiquity?  An illegal roadside Mexican liquor that ruins your insides and then everything else?

 

*The transition from graphic design to English was smooth.

**When you’re done, can someone tell me how to make linked footnotes?

Enter No Dragons?

My friend Stony was hanging out over the weekend, and noticed my book sale haul on my desk.  Stony is my one friend who reads a lot.  “Let me see those dragon books,” he said, and I handed him one.  He looked at the cover for a moment.  “Yup, I read these.”  He handed the book back to me and I replaced it.

“They were only fifty cents each; are they worth my time?”

“Not if your time is worth more than fifty cents.”

Well, I’m glad I was able to help out the library a little, and I’ll drop these into the next book sale donations bag.

To The Core

This is the first canister of a workout supplement I ever bought, some time last fall.  I finished it the other day, adding the last two scoops to a watered-down Gatorade before taking Shirley for a walk.  I didn’t work out hardcore because I was trying to focus on finishing my masters as much as possible.  And in case you’re curious, no, that didn’t work.  I wrote some decent stuff, some great stuff, too, and I graduated, so I can’t say I made a poor decision, but since I graduated, there’s been a steady increase in gym time versus creative writing time.  I know writers are supposed to be alcoholics, but do you think it’s okay if I work for six-pack abs instead of a six-pack of beer?

Speaking of beer, my neighbor and her boyfriend gave me a bottle of Goose Island’s Matilda Belgian-Style Ale for helping them move some stuff, nothing really, took me a couple of minutes from the time they asked.  I said it was too generous, unnecessary, but they insisted, and truth be told, my eyes lit up the second I saw the beer in their hands.  How did they know I’ve stared longingly at your minimalist label, your italicized cursive font?  And now I have to debate between drinking it or keeping it stored for up to five years.  But it’s sitting right here, staring at me, beginning to sweat- what’s that, you’re not even a month old?  Oh my, you are a fresh beer…

Blog Bag: The Camera Failure

So I reached into the Blog Bag before I went to PAX and pulled out a disposable camera.  It had twenty-something pictures left, and I took them all on the floor over the weekend.  That week I brought the photos to a pharmacy that still processes disposable cameras and when I returned several hours later: most of the roll didn’t come out.  They said it was probably just old, but I think there were greater forces at work.  The first couple shots were from my weekend in Amsterdam seven years ago, with a bunch of Asian kids I didn’t know very well.  The very last photo came out as well: my PAX badge, still strung around my neck, in the parking lot at the hotel for Easter brunch.  While I am sad I lost all the new photos I took, I am glad I got to see the old photos.