Kevin's musings

Well, I am currently in lovely Las Cruces, NM. I got in here about 10pm last night.

Thanksgiving dinner was very nice at my sisters house. Lots of family to visit with. Then friday we headed down to tucson to deal with my dad’s estate more. All friday and Saturday we went through things at the house. We made a ton of progress. We finished up the master bedroom, and my parents closet (lots of clothes), All the crystal, all the Silverware, all the stuff in the spare bedroom.

Now we just have the kitchen, and the garage. I guess I get to go back at xmas time and work on finishing it up more. We are hoping to get the house on the market after new years.

Today, it’s time to head back to colorado. Hopefully it’s not going to be too snowy.

I am heading out to the anual family thanksgiving gathering in Phoenix. Since I am not as young as stupid as I used to be, I decided to split up the trip instead of trying to do it all at one go. Toward that end, I am staying the night here at the lovely Econolodge in Gallup, NM.

Three nice things about this place:

- They take pets.
- They have free wireless.
- They are cheap.

And a few not so great things:

- The toilet in this room seems to cycle on and run water every 10min or so.
- This non smoking room seems to have a cigarette that someone dropped behind the tv (I noticed when plugging my laptop in).
- The outside door you need a key to open is broken in the always unlocked position.

Oh well, just need to catch a bit of sleep before heading on tomorrow morning.

Hope everyone is having a good thanksgiving.

Here’s a few pictures from the last few days…

A nice pic of some leaves. They have really piled up in the yard lately.

Kurt and Twyla and Merlin hanging out in the yard:

There was a bit of snow on thursday morning. It didn’t really stick or last, but it was pretty to watch failling:

Here’s the view from the upstairs computer room where I have been hanging out in in the mornings.
It’s nice to be able to look out on the street, especially when it’s snowing so nicely.

I took my truck into the shop friday. There was a recall on it. While they were doing the recall work they found several other nasty problems. Looks like they will be covered by my warentee, but they couldn’t do the work friday, so I had to have a stupid rental car this weekend.

At the car dealership they had this desk with a phone and the sign below over it.
I didn’t see any kind of ethernet jack, so I guess they assume you will bring your own dsl modem to use the DSL.
Oh, and “DSL Line” is like “ATM Machine” or “PIN Number”… anoying.

A while back some folks made an Open Source Beer. J and J and I decided to try our hands at it here. Of course we didn’t have the same ingredients, and here in backward USA the measurements are not in metric, but we did the best we could.
I guess this would be a patch on the orignal recipe. We haven’t yet bottled or tasted it, but hopefully it turned out well.

1) Steep for 20 minutes In 15 gallons of 160 degree F water:

2.0 lbs Munich malted barley
1.0 lbs 55L Crystal malted barley

2) Take out the ‘teabag’ of barley and add Fermentables :

6.0 quarts Pale Malt Extract
1.0 lb Maltodextrine

3) Bring the wort to a rolling boil, and boil until the bubbles
formed are nice and big. This is to ‘crack’ the sugars.

4) Shut off the heat, let the bubbles settle

5) Bring the wort to a rolling boil again, and boil until the
bubbles formed are nice and big.

6) Shut off the heat again, let the bubble settle and SLOWLY add

1.50 oz Tettnang hops
1.25 oz Hallertau hops
7.00 oz Powdered Guarana beans

7) Bring to a medium boil for 30 minutes

Turn off heat and add 2 pellets of Irish Moss, wait 5 minutes

9) Filter mixture, add 3944 Begian Witbier Yeast and ferment for
2 weeks at room temperture.

—> 2 weeks later 2 weeks later and until gone <—

11) Drink beer

Just because I haven’t posted any pictures of the pups recently:

It’s been very lovely weather the last week until today. Today we had a thunderstorm (kurt was not happy) and some rain.

I wouldn’t mind a nice snowstorm though. Would be nice to get one of those fall snowstorms that comes in and then melts and is all gone.

Tuesday this week, some of us got together and make a variant of Open Source Beer.
Stay tuned for the recipe and how the beer ends up tasting.

Almost all the leaves are off the trees now:

Looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend. No great travel plans and only some vuage other plans.
Should be nice.

This sunday I went up to Fort Collins and went for a lovely bike ride with L. It was very nice weather wise until you started going fast on a bike and got the cold wind hitting. We went down south on the Poudre trail. It did sort of end in a dirt road and dump out on a street, but it was nice while it had the path.

There was a very lovely pool where I took some pictures. Unfortunately, it was near the water treatment plant, so it was quite stinky there.

nukestock this year was fun as always. Here’s a recap:

Thursday morning all too bright and early, L dropped by my house and we headed on the road to New Mexico. We wanted to try and leave at something like 6:30, but didn’t end up getting all packed up and out the door until about 7:30. This of course meant that we hit denver traffic at just the wrong time. That cost us an hour or so I would say.
L spent the time working on her coustoume:

We got in around 6:30ish and picked up a nice tray of green chile enchaladas on the way over the nukestock hq. Shortly after we got there, folks started arriving for the beer tasting. We sampled quite a pile of beers. Some of them quite good and a few eh. After that was general partying and visiting. Was nice and relaxing. After all that long day we went and passed out at A’s house just a few down from nukestock, hq.

Friday luckily didn’t start bright and early. We didn’t get up until around 11 or so. We picked up a list of items that were needed (propane refill, some items at grocery stores, etc) and headed out to the dessert. A bunch of us (full suburban load) went out to the damm near the airport. That was our old stomping grounds in college. We used to gather out there and have bondfires and blow up tv’s. Lots of good memories out there.

Once we got back from the damm and errands, it was time for the party to start. L got into her FSM outfit:

There was tons of good food (mostly fish, shrimp, and other such things). Also, tons of good drynke. An excellent time was had by all.
I was relaxing on the couch and thought it must be around 1 or 2am, and looked at my watch and it was 4:30am!

Saturday was the scavenger hunt/road rally. We were at first going to start in on it at noon, but then decided to wait until 1pm, then we pushed that back until 2pm. So, we got a bit of a late start. Most of the locations/clues were easy to deal with, but there was a lot of running around. There was one coordinate that wasn’t right on our list, and that confused us for a bit. Decoding the final set of clues was sorta fun, but we were all tired by then, so we didn’t do too good a job on it.

After all that was over, it was time to put back on coustoumes and party hard again. Things were a bit more restrained saturday night, but there was still tons of good food, drynke and company. We all managed to pass out around 2ish after the time change. I didn’t get too many pictures from Saturday as my camera got full and I kept forgetting to download pics off it.

Sunday was up far too early again. L’s cell phone decided not to realize the new time and woke her an hour earlier than she wanted. Despite all that it wasn’t until around 10:30am that we hit the road back for colorado. The ride back was long. There was a random 30min delay in denver where it seemed like they just stopped the interstate for no reason we could tell. Otherwise the drive was uneventfull.

All in all an excellent time. I’m sure I will be down next year like always.