The Sweet Smell of Success (and sawdust)

Two climbing walls erected, and with chalk and rubber already caking their faces, our living room is officially a fort. No, really. It says so, there on the wall. "The Fort. No Girls." How classy is that?

With the bulk of our wall space completed, the focus of the project has shifted to the finer aspects of creating our playground, namely holds and surfacing. Holds are currently consuming all of my time and, if I let them, will do the same with my money. Surfacing the wall is equally expensive, though due to the byzantine rituals and strange, dark alchemy involved it may prove far more time consuming. Such are the trying (and karate filled) circumstances in which we often find ourselves; life will find a way.

Someday, when I get my life together, I'll add photos to this blog and make it a visual exercise in wankery. Until then it will remain a textual exercise in wankery.

Look who scraped together some building supplies

Hey, Mia for a while, DEAL!

The two largest climbing surfaces on the climbing wall are now in tact. Both the 40 and the vert wall are up. the next steps are to round the corners off to the wall giving us some slap problems and some climbing surface in the realm of 10 to 15 degrees. I Josh am hoping to complete this instead of celebrating some magical bullshit on a randomly selected day to get retards to buy each other shit!

Remember that time I called christmas folks retards, I didn't mean it! Christmas believers and doers are way more fucking useless than retards.

Who is going to make the brontosaurus sound???

Anywho. once this is done the work on the dihedral will begin. this will be very interesting and will challenge Collins and My ability to ghetto rig and make shit up on the fly a little more than the other sections. Have faith though, we take this challenge seriously.

we are also starting to think about the spare bedroom, lighting, buying holds and pads. Anyone wanna come get strong???

J

TNUTS an we love caps

T-nuts have arrived so the wall building can continue. The over hang is about 2/3 of the way complete. if school and work finally screw off some progress may be made on the rest of it. alas some more capital expenditures are due which will be handled by Senior Ledfoot Satan McGee as he was just paid, and I got the last round.

Pictures should be up soon. There are a number of them on Collins Camera. as soon as they get downloaded they should get up loaded and side loaded into your eye holes. That is about enough out of me plus it gets you up to speed.

enjoy

Beer and wall update

BEER!

The nut brown that has been fermenting for 2 weeks was bottled on Thursday night. The consistency was fairly light unfortunately. The flavor was good with no contamination. It id currently carbonating and will be drinkable in two weeks. The Amber we are fermenting will be ready to bottle later this week. Then there will be a complete blank slate. We are slated to brew three batches of beer for the upcoming tahog trip! the last weekend in November we will brew a porter, a nut brown, and an amber. the hope is to be able to keg these. Bottling is beginning to get a little cumbersome with 2 batches brewing at any given time. 5 gallon kegs unfortunately cost $100. Oh well capital budgeting. I bet the net present value of all future beer (cash) flows is win!!

Wall!

The structure for the overhanging wall is all in place. half of the paneling is up as well. The hold up is T-nuts. we have screw in t-nuts ordered for the sections of wall already up. For the rest I have an order of 1000 pound in t-nuts. we'll need to purchase more but will do that when the sections of wall are ready to go up. Things are progressing but never fast enough. As an addendum to the previously mentioned time line the ultimate deadline on the project is January 20th. This day will be spent in celebration all day by climbing and all night drinking to no more bush in office.

hanging issues still for the wall mainly consist of pads. I am not sure where or how we are going to get padding to fall on when climbing. we have a number of crash pads but I am sure that we are going to need more. we'll start scheming on that when I see what Will was able to dig up and what we have.

Wall Updates

The passing of an era has occured. due to some family ailments and ensuing shifting financial burdens, Will (coolest part-time roommate ever) will no longer be able to keep his climbing wall in the dungeon. Thus rent has been raised and Collin and I are faced with replacing the wall. being ones to not fear change but to grab it by the oversized round steering wheel, shifting it into reverse, slamming the gas, dropping the clutch, and pulling donuts in reverse while the other is wielding a semi-automatic shooting at whatever is passing by the pink cadillac in revere. . . we venture on!

Supplies have been gathered and construction has begun. To date we have been working on replacing the 40 degree overhang that Will removed. once this is fully in place, the expansion will begin. Included in the upgrades are a a verticle wall for less insane climbing, a dyhedral for stemming and a proposed top out area. A spare bedroom will be added, a good amount of storage space, and a bike rack are all in the works.

The largest and surprising cost is going to be t-nuts. we are going to spend close to a grand in t-nuts. Timeline: the overhang should be completed within the month and the rest of the walls should be up before the end of the year. hoping to have a party before the end of the year in celebration of climbing and beer!!!

The Planation, As of Now

On Wednesday, I didn’t go to work, a good idea made better by gardening all day. In the course of a couple hours, Josh and I made four wheel barrows full of dirt, potted 84 plants, put a lot more garlic in the ground, and laid out a plan for the garden for the next six months. I also built one of these. Last night it started raining, though it remained remarkably warm. Both these things point toward rapid sprouting.

The plantation is exceptionally leafy right now. A couple types of lettuce, mustard greens, collard green, kale, bok choy, chard, and more cover crop than you can shake a stick at, all sucking carbon out of the air. We’ve also, as I mentioned, got a good sized crop of garlic on the way (we repurposed a pants hanger to dry garlic on, but that’s counting your eggs before they hatch) and the planting yesterday will (hopefully) yield us basil, oregano, sage, thyme, parsley, marjoram, and peas.

The only expansion left on the near horizon is the potato stacks and the hops poles. Once we get those up and running (growing?), all we’ll have to do is water and eat. The fun part. The boring part. As we tend to our fields, the agitation for a new project will surely manifest itself.

Savor The Experience

Drinking your own beer, beer that you made using your hands, some grain, and SCIENCE, is a near sublime feeling.

The beer making process takes time and precision. You have to follow the recipe, wait four to six eternities (weeks), and keep everything sterile. Failure in any of those categories is beyond normal failure: it's a waste of beer. If you think having gallons of homemade booze on hand would drive you to drink, than you are not close to prepared for pouring out your own tainted beer. In such an instance, you assume the role of both the sixteen year-old and the police officer; you feel scorned and guilty, mad at that fucker who took away your fun juice you so cleverly stole from your parents. You also know it's the best thing for that kid, which is enough to make you do it but not enough to make you feel good about it. This conflicting perspective, of being both actor and observer, will unleash storm of emotions that gnaws at you and your inner drinker will quickly present a plan to compensate for the gallons of beer lost with gallons of beer bought. It's not good enough. It can't be. Darkness descends and you find yourself cursing the process of fermentation to frightened passersby. If you're lucky, no one will call the (real) cops.

However, to the victor, the spoils. You can't make ok beer your first time around, you just can't. You're not calibrated to filter out the strongest flavor in homemade beer: achievement. No one has the wherewithal to look past how cool it is that you just made delicious, delicious beer. You did. You made it. As if by magic. When you put the bottle to your lips, it stimulates parts of your brain which, I'm told, are otherwise reserved for fatherhood and winning the Nobel Prize. Immense, overwhelming pride and bouts of rapturous joy. It tastes like drinking your diploma or how Olympic Medals would taste if they were made of chocolate. Sure, as time goes on the feeling fades, which SUCKS, but that first time there is only the crushing angony of defeat or the best goddamned beer you've ever had. Your kitchen will be wrecked, you will pay dearly in utilities, and if you're anything like me you'll probably hurt yourself, but it is so worth it.

I've talked to numerous brewers and everyone I've talked to has agreed with this assesment (generally without the hyperbole). It occurs to me that there may be people out there who don't like beer as much as I do, but chances are they don't brew. While it's sad that we can never really be friends, the feeling of creation extends far past any one hobby. Everyone should be able to relate in that regard. You make something, it's exactly what you wanted it to be, you freak out and get all giddy. We invite people over to brew with us on sundays and very few have taken us up on it. It strikes me as odd that people wouldn't want to share in that glee, but most must not recognize it as that.