At the age of 41, while living in Bellingham, WA, I decided to “spend too much money” on a mountain bike. It had been about 2 years since I’d owned a bike, and (if I’m being honest) probably about 10 years since I’d done any riding. I was going through a tough time (pandemic + […]
You’ve been sent on an assignment to ascertain the perfect cocktail pairing for a Rice Krispie Treat. You’ve been to too many of these places already but what’s one more? You repeat your now banal-seeming request: “I’ll have the house Rice Krispie Treat and whatever cocktail pairing you usually recommend.” This particular bartender opens with […]
Went and spectated a new-to-me thing that was incredibly fun. Ever hear of cyclocross? It’s a kind of bicycle racing that includes all sorts of variable terrain and obstacles and is just generally pretty intense. I’d never heard of it before a few months ago when a long-time friend (and avid cyclist) pitched a long […]
In 2011, I created the Orin theme for this blog — layering a bunch of then new-to-me CSS3 styles on top of the “naked” Starkers theme. It was a perfect combination for me: Starkers provided the barebones mark-up and the WordPress-flavored PHP … and I got to do “the rest”. Fast-forward a year and I […]
Looking over my Untappd journal, I have two wheatwines: one before I’d developed my palate, and another that was adulterated embellished with white chocolate. In other words: I’ve never had one. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to try to make one. With my sights set on making a “big beer”, I brewed […]
No burying the lede here: we knew that moving cross-country would be hard, but the pandemic threw a wrinkle into the mix that resulted in the worst social isolation we ever experienced and it was simply too much to bear. Once we were free of any obligations keeping us on the West Coast, it just […]
Precisely why we decided to move back to Vermont from Washington is a story best reserved for a separate and more thoughtful blog post 1 but needless to say: I felt compelled to capture a few notes about my cross-country drive while the details were still (relatively) fresh in my mind. Slight callback to the […]
Just commemorating the moment. Dose â„– 1 of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine went into my arm at 10:26am this morning.
It was cherry season in Washington, and our household had been eating the crap out of some Rainier cherries. When it occurred to me that I hadn’t worked with whole cherries in a mead 1 before, there was only one thing to do. Fire up the ol’ mead making machine that is me, get a […]
Seems fitting that while we have a wildfire-smoke-hazy / practically opaque sky here in Seattle, that I should do the write-up for one of my clearest-ever beers — a Munich Helles that I’m calling Horst: