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Orin at 10

by Rob Friesel

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 took the styling a step further and got some responsiveness going.

And then… not much happened on the theme for a long time.

It was doing the job. It looked fine and let me focus on writing my content — which is to say: living my life and then coming back to write about it. I was content with it.

Until…

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Homebrew #103: Indolent Rabbit Rex

by Rob Friesel

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 Lazy Rabbit as a glorified starter for this one and then went “small batch” style to make Indolent Rabbit Rex:

Indolent Rabbit Rex, a wheatwine in a glass
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on coming home to Vermont

by Rob Friesel

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 didn’t make sense to stay.

That’s the short version anyway. I wrote two other versions of this before I hit publish on this one: one was much shorter 1 and didn’t do justice to the experience; the other was much longer but zig-zagged between too many competing stories. 2 This one still feels too long but it was also the longest two years of my life.

the word "grind" spray-painted onto some pavement along with a wavy line
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  1. May as well have been a tweet.[↩]
  2. Some of them are worth telling but it was too much all at once.[↩]

the long drive home

by Rob Friesel

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.

Google Maps of the Bellingham to Essex Junction route, as displayed on my Forester's CarPlay display.
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  1. Slight callback to the Farewell, Vermont post here. That forthcoming post is the more qualified bookend.[↩]

Homebrew #106: First Avenue Crow

by Rob Friesel

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 few pounds of fruit, and make an as-inspired-by version of Psychopomp and call it First Avenue Crow. 2

First Avenue Crow is a cherry mead
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  1. Or a beer, for that matter.[↩]
  2. The crow part is an obvious (??) callback to the Psychopomp can design. The “First Avenue” part comes from the fact that First Avenue in Phinney Ridge was simply overrun with them in the summer of 2020 and we got dive-bombed, followed, or otherwise harassed by those corvids on more than one occasion.[↩]

Homebrew #104: Prosody (Barbe Rouge)

by Rob Friesel

It’s been 24 brew days since the last Prosody Project beer. All of 2019 went by without one — and half of 2020. But when I heard that Yakima Valley Hops had Barbe Rouge for sale, I got nostalgic for a favorite back-home-in-the-802 beer: Burlington Beer’s Barbe Rouge Single Hop IPA. There was no better time to dust off the ol’ recipe and fire things up for Prosody (Barbe Rouge):

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