Well we are back home and getting the house put back together. Check out Jacki’s post here for more on that. I still have some vacation blogging to do and I’m going to try to knock out another couple posts about it today. First up is the vacation beer.

I’m going to start by saying that I had a lot of good beer. Everything I had was good. The bad part was that I only had one beer that I thought was awesome. That would be New Glarus’s Wisconsin Belgian Red. This stuff was phenomenal! We actually bought a case of it to bring home. The Raspberry Tart in this picture as good also, just not on the level with the Cherry.

Here is a shot of my beer haul for this day…

All the stuff I’ve had from Lakefront Brewery has been good. I still have some left to drink, but nothing great so far. I still haven’t gotten into the Big Sky beer. I can only drink so much. I’ll let you know when I do. I’ve wanted to try some for a while so I’m glad I found this.
More under the fold…

Read the rest of this entry »

So my grandmother died. There has been the normal family stuff and going through old pictures and stuff. I’m back in Indiana for a few days bumming around and trying to help Mom and the uncles out. Here is a very old recording of my Great Grandma Richards. I’ve cleaned it up as best I can.

The original. Or download it if you think you can clean it up better :)

Here is a picture of Grandpa Cliff, Mom (Diana), Uncle Bill, Uncle Dick and Grandma Dean. I scanned this in from slide and forgot to look at the date.

That is it from here for now.

So pictures were really random on this trip. Just didn’t take a whole lot for some reason. This is my favorite picture of the trip. It’s Jacki and some building that she was going to take a picture of with her nifty old box camera. This is while we were in Muncie and out antiquing. Some little town east of Muncie.

If you actually want to read more check it under the fold….
Read the rest of this entry »

This is going to be a hell of a long post, so I’ll give a recap of the trip and then a fold. If you want to see the tons of pictures and a more detailed description, you can look under the fold for it. Also if you want to see every picture I took check here.

So I had the day off work and we decided to go get some breakfast and run around taking pictures for a while. We have been wanting to go to Cleveland and check out The West Side Market, but hadn’t had a chance when the thing was open. So it seemed like a good day to give it a shot. Jacki also remembered that there was a submarine that had been made into a museum and we thought that would be a fun thing to check out. It turned out that the sub is the USS COD. Who the hell thought that was a good name? So that was the plan. As much of a plan as we ever have for these kind of things anyway.

We grabbed breakfast and headed out. Jacki was reading the DeLorme Atlas and found that NASA had a research facility right on the way. It is supposed to have a really cool visitors center. It’s Glenn Research Center and if you’re going to go there make sure to read their SECURITY INFORMATION. And remember the ridiculous security is for YOUR PROTECTION. So we didn’t go to NASA because we didn’t feel like having our car torn apart in the search. More on that later.

Next, it was off to The West Side Market. This was pretty cool. I think Jacki had more fun here than I did. kinda weird really. I was having an off food day for whatever reason. Lots and lots of meat stands and I didn’t buy one thing.

From there it was off to find the sub. This didn’t go so well. Got a bit lost and found the Brown’s Stadium, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and The Steamship William G. Mather Museum. The only one we actually went to was the ship. We got some good pictures of the others tho.

After the ship we did find the sub, but didn’t go on it as we were out of time and needed to head home to take care of the dogs. So a good trip and more complete info and pictures under the fold….

Read the rest of this entry »

I picked the first of my hops for the year today. This was enough to fill up about half of a gallon bag with. They are looking pretty good despite the Japanese beetle invasion. I am expecting to harvest a lot more still this year.

I’ve got stuff to make 10 gallon of Rye Pale Ale. I’m thinking I’ll make that with at least some of the homegrown hops. I also need to get ingredients for my yearly Blackberry wheat. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Jacki finally has a shop open again! Her Etsy shop is here. Go take a look. I’ll give you a little preview.

Have some patients and I’m sure she’ll get some more stuff up there. Those roving balls she makes are the nicest things I’ve ever spun. *sigh* There is also going to be a website for Gaslight Dyeworks. It’s not much yet, but I’ll work on it.

Some spinning that I’ve been doing lately. This is the seacell/merino blend that I got from Creatively Dyed Yarn in Wooster. Dianne’s roving is so nice to spin and looks so beautiful when it’s spun.

This one is a triple ply that is two plys of CDY and one ply of alpaca that I dyed. It’s 123 yards long and it weighs 7.25 ounces.

Then I ran out of alpaca. So I plyed the rest of the CDY bobbins into a two ply. It’s 210 yards long and weighs 4 7/8 ounces.

I made another LED lamp. This time I used a clear glass insulator and 4 color changing LEDs. For some reason the colors don’t change at the same time. I rather like it that way so I haven’ even bothered trying to fix it so that they are all the same. Also if you want to see version 0.1 look here. Anyway some pictures…

Some video…

Jacki wrote a post about Ellie and the outside cat here recently. She also posted the good video of Ellie. Here is the what happens when you forget to stop recording…..

So that was fun. :)

Love making fun of Microsoft…

Alright I seem to be starting out with a bunch of references that are fairly obscure. Not real sure why. Anyhow the blog will probably change a lot over the next few days while I try to figure out what I want it to look like. So enjoy and try not to leave me too many nasty messages.

Oh and the title is a shout out to the Firefly series .

The Ninja reference is to Threadless.
For some reason in the comments they seem to say Ninja if they get the first post (yes I’m that much of a geek).

Later

T