Mad Andrew's Journal

All about the hobby projects...
Since I now know I'll be employed in January, this weekend Angela and I indulged ourselves in some projects unrelated to work.

Angela is building a 'cat tower' for the Bert. After seeing the atrocious prices on these things in stores, and later seeing the surplus (free if you can use them) wire spools at DZero, she hatched a cunning plan. So there has been a lot of sanding and chiseling and carpet cutting, etc, this weekend.

For my own part, I have my new laptop, which I have tentatively dubbed 'Wakaba', and my new stage 1 Gentoo build proceeds a pace. This thing's speed is simply stunning compared to the antique I'm using now. I have suffered through a lot of the normal configuration weirdnesses (getting the on board networking going, pcmcia, still don't have the wireless going), but having an example, if an older one, that works is enormously helpful.

I set out on Saturday to create a new beer, only to find that my fermentation vessel leaks. There may be some hope of ressurecting it later, depending on how well I can seal off the area around the spigot, but not now. I went to the brew shop, and promptly bought most of it (or at least it felt like it). I bought a new 6 gallon glass carboy to ferment in, along with siphon-starter and the necessary fermentation lock. That evening I brewed, a recipe of my own design: 4 lbs wheat malt extract, 3 lbs light English malt extract, 2 oz Fuggles hops, one HUGE can pureed raspberries with no seeds. The next morning I discover that there SHOULD be a line at 5 gallons on the fermenter, since the yeast bubbled up so high that it got out the lock, and I had some scrubbing to do. Also, I discovered the first casualty of the brewing, one of my Grolsch bottles catastrophically failed.

Doesn't sound like much, but it took up most of the weekend.

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