Good fun at the River
So I made a bunch of beer on Sunday - 15 gallons of my Big Sail Pale Ale recipe. And being a "Conservative American", there are a bunch of liberal weasels that probably thought I was shooting guns at the same time.
I wouldn't want to disappoint.
Jeff, Mike and I headed down to the Trinity River today. I don't know about those guys, but I came back with about a 1000 rounds less ammo. We fired AK, AR, HK and various other "Evil Assault Weapons". You know... The stuff that makes freedom-hating liberals cringe...
I even videotaped some of the more amusing weaponry being fired... Like the Swedish K, Sten Mk II and M-11. All suppressed to keep from scaring liberal weasels who might be lurking about. Once I get done cleaning the carbon deposits and reloading magazines, I might even post the videos.
Oh... And we drank beer after we finished shooting up the river. Sue me.
I still like trains
Both the wife and I have the week off for the holiday. And since we've mostly been sitting around the house doing our own little projects, it was time to get out for awhile.
So my wife got the idea that we should take a train ride. But not just a commuter train. There's something called the
Grapevine Vintage Railroad. It runs between Main St in Grapevine, TX and
The Stockyards in Fort Worth.
Grapevine use to be one of those sleepy communities on the outskirts of Dallas. Its claim to fame is the
wineries around town and the annual Grapefest event. I don't believe I've actually had any wine made in Grapevine, but it is supposed to be good.
The train is pretty cool, but you can tell it's run on a pretty tight budget. It's got fairly old cars and there's even a steam locomotive that pulls it on weekends. Since this was a Friday, we got a "vintage" diesel electric locomotive. At one point, it could have been a fairly scenic ride from Grapevine to Fort Worth. The crazy growth of the Metroplex has pretty much taken care of that. Still, there are parts of the ride that are interesting.
The Stockyards is definitely a tourist trap. But it has some redeeming qualities. When we arrived, we wandered a bit, finally stopping at Trail Boss Burgers for some chow and beers. The burgers were good, fries were crisp and the beer was cold. They even had Sam Adams Winter Lager on draft. It's definitely one of the few places I've been to that does Buffalo burgers right.
Would I do it again? - probably. But only if I were entertaining people. It would have been nice if the windows in the passenger cars were cleaned every once in awhile (they probably do it Saturday morning). And the return trip would have been more enjoyable had we not been sitting next to the surly teenage staff that should have been serving the patrons, instead of whining about serving the patrons (why is it that teenagers of this era feel so "entitled"?). And the parents who wouldn't control their kids are always a let down. Otherwise, we had a pleasant ride.
If you want to do something touristy, I can recommend it.
OK, So this might work...
I just transferred my most recent gem from the
old blog... I never really promoted that blog. Hell, I never even linked to it from anywhere. It was mostly a bunch of venting. But I think I'll leave it up for now.
In the meantime, I'll have to spend some time tweaking the template. And learning all the little "features" of blogger.
I might even start updating the website again.
Yeah... Right...
I've left the comments on. But if the ass monkeys out there start to abuse the feature, I'll have to go postal.
Dog
Been Awhile
note: This a rerun from my old Blog.
Hadn't felt much like doing this blog thing for awhile. Wasn't sure it really interested me. Then the main computer at the house started acting up, and the access to the blog wasn't setup on my laptop (which I couldn't be bothered to deal with). One thing after another as they say....
But it's the Christmas break, the weather is crappy and I don't have much better to do. This will be some major rambling - though I'm still not into all those imbedded links and images thing. That may come later.
Crap
A friend of mine was killed the other day. His name was Jerry McEwen. He tried to stop a drug-addicted, out on parole, douche bag from snatching a lady's purse. The douche bag stabbed Jerry in the chest. Luckily for the douche bag, the cops caught up with him and his douche bag wife before I got really worked up about this. I hope they rot in hell. This all happened in Nashville.
I knew Jerry from windsurfing. He was a stand-up kind of guy who ran his own web design business. He had a cool blog. He posted frequently in rec.windsurfing. He did not deserve to die because some selfish bastard needed a fix.
Did I mention rotting in hell?
I may post more information about this as I get over it. But I'm getting worked up typing about it.
Crap II
So I make beer. And if you're a beer drinker, you know that prices have been going up because the cost of beer ingredients are going up. Barley has gone up $20 a 50lb bag since I last bought it this Spring (from $45 to $65). Hops (when you can find them) have gone from about $0.99/oz to $3.00$-3.50/oz. This is making homebrew fairly expensive. Why has this happened? Because the douche bags in our federal government are on a big "save the environment" push. A big part of that push is about ethanol production. So the land that formerly was used for hops and barley has been turned into corn production. The hop issue is further complicated by a couple of really crappy harvests in Europe. Luckily, I had enough hops laying around to make the batch of beer I want to brew up this coming weekend.
Back to the ethanol thing... The corn growing industry in this country has some very good lobbyists. Good enough that the production of corn and ethanol from corn is heavily subsidized - with my flipping tax dollars. The problem here is that ethanol is stupid. Why?
- Because ethanol has less energy content than gas, so mileage drops.
- Because ethanol from corn uses more energy to produce than it puts back into the system.
- Because ethanol absorbs water faster than Texas soil, which puts water into the fuel system and causes all kind of problems in older cars.
- Because the ethanol crowd wants gasoline in the US to have 20% ethanol even though the majority of cars in the US can barely handle 10% ethanol.
- Because ethanol made from corn requires usage of fertilizers, with the direct result of an increased dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
- Because ethanol made from corn results in higher food prices for the consumer, and more expensive beer.
Ethanol may be a good idea, but this country needs to take it's lead from a country that's doing it right. Because here in the USA, we're just fucking it up even worse.
Sheesh....
Crap III
So I mentioned earlier about my house computer being on the fritz... Well that's not totally true. It still works, except for trying to access the internet. I've managed to corrupt the TCP/IP drivers on the machine - how? I left it on overnight and it didn't work the next day. A typical "feature" of Microsoft OS. But then I probably had it coming. You see, when I built this machine back in 2002, I sorta hacked XP Pro... I say "sorta" because a friend gave me a copy of an 8-in-1 disk which I used to get the machine running. I always planned to get things done right, but you know what they say... If it ain't broke.
But a five year old machine is old. Something like 100 years in people age. I really out to replace it. But this Windows Vista crap is still in it's infancy. Should I build a new machine? Should I buy one? Should I keep using this 7 year old laptop with a dead screen and no battery?
Crap....
Not Crap
So the wife and I have a nice trip down to the Texas coast for the Thanksgiving holiday. It's an annual thing - I forget for sure how long I've been going. It's gotta be 15+ years by now. These days, we call it Bird @ Bird because we stay at Bird Island Basin in the Padre Island National Seashore. This was not as huge an event as years past, but we had quite a few of the usual suspects from the last few years - along with the return of one of the old timers who'd instead been terrorizing Puerto Rico for a few years.
The wife and I left Dallas after work on the Friday before Thanksgiving. We stopped south of San Antonio to spend the night, then drove in the rest of the way on Saturday morning. We stopped at the new HEB plus in Flower Bluff (holy crap that thing is huge!) to load up on groceries and ice. Then we headed down island. We rolled into Bird about noon on Saturday. The truck and trailer probably weighed over 16,000 lbs combined.
We sailed. We ate. We drank. We burned stuff. We had a good time.
I managed to do about 156 miles of windsurfing during the week down there. . My big day was Wednesday before Turkey Day. I had an 82 mile day on the Mistral Classic 276 with an Ezzy Infinity 6.5. It felt like I ruled the water that day.
The weather started getting crappy late Wednesday. We left on Saturday.
Not Crap II
It's been a decent year at Mariner. Not great, but OK. Business could have been better - but that 3 months of rain thing, followed closely by 3 months of lakes too full to be on has to be understood. I'll probably keep working there for the forseeable future. Mostly because I can get away with so much - though the commute can be a killer.
Lynne's still cranking away at BCD. She should make full professor sometime in 2008 - the higher ups at Baylor would have to be total idiots to not do it. I suspect we won't be long for the Dallas area if she doesn't make it.
Max, my Golden Retriever, is still with me. He's over 14 now. A bit stiff in the hips, but fiesty as ever. Lance is still with us. Hank still terrorizes the birds. And Spock, our new pavement special, 8 month old black cat, thinks he runs the place.
That's it for now.
Blogging from The Dog House
This is an attempt to set up blogging hosted from my actual url (
http://www.thedoghouse.net/) instead of using the "free", advertising driven quickblog tool that Godaddy provides.
(pause)
Well it looks like it's working. Now it's just a matter of getting things set up and perhaps transferring some of the entrees from the other blog.
Dog
