Friday night, my wife had book club here. Only a few of the ladies were able to make it. They brought their kids, most of whom are the same age as our youngest, 13, so they had a good time taking silly selfies and playing the Switch.  One of our twin daughters (18) was here and hung out with me which was a lot of fun....

My wife and I are still watching a lot of the Taskmaster back episodes. We've slowed down a bit so we don't go through them so fast. We are watching the seasons in ordered chunks, but the chunks are out of order. We started with series 19 because of Jason Mantzoukas, then we watched series 20. Then we went back and...

We just went to Wild Hare cider in Berryville. We usually love going there, but today we got there a few minutes before they opened at 2pm. We're sitting in the parking lot, and we see a car rush into the parking lot and a guy jumps out of the car and hurries into the building. Clearly, this guy was late for work. So we...

A lot of my favorite bands released new albums in 2025: Sleep Token Spiritbox Eidola Thrice Dance Gavin Dance Architects Dayseeker Thornhill Gore Novelists Ankor But there are a few artists that haven't dropped a new album in a while who I'm looking forward to hearing from this year.  Poppy has a new album coming out in...

Albums: Sleep Token - Even in Arcadia Spiritbox - Tsunami Sea Eidola - Mend Architects - The Sky, the Earth & All Between Lauren Babic - Too Much and Never Enough Poppy - Negative Spaces Dayseeker - Creature In The Black Night Thornhill - Bodies Novelists - CODA Gore. - If You Do Not Fear Me Sleep Theory - Afterglow...

Here are my default or primary apps and services of 2025: Email: Fastmail Calendar: Fastmail and Google Calendar Notes: Obsidian and Google Keep To-do Lists: Obsidian Terminal: Warp and Ghostty Browser: Vivaldi Search Engine: Kagi Text Editor: VSCodium Passwords: Vaultwarden File Sharing: Fastmail, Koofr Cloud Storage:...

While my LastFM 2025 yearly report likely won't come in until after the new year, I've grabbed some screenshots from a few tools that work with the LastFM API.None of this is really surprising. Sleep Token and Bilmuri have been my favorite bands for the last couple of years. Spiritbox is always in there, and Eidola has...

After taste testing and gravity testing the ginger peach mead, I decided to bottle it. The .75g of ginger only needed about 12 hours in the carboy to extract the right amount of flavor. That, along with a little back sweetening from the peach syrup, has given the mead a nicely balanced flavor.  The other batch I've got...

My next experimental mead recipe is going to be a maple vanilla mead. Here's the base recipe:  - 2lb raw acacia blossom honey (primary) - 12oz Vermont maple syrup (primary) - 1 vanilla bean (secondary)  - 2 whole allspice berries (secondary)  - 6g of oak chips (secondary) - 4-6oz Vermont maple syrup for back sweetening...

This week I deoxidized and stabilized the pumpkin mead after back sweetening it last week. It turned out pretty good! If I had to do it again I would go a little less heavy on the amount of spices or the amount of time I left them in. Still, it turned out nice and I can't wait to see how it tastes after a few weeks in...

If you've been reading this blog or following me on Mastodon, you'll know I've been making a watermelon jalapeno lime mead and a pumpkin pie mead.  I had my wife taste the watermelon one yesterday and she gave me the OK to go ahead and bottle it, so I did that today. Photo: 6 bottles of golden watermelon jalapeno lime...

My family and I were just talking about some of the places we've been, and whenever we have this conversation we inevitably remember Blue Mountain in Olympic National Park in Washington (elevation - 6,004 ft). We went there on a whim on our way out of the north end of the Olympic National Park loop. It's a 9-mile drive...

Recently, I've had 2 meads fermenting at the same time, staggered by a couple of weeks. As the watermelon lime jalapeno one is coming to an end soon, the other day on a whim I stopped by the farm market to pick up some honey and pumpkin puree to make my wife some pumpkin pie mead. Now, I've never made this before so I'm...

Companies like Walmart receive a tax credit if they hire someone receiving assistance from certain government assistance programs, like SNAP. It's called the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC). However, Walmart is not required to pay the person a wage that is above the income threshold required for the employee to no...