May 30th 2008
Friday’s (first) beer was Anderson Valley’s Hop Ottin’ IPA, a doubly hoppy and cloudy beer that went well with the sunny evening. I was surprised at how cloudy it was, I was expecting to find yeast still in it but there wasn’t any.
After that, I had an Alaskan ESB, which we have plenty of in the fridge after Havana’s 1st birthday party. This was the first one I had and, maybe Alaskan beers are ho-hum to me, it was surprisingly tasty and much more clear than the IPA.
May 29th 2008
Mark and Lee are still in Seattle after celebrating Lee’s birthday in Vancouver so we had them and Eric over for dinner tonight. We had crab cakes, salmon dip, a leg of lamb, a mango salad, cheesecake for dessert and wine, of course. All the food was made by Gay (I barbecued the lamb, though) and all was very good.
May 29th 2008
I saw this site several days ago and keep remembering it. Christopher Huet does some amazing art. Some of it I like, some it scares me. I really like this one, though:
He even did the music on the site, which is also very good.
May 29th 2008
Havana has discovered the slide:
See the video on Flickr (or click photo above). She likes to crawl up it and in bare feet she can climb almost all the way up it until it gets more steep.
A new word she’s learned is “Up” that she uses when she wants to be picked up, helped up onto something or out of her highchair. But she says “Bup”. The bottom of the slide is too high for her to get on it (fortunately), so she stands at the bottom, looks at you and says “Bup”.
May 25th 2008
Today was brewing day… I brewed an Imperial Stout. That’s grains steeping before boiling for an hour. I even watched Havana while Gay napped while I was brewing. That’s quality time with my daughter.
May 24th 2008
This beer was sitting in the fridge for a couple weeks, I was reluctant to try it because I generally don’t like beers with weird ingredients (I’m talking about you Belgium!) and it’s a brown ale and I have yet to find a brown ale I like. It’s also brewed with raisins and maple sugar so I assumed it’d be cloyingly sweet. But it wasn’t… it was definitely sweet, but very well-balanced. And it was especially good in today’s sun after mowing the lawn. Unfortunately, I only had one bottle to drink.
May 24th 2008
If you haven’t seen Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, I highly recommend it:
May 23rd 2008
Belgian beer company InBev NV is offering to buy Anheuser-Busch. I hope they do, because I would love the irony of all the ‘mericans swilling Bud Light supporting a European company, based in a country that speaks a form of French (sacrebleu!), and they wouldn’t even know it. SABMiller, another European company, already owns Miller beer and MolsonCoors is not entirely American anymore. So with Anheuser-Busch, the last of the big three, no longer an American company we can finally say that American beers don’t suck.
May 20th 2008
We left at 9:30am on Tuesday, got to the US/Canada border at noon and, after a stop in Blaine, WA for lunch, got home by 3pm.
All 20 photos and 5 videos from the trip on Flickr.
May 19th 2008
We left Vancouver Sunday and drove a couple hours north to Whistler. It’s a beautiful drive through the mountains and along the water. The highway was littered with spans of construction making the highway wider for the 2010 winter Olympics.
