This year I planted some hop vines. In their first year, you can’t expect much production, but they are showing some hops forming. Yay! Next year I should get a good harvest. This year I’ll be happy just to get enough to do one batch of beer.
Jess and I spent this past week in Virginia with Jamie & Tammy visiting lots of wineries. There are a ton of vineyards & wineries in Virginia and most of them are making pretty good wine, with a few of them making exceptional wine. We had a great time, took a lot of pictures, and tasted and bought a lot of wine.
I’ll share the pictures here. If you want me to share the wine, you have to come visit us!
The wine we brought home combined with the wine we already had meant that we ran out of room to keep our wine, so I whipped up this quick ‘n dirty wine rack from a single sheet of plywood I had laying around:
Lately I’ve been doing my homework as I prepare to get into home wine making. I’ve been reading books, blogs, and forums, listening to podcasts, and talking about it a lot with anyone that will listen. Some time ago Jess’s dad mentioned that his dad had a wine press and it might still be around somewhere. I was hoping to get my hands on it, but had a feeling I might not be able to. So I was planning to build one this weekend, similar to this one. That is until Jess’s family showed up on Thursday night to give us an early anniversary present:
Here is a video of a very similar press being used.
Yay! Thanks, guys! I might even try to make some wine that you like as a token of gratitude. Or you could just learn to like dry wine. 
Since I won’t be making a wine press, maybe I can make a crusher/destemmer…
We got a little snow last weekend. I measured 19.5″ in our driveway. The official measure at the airport nearby was 21.5″. Everyone has pics and stories of this storm. Here are ours.
I shoveled snow for over nine hours this weekend. Uphill. Both ways.
It’s time for another post with pictures of our Christmas tree. This year’s tree is a good looking Frasier Fir from Hozak Farms. We usually buy our tree at Janoski’s, but their selection this year wasn’t too great. They had a lot of trees, but they were bare in spots and appeared to have been hastily pruned. There were lots of twisted & broken branches. We left Janoski’s to try our luck at the nearby Chiodo Farms, but they were out of business and their property was for sale. Sad. So we looked up directotions to Hozak’s and found them to have a great selection of trees and some friendly doggies there to help us choose.
Read on for a few more pictures. We hope everyone has a great holiday season.
The holiday season is getting into full swing now, but I definitely don’t want to forget out the great Thanksgiving we had last week. We had about 16 people in our little house for dinner and it was great. We had tables stretched from the dining room buffet all the way to the TV at the other end of the living room.
Read more for some more pictures…
Update! The results are in. I finished in 2:09:52. Jess finished in 2:09:53. I win! I finished in 1421st place, Jess in 1423rd place out of 2051 finishers. (I thought there were over 4000 runners. (?)) I was 798th out of 973 men. Jess was 625th out of 1078 women. They haven’t posted our positions within our age groups.
Today was the day we’ve been training for. This morning we completed the Spirit of Pittsburgh Half Marathon.
Was it fun? Yeah. It was nice running through these neighborhoods. Was it hard? Not too bad. Our training prepared us well. Are we tired? Yeah, after having a huge lunch at IHOP, we napped for an hour or so mid-afternoon. We got up, walked the dogs, and then started thinking about dinner. If nothing else, the run made us hungry. We got some food from PF Chang’s for dinner. I’d never had PF Chang’s before. PF Chang’s is terrible. The food was dry, cold, flavorless, bland, and just plain drab. It was very reminiscent of frozen entrees from the grocery store. Jamie – you were right; that place sucks.
Wait, how did this get to be about PF Chang’s and not about running? I’m tired, cut me some slack, Jack. Hey, that’s my name. Anyway, will we run another half marathon, or even hunker down and do a full marathon? Probably not. The run, itself, wasn’t bad, but that’s only because our training prepared us well. But the training is something I don’t want to do again. I’m not too happy about how much life we had to give up over the past 10 weeks to get here. I only went mountain biking once since we began training. Jess went zero times. We had to get up at 4:30 every day to run or exercise before work. This meant we had to be in bed by 9:30 at the latest. The training just took too much away from the rest of our lives, otherwise I’d definitely consider doing another half or even a full marathon.
In the end, I’m very glad we did it. It’s an accomplishment we’re proud of. 18 months ago when we started running just to de-pork ourselves, we could only run for 1 minute before we had to take a walking break. Today we ran for two hours and ten minutes.
It’s bedtime. I’ll post our actual times once the event organizer gets them online. They said they’d be online this afternoon. We’re still waiting.
So you try to view some of the pictures and you’re greeting with a big, scary message telling you this site has been hacked. If you’re using Firefox, it probably looks something like this:
(Click the pic for a bigger version.)
I’m aware of this problem. I wrote to my web hosting company to ask what I could do. They suggested that I update all of my WordPress software and plugins. I have since done that.. I found one active plugin that I didn’t activate. I deactivated it. They also suggested that I go through every file and folder on the site to look for bad script files that I didn’t put there or code that may have been injected into my files. I did that. I found nothing.
I think it’s now safe for you to click on the “Ignore this warning” (or similar) link to continue on to the pictures. The warning should be removed the next time Google tests my domain, whenever that may be.
Thanks and sorry.
OK. Here are the pictures I promised of the shed being built. Most of the work was done back in July, with plenty of help from Cindy, Jesse, and Jamie. You’ll see them show up in the pictures.
Click here or on either of the pictures below to see how we turned this:
into this:
What’s left to do? You can see that there is no fascia yet. Also, I need to wrap the soffit, fascia, eaves, and rake in flashing. The support pillars need to be painted, but that has to wait until next year because it’s best to let pressure-treated lumber dry for a year before you paint it to ensure the paint doesn’t peel as the moisture from the treatment escapes from the wood. Also, we plan to put a little patio under the overhang. We’ll do that next year.
As I mentioned in the last post, Jess and I got new phones – Palm Pres. After a couple of days of playing with them, we’re pretty pleased. They’re smartphones with a lot of similar functionality to an iPhone, except without all of Apple’s shady business practices. Moreover, the Pre, like any Android-based phone such as the HTC Hero, really appeals to me as a software developer because Palm is very developer-friendly. I’m going to download their SDK shortly and start playing around with writing some apps for the phone.
I’m very happy with the phone’s performance. The UI is snappy and responsive, it accepts a standard headphone plug, the phone works well, the camera is fantastic, and there is a rapidly-growing list of applications available for it, and you can actually browse the catalog on your PC, unlike the iPhone app store and the Android Market. For the iPhone and Android-based phones you can only browse the app catalogs from the handset, itself.
I mentioned the camera is great. Look at this picture I took after work this week. It’s scaled down to fit on this page. Click it for the full-size version:
While the phones, themselves, are great, getting them set up… not so much. Some would call the whole process a bit of a nightmare. Read more if you’re interesting in hearing some tales of woe that become laughable at some point.