Jack & Jessica

Mid-Summer Hopdate

Jack — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:31:49 +0000

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.

They Make Good Wine in Virginia

Jack — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 22:57:22 +0000

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:

Click here for more pictures.

We Got a Wine Press!

Jack — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:21:56 +0000

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…

Hedge Removal

Jack — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:04:22 +0000

About a month ago a couple of friends came over and helped me remove the hedges along the border of our front yard. I never liked these hedges. They were overgrown boxwood full of vines and mulberry trees. They looked like crap when I let them grow wild, they looked like crap when they were well-pruned. And because they were situated in a north-south row while the wind typically blows from the west, they collected garbage – lots of garbage. Well, now they’re gone. See?

Removing the hedges was kind of fun. We used tow straps looped around the tow hooks on the front of our jeep to yank them out. Once we had them all out, my friends took off and I got to do the sucky part alone – raking all the loose soil back into the holes once occupied by roots and planting grass seed.

This last picture was taken today. As you can see, the grass hasn’t grown in too well, likely due to it being the hottest time of the year. I’m just going to leave it like this for now, then I’ll re-seed in early September. Next year it should be well-blended-in.

Night Stands for Ryan & Heather

Jack — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:43:16 +0000

I finished building these night stands tonight. They’re for our friends, Ryan and Heather. I guessed it would take me a weekend, maybe two. It ended up taking me parts of four weekends and an evening or two. They’re done now, but they’re not finished. Ryan gets to do that.

New Basement Stairs

Jack — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:46:54 +0000

I’ve been working on finishing the basement. Let me rephrase that… A year ago, I started working on finishing the basement. I quit sometime around last April as summer arrived and I needed to build a shed to make room for a lot of the stuff that was in the way in the basement.

This past weekend I got back into it by replacing the rickety old cleat-style stairs with some new notched-stringer ones. Thanks to my dad for digging his trailer out of the snow to help me get lumber for the stringers and thanks to Jamie for helping to put them up.

Before:

After:

Click here for some more pictures.

Big Snow 2010!

Jack — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:25:44 +0000

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.

Click here for more pics and videos.

Buddy Chopped it Down in the Park

Jack — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:29:58 +0000

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.

This is my attempt to make the trains run a little more quietly. The Lionel FasTrack system looks great and goes together easily, but it’s not exactly quiet. Hard plastic with a hollow underside screwed to hard plywood sort of acts like an amplifier. I took up the track and put some sill seal under it. It helped a lot. It’s still noisy, but you no longer have to shout when the trains are running.

This is Christmas coming to visit for the holidays:

The weather just made it feel right for Christmasizing the house.

The tree is ready for Christmas to start:

All decorated:

…and the obligatory night shot:

Thanksgiving 2009

Jack — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:22:37 +0000

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.

We’re Elite Runners Now

Jack — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:17:22 +0000

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.