Kyle's Blog

Brew 2, First Hefe

2012-02-02T19:09:00.002-05:00

My second brew of 2012 and my first bottling finished, suprisingly, easier and cleaner than all previous batches. To start off with, I didn't have a boil-over. A combination of leaving one gallon (or so) out of the kettle until hot break and a constant skimming of foam caused there to be no boil-over, just a nice, smooth transition from not boiling to boiling.

However, it wasn't until I cooled the wort and pitched the yeast that I discovered my 4 gallon recipe was around 3 quarts short. Now, before with the porter I was a quart short. Now that I think about it, a quart over or under shouldn't matter as long as your gravity was hit correctly. Which, in this case, it was. However, being 3 quarts short made me wonder. Opening up the mash tun to retrieve a bag of grain and to begin the cleaning process I discovered my hose filter wasn't nicely settled on the bottom of the tun. It was, instead, suspended within the grain, leaving a good amount of delicious wort behind. So next time I need to remember that once I'm ready to begin the boil, give the tun a stir to make sure I got all the sweet liquid that I can get.

All in all, brewing today went off well. Stirring the cooler slightly caused the chilling process to go from boiling to 80F in the shortest time yet. It had to have been under 15 minutes, but I didn't check. Hopefully this yeast strain gives me the desired taste. I chose the Wyeast for it's bubblegum qualities, but my local store only had White Labs. We'll see how the taste comes out. All in all, ~3.2 gallons should end up being a tasty brew, and eventually (after a couple of refinements) a perpetual house brew. Oaked Hefeweizen, anyone?

Speaking of oaked, I had a thought that once I perfected my porter I'd take 1-gallon samples and subject them to various types of aging. My winter ale was ... ok ... with oak, but I had wanted it to be sweeter. The porter might benefit from the oak more than the winter ale did. But, after bottling the porter today (busy brew day...) I can say that it turned out, yet again, fantastic. The changes I made to the recipe really brought more chocolate and coffee and roasty goodness out. I'm excited to see how it turns out in a few weeks and I'm going to have to force myself to put a bottle away so I can age it.

Hefeweizen should be bubbling by the end of tonight, porter is bottled, and in two weeks I'll bottle the Hefe. I haven't decided if I'm going to bottle and brew in two weeks or if I'm going to bottle in two weeks, then in two more weeks brew an Irish Red. Today was fun, but it really did eat up my entire day. I want to brew 100 gallons this year, so once I crunch some more numbers I'll know if I'm going to be bottling in two weeks or repeating today in two weeks. Part of me feels that if I do what I did today every two weeks...by the end of the year I'm going to be burnt out. Don't want that.

Rocky start to 2012

2012-01-12T17:43:00.003-05:00

After brewing with my father almost successfully sucked every drop of homebrewing desire I had, I had a hard time getting my head in the game to brew today. I'm glad that I did, but the whole process left me feeling drained and unhappy. Maybe I'm coming down with something, who knows.

But, yet again, I brew with a slew of problems. For starters, my mash temperature dropped from 156 to 146 over the course of an hour, I sparged with half a gallon too much water, causing a boil-over. I even took two large glasses of wort out and added them over the course of the boil. And, to top it all off, my dumb ass didn't use a hop bag for my aroma hop addition, so 2/3 of an ounce of hops adorned the last bit of wort. All in all I thought I used half a gallon too much water, but I ended up with 1-2 quarts too little in the fermenter.

There was good news, though. I hit my target OG (1.061, after a temperature adjustment). The yeast starter turned out fine and hopefully by the end of tonight I'll see bubbles. I also used proper cleanser this time (Easy Alkaline), which did a remarkably awesome job at cleaning the brew kettle of the boil-over junk.

Hopefully once I see bubbles and smell beer I'll start feeling better, but in the mean time it's time to start thinking about my next brewday in three weeks (the porter takes three weeks in the primary). It's going to be a simple hefeweizen that should have hints of bubblegum.

New year, new goal - 100 gallons!

2012-01-08T20:13:00.002-05:00

Here I am in 2012, with a new brew plan and a brand new MLT (more on that in a bit). My goal is to brew 100 gallons of beer this year, across 8 recipes. I'm going to make five recipes on a cycle until I get them down. These will serve as my five house brews and the plan is to have them available at any time. A porter, red ale, pale ale, DIPA, and hefe. The porter and the hefe are the only recipes that have any of my modifications in them (porter has added coffee flavor and the hefe has my hand selected yeast), but hopefully by the end of it all all five will have sufficient modifications that I can give them a name.

I refuse to name a beer unless it's original enough that it's something new. With that in mind, I'm going to be making the big five beers on a cycle all year, with three beers being brewed later in the year for the holiday season. A pumpkin beer (with real pumpkin, recipe undetermined), an imperial harvest ale (everyone loved it despite it being terribly incomplete), and a christmas ale. Last year the Christmas ale had too much cherry and too much oak, so next year my goal is to make it the way I intended, that being like a gingerbread house in a bottle. So nix the cherries and half the oak and quadruple the ginger and add some to secondary. Or something like that, anyway.

But the real star of the 2012 season is my shiny new (and bright orange) Mash-Lauter ... container. I hate the word "tun" for some reason. Sarah's father gt me a 10 gallon watercooler for Christmas and today I purchased all the parts and put it together. No leaks! Though I did have to use two lock washers to get the installed hardware to sit snugly.

Unfortunately, my local home brew store is closed Monday, so bright and early (early being sometime in the afternoon) Tuesday I'm going to purchase ingredients and cleaners and a few other things. Brewday should be Thursday or Friday once I've had sufficient time to make a starter. Going to do all of my beers this year with starters because why not? I plan on making each of these beers at least three times, so if doing a starter I get weird results that can be attributed to a starter, then no more starters will I do. Also it'll give me an excuse to not have to buy yeast 15 times instead of a more comfortable 5.

Starter powers activate

2011-12-07T16:45:00.002-05:00

Sitting on my dining table right now just spinning it's heart out is my first ever starter. Used 2 2/3 cup bottled water and 2 oz of extra light DME. Found out about a few interesting problems that I'd not have known about had I not actually done this whole process. Namely, the flask I'm using isn't completely flat on the bottom. This becomes a problem because as that water boils, it forces the flask up. This happens over and over, causing the flask to vibrate inside the pot of boiling water. My solution was to use a slightly bigger pot and a bit more water so that the flask _just slightly_ is floating in the pot. That allows the steam to escape and prevents the vibration.

That all being said, though, after 15-20 minutes I wasn't able to get the flask to boil. So I dumped the starter into a smaller pot and boiled the starter directly. Way easier. Cooled it down over 10 or 15 minutes in an ice bath (it does cool very quickly), added my (mostly) decanted mead yeast cake, and added the sanitized stir stick. Around 10:30 last night I set the stir plate to on and by this morning the bubbling had all but stopped. Which is fine, though I did remember that I forgot (ha) the yeast nutrient. The starter is ~600ml, so I threw in 1/4 tsp of nutrient, and the bubbling spiked for a few minutes, but subsided.

If the bubbling doesn't increase tonight or by tomorrow evening, I'll be cold crashing the starter and leaving it be until early March, when I'll be bottling the vanilla and brewing the pomegranate. All in all the making of a starter was an interesting experience and I look forward to seeing the krausen-explosion from my porter brew in mid January.

Mead step 2

2011-12-03T13:32:00.003-05:00

Just finished racking my mead to secondary, and made sure that I remembered to add the 6 vanilla beans. Tasting it, I found it interesting that it was actually slightly fizzy. I wonder if this is something that is dealt with with making wine, or because by using an airlock, it creates a pressure problem that keeps the CO2 in suspension. No matter, when I go to bottle I'll give it a hearty shake before I siphon into the bottling bucket, then another couple shakes after it's in the bucket. Then again, in three months, the CO2 might end up dissipating anyway. We'll see.

The taste was as expected, as it's fresh out of the fermenter it's still got a raw taste. In three months it should take on the flavor of the vanilla beans and be a bit more refined. Two months after bottling it'll be drinkable.

In addition to racking the mead, I took a sample of the yeast and put it in a sanitized flask, and sealed it as best I could with tinfoil. Hopefully the gross smell of the fridge doesn't get in over the next couple days. On Tuesday or around there I'll be purchasing a stopper for the flask and some DME so to make a stable starter for the next batch of mead, which is going to be pomegranate mead. I'll post again then for I'll be excited at making my first starter and getting to use the stir plate that I made.

Science and more science

2011-11-27T16:52:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I finished building a custom stir plate for use with starters. Thanks to Chris, with his desire to build stuff and his connections to obtain cheap lab glass, I've a working stir plate.

Video!

A bit of warning, though, the video is a bit loud. The stir stick and the whine from the power supply unfortunately come through annoyingly. When there's yeast and sugar in the water it'll be much quieter.

Now with this built, the next project is building a mash tun. Just need to find a 10 gallon rubbermaid cooler (the round cylindrical kind) on sale and the rest of the parts are cheap and easy to find. But no rush, as I'm almost sort of slightly entirely broke. Hopefully I'll be able to find something before I leave for Christmas.

The idea for my next brew day (and the beginning of my 2012 brewextravaganza) is the second week of January. I'd like to order materials and yeast right before I fly back home, so when I get home I can make a starter immediately, and in 3 days brew a custom porter (and label it this time!). Soon after that I've a double IPA in the works. After the DIPA, my plan is to go through a cycle of beers that will become "house brews", and they'll be recipes I keep making over and over until I get them customized enough to warrant a name, and make them well enough that I always have them on tap and have a base of beers to gauge experiments and experience on.

I have a few styles in mind - Irish Red (have the recipe, needs tweaking as the last time I made it I tasted little of it as it exploded), Porter (next brew day), Pale Ale (don't have a recipe yet), Hefe (no recipe yet, going to use Sarah to gauge taste), Brown Ale (no recipe yet, something plain but notably different from the irish red and the pale ale), and the DIPA.

Thinking about it now, my cycle for the year will be Porter - DIPA - Red Ale - Pale Ale - Brown Ale - Hefe, the repeat. Seasonal brews will happen between these, and mead is going to be made every 6 months or so. People seemed to like my imperial harvest ale, so I'm going to tweak that and make it again next year, and in addition to the harvest ale I'll be making a pumpkin using real pumpkin...but I don't have a recipe for that yet.

Next weekend I rack my mead to secondary where it'll sit for three more long months, and the day after my Christmas Ale is ready to drink. Hopefully the cherry flavor has mellowed out, I'll post a review on it in a week or two.

Winter beer bottled!

2011-11-13T13:33:00.002-05:00

Just finished bottling my winter ale, and it turned out to be rather ... interesting. I didn't realize the effect that cherries and oak were going to have on the beer, and I fear I may have used far too much. The beer starts off smooth and slightly sweet, then a bit of oakiness. The aftertaste is a sharp touch of cherry, followed by a lingering slight bitterness. I sort of like it, but the cherry flavor I'm hoping mellows out with a couple weeks in the bottle. Next year I may increase the ginger by 20% or so, and decrease the amount of cherries and oak by 20% or so. We'll see what it tastes like in a couple weeks and how it ages to make any recipe-changing decisions. Who knows? The ginger flavor could come out strong, only time will tell.

Updates on cider, mead, and the bottling to come.

2011-11-12T13:48:00.003-05:00

So I had Greg try the cider last night, and though he was polite about it - he really didn't care for it. Which is fine for me, as the cider was an experiment and all I did was throw yeast into it to see what happened. However, the experience has taught me that the next time I try to make hard cider - essentially apple cider wine - I'm going to use actual wine yeast, and not Nottingham ale yeast, despite how much people seem to like it. I came to the realization of the yeast when I thought that when it was dry - it wasn't that dry. This is because, or probably because, I used an ale yeast rather than a dry-finishing wine yeast, like champagne yeast.

Next year my plan is to get four gallons, apply the new yeast to all of them, then backsweeten one and I'll have two gallons each of dry and sweet hard cider. Though I'm also wondering seriously if the flat taste came from the pasteurization of the cider. Which means I should have six gallons, or some multiple of three, two raw, four pasteurized, so I can see the differences between dry, sweet, and unpasteurized vs. pasteurized. Problem with that is six gallons of cider is expensive for an experiment. Hopefully I'll have a bit more cash laying around next year for further experimentation.

Mead is fermenting famously, though it seems to have slowed a bit since yesterday. The temperature range has been terrible - from around 76-78 ro just below 68. Hopefully it should be fine, though it's extremely difficult to regulate the temperature in my tiny, old apartment.

I should have another post tomorrow about the christmas ale I've been excited about, as tomorrow is bottling day and I should have somewhere north of 3.5 gallons or so. Bottles ready, can't wait.

Yeast nutrient? More like fermenter hyper-explosion.

2011-11-08T11:51:00.002-05:00

Never used yeast nutrient before today, when I added 2.5 teaspoons to 5 gallons on the third day after yeast pitching. I had no idea what to expect, to put it lightly. Soon as I dumped the first teaspoon in the fermenter, it basically all dissolved immediately in a bubbling froth of insanity. 1.5 teaspoons later and I had a huge bubbling mess that threatened to breach the fermenter's top. Stupid me didn't realize what was going on, so I shut the fermenter only to have the airlock go INSANE, and threaten to shoot off like a bottle rocket. So, hastily, I reopened the fermented just to have a good pint or so of thick foam shoot out the side. Luckily I had the foresight to put a towel under the fermenter and move the bucket to the kitchen. After the bubbles quieted down I resealed the fermenter and gave it a couple nice good shakes, each time the airlock was notably more active, then subsided shortly after.

I'm sort of running in the dark here with this whole mead business, but we'll see how it turns out and make changes the next time after I've finished the full production of primary, secondary, and bottling. Thankfully, bottling is very easy, so there shouldn't be any problems or blips with that procedure, despite never bottling something without sealed bottle caps before.

Another interesting point to note - when I opened the fermented there was no krausen to be found. I thought this was odd, as the smell coming out of the airlock was notably fermention-ladeled, and the airlock was producing a "it's definitely fermenting" amount of air. With a quick google search I discovered that mead can run the range from no krausen to explosive krausen.

It's also more evidence and force toward every time in the future that I do not use a smack pack, I will be doing a starter. Cider with dry yeast and mead with dry yeast both have produced the same sort of ... slow, boring, and nondescript ... fermentation that hints to me that either I have too high gravity liquid (extremely not likely) or that I'm not treating my yeast with the respect it deserves. So in addition to building a water cooler mash tun, I will be obtaining materials (mostly just a flask) to construct a starter vessel.

I should also consider actually doing gravity readings....

Mmm, cider

2011-11-04T16:39:00.002-04:00

Bottled my first cider just now, and I'm surprised at how easy the entire process was. From start to finish took two weeks, and the hardest part was sanitizing the buckets and bottles. Star san makes it easier to sanitize bottles, though, compared to one step.

When I first cracked open the fermenter, I didn't expect the cider to taste the way it did. I was expecting something much drier, and the taste was entirely drinkable and delicious. I still added 6.8 oz of lactose, though, to backsweeten the two gallons. It's .4 oz too much, but whatever. The sugar cut through the dryness with a light touch. The cider wasn't that much sweeter, but the dryness was considerably diminished and it became slightly easier to drink.

I like to use the test of something's tastiness by giving a small sample to my gf. She'll taste it, then if she goes for a second taste and won't give me back the glass I know I've succeeded in making something tasty.

Next time making cider I'm not only going to use much more, but I may try to referment some in the bottle to make sparkling cider or play around with different blends or types of yeast. Milburn's Cider and Nottingham Yeast make a tasty drink, though.

Mold? No!

2011-11-01T23:25:00.002-04:00

Earlier today, a friend of mine asked me how I was doing my secondary, and if I've been checking for mold. Intrigued, I did some googling and couldn't find anything about mold problems with using fruit in a secondary. When I couldn't find anything, he linked me to the thread where first heard about mold. Curious, I whipped up some sanitizer and cracked open my secondary, only to find a light layer of krausen and a wonderful smell of yeast - no mold here! Whew! Christmas Ale is still on target for a bottling in just over a week and a half.

Mead supplies came today, and I'm hoping to bottle the cider Friday and start the mead either then or the following weekend.

Adventures in brewing

2011-10-30T14:20:00.002-04:00

For the past few years, I've barely posted much. And many of my posts go something like this:

"Hey, I haven't posted in awhile, sorry about that! Here's some of the same claptrap that's been going on in my life that nobody is going to read, be back in a year to do the same thing again!"

That's sort of boring. So why not start posting about something that's meaningful to me? Like brewing! Keeping a brewjournal both in my personal stash and online is probably a way for me to post more. And have meaningful posts. Also, I tend to think of great ideas mid thought-stream, and most to all of everything I've written since high school has been entirely voice. It works for me, though I could never be an English major.

So where do I sit with brewing? I have two fermenters currently active, and a box of ingredients that should arrive tomorrow.

In primary (with a sweet cheap once-used bucket from How Do You Brew) right now are two gallons of cider from Millburn Orchards. It's more of an experiment, really. I've only brewed beer and have wanted to get into wine - but I've been worried that it's somehow more complicated than just warming the juice up and adding yeast. Turns out it IS more complicated than that, but if you just want to make wine (and I do love to hit the ground running) that's all you need to do. So I bought a packet of Nottingham, and promptly burnt the fuck out of it with 140F tap water. Oops. I pitched it anyway and the next morning I saw no airlock activity. So I went to buy another packet - got two this time. Pitched the yeast directly in, gave it a swirl, and from that Saturday until this past Wednesday or so it's been farting out nasty-smelling deliciousness more vigorously than I've ever seen. I hope that I can bottle it next weekend, but that may not happen. I am, though, going to taste it. Also got a pound of lactose for back-sweetening, because I'm pretty sure I won't like dry cider. I don't like dry wine (though chianti and merlot are good), so that makes sense.

In secondary is a Christmas beer I'm making partially for winter, partially for experimentation, and partially for Sarah for her birthday. It's an interesting beer, unlike anything I've done before. I used honey in the boil, and I'm using a secondary. It's 3-4 gallons and I used an ounce and a half of fresh ginger in the boil, and in secondary I've got whiskey-soaked oak and three pounds of frozen cherries. I tasted it while racking and it's definitely beer, but it's got quite a distance to go before it's done. Two weeks on the oak and cherries, then three weeks in the bottle. The recipe said it tasted like a gingerbread cookie, and given the ingredients I'm expecting it to be gingery, slightly aromatic (from the cinnamon), and with an earthy sweetness. I already have a name for the recipe, though in keeping with my recipe-stealing morals I do not name my beers until I modify the recipe. So I'll find some way of modifying the recipe to make it my own, then I'll name it.

The box of ingredients I'm (or should be) receiving tomorrow contains yeast nutrient, yeast, and 12 pounds of honey. I'm making mead! ... for next year. I don't have another airlock (stupid me should have bought a third) so I may have to wait until I bottle the cider or the christmas beer, but given that I'm using a 6 gallon carboy and making 5 gallons of mead, I may also just employ a blowoff. It might end up being a good idea, actually, as there's a lot of sugar in honey and I expect the fermentation to be extremely vigorous and take a week. Unfortunately the mead is going to take no less than 6 months to become drinkable. One month primary, two months secondary, and two months in the bottle. At least 2 months, anyway. This is another experiment, so I'll be using my brewday as a starting point and save at least one of the bottles for the next year's mead brewday to see how the aging process works.

Speaking of aging, I've a few bottles left of a porter I made, and bottled on September 3rd. If kept at proper beer serving temperature, the chocolate taste is slightly more pronounced. I'm remaking it with modifications for St. Paddy's day, and I'm very interested to find it's optimal aging time. I've six 12-oz bottles and two bombers left, though two 12-oz and one bomber are already accounted for, hopefully I'll be able to hold off drinking them all until I reach at least 6 months. Interestingly enough, 6 months (and a week or two) past the bottling say for this beer is st. patrick's day. So St. Patrick's day 2013 may end up getting it's porter made in August of 2012.

Beer is fun.

Sitting around, and cancer

2011-06-07T12:04:00.002-04:00

Couldn't think of anything to post last week, was reeling from a diagnosis of skin cancer. Went in to my dermatologist to check out my moles and get a cyst removal appointment made, and the mole that the doc removed turned out to be stage 1 melanoma. Not serious, but it's something that I can't deal with with diet and exercise - it had to go. So last Friday I have the surgery and I've been moving around as little as possible while my back wound heals. 18 stitches in an S-pattern looks pretty gnarly. Might whore some karma on Reddit once it heals, we'll see. What I hope for the most is, during my appointment to get my stitches removed, that he doesn't find any moles that look at risk, and he tells me the samples he removed show that I'm now cancer free.

On the bright side, though, is all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 are on hulu, so I've something to do/watch. However, now being unemployed is a strange thing. I'm not sure what to do with my time. Before, when I had off days I could use the excuse that it's an off day, and just do fuck all. Now, I've all my time to do whatever, and I find myself doing nothing constructive. Maybe I can use the excuse of my back is healing, but at the same time I really should get things done.

Yeah, I know, I'm blogging instead. Need to use a to do list, that should help.

The only outlet I have

2011-05-25T18:29:00.002-04:00

Sometimes, things come up in one's life that they need to talk about. Sometimes it helps to talk to a third party, like a counselor or a friend, and sometimes it helps to not talk to anyone but the voice inside your own head. Most times, though, it helps the most to talk to the person that is the culprit or the focus of the problem bugging you or affecting your life or otherwise existing in such a way to throw you off the calm, peaceful existence that you'd like to call your life. And since I know the person in question won't read this, and the few (if they exist) that would read it won't say anything/can't say anything/etc. makes this a better medium for venting my frustration.

Suffice it to say, I don't think it's a normal thing to think on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis after 7 years of a relationship that you don't want to remain in the relationship anymore. Even less so that, and I put my future at risk by saying so, depressing thoughts enter my mind mixed in with the angry and confused and fed up ones. Nothing serious, but they're there and have been for quite some time. Now, you'd ask yourself, why can't I just talk to her? The answer lies in what I know would happen and what I know I'd fail to say. I've no idea how to open up the conversation. "Hey, babe, I'd like to talk about us." is probably not the best way to open up the conversation. It would, undoubtedly, be misconstrued as "I want to break up with you". Which ... I don't want to. 7 years (technically 6.5) is a long time for a relationship. Fixing it is the best course of action, but I don't know how. I feel that, regardless of how the conversation starts, it will rapidly degenerate into an argument (where I am the one at fault), or crying. The crying would make me feel terrible, as if I was making a mistake, the conversation would go nowhere, and I'd be right back where I was.

Halfway through that sentence I lost my train of thought and lost what it was that I was talking about, so I guess I'll leave it here.

Camping, Survival, the Rapture, and a New Beginning

2011-05-24T14:03:00.004-04:00

This past weekend was supposed to have been the rapture. Very clearly I wasn't raptured, though given the severe lack of news follow-up, it's also clear that nobody was raptured, either. As I knew the rapture wasn't going to happen as described, I am a bit disappointed that nothing happened at all. Frankly I was expecting a riot, mass suicide, or other such outrage at the fact that nothing happened. Or aliens, that'd have been grand, really V-style. Alas, nothing happened. The time passed, 5:45 this past Saturday, while I was on the Cape Henlopen beach with Sarah and three of her friends. Watching an Osprey catch a fish, and some dolphins kill a shark. Nothing spectacular, though I did get a sunburn.

I thought it fitting that I was camping the weekend that the rapture was predicted to happen, and in my words i was "avoiding the rapture by hiding in slower lower". What I was really doing is testing my survival kit/camping kit. Turns out I missed a few things. Also, camping where were at wasn't so much "camping" but more "going to a hotel without any walls". That didn't stop it from being fun, however. The experience taught me a few things, and added another line to my "zombie apocalypse" rulebook. That rule is: "If you don't know if you need something or not, consider the consequences of not having it. If you are comfortable with the consequences, do without. Otherwise, do with.". This rule, as ambiguous as it seems, was borne out of my lack of sunscreen whilst I went for a run on the beach. I thought "I won't be in the sun for very long, I don't need any sunscreen". Totally wrong, I was.

It also taught me that my Bug-out-bag is just too big. What I have is more of an 'I'm never coming home bag', which for the purposes that I'd apply it to in the near and distant future, is hugely overkill. I'm planning on going for a 3-day pack and designing it for a "real" bug-out-type situation, also to take up much less space in my closet.

Today I told my boss that, officially, I'm going to grad school. When I told him that I'm essentially going tuition-free, the conversation went quickly to, and i'm paraphrasing, "I'd do the same thing in your situation". Frankly, I underestimated him. He expressed an observation of me that was more spot on than I even realized about myself. That I'm 50/50, one foot in this job, one foot in grad school. this, to him, explained why I wasn't totally focused on my job, and when combined with the fact that I still don't know what it is that I want to do, this makes more sense and, to him, grad school is the right thing for me to do. At the end of next week will be my final day here at NRG-Edge, hopefully I have enough cash to float myself until the semester starts and my loans get disbursed.

So I'm going, in the fall, to grad school for an MBA, which I've explained in previous posts. The only problem I'm going to have is that I'm going to end up digging into my savings. What I might do is accept all of the financial aid that I get, and defer interest, and stick it all in my savings account. Take what I need, then upon graduation, pay as much back as I can. Hopefully, over the course of two years, I'm able to get my internet presence up to the point of paying the bills...but I'm not holding my breath.

I don't normally like to plug my game, but Zombies at War is progressing nicely, and in the next few months I'm going to have a lot more time to work on it. I'd like to have it out of Alpha by the end of the summer, but as time has shown there's always a lot more to do than I realize.

Day in, day out

2011-05-16T10:52:00.002-04:00

I thought, over the past few days, why I never post much. I think I've discovered the real reason behind it. That reason is the fact that I always have _something_ going on in my head that I'd like to post/share/etc., but I don't want to make a new blog entry for every single one. So these thoughts fade away, and time goes by and none of these ever make it to my New Post window. I think the solution is to just wait a few days between postings, then post whatever is on my mind at the time. Anyway...

Grad school is looming over my head, and I'm still conflicted as to staying/leaving this company. i had planned on having a conversation with my boss today, but he's out so it'll be Wednesday at the earliest, probably Thursday before I sit and have a conversation with him. I'll e-mail him next time I'm in the office and he's not, either Wednesday or Thursday. Thing is, I love working here. But, I also can't pass this opportunity to go to school, essentially for _free_. How awesome is that? College isn't a scam if you're going for free. Other than the $90+k in lost wages, but it's my plan to create an online presence by graduation, hopefully knocking out all of my student debt and ending grad school in the black.

That being said, however, I'm finding it very difficult to get myself back into the coding mindset, at least for Zombies at War. Part of me wants to scrap the project, but I know that's just both me giving up and me being lazy. It's my fear that it's never going to make any money, and that my future ideals as a businessperson are totally flawed and impossible. Maybe it's not possible to live a comfortable lifestyle without really working. Perhaps it's only possible to remain alive, with no extravagances, without working for only a short time. So far, things have worked out for me. Maybe they will work in the future, maybe they won't. But all in all I realized a few days ago that if i'm procrastinating _now_ because I'll "work on it during grad school", what proof do I have that I will actually work on anything related in grad school? I have the same free time now, I won't be moving anywhere, so why do i insist on putting it off until later? I should just do it now. And that's what I'm going to do.

...Almost a year?

2011-05-09T09:26:00.002-04:00

So I've seriously lost track of time and haven't posted anything for...damn near a year. So what's been going on? Quite a bit, in fact. From my diet/body change perspective, I'm down to 166 as of yesterday The goal is 8% body fat, so I've still a few pounds to lose (around 10.8 as of this morning). My diet started June 15, so on that day I'll have pictures and fanfare and personal congratulations, etc, etc.

On a non-diet subject, I've learned to brew beer. A few days ago I received the ingredients for my fourth brew to date, my third all-grain brew and, if things go as well as they did the last time I brewed, my second successful from-scratch brew. It's going to be a red ale, and there should be enough for a case of pint bottles for Otakon.

I can't remember if I spoke of my job, but post-graduation I was offered a job for Hosting.com, which I worked from mid-June until Mid-November. At which point I received a job offer from another company, NRG-Edge. Love these guys. And...I'm going to be sad to go. Why? I've also been accepted into grad school!

UD's MBA program, I applied and was accepted, and for icing on the cake - I've received a fellowship worth 50% tuition. This means I pay no tuition for my first semester - and if my grades keep up the second one, also. It's an opportunity that I can't turn down, a $12k/semester MBA program for, assuming two semesters of fellowship, $12k TOTAL (in-state students get 50% off from the get-go).

Hopefully, combining my savings and on-campus jobs I can come out with paying $0 for grad school. With $22k in loans outstanding, I need some sort of financial wizardry to get this done.

I'm going to try to post more, I know I need to. Even if nobody reads anything it'll allow me to get ideas and thoughts and feelings, etc. out in a timely manner.

Week on, week off

2010-06-19T22:41:00.002-04:00

Been awhile since I posted (less time than my usual though) and things have been going great. Last time I ran was last Wednesday (walked on thursday and didn't do anything on Friday) and it felt great. That night, we went to the gym (oh, we bought gym memberships Tuesday evening) and had our first of two free sessions with a personal trainer (or was it only one free one? I don't remember). I was paranoid and scared it was going to be super grueling and I was going to hate myself and almost die, but it turned out to be a mix of not even close to that and almost that.

The session was essentially Chris and I getting there a few minutes early, then having to wait for 20 minutes until the trainer was ready for us (scheduled at 7:30, didn't start until almost 8). We talked a bit about what it entailed and how things would work, then we signed a form "in case he kills us", then went onto tho floor to do workouts. Pushups and squats was all we did, and I have to say, three days later, my arms still fucking hurt like a bitch. Then again, I've never worked my muscles to failure before, but it's my goal - find the correct weight to lift, and lift until they fail - then stop. No idea if this is the right way to do it, but it's what I'm going to do without actually hurting myself.

Tomorrow I was going to go to the gym with Chris, but I feel that I should probably go to see aerospace camp people again (tomorrow is setup for the first week of day camp). I might end up being an overnight counselor, maybe not. It would be great for my gas that week, but we'll see.

Diet is going great, I'm almost under 200 pounds. Weighted myself earlier today after a shower and I weighed 201-ish. Almost there, maybe another week of work and I'll be under 200 for the first time is as long as I can remember. The sedentary nature of my work enables me to control my eating during the day, I spread out my eating - instead of lunch all at once, I eat parts at 9, 11, 1, 3, and 5...then dinner around 7 (comprising of as little carbs as possible).

Speaking of work, I love hosting.com. I also hope that my work this week impressed my boss, and that I can continue to do so into the future. The only thing I don't like about it is the hours. Working until 6 means that I have precious little time for me during the week. That being said, it makes me appreciate my weekends and time off even more. And the running in the morning makes me feel like I'm doing something good for myself all day.

And a day off

2010-06-12T23:48:00.003-04:00

I'm convincing Chris to only run on weekdays, so we can use the weekend for resting, and I'm glad we did. I was super tired and slept until 1 p.m., subsequently wasting my day. I'm not doing that tomorrow, blah. Food was better today, though, as we went to BJ's and spent damn near $200 on food, including boca burgers, yogurt, and V8. Then we had a cookout.

It's going to be hard to eat tomorrow, as I'm going out to lunch with Sarah's family, and finding something that fits my diet and doesn't break the bank at a restaurant is going to be damn near impossible. We'll see how it all works out.

Still super nervous about work on Monday, here's to hoping that by the end of Monday, I can post something happy and joyful.

Today is better than yesterday

2010-06-10T11:44:00.003-04:00

For yesterday I felt very very tired all day. So tired that I thought something was wrong with me. I got around 6 hours of sleep last night and feel better, but still tired, so I'm thinking the tired feeling is a combination of not eating enough, not sleeping enough, not drinking enough water, or detox. I'm hoping it's detox.

Went to the range last night, realized that I can in fact get a large box of ammo for my .45, 500 rounds for $200. Or if there's sales tax, $216. So the next time I head over there after I get paid I very well may buy a membership and a box of rounds so I can get them cheap and not be hurting every time I go shooting.

But back to the diet plan. 5 days of running in and I can say that it's getting easier. Not much easier from day to day, but certainly feeling easier overall. I feel healthier already, despite my fatigue and strong desire to not have to get up at fucking 6:30 every morning. But such is life I suppose. If it's what I must do then it is what I will do.

Next Sunday comes the second picture I'll take of myself, here's to hoping that each week I see a notable change in my physique. Once the fat gets down to an attractive level, I'll step up the weight training because by that point I'll be in better shape endurance-wise and will actually be able to see the results.

Good times

2010-06-08T14:57:00.002-04:00

Today was a great day, it's day 3 of the diet and for the first time in a long time, I've gotten myself up early enough to run at the beginning of the day. Yesterday was far worse than today, in terms of my fatigue during my run, though I have a feeling that my body is regaining the energy it had when I ran for the whole summer as I feel great.

I'm having an issue undereating, so I'm trying to snack more during the day, just had a granola bar and coffee, and in half an hour or so I'm going to have cider and fruit, then maybe some rice after a bit more. I hope, after all of this, that I end up with a better outlook on food and can remain healthy for the rest of my life.

Oh, and I got a job. :) As a developer at Hosting.com. I start Monday, and I can't wait.

Weight loss 2k10

2010-06-07T08:36:00.002-04:00

So about a week ago, one of my new roommates and I decided that we would work out, run, and diet this summer because we both are fat, lazy, and really out of shape. I should have posted yesterday, because today is technically day 2. The diet started last night after Chipotle, and is going to consist of something like flexitarian - that is, mainly vegetarian but with some very lean meat occasionally, because we love chicken and fish (both lean and healthy).

It's going to take me awhile to get into the desire for more exercise than what we've done so far, which is just a run followed by a healthy breakfast. Two days of running in and I have to say - when you run in the morning it makes the whole day feel awesome. And though I'm a night person, I'll put up with it for the summer because I need to lose weight and get into zombie shape.

Counting calories starts today, a number that I KNOW will be way over 3000 if I ate what I normally would eat. My goal, with how sedentary I am most of the day (computer guys rarely move), is around 2000 or less. I'll be taking pictures of myself to document my change, and for a way to berate myself if I go a month and there's no obvious change.

No fast food, no red meat, and actually measuring and portioning my food is going to be a challenge. But it's going to be really worth it in the end. My girlfriend and one roommate think it's stupid: "why be a vegetarian when you can just eat healthier?" - spoken by my girlfriend who is known to eat TV dinners as lunch at work because it's "easier", and my other roomate who just laughs and eats delicious and crappy food just to be a jerk, and says that he "knows what it is to eat healthy and chooses not to". My hope is that after 3 months of my new diet (if I can keep it up that long), those jests will cease.

We'll see.

Glitch in the Matrix

2010-02-16T16:24:00.002-05:00

Something strange happened to me today, something that can be easily seen as a cool coincidence, but I see patterns where there are none. Check this out. Over the past four years, I saw unsweetened tea in Trabant maybe once or twice - and that was near the time they started selling the Gold Peak tea in general. Soon, though, they stopped selling the unsweetened tea and you couldn't find it anywhere. Fastforward to yesterday. I was eating with a friend when I commented verbally that I wished they sold unsweetened tea, but alas - it was not the case.

Now today, I go to buy lunch, and what do I see? Unsweetened tea just sitting happily in it's row in the refridgerator. Spooky. Why spooky? Because it just is. And I find patterns where there probably aren't any, so my mind is thinking "whoa you're psychic", or "holy shit man the government is listening to you!" Both of which don't really make any sense. Nevertheless, I'm happy I managed to find unsweetened tea, and hope it shows up more.

Why unsweetened? In a nutshell, I can drink it like water, and drink it guilt free. No sugar = no calories = awesome.

Also awesome is me picking up an additional 5 hours a week at my job, which equates to around $95 more dollars every paycheck. Can't go wrong there.

Excited for classes to start

2010-02-13T18:54:00.004-05:00

Sitting here about to go out to dinner, I find myself excited that classes are about to start. Granted, they officially started last week, but I don't have class on Friday and we had three snow days - so classes haven't really started for me yet. But of my four classes, I have had one meeting of two of them - Automata Theory and Written Communication in Business. The former seems easy, given that I've taken 2-3 classes that require it and gotten a B or better. The latter is, I expect, going to be a lot of pointless work that I'm really going to be able to summarize the entirety of the class in a few pages and a couple templates. But such is many of the classes you take (and it's a discussion/rant for another day) The people in the class seem interesting, and the two that I met (oddly all three Comp Sci students sat together without provocation) will make the class enjoyable given that I'll be able to work with them. I forget their names, but I'm epically terrible with remembering anything.

The other two classes, Software Engineering and Advanced Web Technology (I think that's what the other class is called, it's something like that), are what I've been waiting for - a return to programming. True, I have had the chance to program this whole time, but I like it better when I have a deadline. I don't usually work very actively unless I have a deadline, I'm a lazy SOB like that. The only reason (and this is a bit of a tangent) that I finished as much of my Zombie game that I did was due to the fact that I turned the game into an art project for my ART307 class last semester. In doing so, I made a deadline for myself and finished the site to it's almost-current state (I've added more to it since) in a given time period. That's not to say I'm detrimentally lazy - I get done what I need to get done. And Zombies will eventually get finished, just right now there's so much to do I need to make a to-do list and take it slow, etc. etc. I'll post again about that issue whenever I get the motivation to.

But classes. Well one more thing, that I'm particularly interested in. In the Web Technology class, I have a slight feeling that one piece of the class will be Android Application Development. If this is the case, then hell yes! I have an Android phone, and if the class will be formally teaching us to write Android apps, then I will be able to extrapolate and write apps for submission to the Android Market. What does that mean? Easy money for me when I am jobless in a few months, because let's face it - I ain't getting a job. As an American trying to find a programming job in America, I'm SOL. Though I am trying. Very hard.

Blogger is better than I thought

2010-02-10T15:42:00.003-05:00

My previous couple incarnations of my blog, hosted on my own web space, never really took off. Perhaps now that this "Buzz" thing integrates everything I'll post much more.

Snow Day!

2010-02-10T15:30:00.000-05:00

It's miraculous, when you have nothing to do, you find it very difficult to actually do anything - yet when you have things to do, it's very easy to do nothing (and feels better).