Kamikaze!!!!!!

I'm mixing them, I'm drinking them... woe is me!

More tomorrow...

Holy crap, I got a free beer!

Not only that, but I bought a cordless trimmer for the yard work. No more 50' extension cord for ME!

Free beer is a cool story. There's a gas station just one mile from my house, and they have the best selection of craft beers I've ever seen anywhere in my life. It is just a little convenience store, that is packed to the rafters with beer and wine. I don't know... 150 varieties of beer and another 150 varieties of wine? A fucking shit-ton of booze, especially for a little convenience store in the middle of nothing in a medium-sized suburb. Me and the guy who runs the place have 'bonded' over the beer over the years. I'll steer him towards new stuff to bring into the store, and he'll point out the new beers I haven't tried yet.

Which is awesome.

Recently, he got in a new beer. Something called "Ten Fidy Imperial Stout" from Oskar Blues Brewery in Colorado. It comes in a can. IN A CAN! And a 4-pack costs... $14.99. With tax, that's $4 per beer, IN A CAN! IN THE STORE!! I'm not paying that! Even if the "Ten Fidy" means that the alcohol content is 10.50%... which is DOUBLE AWESOME!

Well... turns out I didn't have to. Today I went in to pick up a sixer of Dogfish Head Raison D'etre Ale. Good old Don rings up my beer, and as he hands me the receipt he says "did you see those beers in the can? They're so expensive... do you want one? Let me go grab you one!" I was a bit confused, but he was already on the move. As he's walking towards them, he tells me that the supplier dropped off a 4-pack with a missing beer that he had written off as damaged and lost, and gave it to him for free. As he's telling me that when he got the free 3-pack he thought about me and figured I'd like to have one, he's putting two of the three beers into the ice cream freezer. He comes back around to the front of the store, hands me the third beer and says "let me know how you like it Joe!"

Well, it has been a few hours, the beer got cold and got drunk, and it was incredible. Pretty damned excellent. Like a Guinness, but almost like a REAL Guinness that pours slow and thick. Just really excellent and flavorful with a great aroma and it is really smooth going down, although the strength of the alcohol is higher than the level of the taste, so you could easily make the mistake of drinking too many of them too quickly. Not that I'd ever buy this, not at $4 a can... but it is nice, and I'm really happy that I got to try it.

Did I mention my new trimmer?

It is a Ryobi One+ trimmer from Home Depot. I've already got a bunch of the cordless power tools with the old Ni-Cd batteries, but those batteries are starting to die and not hold a charge anymore. They have new Lithium-Ion batteries that cost more, but last a bunch longer. The cool thing is that the batteries are so expensive that it makes more sense to buy more tools that come with batteries. The REALLY cool thing is that the batteries are forwards and backwards compatible. My old batteries will run the new tools, and my new batteries will run the old tools.

So, one of my old batteries died. Instead of buying a new Lithium-Ion batter for $90, I got a new cordless trimmer for $120. Pretty neat, right? When my next battery dies, I'm getting a leaf blower!

To get serious for a minute: I have been on the waiting list for a couple of cool overdrive pedals for almost 6 months now. I finally got the email telling me that my pedals were ready, and I turned them down to get a damned weed trimmer. I guess I'm getting old, but you know what? That's OK with me. I've got more or less enough toys to get me through, and what I need are tools like a cordless trimmer so I'm not taking an hour to do a 20 minute job because I'm playing cord wrangler all over the property. Yeah, I think I might actually be MORE than OK with it.

My house smells so good!!!

I've been working all sorts of new cooking angles since we've been back from Puerto Rico. I've been doing more cold stuff like cheeses and sliced meat and chilled shellfish in light sauces and dressings. I've been experimenting with various and sundry new ingredients like mango, plantain, and calabaza squash. I've gained a new appreciation for stuffed olives.

And I've been baking.

Not really baking, mind you. Baby steps. I'm baking the pre-made pizza dough from the grocery store. So far garlic knots and bread sticks stuffed with cheese and pepperoni. The garlic knots are the big hit so far, although I'm still working on it. The topping is some mix of butter and olive oil and pesto with a little sea salt, but I'm still working on the proportions. Also, trying to figure out the whole rising bread business, which is confusing. How much will it rise as it sits out, how much more will it rise after I bake it?

I should have made 12 knots with my current batch of dough, because the six I made are each bigger than my fist. Which is sweet, except my wife can only get a third of one if she's going to eat the rest of the meal. The rest of the meal BTW is chicken thigh pieces in a mushroom(baby bella, shitake, and white mushroom blend) cream sauce over steamed jasmine rice, with a carrot, zucchini and pepper medley on the side.

So, I couldn't sleep last night...

...

I guess the biggest reason was that I've spent the last few days trapped in the world created by Jeff Somers. I've been a huge fan since his first "Avery Cates" book a couple of years ago, and I got the last tow books in the series over the weekend. I think I started reading the fourth book on  Friday, and I finished both books by the following Tuesday. Finished reading, at least... it may be a few more days of digesting.

We're all aware of my politics. I'm generally progressive, respectful of profits and against profiteering.

These books have seemed like an expression of the worst of the political positions I'm against. Not in any remotely obvious or overt way. Not even in a covert or disguised way. Just a series of books that play out the libertarian-ish outlook to its logical conclusion. Does humanity survive? It comes down to the wire.

Want to know more? Read the books!! Jeff Somers. Avery Cates. Get some. NOW.

Quick update: Books I've read update

Sorry folks... I sort of got lazy and haven't updated that feature in a couple of months. It isn't that I'm not reading anything, but I sort of hit a slow patch and took forever to finish what should have been a two-afternoon read.

Anyhoo, I'm caught up and quickly closing in on 40 books for the year. I had hoped to read at least one book a week, so I'm just a little bit ahead of schedule. Can I read 100 books this year?


....



....



....




...Ummmm....





NO!!!!!!


What are you, crazy? I can't read a hundred books in a year! Of course, it isn't like I don't have a stack lined up...  here's the next seven, unless something new comes out and skips ahead of the queue.

So, my wife has left me...

... not the way you think, put away the hankies.

Back in 2005, George R. R. Martin released the fourth book in his huge epic fantasy series, called A Feast For Crows. My wife and I had been married about 8 months at that point. Ever since, she's been talking about the next book in the series. No big deal in 2006. Nothing to worry about in 2007. Come around 2008 my wife starts wondering. By 2009 my wife had started turning into a nagging crow over the whole thing. 2010 and she sort of burned herself out on it and stopped complaining so much over something that I couldn't help... although she still mentioned it from time to time.

Not her fault exactly. After four rather large books, Martin realized that he had written himself into some sort of corner that he couldn't figure a way out of. Apparently the books are sort of plotless, and progress almost randomly from place to place without any momentum. It is like "here's a thing that happened" and then "here's something else that happened"... and not much in the way of through-line to link them all together. It seems like Martin created a playground that he's so happy with that he didn't create any games with clear rules or ways to win or lose. That makes it hard to get from beginning to end, don't you think? I'm not getting involved... I'm still smoking and singed from Stephen King's Dark Tower debacle.

Come 2011. Martin announces an HBO series. Then he announces a publishing date for his fifth book in the series. Then everyone on the Internet plus my wife starts freaking out. Then finally we get to July 12, 2011. And the book actually comes out. And I'm at the bookstore before the book makes it to a shelf, and I buy it. And my wife was too busy yesterday to start reading it.

... and now I'm a widower until she finishes the book. Now I know how the wives of obsessive sports fans must feel. That's cool though, because my wife has sat through a few of my obsessions. We work like that... we're the same type, so we tolerate each other when the obsessions happen. It is better than the alternative, which is a chick saying to me "What's the big deal? That's just War Trek or whatever, Wookies and the Enterprise and lightphasers, and I don't know why you care?!"

Yeah, this is MUCH better!

Eureka!

The TV show!

Part 2 of the fourth season starts tomorrow night on Syfy. Gosh I loves this show. My wife and I were looking for something to watch in between the end of the spring season and the start of the summer shows. Netflix has the first three seasons up for streaming, so we watched them all over the last few weeks. We've also watched the first of two discs for the first half of the current season.

It is  AWESOME!!

It is the story of the smartest town in America, and the average guy who is the sheriff and voice of reason. The set-up is that back in the 1950s Albert Einstein convinced the government to set up a town where the best and brightest could live and work together to produce the best science possible. 50+ years later, Eureka is at the cutting edge of 22nd Century science... which could get to be 21st Century science if they can work out the bugs. The high school science fair is one part cool and nine parts potentially fatal.

Our hero is Jack Carter, former Federal Marshall who along with his teenager daughter stumbles on the town by accident, helps them solve a mystery, and ends up replacing their old sheriff when he's injured in an experiment gone horribly wrong. Carter has the lowest IQ in the town (110-range) but he's a great detective and has a knack for reading people and making intuitive leaps. That's useful in a town where people are great at creating crazy technology but can't see the forest for the trees.

It is a really fun show. Every episode is a "science experiment gone wrong" but each episode is really about the great cast of characters and how their personal issues are reflected in the bigger near-catastrophes they face. They all feel like real people in unlikely situations, which really keeps the show grounded and lets you ignore the techno-babble explanations of what's going on.

The only rough spot with the show is that you absolutely have to watch it from the very beginning. There are a couple of time travel episodes that completely reboot the show and change everything around. If you watch season 1 and then skip to season 4, you'll be really confused as to why people who used to date are now barely speaking to each other, or why one person with a disability is not only cured but was never actually disabled at all.

Other than that, go watch the damned thing! Mondays on Syfy.

KNIVES!!!!

I'm just a little bit obsessed with these new Ka-bar Zombie Killer knives. Yeah!

A couple of these things are better than 15" long... not knives as much as short machetes. Not that I'm complaining... I WANT!!!! 

Gimme gimme gimme gimme. NOW!! Zombies could be right outside dammit!