Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category



Happy 2011!

Seems like every year holds major changes for us, and 2010 was no exception, so we’ve included some highlights. As you may remember from last year’s letter, Berck joined the ranks of the unemployed. While he waited for the flying industry to improve, in February we decided to purchase a 1973 Honda CB 350 as a hobby project.

Unfortunately, we had to wait a month between purchasing the bike we dubbed Yoshiko (Japanese for, among other things, “little, pretty, green girl”) and actually getting to ride it, since we really wanted to take a motorcycle safety course first.

Berck has had fun replacing all the worn out parts and tuning the engine. We took many trips during the year around the area just for fun. And we found out an added benefit of owning a motorcycle later in the year…but more on that later.

In March Berck went down to Florida, where his Uncle Stacy had graciously hired him to give him flying lessons. Coming back from dropping him off at the Denver airport, however, Joanna hit a patch of iced slush, having already driven 40 miles of clear pavement, and spun Berck’s car around, which led to another driver crashing into it.

Amazingly, despite driving at Interstate speeds of 75 mph, nobody was hurt badly–the other driver just suffered the effects of her airbag deploying, and Joanna had a giant bruise on her left thigh. But Joanna was charged with a misdemeanor of driving recklessly and causing bodily injury and had to go to court in Castle Rock. Fortunately, because she had a clean driving record, she was given a plea deal of operating a defective vehicle and given a $35 fine.

Joanna got to visit Berck during his six weeks away, and we had some fun on Uncle Stacy’s lake when Berck wasn’t working.

In the meantime, Berck had found the car of his dreams, a ’91 Special Edition British Racing Green Miata with ABS to replace his wrecked car. Instead of flying home, he went to Portland, Oregon to pick it up and drove it to Seattle to Joanna’s sister Stephanie’s house to replace most of what was under the hood, with a little help from a nephew, before driving it back to Colorado.

In June Joanna made a job switch and left the foreclosure firm, which had been forced to cut everyone’s hours down to part-time, to a workers’ compensation firm downtown, where she works full-time and has great insurance benefits, even if she does have to dress up a little. She is currently in charge of going through 30 years’ worth of files, deciding which ones need to be kept and which can be shredded and contacting each client to see if they want to pick up their files first.

In July Berck’s sister Sydney and high school friend Dave came from opposite ends of the country to spend the 4th with us, eat lots of grilled food, explore Bishop’s Castle, hike up part of Pikes Peak, and do some driving in dual convertibles.

Over the summer, the two of us went on a lot of bicycle rides on the nearby New Santa Fe Trail, regularly making the round trip to Palmer Lake (two towns away) on weekends, stopping at O’Malley’s for wings and Blue Moon before heading back–a 32 mile trip total.

As fall arrived, Berck decided to take advantage of all his free time and put it to good use by becoming the newest junior at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, pursuing a computer science major and math minor. If all goes as planned, he’ll graduate in spring of 2012. Here’s where the motorcycle came in handy, since a bike parking permit is substantially cheaper than one for a car, saving us a couple hundred bucks a year. Also, he can park in the parking garage in the spot closest to his classroom buildings.

In October, we each took off a few days to head down to Mobile to celebrate Joanna’s dad Robert’s 65th birthday with his entire family a couple weeks early, then drove up to Highlands, North Carolina with her brother Ben and his wife Amanda to meet Berck’s mom Cynthia and sister Sydney.

Sydney joined us again at a wedding a week later and then for Thanksgiving, at which time she bought us our 7-year-late wedding present, a batch of brewing equipment. Berck has been enjoying his new hobby over his winter break and has already brewed three batches of beer.

Finally, we ended the year with Ben and Amanda, who joined us in Colorado for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Our favorite Christmas present was probably the one from the federal government in the form of extended unemployment benefits for the time being. Despite the past year’s changes, we are continuing to get by, have fun, and enjoy this beautiful part of the country we call home. We are grateful for family, friends, and love and wish you better year than last!

Berck and Joanna

The beers I’ve made so far (and still not actually tasted), have all utilized malt extracts. This is somewhat limiting in terms of the kinds of beers I can make, but quick and easy because someone else has taken malted grain and mashed it for me.

The goal with this beer making is to make seriously good beer on the cheap. Soon, I plan to attempt a clone of one of the best beers in the world. Doing so involves making beer directly from malted grain. Which means mashing said grain, as there are no extracts available made from specialty Belgian grains.

This means that I need yet another piece of equipment. Well, I’d need a mash tun, a lauter tun, and a hot liquor tank if I were doing it the professional way. Since the goal is to do this cheaply, I’m going to make do with a single 10 gallon multi-purpose mash/lauter tun. I constructed one this morning, utilizing a 10-gallon Rubbermaid water cooler from Home Depot. Actually, everything I needed to construct it was available at Home Depot, with exception of some stainless steel 5/8″ washers which I had to pick up from Ace. If anyone else is in the market for 10 gallon water coolers, Home Depot has by far the best price at $39.

Here it is!

On the inside you can see my fancy lautering “manifold” which is just some braided stainless steel faucet hose, with the plastic removed from the inside. The internets say that it should work fine for batch or “English” sparging.

…so they got oven mitts.

Ben got everyone anti-snoring nasal strips.

In the days leading up to Christmas, as the boxes accumulated under the bacon, I noticed two identical boxes addressed to me with the same nondescript return address. I worried that someone had messed up and given me duplicate gifts. Jonah assured me that was simply impossible.

When it came time to open the boxes, it turned out that their contents were identical. One box was from Mom, the other was from Ben, and Jonah was very wrong. But it also worked out perfectly. It turns out that I’d mentioned that I really wanted some Kwak glasses in front of a group of people, all of whom got the message! Woohoo! Two isn’t enough, but four is perfect. Thanks, guys!

It’s now snowing, and we’re hoping Neal still makes it down for Pizza. Here’s Ben being Ben.

Ben and Amanda have an excellent end-of-the-year tradition of coming to Colorado. They keep coming back even though we never feed them.

This year, Ben treated us all to brunch at the Broadmoor. Jonah and I have been talking for years about how we should do this, but it’s pricey and requires reservations. Ben thought ahead this year and got us reservations several weeks ago, but even then the only seating remaining was at 9am, which is when they open.

We have something of a tradition of suiting up at least once every year. It started the first year when Ben, Jonah, and Amanda all got suited up to greet me on my return from a job interview. How I Met Your Mother was new, and it seemed like the thing to do.

9am on Boxing Day seemed terribly early, but somehow we managed to get down to the Broadmoor at 8:45, only to discover that they absolutely do not seat anyone until 9am. Which meant there was a healthy line just to get a table.

Brunch at the Broadmoor is a buffet, and it’s possibly the only buffet worth bothering about in the world. The vast array of options is overwhelming, and I suspect no one could possibly try everything. I gave it a pretty good shot. With many return trips, I ate:

Lamb, antelope, prime rib, duck, ham, eggs benedict, biscuits and gravy, salmon, oysters, crab legs, assorted charcuterie, mashed potatoes, scalloped potatoes, cheese blintzes and a cup of what was probably the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had. Jonah seemed particularly enamored with the seafood, of which there were dozens of varieties. She had, I think, 4 kinds of salmon, of which I tried a bite of two and they were very good.

I totally neglected entire sections of the buffet. There was much traditional breakfast like pancakes, waffles, eggs, a bespoke omelet station. The array of desserts was astounding, but at that point I was only able to manage nibbles of some really insane things like “port jello shots” (Amanda’s name for them). In addition, Ben had apparently mentioned that we were there to celebrate Jonah and my anniversary, so they brought out some kind of ridiculous raspberry cake with raspberry sauce and a candle just for us.

After brunch, despite having consumed a truly frightening amount of food, we managed to head down to Manitou Springs for Skeeball, still suited up. Manitou Springs has a huge vintage arcade area that takes up a half-dozen buildings. They’ve got pretty much every old arcade game you can think of from decades past, with nothing more modern than the early 90’s or so–before video games got insane. They’re almost all $0.25, but we never play anything other than Skeeball.

The Skeeball machines are vintage, purely mechanical and awesome. You have to pull a lever to get your balls, and you have to be sure to hold the lever long enough, or it’ll eat your quarter without providing all 9 wooden balls. The return springs on some of the levers are a bit weak, and if you don’t make sure the lever is fully returned, the machine won’t count score.

By the time I was a kid, skeeball machines all had 100 point tubes in the corners, but delightfully, the machines in manitou springs were created before that fad, meaning that the 50 point at the top of the center is the maximum score per ball. I’ve never liked the 100-point corners as it’s too complicated to come up with a good strategy.

We spent a ridiculously long time playing skeeball. Even with 4 people, it takes a long time to go through $10 worth of quarters on $0.25 skeeball. I held the high score for a long time, 290 points, a feat I even duplicated. But then Ben smashed my score with an awe-inspring 310. Jonah probably had the highest average score, as her strategy was to aim for the 30 point tube. Amanda declared herself the “Winner” most often, because her machine was the only one whose “WINNER” light seemed to function. They all had mechanical bells that let out a delightfully pathetic ding whenever you hit the 50 point tube.

In case anyone is wondering, Skeeball is most fun when played in a suit.

After having tossed the last of our balls down the lane, we gathered our tickets. Despite the vintage skeeball, the arcade had a very modern ticket redemption system where you feed the tickets into a machine, it counts them, then prints out a ticket with the total number of tickets. I approve of this modernization. Amanda picked out a couple of plastic dinosaurs that matched her dress, then herded us all into a photobooth. The photobooth was out of order, but that just made it cheaper for us since we had our own camera.

At this point, it was noon or so, and we decided it was high time to move on to more serious drinking. We headed downtown and wound up at Bristol Brewery. The brewery is large and distributes their very popular Laughing Lab far and wide, but the bar attached to the brewery has a very neighborhood feel.

It also has a shuffleboard table. Ben requested shuffleboard pucks and stated he knew how to play. This turns out to have been a blatant lie. After investigating the rules on his Droid for awhile, he showed us how to play. After a few minutes, some folks in the bar came over to show us how it’d work a lot better if we turned the pucks right side up…

Eventually, someone bought everyone in the bar a round of drinks, which excited Jonah to no end because she was convinced that never actually really happens.

After a few hours at Bristol, it was time for our movie. The local indie cinema is awesome, in that it also sells local beer. We got there 45 minutes before the movie was scheduled to start because we figured, correctly, that Boxing Day would be a hugely popular movie day. The line was longer than I’ve ever seen at the Kimball. Actually, I’ve never seen a line before, and this line went way out into the street.

It turns out everyone was there to see True Grit, and we’d made the correct choice for the day to watch Black Swan. We’ll go back and see True Grit later in the week.

It turns out the Kimball has three screens, when I’d thought there was only two. Black Swan was showing in the smallest of the three, which was upstairs in what seems like an attic converted into a theater. We sat in the second to last row, which I think was the perfect distance from the screen. I think there were only 10 rows, the seats were very comfortable, and it made me realize we should go to the Kimball more often than the once a year we usually manage.

Black Swan itself was good, as long as you know what you’re in for. Aaronofsky isn’t for the faint of heart, and this was as Aaronofsky as it gets. Despite not being remotely interested in ballet, I enjoyed the movie. That could be because Natalie Portman finally has hair again. It may also be one of the hottest movies she’s ever done, including an excellent lesbian sex scene with Mila Kunis that nearly garnered the movie an NC-17 rating.

After movie, we headed down to Oscars for some more Laughing Lab and some fried oysters. Despite it being dinner time, we were still completely full from breakfast, and the oysters were all we ate for dinner.

All in an all, a legen…wait for it….dary boxing day. There’s a few pictures up in the gallery.