Not So Famous…

We found this video a couple summers back, and it made us laugh a lot.  I’m posting it now to get everyone looking forward to brew day!

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/flash/play/653/

Wooo!!!

It’s been a long time since I brewed last, and I really miss it.  I’ve been thinking about what I want to do, and I think what I’m going to be brewing within the month is a 140 Shilling (140/-) Scotch Ale.

The shilling measurement for naming Scotch Ales is a highly debated topic among beer historians.  One of the more plausible explanations I’ve heard was that the shilling denoted the cost of the barley used to produce it.  The higher shilling ales definitely required more barley, and more efficient barley…barley that produces more sugars when mashed. However, this explanation falls somewhat short when you consider that the price of a bushel of barley would fluctuate with supply and demand, so it wouldn’t be exactly consistent.  It’s possible that the shilling measurement just stuck at a time when barley cost X shillings per bushel, and became the standard for measuring the relative strength of the finished product.

Still, it’s a debated topic, and the most important thing you should take away from the debate is that a higher shilling count generally means a higher original gravity, and thus a higher alcohol content after fermentation.

Specific Gravity measures the density of a liquid related to water.  A liquid with a 1.000 specific gravity is exactly equal to that of water, while higher ratings are more dense.  The higher the density of wort (unfermented beer), the greater the concentration of sugars, and the more food for my alcohol-producing yeast!  When they eat more, they produce more alcohol, so we get a stronger beer.  A sipping beer, if you will.

For what it’s worth, a medium original gravity (OG) for wort is about 1.030 to 1.040.  A pretty high OG is 1.050 - 1.080.  The 140/- Scotch Ale has a projected OG of 1.100, which is 110% the density of water.  The estimated alcohol by volume percentage is around 10%!!!!

The other thing that I’m pretty stoked about with this brew day is the fact that I’m going to try my first all-grain brew.  (Maybe.)  The reason I say “maybe” is that getting a wort with an OG of 1.100 is not a simple thing.  More on that in a later post, though.

Tomorrow, I’m going to the local homebrew store, and I’m going to check out how this whole thing is going to proceed.  I’ve got some questions I’d like to ask the proprietor, as well as I need some parts to finish off my homebuilt mashing tun.  (I’ll have to explain that in a later post, however, because right now, I’ve got to go!)

I’ll post dates on the upcoming brew day, however, and anyone who is in the area is more than welcome to show up.  I can guarantee that fun will be had by all!!!

What happened for me to be so happy?  A little background…

We recently moved from the front apartment of a duplex to renting an actual house.  It’s a pretty nice place, even if it has a bit of a spider problem. Well, on to the happiness of today.

To begin with, the chemical strikes we ordered on the strongholds of the arachnid army happened today.  (I was informed that the strikes were chemical rather than biological…whatever.  It kills them, which means it achieves the desired end result.)  :) But the amazing part is this…Kim had the guy spray our basement while he was hitting the pockets of resistance!  WOOOOO!

The other thing about moving into this place is the fact that it has a basement, which up until now, has been an extremely Chris-unfriendly place.  Spider webs….lots of spider webs.  Gabe went down there to do some stuff with the phone lines, and said there were no spiders.  However….I didn’t believe him.

Kim went down there today, and cleaned out all the webs and everything.  She also said there were no spiders.  I believe her.  I still think Gabe is lying, though.  (Logically, that doesn’t work, I know…doesn’t matter: Gabe is a liar.)

Anyway, the culmination of all this is that I went into the basement this evening and stayed there for 5-7 minutes looking around with Kim…and lived to tell the tale.

What’s more, this basement is going to ROCK THE HOUSE for the purpose of fermenting beer: something that needs cool temperatures to slow down the process and avoid fruity esters, which are not pleasant in most styles of beer.  I am way stoked!  Brew Day within the month, people!!!!  Be prepared!

Dark Passion Play arrived today.  Nightwish has catapulted into my top 5 bands with a vengeance.  I will say more later, but right now, I am in musically stunned silence.

In organizing our raiding party into the further reaches of the battlefield, we discovered several strong pockets of resistance. These resistance cells appear to be leaderless, as we have not discovered any generals among their midst.  They also appear to be without any recon intelligence of any kind, as they are completely scoutless.  Yes, dear readers, these pockets of resistance appear to be composed entirely of the soldiers of the arachnid army. 

Our blanket biological strikes appear to have had no effect on them, but upon discovering these vile invaders, surgical biological strikes seem devastating to their ranks. We have called in blanket strikes yet again, in an attempt to eradicate these foes once and for all.

From the battlefield, this is Commander Dow with the Arachnid Strike Force.

I’m sure I’ve mused upon this subject enough to annoy most of my readers, but it’s an important topic.

So what does makes someone a Christian?  Is it enough to believe that Christ existed and died on the cross?  No.

Is it enough to believe, even, that Jesus was a good man?  Or is it enough to believe that he was a moral teacher?  Are any of these things enough?  Not according to the Bible.

So what about believing that Jesus was the only Son of God?  The demons believe, and they’re smart enough to tremble because of it…but they’re not Christians.  That he died on the Cross to save mankind from their sins?  That manages to be both inaccurate AND inadequate!

So what makes someone a Christian?  Being born in America is not enough.  Believing in God is not enough.  Believing that we ought to be the best people we can possibly be is not enough. The only thing that can make you a Christian is believing that Jesus Christ is God, that He died on the cross to save His people from their sins, and trusting in His substitutionary work on the Cross as the ONLY way to heaven is what makes you a Christian.

So if you believe that there are many ways to God and that Jesus is just one of these ways, you are not a Christian.  If you believe that the Bible is a set of suggestions on how we can be better people, you’re not a Christian.  If you believe that Christianity is more of a social gospel than a way to save sinful people from eternal, justified damnation, then you are not a Christian.

Christ’s claims, themselves, ought to be enough to disabuse you of the notion that Jesus was anything other than a lunatic, liar, or the only Lord there is.

This may sound arrogant, but the problem with that claim is that it’s only arrogance if it’s not true that Christianity is the ONLY way to heaven.  It’s not arrogance if everything I have said in this blog post is correct.  And it’s not arrogance on my part anyway, because I’m not saying this as my own words.  I’m saying that this is what the Bible says…this is what Jesus, Himself said.  It’s not arrogance because on my own, I seek out other ways of being a Christian than to die to myself and life in Christ.  I know darn well that I am as guilty as anyone else, more so, of trying to make my own way in this world.

And I thank the Lord that He shelters me in the palm of His hand, keeping me from evil, and delivering me from temptation. Don’t look at me as an example, for I am a poor one. Look to Christ, who was crucified, and paid the price for the sins of His people. He is the example.  He is my Lord and my God.

Kim and I walk the battlefield, observing the carnage all around us.  War is hell, and none more so than arachno-war.

Our front porch, the doorway to the Human HQ, corpses lay strewn about the landscape. Their little arachnid faces fixed in the gory rictus of death, they stare at me. Our victory is apparent in the number of their dead vs. the number of our own. They didn’t really have a chance, since we were using biological weapons.

We are too busy regrouping to see what damage has been wrought in the yard areas. We are pleased to see that no enemy troops have been spotted within the confines of our headquarters and are organizing a raiding party to go out to the other battlefield areas this weekend. I know not what I will find, but it very well may involve me screaming like a little girl and running back into the known safe areas.

I have had a soldier with the Human Army check out the devastation on the porch, and he has identified at least one of the large corpses as a Wolf Spider. The muscle of the invasion was apparently carried out by the Wolf Spiders, who proved the most resistant to the biological weapons we unleashed.

Saturday will show whether our tactical strikes have been successful…

So, Kim called the Pest Control people today, and was told that creepy crawlies are to be expected, but that we should only see them through today.  Ok, fine…I’ll fight this battle for today…

Armed with my trusty can of Raid, I advanced to the front porch, and there found a medium-sized spider.  It quickly fell beneath the rage of my can of aerosol death. I then turned to the outside of the house, knowing I would find more…

On the outside of the house, I found 2 more of the extremely large spiders.  I am beginning to think of these bad boys as the real muscle of the invasion.  These are the armor.  However, no armor has yet been invented to stand against the mighty Raid.  These two fell as did the others.

I found a casualty black widow on the side of the house. Such signs are indeed heartening, causing me to wonder if indeed the tide of this battle is turning.

I see the black widows as the generals of this battle.  Brown house spiders and daddy longlegs are the infantry, easily dispatched, but for the sheer number of them.  Finally, the jumping spiders are the scouts/recon force, of course.  These ever-present, fast moving scouts have been spotted all over the house, but we kill them as we see them.

Stay tuned for up-to-date war coverage. Solidarity, my fellow humans, against the arachnid invaders.

I’m not going to say our new place has a spider problem, but…well, yes I will.  Our new place has a spider problem.  Lately, I’ve been finding spiders on a nightly basis.  Now, many of you might have to deal with this on a regular basis, but I feel I must let you know that I don’t have to, and I don’t want to have to.  I am a severe arachnophobe, which makes Gabe laugh so hard, I wonder if he’ll survive.

Anyway, this spider problem is not do-able for me on a long-term basis.  No no no.  So we have started up a pest control service, which came for the initial cleaning today.  Let me tell you that today has not been a good day for my arachnophobia.

I don’t know what your experience has been with pest control, but mine has been that when you spray for pests, they come out of the woodwork…  When we got home today, after the savior of all arachnophobia came and sprayed, this is a catalogue of what I found:

1. Smallish spider on the wall to the right of our door.  No big deal.  This is the kind of thing I can usually deal with without too many problems.

2. GIGANTIC SPIDER OF DEATH ON THE LIP OF OUR PATIO!  Please excuse the caps, but I think I almost passed away when I saw it.  I can’t explain to you how large this spider was except to say it was the largest non-tarantula spider I have ever seen in my entire life.  When Kim hit it with the Raid, it ran so fast, I almost died again.  This is the nastiest thing I’ve ever witnessed, and if I never see anything like it again, I’ll be a happy little pansy.

3. Black Widow spider in our kitchen.  This one caused me to freak out a lot, actually.  We’ve found a widow in our front shower and one on our porch.  The sprayer dude told Kim he found and sprayed 2 more outside, and Kim just squashed one on our porch a few minutes ago.  If we’re still finding spiders like this tomorrow, you can bet there will be one large, irate man on the phone to this pest control service.

In all, I’m not exactly thrilled.  I know that spraying for bugs causes them to move…a lot, but if the spray just sort of annoys them, then I’m down for using some stronger spray.  I’ll keep you all posted, if I don’t die of a fear-induced heart infarction.

I ordered a BUNCH of things from Amazon using money I got for my birthday a couple weeks ago, and I was pretty stoked to order these things.  I got a new keyboard (like the old one, only more awesomer), a memory card for my mp3 player (doubling its storage), a video game for the Wii (Metal Slug anthology FTW!), and Nightwish’s newest CD, Dark Passion Play.

The memory card came on Friday, which was way cool.  Turned my 2GB MP3 player into a 4GB MP3 player.  WOO!  My keyboard is supposed to get to my house tomorrow…also cool.  I have no idea when my Wii game will get here, but it supposedly shipped early last week, so I expect today or tomorrow.

The Nightwish CD, however, has not shipped, 1 week after ordering it. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten Free Super Saver shipping from Amazon. It used to be that they would ship it pretty quickly whether you ordered Super Saver or not, but no longer, apparently. And yes, the CD was In Stock, according to the product page.

The really suckything is that Gabe just ordered the CD (1 week later), and it says that it should ship today.  :(  Figures…

I’m never getting free shipping again.