Two Beer recipes- Ah ha ha

8/1 (but really 7/31)
Recipe:
LALVIN, EC-118 saccharomyes bayanus
1/2 kil Muntons dry malt-amber
1/2 kilo sugar in the raw
"Some" (Eyeballs down of a bear of) honey

1/4 c. priming sugar
1/4 c. amber dry malt
3/4 c. lactose

Dissolve misxture in two bottles of cider. Jessi whisked like a fiend. Smells nice and appley. Sidenote: Carrie, in her drunkeness, decided that we should wash bottles tonight for a brew to be bottled next week.
->No more honey in the house, need to improvise.
Sugar is disolved, removing from heat
Dump 1 1/2 bottles into the carboy first so's it doesn't crack
Let mixture get to 75 degrees and add the yeasties (Carrie is drunk, so take the rest of the instructions with a grain of salt)
LALVIN is added
Add a little bit of wort to your water to get it spot on
Perfect at 105 degrees
Add yeasties. Let sit without stirring at least 15 minutes
It went up and down
ADd 2.25 tsps of Pecitic Enzyme to the wort
Swirl the yeast mixture into the carboy
Add Wort and swirlie, swirlie, swirlie
Add rest of the cider
Run cheap vodka through tubing
Put the Blow off on
Blow off initiated! Go yeast!

Make sure the spigot on the bucket is upside down and turned with handle to the left. While siphoning (or "racking") cider into bucket, wait until about 2 inches are in the bucket, add ingredients while gently stirring in one direction. When suction starts to fail, lift wand, keeping on side of bucket, above level of cider. Make sure NOT to suck dregs from carboy (Especially since Carrie is going to refrigerate and culture the yeast, 'cause this is good yeast, not evil yeast)

One beer - ha ha ha

Weissenbier X2 7/14/09
Drunk as [expletive deleted] (ED)
Can Preumium Premium Imported
Brewcraft Bavarian Wheat 1.5 kg
Instructions call for 1 kilogram dextrose, have 700gr
Am dumping all this [ED] into the wort
Now we need to add malt 'cause we have lots of malt
300 grams of malt ed Barley are going in if I can find a funnel (very chunky) (I need a bigger funnel, this has a [ED] screen in it.)
Stir until the chunks are not chunky any more
Dance and sing while stirring
If not disintegrating, whack with a pastry cutter a la Jojo
Eventually, being like flour, but not really, it will melt
Sacrifice local honey (1 squirt) so's Carrie's allergies will get better
Add more water to temper it a bit
Turn off heat
Doesn't matter if their are still chunks 'cause the yeasties will eat them (If you run out, find more liquor)
Before putting the yeast in, make sure it's cool enough, that they won't die
Pour pot through funnel into fermenter. Add yeast as pouring
("C'mon little guys, make beer")
Add more water to de-glaze the pot. Use rest to fill up the fermenter.

Indiana 1-Becca's wedding

So, I've recently gotten to spend the last three days with one of my dearest friends, Miss Becca Cross. I flew out of Bozeman on Wednesday, hoping to be in Indy and at her house by 8 so we could have a pseudo-bachelorette party. However, the weather had other plans. Tornadoes, in fact, in Denver. I was there an extra two and a half hours. I got in around midnight. It was not good. I was a little hampered by the fact that I'm used to western towns where the designers started laying things out in grids and Becca and Matt live in an old part of Indiana. The roads all have similar names and they're all twisty and curvy. Blergh. At least I got a rental car with a sunroof and got to rock down the freeway. Love being back in the Midwest. My skin... instantly plumper. I LURV it.
Thursday, Becca and I stopped at her parents house to pick up the flowers for her wedding. Unfortunately, three of them had started drooping. So we went to Fresh Foods, which I have never been to before so that was pretty exciting. Then we drove down to her family's farm. It is so beautiful down there. All green and purty.
Friday, we started running around picking things up for the wedding. I got to hang around with the Skelton side of the family and they were so warm and welcoming, it was just fun to be there. Pizza and Zombie Nerf guns rounded out the evening.
Saturday was a little hot for the wedding, but it ended up being so... beautiful. The tent was set up in a field behind the house and the ceremony was held underneath a natural bower of trees. A little warm, but with a short ceremony, was totally doable. The food from the Schnitzelbank it was just a wonderful evening. I am so happy I got to go and am so sincerely happy for Matt and Becca. Yay!

Gardiner weekend

All of last week was uber-busy. It was our last Arts Council performance and I was the lead. This was the performance that was supposed to happen in February but was cancelled due to snow. Another little spar thrown in the works was that we had promised to provide dinner, but the woman who usually does that for us was called out of town. So, I pulled Emily and Allie into the mix. Thank goodness they were willing to help because I had NO clue how to make chili.
Between kickboxing, rugby, Parks-to-Paradise race meeting and everything else that was going on, I was pretty much not getting home 'til 8 or 9 and trying to get everything fixed up on all of my breaks and lunch. Saturday morning was the start to a nice relaxing day.
Our performers were supposed to show up at 6 with the show starting at 7. Well, one of them showed up at 6:55. Thank goodness Gardiner is so relaxed. I myself am not usually relaxed. In fact, I almost started freaking out because I wasn't panicking. But really, the worst thing that might happen would be that we'd sell off the dinner and have to refund some season tickets. No biggie. Especially since I'd get my post-show cocktail that much faster.
Then, Saturday, Josh came down to look for jobs and we got to spend some time together. Good weekend.

Guatemala-Thursday

Well, we started off the day at the country house but there was nothing much to do so we all tripped on over to the city house. Where we poured concrete. Yep. It was concrete. Again.
We had lunch and then went to get the wood for the benches. Once again, the kids loved seeing me and I got hugs and high-fives all around. It was freaking awesome. The benches were cheaper to build so Todd fixed up a plan and we went to work. Well, they only let me do a little because, though I dearly love me some power tools, I'm not incredibly proficient.
That night was Miriam's birthday. Miriam was the owner, with her husband Gilberto, of the hotel where we were staying, Marelyn's mother. So Marelyn made a cake, some of Miriam's friends and family came and the family got a DJ. Yes, across the street in the hotel's garage, there was a DJ. It was the thirteen of us dancing our hearts out for the second night in a row. It was fun and exhausting and I was so glad there was only one more day of work because I was just tired of having so much fun.

Guatemala-Wednesday

Wednesday, hump day. I was looking forward to being halfway done. In the morning, I helped do more concrete in the country house. We finished up in time for lunch. After that was more ESL with the pastor and his wife. I also helped bring wood from the top tier (the pastor's house) into one of the school classrooms. So there were these great long boards that I was carrying one end of. When we walked onto the school grounds, all of the kids started yelling "Jessica, Jessica." I felt like a rock star. After putting the boards down, we noticed that one of the things the kids were learning was English. One of their sentences was "My name is Linda."
Well.
One of the women in our group said, "My name is Linda!" And the kids looked at her wonderingly and then very obediently parroted, "My name is Linda." It was so... darn... cute!
That night was pretty fun as we all went to Zacapa and danced the night away with another CALMS group from Indy. Okay, our group danced and the other group kind of sat. The band was awesome especially since it was Jovanni (Yo-van-nee)'s marimba band. Very, very fun.
Only depressing part of the day came from the dentist's group. They had to pull out the permanent molars of an eight-year-old. Just eight years old and her teeth were that bad. Blergh.

Dude

Dude, I'm, like, totally loving this video. There're some definite language issues but this is totally representative of discussions I've had while drunk and talking about eighties cartoons.