Been a whole season since I blogged
Whoah… what happened to summer. Last time I blogged I was on vacation, and now I feel like I definitely need another one. Things around here have been fairly crazy.
Beer Brewing Continues
A few batches have come and gone since May - some good - some not so good. In June we sampled our Blackberry Wheat and found it was good. We brewed a brown ale. In July, my brother carted the Brown and the Wheat up to MI to our parent’s, where several family members and friends of the family saw that it was good, and helped us drink a good portion of it. In late July we made a Pilsner - an attempted 10-gallon batch that we only got about 7 gallons out of. The verdict is still out on that one - it needs to lager a bit longer. A few weeks later I made an Irish Red with my friend Jason. That one came out really well (I still need to send a bunch of Jason - I haven’t forgotten J). The week after that, my brother and I made a brown ale. Something went wrong with that one. The yeast never settlted out of it. It’s got some funky off-flavors. I’m hoping that it will eventually age and become drinkable, but it doesn’t look good so far. We’re getting ready to do a clone of Magic Hat #9 this weekend.
Kitchen Cabinets are DONE
After a long battle consuming several years, I’ve finally managed to get all of my kitchen cabinet doors stripped, repainted, and hung. What a mess that’s been. I’m thoroughly glad it’s over.
Bathroom Renovations
I’m in the middle of fixing up the bathroom. Of course this has been like any project around this house… what starts out as a simple project - I’m just going to repaint and put a new medicine cabinet in - has become a major undertaking. I’m going to put in a larger medicine cabinet, and some proper GFI outlets, which means I gotta make a bigger hole in the wall, move some studs, run some electrical cable, etc. And last night I almost killed myself cleaning - a heavy concentration of TSP and bleach does wonders against mold and mildew, but in a small room such as a bathroom, it can be deadly - even with the door and the window open and the fan blowing.
Survey’s Up
I completed my first major freelance coding project recently. This one took a lot out of me. In addition to my regular job, I put 80 hours of work into it. It was a fun project, and I learned a lot of neat tricks in PHP/mySQL and generally advanced myself in knowledge. With all my previous PHP/mySQL work for lunabyte systems and working with (hacking at) several other scripts, I felt I had a fairly good grasp of the language/environment, and was probably an avarage coder. I think I’m advancing past that point gradually, and my bag of tricks is groing substantially. Unfortunately, this is starting to seem like the project that will never end, because after two weeks the clients are still finding all manor of changes and modifications that need to be done. I really noticed that it’s almost impossible to do a project right without having the time to schedule meetings with clients, properly review requirements and specifications, etc.
