Anthony Rants

How easily putting off a blog update turns from days to weeks to months is always astounding to me. The nice thing about waiting so long to write is that there is always so much to share after a hiatus... that is of course if you still have people reading your blog to share with :)

First things first, the really big news: Anna left for Chicago yesterday to take the BAR today and tomorrow. She has been studying really hard for the past few months and I am sure she is going to do fantastic. I can't tell you how much of a relief it will be when she is finally done studying.

I have lots of little footnotes to share about what has been going on with me but it probably won't all fit into one post, so for this post, I'll share news about beer brewing. I organized this year's competition for the BUZZ club and it was pretty successful. It was the biggest competition we've had to date (239 entries) and it all went very smoothly. I also managed to do very well in the competition itself. I entered 11 different beers and scored 7 ribbons. For the year, that brings my entries to wins ratio to 58% (19 entries, 11 ribbons) and puts me in first place running for the Midwest Homebrewer of the Year competition. There are 6 more competitions to enter though, so it is really still anyone's game. Two friends from the club and I attended this year's National Homebrewers Conference. This year it was held in Cincinnatti and it was an absolute blast. During the day there were interesting lectures about various nerdy beer topics and during the evening, social events bringing brewers from all across the country together. It was the first time I had gone to any sort of beer related conference, and I wasn't sure what to expect, but it far exceeded all of my expectations. Next year's conference is in California, and I am already in negotiations with Anna to attend it :) October is going to mark my two year anniversary brewing... I'm sure that I will have to brew something special for that.

Oh, and in the BUZZ competition this year, Comrade Alofskie's Imperial Stout finally got its well deserved recognition with a first place ribbon in its category.

Absolutely awesome.

We've been back from vacation for awhile now, but I've been having trouble getting back into the swing of things at work. In a little less than a month, Anna will be graduating from law school (watch your email for the announcement!), and we are in a little bit of a scramble getting the house picked up. It is amazing how much yard work there is to do after a long winter. Not to mention beer related chores getting all the beers ready for Anna's graduation party. I have finalized the lineup, but will keep it secret for another couple of weeks :-p

A weekend or two ago, my parents (and Nathan too!) were here visiting on their way back to Colorado and we had a really good time. Since they were taking the train back from Chicago, we stayed up there for the weekend visiting Shedd Aquarium and Goose Island Clybourn. Nathan is really growing up fast, you can look through some of my recent pictures for proof.

Anna and I were awakened by something interesting around 4:45 this morning... a loud rumbling noise! At first I thought a tree was falling on our house and then I thought maybe it was the wind... well, it was neither. It turned out to be the earthquake I'm sure everyone (by now) has heard so much about. No damage, but a little unsettling nonetheless. Then, as I am sitting up in the 5th floor in my office at work, an aftershock hits and sends the whole building into a swaying motion, now that was really unsettling. Hopefully that is the end of earthquakes for another couple years.

Little else is going on in Champaign. We recently purchased Rock Band for the Xbox and had a bunch of people over to 'rock' with us. It was a lot of fun, kind of like karaoke, but with controllers :) Hopefully we can expand our band during Anna's graduation party to include some of our out of town guests too. I'll also have to look through my pictures and see if I captured any entertaining moments of Matt and Kate (Matt on the drums and Kate on the mic) rocking out. Stay tuned for those.

Last Saturday was a day of firsts for me. It was the first time I have attended a beer competition in person, the first time I have judged beer at a competition, (Drunk Monk in Aurora, IL), and the first time I have ever been there in person to accept my ribbons :-) The competition was great. It is really a unique experience to get to meet so many people that are as excited and passionate about beer as I am. I judged two categories of beers, in the morning I judged American Amber & American Brown Ales and in the afternoon I judged Old Ale, English Barleywine, and American Barleywine. Since I haven't taken the Beer Judging Certification Program's (BJCP) exam yet, I judged as a 'novice' essentially someone who knows something about beer, but isn't certified to judge it. In both instances, I also judged with some folks who have passed the certification process, so my opinions were tempered / weighted with theirs. And to think I probably wouldn't have attended at all had it not been for the fact that A) I forgot to send my entries to DMC, and if you attend in person, you can walk entries in at the last minute and B) a good friend of mine, Joshi, strongly encouraged me to go for the experience (plus I am the organizer behind our local club's competition this year). I walked in five entries and won ribbons with three of my beers (1st place for an Ordinary Bitter, 2nd place for a Cream Ale, and 3rd place for a Northern English Brown). The results were very respectable considering that DMC is one of the biggest contests in the midwest with some of the best (toughest) judging around as well. Another great part of the competition was the raffle. I spent $15 for raffle tickets and brought home $50 or $60 worth of cool beer stuff (a hat, t-shirts, bar towels, a pint glass, 2 really nice German liter mugs, 3 beer faucet tap handles, and hops. It was a great experience and I only hope I can put on a competition here that is as fun for all involved (It will be quite a challenge because Sam Adam's Longshot regional judging takes place on that same weekend).

This next weekend, Anna and I are going on a much needed vacation for her Spring Break. We are going to spend the first part of the week visiting my family in Colorado, and the latter part of the week at Mount Elbert lodge. We are really looking forward to it. My one beer-related mission for the trip is to bring back some La Folie (oh so good!).

Not much else is going on. Last night I brewed up a 5 gallon batch of Vanilla Porter for Anna's graduation party, it was the only beer she requested for the event. I will likely have 3 or 4 others on tap that day as well (probably a lighter beer [Cream Ale], some sort of fruit beer [Raspberry Cream Ale?], some sort of a hoppy beer [American Amber?] and another malty beer [Scottish or English ale?]). So if you are looking for something to do mid-May, the party is at our house! Come celebrate Anna's graduation from Law School and her entrance into the 'real' world with us!

The weather finally seems to be improving around here. We had a stretch where it was raining or snowing every other day. I am really looking forward to spring, something about that first couple of months of getting out into the yard and cleaning everything up is relaxing (of course that last couple months of cleaning up leaves isn't so fun). This year will also be my first year attempting to grow hops, so we'll see how that goes.

She didn't make a liar out of me after all...

This past weekend I looked at various parts of Champaign-Urbana through my viewfinder, a hobby that has taken the proverbial back seat to my more recent obsession with the art of brewing beer. One thing I've immediately realized, if you don't stay in practice, little by little you lose your eye. All of those shots that looked wonderful in your mind just will not line up. My second revelation was a little slower in realization. Those of you who know me know that I shoot entirely in digital, do a minimal amount of post work, and primarily share my work through my great (albeit sporadically updated) photoblog. I always expose, adjust saturation, and finally sharpness to the point that it looks good on my relatively calibrated LCD at home. Unfortunately for me, very few of my viewers are reviewing my work on my LCD, and therein lies the rub. Completely digital presentation, that is, through some sort of a web/electronic medium can never be consistent. I adjust everything for viewing at home, head to work and share under-saturated, under sharpened photos through the dull glow of our cheap LCDs at work. It is no wonder Matt prefers the traditional development process. Even though he eventually has to deal with these consistency issues (when he scans his pictures), he will always have that 'perfect' print that matches exactly what he thought that moment/place/object should be represented as. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't start printing my photos more regularly.

In other photography related news, both Canon and Nikon have announced new entry-level cameras, but neither have really piqued my interest, especially considering the ridiculous choice of SD memory cards on both of those bodies. Don't they know I have 10GB in CF that I'm attached to!? I have no idea what my future camera plans are, but I do know that with all of the other purchases of hobby related items recently, if I don't acquire at least a European vacation for Anna and quite possibly an automobile shortly after that, I may be looking at acquiring a bed for the garage :) So if I figure that a new camera body purchase is at least a year away, it really makes it hardly worth considering at this point... maybe I can sneak a lens in there somewhere though ;-) probably something in the big zoom range, maybe something like 100-400mm or a 70-300mm 4-5.6 IS. A decent zoom is definitely something my camera bag lacks, right now I make do with an old 75-300 4-5.6 III that I picked up for a song right before our honeymoon trip to Hawaii... and while it has captured its share of pictures (1,2,3), I think it may be time to retire it to the great camera bag in the sky.

Over the past few weeks, I've gone from getting owned by 15 year olds to p0wning all the newbs I can find. And so, I continue the grand tradition of AMFH p0wnage. The neat thing about Halo 3 is the 'films' feature. It doesn't just record your point of view, it records the entire game, you can move your camera to any point in the map and watch the entire game from that view, you can follow any player you want, it is really amazing. Not only that, but from within that interface you can take high resolution photos and instantly upload them to your Bungie.net profile. In my last post, I promised some pictures, so that is where this post's pictures come from, in-game footage.

In other news, beer brewing has been steadily progressing. I've fixed small bugs in my process here and there by brewing pretty much every weekend since New Year's. The cream ale I mentioned in my previous post is turning out to be a pretty good beer. I think it originally had a little bit of a rough edge to it, but that has been smoothing out with time. Along with beer brewing, I've also been doing a good bit of mead making... but I won't know the results of that endeavor for some months to come. Hopefully I won't wait until the mead is ready to write another blog post :-)