This is a super fascinating article about what it takes to make great ice for hockey. I never knew so much time went into it!
Also, fun fact: Skaters will travel almost 200 miles in a single game, slicing, shredding and shaving a surface just 200 feet long, 85 feet wide and 1 inch thick.
Also: GO KINGS!
O must have been in sync with the universe today - he put on his geekiest shirt without even knowing it was Geek Pride Day.
XM woke up early with a fever and a scratchy throat. She wanted her favorite comfort food this morning.
Ziggy had a joyous, treat-filled time at the vet on Tuesday. Then we drove home, and I slammed the tip of his tail in the car door. Ouch. He got his revenge by vigorously wagging his long, whip-like, bleeding tail all over the house. It was like cleaning up a crime scene. Numerous attempts to bandage his tail were futile, as he would happily bang it against the walls or stove or dryer and re-open the wound. I ended up at 4:45 pm taking him back to the vet. They gave him the snazzy blue bandage you see in the picture. It fell off (read: was wagged off) less than 24 hours later.
He went back today for a check up, and it is healing nicely. They don’t want him banging it open again, so the vet tech came up with this fancy plastic tube with bandage combo. He finds it a little embarrassing.
Note all the dog hair on the couch he isn’t supposed to sit on.
Here’s hoping for a blood free weekend!
I love our garden. My mother-in-law does most of the actual labor of weeding and trimming and stuff, but we both have an addiction to plant shopping. This year I noticed the garden is really maturing, and everything looks really pretty right now. Which I see you can’t quite tell from all my extreme close-ups!
Tulip.
Sweet woodruff.
XM’s watering can.
Colorful.
Columbine.
White dogwood.
Tiny gnomes.
D’s birthday was last weekend. To celebrate that and the completion of his brewery, we got him a custom wood tap handle made by Jerry’s Wood Works on Etsy. It is so pretty!
We have a really fun game called Igloo Pop. Each igloo has a certain number of beads in it. Your job is to shake them and try to guess how many beads are inside (there is a sticker on the bottom with the number). There is a ring of nine cards with numbers on them that you set around the igloos.
If you guess that the igloo you are shaking has 10 beads in it, then you put your token in the igloo and set it on the card with a 10. Some cards have two or three numbers, so you can hedge your bets a bit.
It is a free for all of igloo shaking! Once everyone has placed tokens and igloos, you go around the ring and check to see if anyone has guessed correctly. Losers lose their token, winners get their token back and the card, and there are some rules for multiple people on a card. At the end of the game, you count up the number of people on your cards and how many tokens you have left. Highest number wins!
Shaking is serious business. This review brought to you by Pepsi.
This game is really different and a lot of fun. It even has a cute story to go along with the theme.
D made his first beer from the new electric brewery system! He made a hoppy brown ale that is pretty delicious. I’m sure I could find out all the brew specifics, but I’m feeling lazy so I’ll give you the layman’s rundown. He brewed 10 gallons and pitched one kind of yeast for one 5 gallon batch, and another for the other 5 gallons. On a side by side tasting they are pretty similar, but there are some subtle differences.
The brew day was really successful until the last step - D started to run water through a hose and hadn’t opened the valve quite yet to let the water flow. The water backed up in the hose and the hose expanded like a balloon until it loudly exploded and threw water everywhere. This little incident inspired the name of the beer, Le Boomb Brown.
See, we’ve been naming our beers (okay, his beers) with a board game twist, as the brewery name is Victory Point Brewing. Previous beers have had such names as Coco Rally Toasted Coconut Porter (game inspiration: Robo Rally), AppAles to AppAles (Apples to Apples), and Ticket to Rye IPA (Ticket to Ride).
Le Boomb is a silly little dice game that has you roll to see if you do nothing, if you pick up the bomb, or if the bomb explodes. If you are in possession of the bomb when it explodes, you are out. Last one in is the winner! It seemed a fitting name for the exploding brew session.
Pretty beer! We also made a Victory Point Brewing logo and made a tag for the electrical panel.
Exciting stuff!
We managed to squeeze in a lot of board games over Spring Break. I took (mostly terrible) pictures of them with the Hipstamatic app on my phone.
Climb! A finger dexterity game.
Dominion: Seaside Expansion.
Flash Point Fire Rescue. Got this one off of Kickstarter. Great co-op game!
Frog Jam. A matching and memory game with a chance to mess up other people. I used to play this with O when he was really little, and I just found it in the basement.
A La Carte. A cooking game!
Mystery Garden. 20 questions with a theme.
And finally, Tribune. We would have probably played more, but D had the flu!
D and I took a tour on the Brewvana bus a couple weeks ago. This was a special tour put on by the New School Beer Blog. We went out to the Hood River area and visited five breweries. It was a nice trip! The Brewvana bus is really fun, and it is nice to go visit a the gorge without having to drive ourselves.
First stop: Everybody’s Brewing in White Salmon, Washington. We’ve been here a couple times, and always enjoy the beer and the lovely space.
Then we were off to Pfriem Family Brewers, a new place in Hood River still under construction! Fortunately they had some bottled beer that we got to try. Yum!
We then went up the hill to Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, which are literally brewed in a farmhouse.
Then we were off to Parkdale to visit the almost open Solera Brewing. Solera is in the old Elliot Glacier Public House spot. They had some of our favorite beers of the day! Can’t wait to go back.
Finally we had dinner at Double Mountain in downtown Hood River.
We had loads of fun! I highly recommend the Brewvana bus.
