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Driving across the Flint Hills area has been a more and more frequent event for me lately.  Highway 77 has become quite the familiar path.  I like the scenic openness that is offered in short-sight.  However, lately I find myself looking deeper across the horizon and can't help but notice the landscape littered with power poles and transmission towers.  Then, I can't drive through a hill, looking at sheer limestone that has been blown away on each side, without imagining how that hill was once complete and flowing unbroken.  Upon further consideration, I came to the stark and devastating realization that I am in an industry that put those things there...   ...damn

Nice Evening

At that moment in time, with the choices I had at my disposal,  there wasn't anything better than sitting on my front porch, smelling the fresh cut grass, sipping on a homemade IPA and listening to the birds as the sun went down.  Ahhh...nice evening.

Weird

He noticed the mark on his arm around 9:46 AM.  That was the first time.  It looked as if he had just donated blood.  He hadn't.  It wasn't there yesterday either, he was certain of that.  He had worn a polo and would have noticed.  He supposed it had happened in the night, while he slept.  Somewhere, far off in space an alien spaceship was now carrying with them a vial of his blood.  Human DNA traveling across the galaxy.  That's weird.  He didn't even feel it.

Beer Geek

I have recently come up with an idea that should qualify me for a Beer Geek license if there is one. It's a modified version of something I heard the other day on a podcast, same overall principle, but different approach plus one. The facts are these (ref): the less time your beer is in contact with oxygen after fermentation begins, the better off you will be. Fact. Oxygen is a beer's worst enemy at that point causing off flavors in the finished product. Handling your beer as little as possible is the rule to stave off any chance of splashing or swirling around your beer and dissolving oxygen. Conversely, carbon dioxide is great for your beer. It is actually a very important part. Who wants to drink flat beer? I have taken these things into account and devised a way that my beer can ferment, be transferred to a bottling bucket, primed, and bottled with virtually no oxygen interference at all. See the picture below.You start by hooking a hose to one of the ports on your carboy cap and hooking the other end to the spigot of the bottling bucket. Place the air lock on top of the sealed bottling bucket and all of the CO2 produced during fermentation will travel through the hose, into the bucket, and drive all the oxygen out the top of the air lock. Now we have a carboy full of beer and CO2 and a bucket full of CO2. When fermentation is complete, and the yeast has settled sufficiently, it's time to prime and bottle you beer. Simply take the hose off the spigot and connect it to the top of the bucket where the air lock was, and connect a second hose from your racking cane to the now free spigot. Once the siphon begins, the beer will transfer through the lower hose, into the CO2-filled bucket, forcing the CO2 out and across the top hose, down into the carboy again, forcing the beer up the racking cane. Now we have a carboy full of CO2 and a bucket full of beer and CO2. They just traded places, without oxygen. Next, disconnect the hose from the racking cane, attach your bottling wand, and you're ready to start filling bottles. Once the beer starts flowing into the bottles, the empty space from the exiting beer will be replaced with, you guessed it, the CO2 from the carboy. Cap the bottles and you'll be ready to drink in no time. Is this necessary? Absolutely not. You can't certainly make great beer without going to this much setup. But it's fun to come up with geeky contraptions and experiments while brewing. That's part of the draw for me. That and, well, good beer too. I plan on trying out my method on my wheat beer this weekend. Wish me luck.

Hops

I'll admit...I was worried about my 2009 hop crop for awhile with the snow and the cold nights we had a few weeks ago. However, it looks like they are going to pull through. I am planning on 6 vines this year and see how that goes. I can't wait to see how they come out.

Oh yeah, Garrett and I finished the fence last night too.

Think With Your Dipstick

I just saw this one last night and seriously lost it. I don't know if I was just in the right mood or what, but I thought it was great.

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I like it...

Spinning

He stood spinning in place, rotating, revolving around nothing, corners at every turn. He could do nothing for it but count: count the seconds, count the days, count the number of times the guy next to him dropped his wedding ring on his desk. Yes, he counted everything to a point of compulsion. Sticky notes could not hide the time, nor could ear phones drown the drone of a cycling humidifier that came on every 147 seconds. The 68.75% of usable time he spent in the chair was filled with counting, and all he could do was spin.

Gone

Ben Markley, Ben Markley,
A new gig has hashed,
Against a brick wall,
Our plans have been dashed.
Gone is the merriment,
Excitement faded,
Of the fans of your piano,
For the one who still played it.
Hopes arose,
For too many years,
This was a chance,
To catch up with beers.
Gone too, the dream,
For a Sno ball so cold,
Lest not forget,
A Jalisco fish bowl.
Missed was the promise,
For a Pheasant Run 'cake,
A trip out to Hays,
That now we can't make.
Alas we can say,
Another time again,
To say hello piano man,
And I still love you Ben.

Fenced In

It's fence building time at the McMahan house. It took twice as long as it should have today, but I definitely wouldn't have been able to do it without Garrett's help. I thought I'd put a few pictures to show the progress and so my dad can check our work.

An Anarchist Manifesto: The Reaction

A co-worker of mine had me listen to a libertarian podcast yesterday about an anarchist's view of work. It was manifesto of sorts that espoused that we all as working people are little more than slaves of tyranny, and would all be better off playing and left to our own devices. Clearly this is insanity. I listened with a passing interest, but his words might as well have fallen on deaf ears. My mind couldn't even grasp, couldn't even branch out far enough to explain the many faults in his pseudo-Utopian view of the modern world. At the end of the discussion I wasn't left with any inkling of desire to walk out on my job and tell my wife that I was just going to have fun from now on and use this ideology as comfort. It's just ludicrous.

The article clearly did not reach me on a political level as it was designed, but it did leave me with many introspective, philosophical level questions. The root of all of the questions being: What is it all really for? I've talked about it awhile ago, about who you are. Are you your memories and experiences, or is there a soul that resides and drives your life? I've talked about heaven. Is there a heaven, what is it, what could it be like? These are all topical when thinking of the over-arcing question, what is it all for? If there is a soul, and heaven accepts those souls upon physical death, and if heaven truly, truly is Utopia, why "waste" 80-90 physical years "living"?

It is almost too complicated and overwhelming for me to think about. Because to really get to bottom of it (which I'm sure I won't do today) you have to have an understanding of time, and how the universe works and how the two are ultimately interrelated or, correct me if I'm wrong, the same thing all together. I'll start by saying that time is NOT seconds, minutes, and hours as many would answer. Nor is it the aforementioned 80-90 years. Those are man-made terms used to measure change. Man has found a way to quantify earth's relationship to itself and to the sun, and we have all accepted those quantities as "time", but it would indeed be inaccurate to define time as seconds, minutes, hours, etc.

Can you see how different the world would be if long, long ago, the people that made these decisions on quantifying time had decided that every rotation the earth made was to be 1 hour
instead of 1 day? Very good, that was a trick question. The world would in fact NOT be any different at all. That's the point. All that would be different would be the semantics of how we discuss the measurement of change. Instead of talking about being 80-90 years old when you die, I would be talking about being 3-4 years old. Time would still exist unchanged, as it always has and always will. This moment that is a permanent fixture of the universe would still exist whether you call it a second or a millennium. It doesn't matter what I call it, it's your mind in each moment that makes it real and organizes them into past, present and future moments. Time just is, and you can see how talking about it in terms of measurement can be irrelevant to this discussion.

So where does that leave us then? If you have a soul that has rented a physical body on earth for a finite amount of moments that add up to less than a spec on the timeline of eternity...then why? Why would your soul gamble those, relatively speaking, minuscule moments away on an earth that has pain and suffering. What does "living" have to do with anything in relation to your soul? And beyond that, what does anything we do on a daily basis have to do with "living"? These are very open ended questions here. And as usual, I don't have any of the answers, just more questions.

So the anarchist failed to convert me politically. That much is no surprise. What it did do, however, was open up a lot of old introspective questions that have been plaguing me for some
time now. Will I ever have the answers to these questions? Probably not. Then why worry about them? I suppose it's the old-fashioned fear of the unknown. A fear that this all might not mean anything in the end, and that we didn't take advantage of the moments we had when we had them. Maybe knowing that is enough, and maybe it's not. Maybe it is in the not knowing the end that we gain a clearer understanding of what we do know now, and will hopefully learn to cherish our "time" that much more.

Stupid Libertarian podcast...