Carbonation complete

Hooray!  My beer is carbonated and cold again.  I don't think it carbonated quite as much as it would have if I hadn't mucked it up, but it's still really very good.  If you're thinking about brewing beer, I highly recommend The Brewhouse kits; despite my inability to properly follow directions the Munich Dark Lager turned out excellent.

Not a lot else going on.  Writing seems to have stalled out again, I'm rubbish at trying to arrange it around full-time work.

Beer is not success(ful)... Yet.

I messed up the carbonation phase, but I think I've got it working now, so hopefully I'll have proper beer in another week or so.  Managing the temperature range is tricky, but if I'm lucky I've got away with my mistakes up to now.

No danger of this turning into a writing blog before the end of the year, at this point.

Beer is Success

It's a week early, but I tried some of my beer tonight - and it's actually pretty great.  I was expecting the first batch to be merely okay, preparing myself not to give up right away, but if this is where I'm starting from, great things are possible.  My next batch, I'm already planning well ahead, will be an unmodified Stout kit, and then after that the experiments begin.  I've got a lot of things I want to try.

I recently decided to start making myself write every day.  I haven't set myself a word count, as some writers do - though I may do that eventually - but I am trying to be somewhat disciplined about doing at least some work every day, even if it's more editing than writing.  It does seem to be working.  Progress is still slow, since I just started I haven't built up a tremendous amount of momentum yet, but I have already solved some important problems.  If I can keep it up, this might even turn into a writing blog.

All bottled up.

The beer is in bottles and carbonating now.

Racking to Secondary

Today I transfered my beer-to-be from the sealed bucket to the carboy; in brewing talk, this is racking from the primary to secondary fermenter.  The primary fermenter was seriously threatening to explode, so it's a good thing I got to it.

I measured the specific gravity before siphoning; down to 1.020 from 1.050, right on target.  I also tried a little sip - it actually tastes pretty good already, very promising.  Given that I'm going to end up with twenty-three liters of the stuff, I really want it to be alright...

I'm slowly accumulating more equipment - I've got a hose that connects to my sink, now, to help with the cleaning (washing stuff in the shower wasn't super convenient), a little ladle to take the samples for testing, and a few other things.  Two kinds of sterilizer, sanitation is very important.  I feel like by the end of this batch I'll have a pretty good handle on things; what I need next, probably, is a platform so I don't have to move the fermenter to transfer out of it stirring up the sediment.  I'll have to see what I can come up with.

Brewing Commences

I started my first batch of homebrew today. It's going to be a learning experience, for sure... Things I have learned already:

1. I need to make better arrangements for cleaning and sanitizing my equipment - what I went through today was ridiculous.

2. Those headaches probably were related to the TSP fumes.

3. Wort smells awesome. I wish my apartment always smelled like that.

4. My handwriting deteriorates very rapidly under stress.

5. Italics can be overused.

But now the primary fermenter is merrily fermenting away, or so I hope, in its dark corner, and I have a few days respite before I have to mess with it much again. A few days in which to figure out how to use the siphon without covering myself and my apartment in beer.

Considerations

I got caught working on a mathematical proof at work today, though fortunately I don't think they realized how much time I'd actually put into it. Fortunately I do most of the work in my head, so there isn't much of a paper trail, just a few diagrams and one false start. The proof is actually related to a potential future writing project. Of course, given my current level of productivity, I don't expect to actually start working on said project until sometime in 2097 at the earliest.

I'm reconsidering the blog. This is the general pattern; I spend some time on the design (it took a depressingly long time for me to do this), get psyched about what I'm going to write about, and then realize I don't actually like sharing. It's a problem. I should keep it in mind the next time I'm tempted to start one of these... We'll see where this one goes.

On the upside, I think I'm almost out of the train station. Another couple of months, at this rate, and I'll be able to start rewriting the next scene. By sometime next year I hope to have gotten sick of the story and decided whatever state it's in at that point is good enough.

Where the Wild Things Are

So, the film version of "Where the Wild Things Are" finally came out. I have seen it.

Now, what to do with the rest of my life?

The Shut-In

Being trapped in my apartment for the weekend if not longer (I literally, due to unfortunate circumstances, cannot leave the house at all) has turned out not to be nearly as good for my writing as I might have expected, had I anticipated the situation at all.  Perhaps if it weren't accompanied by stress related to the above mentioned unfortunate circumstances...  Or if I weren't already as stuck in that damn train station as I am now in my own home.

The City of Signs

Possibly the best euphemism for violent debt-collection

practices that I have ever seen.

The last city I lived in was a City of Stairs.  Everything was above something else, and usually a bit to one side, maybe on kind of a slant.  I loved that.  It looked like everything sort of half-grew, or as though things were being built so quickly the forming structures actually collided and wound up wrapped around each other the way trees sometimes grow through an iron fence.  There was a tremendous sense of narrative and life to it.  Also, rents were very affordable.

My current home is a City of Signs.  Some, like the one at the top of this post, are pretty ordinary but funny in their way.  Some, like the signs reminding drivers that vehicular manslaughter of construction workers isn't very nice, are bizarre by virtue of the fact that they need to exist at all.  Still others are probably more intriguing than they were intended to be.  None, so far as I can tell, originate with any higher power than the private companies charged with all the city's services.

The short story I'm working on now, along with at least a couple of other projects that are simmering in the background, is set in the city I used to live in.  The thing is, a city like that is a character in such an obvious way; the stories are all over the surface, you can't avoid them.  Those stairs take you places, where things happen, and strange characters collect on them, vagabonds and punks and drifters.  A city like this, on the other hand, hides everything behind the signs.  It's a city of cryptic clues and frustrating hints, and to get at its stories you have to go digging in the dirt for them.  Which is fine, but harder to use.

Or maybe I'm just more of a stairs kind of guy.  The test, I suppose, will be where what I'm writing after I move away from here is set.

Normally, who would think of removing an animal
from the park?  Now, who can think of anything else?

Mad Transit

Having finally established myself with a physical address, ADSL line, and bookshelves (these being the basic necessities), I've got around to redesigning the blog as I promised in a bunch of posts that are now gone, and am finally going to be actually updating it.  Starting now.

I have a complicated relationship with mass transit systems.  On the one hand, I don't like to drive and indeed do not have a license or vehicle, and I think the effects of the personal automobile on North American life and city planning are hardly salutary.  On the other hand, I have no sense of time and little sense of direction, and a long history of getting on a bus to go to a friend's house and finding myself at the airport, or in a Montreal hotel, or...  Any place I didn't intend to go, and will have a hard time getting back from.

Currently I have to take three buses to get to work.  This is tolerable because, first, I am a grown man and can deal with day-to-day life without obsessing, and second because I have obsessively memorized every landmark along the way and where other frequent riders get on and off relative to my own stops.  This, of course, requires remembering them, which requires paying some attention to them, and a kind of weird one-sided intimacy develops.  I have to remind myself that I can't tell that one skinny blonde that "craby" isn't a word, and 42 Across should be "cross".  I feel sad when Veronica (my nickname obviously, not her real one) disappears and Betty is left riding to school alone, and then a bit worried soon after Betty stops turning up too.  I feel kind of inexplicably fond of Bird Lady and Sadness Claus.  This isn't just a means of navigation, it's also a coping mechanism, because getting into a large vehicle over which I have no control terrifies me.

The relevance of this to writing, apart from the basic relevance of any of my bizarre phobias and neuroses, is that mass transit has foiled me in that realm too.  In the short story I'm currently really, honestly close to finishing, I am stuck in a train station.  I have some information I need to establish, and some other information I want to smuggle in, and the train station is where it must all go down.

Unfortunately, the train station scene is a slow, largely pointless mess, and much too long, and it keeps getting longer as I try to fix it instead of shorter, but at the same time harder and harder to cut as more of that information being established becomes integrated into later scenes.

I should have written a scene with the characters just walking somewhere.  I rarely get lost on foot...

On Wanting for Nothing

I wouldn't call my life perfect, or complete, or necessarily satisfactory. I have a one room apartment with one chair, a desk to write at, a thin futon on the floor to sleep on, a set of shelves for my books. I have two pans, one pot, and a cookie sheet to cook with, and three knives (which is actually a bit of a luxury). I have a bottle of whisky I could stand to replace soon. I have some nice red curtains I need to get around to hemming.

I would call my life pretty simple. I don't have a television, or a stereo system. I don't have a lot of appointments or activities. I don't have a vacuum cleaner, or a carpet shampooing machine.

A lot of people do have carpet cleaning machines, though. It's kind of amazing to me. I repair said machines, so they get brought in to me when they stop working, which seems to be often, and almost invariably because they were not properly used or maintained. People often want them back in a hurry, too, seeming to expect while-you-wait service. I can't help but think that people do not need to own their own carpet cleaning machines. They need less carpet, fewer floors. These people have too much, not in the sense that they are depriving others or it is somehow unfair, but in the sense that what they have is literally more trouble for them than it can possibly be worth.

When I say I want for nothing, I don't mean that I don't want anything. I want a bigger pot so I can make long pasta. I want a better copy of the Ring Cycle. I want a low table with cushions around it to sit on if I ever have guests. I want to hammer the short story I'm working on into something resembling what I originally meant it to be.

Most of all, though, I want nothing. I want more nothing in my life, not even a vast expanse of emptiness, but just a general absence of all the hideous clutter everyone surrounds themselves with. My one room, quiet and spartan.

Or at least fewer damn carpet cleaners full of soap. You have to use the rinse setting, people, it's not rocket science.

There can only be ONE!

Wireless operates on the same basic principles as the Quickening, right?

So my MacBook, DEUS, usually so reliable, spontaneously and without any warning or apparent cause loses the ability to access the Internet. It can connect to wireless networks just fine, it'll connect to your cell phone from across the world, but it can't actually do anything with the connection. This is bothersome, as I am in the process of moving and for various reasons in this Modern Age that requires me to have Internet access.

So I dig out the old Toshiba, Wintermute, the venerable, battle-scarred, and frankly broken refurbished Toshiba I bought back in university and used more or less to death. It won't read most kinds of removable media anymore, it has trouble with the USB ports, the screen isn't great, the battery holds zero charge, it issues random exciting error messages you will never ever discover the cause or meaning of, and on and on, but its cheap generic wireless card still works. So I can haul it, my MacBook, and their respective power adapters down to the Internet cafe to look at tech support forums and figure out why DEUS abandoned me in my hour of need.

So I log on here, eating some kind of disgusting whipped-sugar pie and drinking the wateriest latté I have ever, I hesitate to say tasted, but had anyway. I begin digging into the forums, and find a very promising-sounding, though apparently borderline unsolvable, problem which sounds just like mine, but turns out not to be what I have at all. So I start looking for something else... And the café wireless dies.

I convince the shiftless sandwich jockey to reset the router, and find that Wintermute can now no longer connect to the wireless at all... But at the exact same instant, DEUS has Internet access again.

So apparently the problem is that only one laptop can have any given function at a time, and I just needed to sacrifice Wintermute's 'Net access so that DEUS could be resurrected. Now if only I could find a way to sacrifice Wintermute's larger screen...