Had a nice Thanksgiving and birthday celebration Thursday and Friday. For the first time in a few years, I was able to celebrate with my parents, which was rather nice. Aunt Nancy put together a very nice Thanksgiving feast. The turkey was perfect; her famous sour cream mashed potatoes were sublime; the stuffing was delicious; and the made-from-scratch cranberry relish was tasty tasty tasty.

Friday we had lunch at Alladin’s and headed back to T&N’s for cake and presents. (Must have presents for one’s birthday!) Unfortunately, Ted came over all nauseous and headachy. He was doing rather poorly. Later that night, Sherry’s low-grade cold came on full bore, and late Saturday my stomach decided to join the fun.

We spent all of Friday afternoon in a dive-y diner in Elyria visiting with Wade and our friend Kendra, whom we haven’t seen in quite a while.

Oh, for the record, this was a very nice year for the showering of gifts upon my person in celebration of my Natal Eruption Day. Sherry reciprocated my Christmas gift to her and got me an Ipod nano. T&N procured the entire BBC Jeeves and Wooster collection. My parents and sister gave me various clothing items that I very much needed (and wanted).

Everything was very nice, and I plan on enjoying all of the gifts to their fullest. But the best feeling of the day came when my family sang me Happy Birthday. In 30 years, all of the material items they gave me will have gone–even the iPod–but the seemingly ephemoral singing of a song will be what stays with me and will be what cannot be replaced.

Thank you.

Some of you may have noticed that before Thanksgiving I took down the NaNoWriMo progress bar. For the third time, various factors have conspired to keep me from composing the requisite 50K words during the month of November. While I’m a tad disappointed, this year did yield a positive result that I’ve never experienced in my previous attempts. This year the exercise of spewing forth on the page with as little editing as possible allowed me to get into a story far enough to see that the story has promise. I was also able to see some problems (and solutions) that I never would have seen without giving it a go. So, while I didn’t “win,” this year was successful.

Probably some life lesson in that.

For the first batch of homebrew, I chose to keep things simple and go with a pre-packaged ingredients kit. I chose Grape and Granary’s Dortmunder Export. Because this was my first solo run, I chose not to modify the kit in any way; just brewed it as provided.

The G&G kit was very nicely put together, and I appreciated that each ingredient was numbered and the instructions referenced the numbers: take bag 1 and dump it in the pot. The only downside to this is that certain ingredients lacked any label whatsoever indicating what it was exactly. For example, all of the steeping grains were packaged in a single bag with no indication of what was in it. In addition, the hops, while nicely packaged in barrier bags, gave no indication as to what they were or how much there was. A phone call to the company yielded a hastily recited ingredient list that I hope I copied correctly. I should note here that in all other ways my experience with G&G and their products was excellent.

Thus, my Dortmunder Export consists of:

• 4lb Alexander’s Pale Malt Extract syrup
• 3lb Plain Extra Light Dry Malt Extract
• 1/2 lb Wheat Malt Grain
• 1/2 lb Munich Malt Grain
• 1/2 lb Carared Malt Grain
• 1/2 lb Pilsner Malt Grain
• Bittering hops: Perl
• Flavor hops: 1/2 oz Saaz
• Aroma hops: 1/2 oz Saaz
• Nottingham Ale Yeast
• Irish Moss

Starting Gravity: 40
Finish Gravity: 12
Alc %/vol: 3.612

Pitched yeast: 9/22
Racked to secondary: 9/24
Bottled: 9/30
Fermentation temp range: 68-low 70’s

Bottling Issue Update: You may remember that when I bottled this batch I ran into a slight difficulty with twist-off bottles. Here we are now over a month past bottling, and there appear to be no problems. The carbonation is slightly lower than I thought it should be, but not enough to blame a bad seal. There have been no blow-outs. And, as for any other concerns, those who have tasted the brew have been very complimentary.

I’m still tossing the twist-off bottles as they are drained, but I’m happy that there were no serious reprucussions. On a side note, is it just me or am I noticing an increasing number of twist-off bottles being used by the breweries? It’s been kind of difficult to locate regular bottles in the store. Bass Ale is consistently good.

Tasting Notes:

Appearance
Not as dark as Great Lakes Dortmunder, but definitely golden. Good foam. Lacy head streaks the glass as its drunk There’s a very thin layer of sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Clearly racking to the secondary had the desired effect.
Aroma
Hoppy. The saaz is the main player.
Taste
Good! Definite hop bitterness present, but not as strong as an IPA. Malt is very subdued. Sweet aftertaste. I think the Great Lakes is maltier. If I make this again, I’ll probably want to add some malt to subdue some of the hops.
Mouthfeel
Higher end of light bodied. Crisp, clean. Swishing it around makes it creamy.
Drinkability
I’m generally not a fan of the hoppy brews, but this avoids the over-powering nature of IPAs. The low ABV and clean finish make it rather downable, but it has enough flavor to be interesting. Folks I’ve served it to report good things.

Overall, I’d say this was a successful maiden voyage.

Well, yesterday was the half-way point of this crazy exercise. Folks that are on pace are over the 25K mark.

I am not one of those folk. In fact, I’m not even close to being one of those folk. I’m a good 9-10K behind. Why is this? Good question. The only legitimate response I have (being rejected &9@) really only brokered me a couple of days leave, but one doesn’t get that far behind with only a couple of days.

Well let’s not dwell on the past. My new calculations reveal that I need to be writing about 2300 words a day for the rest of the month. That’s a tall order, about 3.5 single-space pages a day.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, what has been produced thus far fully embraces the NaNoWriMo ideal of quantity over quality.

So, it appears that Halloween is still lingering in some parts of the country. Cincinnati, to be exact.

Last week I placed an Amazon order, which as the order went through its processing I learned was being packaged in Cincy. Yesterday, the wonderful brown box appeared on the porch with my order. I opened the box and was greeted with my order.

• Vocal score for Handel’s Messiah
• Aimee Mann’s new Christmas album
• the Firefly/Serenity graphic novel

The contents of my order are somewhat important, so keep those three items, well the first two anyways, in mind. After the initial jolt of joy that comes with opening any box from Amazon, I finally got around to looking at the packing slip. Due to my training at a young age checking in packages at my family’s bookstore, I always look at the packing slip even though I was holding in my hand the exact items I had ordered. I was quite surprised then to read the following on the packing slip:

• Anatomy Coloring Workbook
• Essential Golden Dawn
• Modern Magick (LLewellyn’s High Magick)
• Meditations on the Tarot

So, apparently, somewhere in Chicago, someone who ordered these various pagan texts is a person who, if they read their packing slips like I do, will be holding in their hands the Essential Golden Dawn and a packing slip reading The Messiah.

Strange.

As the dust settles and we wait to hear what’s going to happen in the Virginia and Montana senate races, I thought I’d share some random observations from my tiny little couch here in rural northwest Ohio.

Ohio voters proved themselves smart
I was really impressed with the Ohio electorate yesterday. We were faced with two competing issues on smoking bans: Smoke Less (issue 4) and Smoke Free (issue 5). The apparant similarities between the issues made choosing potentially confusing. Big Tobacco added to the confusion by mounting a campaign supporting Smoke Less whose ads looked rather similar to the Smoke Free ads. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Issue 4 (Smoke Less) was a constitutional ammendment while Issue 5 was a state law. If both issues passed, the less restrictive Issue 4 would have trumped Issue 5. Further, while Issue 4 supporters tried to paint Issue 5 framers as draconian and invasive, they failed to mention that had Issue 4 passed, it would have recinded several county smoking bans already in effect.

With all of that confusion, I would not have been suprised to see both issues either pass or fail. But Ohio pleasantly surprised me. By soundly defeating Issue 4 and soundly supporting Issue 5, the voters of Ohio proved they could see through the smokescreen and make a clear choice. While I voted for Issue 5, had the election gone the other way, the point would still stand. When faced with a confusing choice between two very similar bills, the people were able to pay attention to the details and make a clear, informed decision.

And that’s good for America.

Liberal Bias?
It’s beating a dead horse to decry bias in the media, I know. But that doesn’t stop the poor thing from getting pummelled. Just last week I was hearing on the radio all sorts of talk about how the Democrats chances for victory were being overplayed by a media elite that wanted them to win.

So, with all of this liberal media bias, I was quite surprised last night by the coverage in Toledo and Cleveland of the Ohio Senate race speeches. Due to our geographic location, we get stations from both Toledo and Cleveland. When Senator DeWine gave his defeat speech, all the stations covered it, and most of them aired the entire speech. That’s fine. However, when Senator-elect Sherrod Brown rose to give his victory speech, he recevied decidedly different coverage. Every single station only showed a short portion of his speech. Once he got past his nice soundbite about the middle-class in the middle of the nation winning, the stations quickly cut to other election coverage; one station even began running tape of Kenneth Blackwell’s gubernatorial defeat speech.

Now, I suppose I can understand that DeWine is the sitting Senator, and perhaps he deserves some defferance. But Brown is our new senator. Isn’t it important–no matter who you voted for–to hear what the newly elected representative has to say about where he wants to lead us in the next six years? Others might argue that Brown’s speech was running into the 11 o’clock hour, and the stations were going to local news shows. Was there any more important Ohio news at that time? Was there anything more important happening at that minute? Surely the weather update could wait a few minutes.

In the end, it was rather disappointing that after an evening of basically fair coverage that the stations chose to act in this fashion. Biased or not, the conspiracy theorists are now going to have even more evidence to point to conservative bias in the media. And that’s just what we need: more beating on dead horses.

Blackwell’s Desperation
Back in May or June, certain groups raised a question about Kenneth Blackwell both running for governor and serving as Secretary of State. The Sec. of State is in charge of running election, and folks thought that it might look bad for someone running for governor to also be in charge of running the election. Given Blackwell’s position at the center of several controversies surrounding the 2004 presidential election, their concerns didn’t seem to be outlandish. Blackwell pooh poohed the notion, but another controversy about his owning stock in the company from which Ohio bought voting machines also called his ability to run a fair election into question.

Going into yesterday’s election, Blackwell was far behind in the pre-election polls. Adding the previous controversies to his poor performance as a candidate, it’s hard to read another Blackwell mis-step as anything other than partisan skullduggery. Early Tuesday, a Cuyahoga court ruled that election officials must allow 300 poll observers statewide into the polls. Blackwell, however, only saw fit to inform the workers at Cuyahoga County locations, arguing ostensibly that the judge’s authority only counted in the county. A contempt hearing is scheduled for today.

So, here’s the thing. Why, Blackwell, would you do such a thing? If there’s nothing shady going on, why keep poll observers from watching the polls to make sure the elections are run properly? Yes, the motion was made by Democrats. But if that’s the only reason, then Blackwell’s actions, at best, look like a petulant child throwing a tantrum. At worst, they suggest that there really was something that needed observing that he didn’t want witnessed. Given how badly the Republican’s lost yesterday, it’s hard to see how any shenanigans that weren’t off the charts obvious, would have made any difference, which leaves me with the petualnt tantrum.

And that’s not good for America.

Perhaps an end to the horrific mudslinging and character assasination is too much to ask, but at least we can move from the dirty campaign ads to the dirty “they stole the election” ads and finger-pointing about negative campaigning. At any rate, here in the Eastern time zone the polls are open and humming.

Whatever your cause, side, party, proclivity, persuasion, or leaning, please cast your ballot today (even if it’s upon the waters). [insert speech about civic duty, patriotism, etc. here]

A quick observation about voting method: Here in my little Ohio county, we don’t yet have the entirely new-fangled electronic voting machines that are causing all the fuss in the big city, but we do have the old new-fangled optical-read machines (think SAT tests). I’ve got to say I miss the old punch cards. My main gripe about this new process is lack of privacy. The voter has decent privacy while coloring in the bubbles, which is all well and good, but then you have to carry your overly large ballot WITHOUT A COVER over to the reader. While you’re waiting your turn to insert your ballot into the machine, anyone–including the poll worker–can see your big black dots indicating your votes. The whole concept of a private ballot is that your vote is your own, and you shouldn’t be able to be intimidated into changing your vote. It seems to me that this system is just asking for a challenge.

As you can see, I’m trudging along quite nicely in the word count area. Mind you, it’s total rubbish, but quality isn’t exactly the point of NaNoWriMo. Mugglenet.com quotes J.K. Rowling describing

the all-too-frequent, ‘it’s rubbish, I’ve wasted a week and I’ll have to re-write the lot.’ And if you think that’s an exaggeration or false modesty, you are very, very wrong. It’s perfectly possible to put in eight hour days and have nothing to show for them but a single idea that, if reworked completely, might be passable.

I’m somewhat in the midst of that feeling right now, but, you know, it actually feels kind of good. As I’m slogging through this gook, I look about, and I can actually see how something might work. I’m having ideas.

And that’s always just a tad bit dangerous.