I’m officially on vacation, limiting my liability for a weekly posting. We flew to DFW on Friday evening with the Martins, and have been hanging out with our friends Jill & David since then. Saturday consisted of sitting by the pool playing jenga all day, and grilling some tasty fajitas. Sunday was spent in much the same fashion, although we did manage to break away from the house long enough to go out for dinner. If I was a gambler, I would guess today will be a repeat of the previous two. Could be worse.

Time to get all crazy and add something new.  I’ve decided to add a weekly update featuring a new beer I’ve tried.  I might move these entries to the all-but-defunct “recipes” page, I might leave them here…  I haven’t got that all figured out yet.  A little background on this earth-shattering decision:  I’ve always enjoyed tasting the occasional new, different, and even sometimes odd beer.  This penchant was made a bit easier to accommodate when a new shop opened around the corner from my house, the aptly named Bier Station.  It’s an interesting concept: They have several coolers full of every kind of beer imaginable.  Most have two prices listed, one if you purchase a bottle “to go” and another if you would like to enjoy it there.  In addition, they have about 15 taps which rotate very frequently.  Often times they may only have one or two kegs of a particular brew.  I follow them on Twitter where they post new beers, and if something sounds good, you want to get up there and try it because it may be gone in a few days.  As to the place…  Well I’ve got somewhat mixed feelings on it so far.  It is often too crowded for my liking, and usually too loud.  In addition they are, to put it mildly, beer snobs.  I do indeed enjoy new beers, but I don’t want any staff or patrons quizzing me on “what flavors I’m picking up,” like some Northlander fawning over a glass of pinot noir.  (Direct shot at Martin there.)  I prefer to just sit at the bar and enjoy my pint, maybe jot a few notes about it in my phone.  And heaven forbid somebody order their favorite American Lager;  That is not well received at all.  Personally I think they would be better served to just reply “I’m sorry but we don’t carry that brand,” and leave out the snide comments.  But, those negatives aside, it is a way cool shop and I’m glad to have them in the neighborhood.  So, I bring you…  MY FIRST BEER REVIEW.  I’ve kept a small log of everything I’ve tried there and other places for a few months now, so I should have ample material even if I miss a week or two at the Bier Station.  I recently made the decision that pictures would be a nice addition though, so I’m a bit lacking there.  I’m shooting for brand, style, some tasting notes, and maybe the price.  It’s a start.  My selection for this week is Deschutes Obsidian Nitro Stout. This pitch-black beer was served from a nitrogen-pressurized tap in a standard 16 oz pint glass for $6, at the aforementioned Bier Station. They do pour a proper pint there;  It arrived with a nice 1/2″ of dark tan head and at the perfect temperature. At my first taste I was bit surprised at the bitterness. Not overwhelming, but definitely more pronounced than most beers of this style. This was nicely offset by what must have been about a ton of toasted malt, giving a nice sweet/bitter balance. I’m not very good at picking out flavors, but coffee and chocolate were unmistakable in this one.  Definitely a more complex flavor than your standard Guinness.  It was quite enjoyable, and the heavy lacing on the glass made for a nice first pic here.  Overall very enjoyable;  If you are a fan of the style this is a must-try, and if possible on the nitro tap, as I do think it adds a bit of character to the pour.

Chad hooked us up with a suite at the Royals game last night. For some reason he’s not in the picture though…

Teagan’s new “indoor ball.”

Wow, finally some decent weather, if a month behind schedule.  Doesn’t look like it will last long either.  I’m leaving town next weekend though, so maybe it’ll get back on track while I’m gone.

I am somewhat limited in material this week.  I went oncall Friday, which always puts a moderate to severe damper on my activities.  Friday, for instance, I did one whole bunch of nothing.  Luckily there were some passable movies on HBO, and that met my modest entertainment requirements for the entire evening.

Saturday I got up and decided to work on my super-duper little webserver.  It is a relatively low-maintenance machine, but does need the periodic tweak or two.  I was several revisions behind on the actual operating system, so I took care of that first.  After that I decided to get a new backup scheme devised.  Besides hosting this website, this fancy little device also serves up movies and music to various other devices around the house, and stores all our pictures, documents, and assorted other media.  All of this stuff is regularly backed up to a different disk, but not the website.  It’s excluded from my weekly Acronis schedule because…  Well, never mind why, it just isn’t feasible.  Leave it at that.  Although I’m not particularly attached to this site anyway, I will admit I’d be a bit remorseful if I woke up one day to find I’d lost a decade’s worth of blog posts.  Granted, not especially meaningful blog posts, but there would be a few tears shed.  Anyway, after a few failed attempts with various methods, I got Backup to Dropbox working, or at least it appears to be working.  It “should” kick off at 02:00 Tuesday morning and automagically transfer everything to THE CLOUD.  As you can imagine, this will surely be a sleepless night as I excitedly wait for this monumental event to transpire.  This and other similarly fascinating ramblings should be safely preserved from harm, whew.  After that waste of half a day, we both headed up north for her sister Ronda’s fund-raising event.  This is the event we’d spent last weekend BBQ’ing for, so we were returning to serve it up.  Unfortunately we had a bit of an issue getting it re-heated for some reason;  I’ll blame the clubhouse oven we were using.  We figured two hours at 250 would be more than enough time, but it was barely warm after that.  Oh well, what can you do…  Serve it up.  Despite the rather tepid serving temperature, it seemed to be well received.  Now I don’t like to stereotype, but I will say, them northlanders can do some eatin’.  I’ve honestly never seen anything like it.  By my rather quick scan, I counted 35 people in attendance.  We’ve done more than a few of these events, and by our standard unscientific formula 12 pounds of ‘que should have been plenty, with left-overs to boot.  Luckily I rounded that up to 20 pounds just because we had it.  They killed that with ease, and I swear if I had put out another brisket it would have been gobbled up too.  I’m not kidding, it was 9:00 at night and people were still fixing pulled pork sandwiches.  WHO EATS THAT LATE??!!!  Eh, whatever, we had fun doing it and I think the event was a success.

Sunday we slept in, totally missing the Trolley Run.  I usually like to walk down the street and watch the runners, but just couldn’t seem to pull myself out of the house.  When we finally did get up, Donette headed out to the ballpark to watch the Royals game with Kelly, and I geared up to go on my inaugural bike ride of the season.  I’m going to conservatively guess I had 300 miles under my belt by this time last year, and here I am going on my very first ride, tsk.  I blame a combination of weather, schedule, and a general lack of motivation.  (At the end of the day, I’d say mostly the last item on that list.)  It’s on now though, the season has begun.  I wrapped up my ride at the Brooksider, just in time to catch the last few innings of the ball game on the patio.  Donette met up with me after the game and we headed over to 75th Street for pizza, and called it a day.