After a couple months off I've decided to try my hand and making some "wines" again. Two cherry-cranberry, two mango, one lingonberry, and one elderflower. Having learned from my previous experience I'm pre-activating the yeast before I mix it with any of the juices or sugar water mixture just in case the high sugar contents were preventing good ( Read more... )

At the new house I'm trying to avoid some of the pitfalls that I ran into at the old house. Such as falling behind on yard work and having a garden that only produced a couple tomatoes, a cucumber, and two peppers. So two days ago I was out in the back yard with a shovel and pix axe breaking up the soil trying to churn it over when I realized just ( Read more... )

Team Fortress 2 came out almost four years ago and Valve has been updating it ever since. Not just fixing bugs but also adding tons of new content. It had been a pretty sweet deal for anyone who purchased it as part of the Orange Box years ago. it got to the point where almost anyone who wanted a copy of TF2 already purchased it so Valve decided ( Read more... )

I just finished the single player campaign of Portal 2. Damn that was satisfying. The puzzles were fun/challenging/aggravating as always and I loved the voice work of the three main characters. It took me about 12 hours to beat it the first time around. Aside from getting hints for two of the chambers I was able to solve everything on my own. ( Read more... )

As of late I've gotten into wine brewing. It's a cheap, fast, and inexpensive hobby that produces a tasty beverage in a short amount of time depending on the wine you're making ( Read more... )

Dinner:
basmati rice with lentils, sweet vinegar, and homemade cranberry sauce

Drink:
homemade cranberry-cherry sparkling wine

Mood:
tasty

The weather people said there would be a snow storm starting at 4am. It's been six hours now and no sign of flakes. WTF?

OMG! These cranberry-ginger-orange orange muffins turned out fantastic. I almost don't want to give them to my family tomorrow. All I need now is more muffin tins so that I can bake four dozen at a time instead of having to do them in batches.

Oh, and while I was at a Best Buy today I checked out one of the 3D TV stations that were setup showing Avatar. It didn't impress me at all and didn't make me want to get a 3D TV. The image did jump out at you, but it didn't really add anything to the viewing experience. More than anything, the active shutter glasses made it worse. I could ( Read more... )

Wandering out today with the shoppers was surprisingly pleasurably. I didn't see any surly or angry people in any of the stores I went to. There was no sign of extreme desperation while going up and down the aisles, and even the parking lots were reasonably calm yet full. All in all a surprising Christmas Eve at the malls.