A new hobby

I've recently started a new hobby (more by chance than anything). Awhile back, Megan and her mom (Marty) went to California to help clean out Megan's grandmother's house. When they were out there Megan called and asked if I was interested in any of the beer steins and barware that was there. I said sure. Steins have always been cool, but all I had up to now was a stein my dad gave me for Christmas one year. Megan said she'd try to take any that no one else wanted and also said she'd get some beer glasses (a mix of tumblers and stemware) out here too. A week ago I guess now, it got to Richmond and we went up there to help unload the truck and get things organized. I pulled the boxes that had the steins and stemware aside and only glanced in them enough to determine that none of the steins were broken. One piece of stemware was but overall I thought it was amazing that it was the only casualty.

Once getting home, I opened up the boxes and went through the steins as Megan watched. They are, in a word, cool. We know for certain that one of the steins is from circa 1896. One stein holds 2 liters. As Megan said, "it's always good to have a stein you can keg in." Hey, I might need that much while grading exams! :-)

Rather than put a limited set of images up here of the steins and glassware, I've just created a quick web page with images of the steins on it. Check them out! And now I don't wanna hear anything about "what does Brett want for Christmas?"!

Grapes - a postscript

This will be quick as it's really just a postscript to the previous post.

We mushed up our grapes and extracted the juice. If you recall, I said we had about 1.5 - 2 bushels. We got 1.5 gallons of juice out. We've done the initial filtering so far. Now you let it cool in the refrigerator, then filter out any solids that made it through the first step, then we'll freeze it or use it immediately to make some popsicles and/or grape sorbetto. With this much juice, we might even make some grape granita (italian ice).

Grapes

So, we have been pretty quiet in terms of talking about the garden this year. Really. Go look at previous years! It's not that it's not going well - it is. But, does everyone want to hear about our garden really? Again? Sure we have tomatoes, peppers, beans, potatoes, (really really wonderful) garlic, basil (coming out of our ears), and corn. Sure we've had carrots, radishes, lettuce, and squash. Yeah - been there done that.

What's new this year? Well, number 1,we've severely cut back on the number of tomato plants. Last year we had around 25. This year we're down to around 12. It's made our yard look more like a real garden than, say, a field owned by Ragu. What's really new is our grapes. Sure, you've seen pictures of our grapes before, like the one below. The grapes are the ridiculously large mound at the left side of the image. See that mound of green? That's them going over the arch we were supposed to use at our wedding. Megan's since cut the vines back so going through the arch isn't a limbo contest.


We started these mostly as a privacy barrier for summer. We thought they'd look nice and in addition provide a visual barrier for dinners out on the patio etc. And, if we happened to get a few grapes out of the deal, we'd be more than happy. We bought 4 types of grapes and let them run over the fence surrounding that part of the yard. They've done an (obviously) excellent job of doing so. Last year we had a few grapes, with few being the keyword. This year, it's a little different.

As Megan pointed out to me, that's not such a great picture. One, you have no cue for how deep that container is. Well, to give you some visual help here, the corn is about 8" long. So, because I was too lazy to measure this, that container is about 24" x 16" x 14". It's not filled all the way to the top and these measurements aren't real, but even being conservative gives that as being at least 1.5 bushels of grapes right there. Now, that sounds impressive. It does. It's way more than we thought we had till we started picking. What's more impressive is we haven't picked all the grapes yet. Recall I said we had 4 plants? Yeah, of the total vine length we have, we've picked off maybe 1/3 of the total distance. Seriously.

You know, it takes a while to de-stem and wash that many grapes! So, what are we gonna do with all of these grapes? First off, we set some aside (and gave some away) for eating. The rest we are going to mash up and make juice out of. What will we do with the juice? Oh sure, I suppose we could make jelly. We're the Taylors though, not the Smuckers. (That and I don't have any canning gear). Instead we're going to take the juice and do a few things with it:

1. Make popsicles. Yummy! We have some Edy's brand real juice popsicles already, but we want to make our own!
2. Grape sorbetto. Again, could it be yummier? Is "yummier" really a word? It is now.
3. Grape italian ices.

Everything we've read says the juice freezes fine so we'll have plenty for all winter long. Jealous yet? You don't have to be - come on over and have a popsicle.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned how great the raspberry/dark chocolate chip ice cream was I made a little over a week ago. I guess I'll have to save that for the next taunt, I mean blog entry.

The crypt is gone

When we moved in to the house, we inherited what soon became known, to us anyway, as the crypt. It was supposed to be a picnic table, but it really looked like something a dead body would be found in. Or Dracula's summer home.

Anyway, it was useless as a picnic table unless you were (a) a child, or (b) had femurs that were less than 30 cm long. Just great... If you, as a normal human being, sat it in it and managed to get your knees under the table top, your butt would have been setting about 4 inches back from the far edge of the bench. But, we never did anything with it as it was a family "heirloom" that our old neighbors had shared with her family. She had grown up in our house and moved in with her husband next door to us. We just couldn't bring ourselves to ask them if we could take it out when they lived here. Once our new neighbors, Zack and Charlene moved in though, we immediately decided to take it out. Megan and I were thinking of waiting until cooler weather prevailed as it's been hot and humid here. Zack and Charlene had different ideas though. We came home one day and Zack had started breaking off the top of the table (a 4" thick piece of solid concrete, with rebar) and the base (lots and lots of cinderblocks). We were severely disappointed that it was not a crypt!!! The whole base was solid cinderblocks except for maybe a 1.5 cm gap between the two long rows of blocks. Pooey!

Here you can see the power sledge team at work. Bunk and Mary (neighbors from across the alley) have come over to supervise. Supervising manual labor is always a specialty of Bunk's. :) Charlene and Megan decided she needed to adopt some of the volunteer basil overtaking our garden, so they made a home for it in last year's tomato patch.

Megan and I spent a lot of time hauling off this initial debris. It eventually took us 14 loads in our "truck" (please read Brett's LRC here) to the local dump to get rid of it all. The last piece to get rid of was the base. Again, it was solid concrete, about 4" thick, but this time very little rebar in it. The problem was it was flat on the ground. Smacking it with the sledgehammer didn't do much since it was well supported. Megan and I decided to see if we could pry it up and put some cinderblocks underneath it and then hit it. We knew that would do the trick, but the prying it up was gonna be the hard part. We used the pry bar and slowly levered the whole pad up. Then it was time to take out some aggression on the concrete!


There it is - all broken up. I wish we'd had more pictures of the destruction process, but we didn't know Zack and Charlene were going to start on it so soon! And then we forgot about it in the excitement of the destruction. We're going to fill it in with some dirt for now and put grass over it. Megan and I are looking forward to, hopefully, next year taking out the rest of our concrete pad out our back door and putting in a brick/stone patio that extends around the corner here, out to our property line, to make a nice summer evening retreat. And yes, I'm pretty pleased to have it gone.