As my calendar app so helpfully notified me this morning, tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be easing gracefully into…
…ah, who am I kidding. I haven’t been graceful since…
Ahem. Anyway. This was a fun week. As you can see from the attached photo, I now have two different meads bottled. I have four bottles of each at this time. The plan is to put one of each aside for tasting in a year to see how they age. The first one is the simple one, the other blueberry. The Mrs is particularly fond of the blueberry.
Oh, that’s in addition to two batches (about a gallon each) in primary fermentation, and two batches in secondary (one gallon and five gallons). So if you are on the Christmas list, there is a good chance that you might be receiving mead this year, lol.
A week ago we went out to Warner Vineyards in Paw Paw, MI for The Mrs’ big surprise — the Bacon Brothers in concert. I’m not going to lie, they were actually quite good. It will shock no one who knows her that the second that Kevin took the stage I was abandoned.
The Mrs managed to get this close
Not bad considering she started back here with me
Friday we had a quiet celebration at home to recognize the anniversary of the first night we spent in the New House™.
Saturday we went to a honey festival. Amazingly, I limited myself to only one jar of honey (orange blossom to replace the one that got sacrificed when the fermenter broke last week. Yes, it has already started its transformation into mead.).
And now it’s time for Uncle Mike’s Learn From My Stupidity Moment: If you are diabetic, pre-diabetic, or have any sugar related health issues, be careful when spending a morning sampling honey. Whatever you do, do not have pancakes with real maple syrup before heading out to sample honey.
Listening To: I’ve been burning through the audiobooks lately. I finished This Wretched Valley, a supernatural/haunted woods novel, read The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O’Connor which was entertaining but a little light on the Bigfoot material, read The Big Lie by John Mankiewicz which I enjoyed more than The Big Fix (read them out of order <twitch>) but which deals with the McCarthy era Red Scare making it an uncomfortable read right now. I’m currently half way through The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black and I’m enjoying it immensely.
Currently Reading: As you might guess, with all of those audiobooks going, I haven’t done much in the way of physical reading, but I plan on spending a lot of tomorrow making up for that.
Current Obsession: The Mrs and I just burned through the limited series Untamed on Netflix. Good characters, great acting, beautiful scenery. My other obsession has been playing Escoba on-line. It’s a Spanish/Italian card game with rules more convoluted than an 80’s era middle schooler’s home brew RPG. Seriously, I don’t know how anyone could add up the points without taking forever. I explained it to The Mrs and it went thusly:
Her: Are you drunk?
Me: No. It’s just got a lot of different ways to score points.
Her: If you’re not drunk, then whoever made this game was drunk when they did so.
Dragon’s Roost Press News
We have locked orders and addresses on the Nightmerica Kickstarter and have started placing the orders. If you are one of the six people who has not yet replied, please do so ASAP!
We have out the magnifying glass and the fine toothed comb as we go through Here There Be Horrors with a scheduled release next month.
We received the edits back from Frank Oreto and will start formatting It’s Dark In Here as soon as Peggy’s book is off to the printers.
We’ve started making plans for a couple of books for next year as well as looking at next year’s convention calendar. Keep an eye on the Dragon’s In The Wild page for more information.
We have received some sad news. The Merry Krampus, a Columbus based show that we have enjoyed attending has been cancelled. There have been ongoing difficulties with the location and the show runners have opted to end the con on a high note. We will miss our annual trek down.
This means that we have a large gap in our schedule after the big holiday (see below). If you know of any vending opportunities in November or December, let us know!
This Week’s Rambling: One Hundred Days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween. One Hundred Days to Halloween SILVER SHAMROCK!
Good luck getting that out of your head.
Yes, it’s still July and they are talking about a heat wave hitting the area tomorrow (which reminds me, I have to go vacuum the pool), but my birthday marks a very important day.
No, not the anniversary of my birth.
Well, not just the anniversary of my birth.
24 July marks the day that we tick over to only double digits left before Halloween. Or to say it in a way that actually makes sense, as of tomorrow there will only be 99 days until Halloween. So my birthday is an important benchmark for all of you creepy types.
Looking at things in a more back-asswards way, I know about three dozen people who have birthdays in July. The assumption is that if you count backwards 9 months you get the first real cold snap, or what a local meteorologist used to call “cuddle weather.”
However
If you plug your birthday into one of those websites that calculates your most likely date of conception it will give you a range of days. In my case Halloween falls smack dab inside of that range.
Way more than you wanted to think about, but it does explain quite a bit, doesn't it?
I don’t want to leave you with that image, so here is the recipe for the cake that I have had every year since I was a wee lad:
