#&$@% asp!

So I find The Wife in our bedroom watching an episode of Buffy, so I flop down on the bed to spend a little quality time with her. Right away I notice a slight stinging sensation on the back of my right calf. I look, but don't see anything. Then I notice a similar feeling on the top of my right foot. I rub it and look, but nothing is visible. Spider bite? It's not bad, so I shrug it off.

About the time Cordelia realizes the guy she's dancing with is a vampire, the feeling has turned to a more intense burning and I see a raised welt. Actually, several. Mutant mosquito? The Wife asks if I got into fire ants, but this is a different type of pain entirely. Both spots are inflamed, and the back of my left calf is starting to sting as well. And Bug comes up complaining of burning on the side of his arm.

I get up, flustered because I'm really starting to hurt--very intense burning--and then I see it: A white, teardrop-shaped caterpillar about half an inch long on the bed. It's a damn asp, just like the one that stung the heck out of The Wife so badly last summer. I scooped it up in some toilet paper and flushed it. We still have no idea how it got into the upstairs bedroom. It got The Wife on the leg as well, we soon realized. But I got the brunt of it. Joy.

Tomorrow I'm breaking out the pressure sprayer and loading it up with good old caterpillar-destroying thuricide, and dousing every tree on our lot something good. We've lived here seven years, and last summer was the first time we'd so much as seen an asp. I'll be damned if I'm going to let them take up permanent residence.

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Friday Night Videos

Enjoy the spectacle that is "Doctorin' the Tardis" by The Timelords, a.k.a. the KLF, a.k.a. the Jams. I'm not certain what the story is behind the various band names, but at least we know Gary Glitter isn't involved. Well, actually, he was. On the "Best Of" compilation, there's a remix version of this song titled "Garyin' the Tardis" so there's that. I'm inordinately amused by the high-tech Daleks in the video. What I wouldn't give to see a similar scene played out on the current Doctor Who series with a Ford Galaxy. And Billie Piper. But that kinda goes without saying, huh?



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Kenny Loggins.

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Little dog lost

Our younger female beagle, Precious, has disappeared.



It's not entirely clear when she got out of the yard--sometime mid-morning July 6 is our best guess--and it's not certain how she got out. Monkeyshine, our older beagle, was something of a Houdini in her younger days but is still in the back yard, although she's a bit lonesome. I'd dog-proofed the yard way back when we first moved in, and a couple of perimeter checks turn up no obvious escape routes. There are a couple of possible exit routes she might've taken, but these seem unlikely given the effort that'd be involved.

She's not at the New Braunfels Animal Shelter, but The Wife's filled out a missing dog report in case she does turn up there. Fliers will go up around the neighborhood this afternoon. On the off chance she was stolen from our locked yard, I checked the phone book for any listings of "Baggins," "Underhill," "Took" and "Hobbit" but alas, that turned out to be a dead end.

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Caramelized honey

Some of the various meadmaking blogs I've followed in the past have fallen into disuse over time, so I found myself poking around the old internetz trying to find some new blogs offering interesting reading. In the process, I came across this:



Now I don't know about you, but the thought of caramelized honey with nutty overtones serving as the base for a mead sets my mouth watering. This "bochet" style mead has a name that means "burnt" but if you ask me, the guy in the video takes that a little too literally. Cooking the honey until it's a deep golden brown seems more than enough without out all that nasty pine tar residue. I may well have to experiment with a little gallon batch before long. Here's the recipe featured in the video:

"BEVERAGES FOR THE SICK - BOCHET
To make six sesters of bochet take six pints of very soft honey and set it in a cauldron on the fire, and boil it and stir it for as long as it goes on rising and as long as you see it throwing up liquid in little bubbles which burst and in bursting give off a little blackish steam; and then move it, and put in seven sesters of water and boil them until it is reduced to six sesters, always stirring. And then put it in a tub to cool until it be just warm, and then run it through a sieve, and afterwards put it in a cask and add half a pint of leaven of beer, for it is this which makes it piquant (and if you put in leaven of bread, it is as good for the taste, but the colour will be duller), and cover it warmly and well when you prepare it. And if you would make it very good, add thereto an ounce of ginger, long pepper, grain of Paradise and cloves, as much of the one as of the other, save that there shall be less of the cloves, and put them in a linen bag and cast it therein. And when it hath been therein for two or three days, and the brochet tastes enough of the spices and is sufficiently piquant, take out the bag and squeeze it and put it in the other barrel that you are making. And thus this powder will serve you well two or three times over."

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Brew 4th, and drinkify

Took a road trip this weekend to Utopia to drop Monkey Girl off for horse camp. Which means there will be 98 percent less sass in the house this coming week. Yet the squabbling between Fairy Girl and Bug has exponentially expanded to fill that void. Funny that.

In a misguided effort to be productive with the remaining time available to me over the weekend, I racked the plum wine I've had fermenting since June 7, separating the plum solids from the proto-wine liquid. Which may sound simple and straightforward, but it isn't. The plums had essentially decomposed into fragments of skin and pulp, none of which had any coherence except when it came to plugging the bung spigot in my fermenter--they were plenty solid for that. So I was reduced to using a ladle to scoop out the wine and pulp and place it in a cloth-lined colander, straining the liquid from the solids. You'd be surprised how quickly those solids can plug up the weave of even a loosely-knit cloth. Eventually, I didn't even have a clearly defined mix to work with as I ladled. What I was getting out was more of a thick slurry, with the fruit and liquid indistinguishable. Out of the six gallons I started with, I ended up with four--the pulpy fruit solids thrown out on the back yard compost heap. I then dissolved four pounds of sugar in a gallon of water to top the proto-wine up to 5 gallons, and provide the yeasties with enough sweet fermentables to bring the alcohol content up to a storage-friendly 12 percent. The good news is that when I sampled a bit of the stuff--it certainly smelled like wine--I was rewarded with a dry wine that tasted very strongly of plums. I think, despite my misguided efforts, that my first attempt at winemaking may be a success.

I have to say here that my racking task was made much easier by the addition of two extra 6-gallon fermenters. My brother Chris was kind enough to loan me his, since he hasn't done any homebrew in several years and doesn't expect to return to the hobby any time soon. So, with the wine safely locked away in one of the new fermenters, I had mine available immediately for more brewing.

I had 9 pounds of honey on hand, and wanted to try some plum melomel, as well as take another crack at the infamous jalapeno metheglin, so my course was clear. I emptied all nine pounds of honey in a large pot and topped up with about a gallon of water, heating the mix gently so the honey would dissolve. Since I want the starting mead to be moderately sweet instead of dry, I decided to only make 3 gallons worth. I put the honey mix in the fermenter, then added 1.5 teaspoons of yeast nutrient and yeast energizer before stirring vigorously to oxygenate the must. I topped it up with cool water to make just over 3 gallons, and then pitched the yeast starter. This is a new yeast for me, Bourgovin. It's a Burgundy yeast, supposedly good for dark fruit wines such as plum. We'll see. I made a mix of honey water and grape juice, to which I added the dry yeast. An hour later it was fermenting vigorously, so I expect good things from it. A month from now, when primary fermentation tapers off, I'll rack the mead into a 1.5 gallon vessel to which I'll add a bit more honey, for enhanced sweetness, and a single large jalapeno. The previous results were quite striking--akin to biting a live wire--and I expect no less this time around. To the remainder I will add no less than 7 pounds of chopped plums. The resulting fruit profile in the finished melomel should be robust. If you ask nicely, I might even share some!

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Roadside service

So Wednesday I had to go to a construction zone for an interview, and apparently whilst there my rear passenger tire picked up a nail or somesuch. I know this because by the end of the day, when it was time to go home, the tire was completely flat. I got to spend 30 minutes changing the darn thing in the rain and hoping the little donut spare would get me the 25 miles back home. The puncture was obvious, though--a clear hole in the tread where a nail must've punctured it and then fallen out once the pressure dropped. Easily plugged.

Thursday I pick up a tire repair kit on the way home from work and set about fixing the tire (again, in hurricane-spawned rain showers), because I really didn't feel like dropping $70 or so on a new wheel. I get the plug in, along with a good amount of rubber cement, and set the portable air compressor to filling it up. The little compressor works slowly, so it was 15 minutes at least before the tire reached its recommended 15 psi. I turn the compressor off and get ready to mount it on the car when I hear... hissing. And it's not coming from the plug. I roll the tire over and there, on the opposite side, is a screw buried in the tread. I mean, what are the odds?

I got a pair of pliers, removed the screw, deflated the tire and repeated the process. The tire's held up now for 24 hours, but man, talk about a misfire in the luck department!

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Friday Night Videos

Okay, Kenny Loggins was still riding a wave of popularity right when I hit those "into music" teenage years. I had his "Vox Humana" album on cassette and played the heck out of it until it reached that screechy stage all cassettes do, and eventually threw it out. I even had a big concert tour poster put out by Levis I acquired unexpectedly through some store promotion or other (and it was a quality poster--the glossy print was oversized and of a much heavier stock than most pop-culture wall posters of the day). I really liked the weird, discordant rocking sound of the title track, and the "gypsy woman on the road to Tennessee" lyrics still make me smile. But the video, oh goodness, the video is a revelation unto itself. It's a gloriously bizarre mix of slapdash surreality that may very well have been conceived of during a late-night kegger in which the party-goers indulged in way too much drink--among other things. Really, is there another video out there that so definitely exemplifies everything that was great as well as terrible about the 80s simultaneously? Leather pants! Break dancing! You've got to see it to believe it.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Kinks.

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