One of my oldest friends, Sheehan, goes to Boston University. My old Battle Captain, Leo, attends Harvard. Flickr friend, Meg, goes to Northeastern. Over the course of my five days up north, I got to see them all.

Meg was kind enough to invite me to Cape Cod with a group of her friends. The trip started great, but a medical monkey-wrench got thrown into the works early on. The first morning at the beach house started with an unfortunate trip to the hospital for Meg. I won’t go into other people’s medical business, but I will say if you have to go to a hospital make sure it isn’t on Cape Cod. I wasn’t even the sick one, but I still wanted to choke half of the staff. Color me unimpressed.

Meg pre-hospital

Once Meg’s parents showed up, and we handed off all of her things, the rest of the group decided it was time to head to the beach. I decided it was time to call on an old friend for an extraction. The group was nice, and did a lot to make me feel welcome, but I just didn’t feel right sticking around. Leo said it best, so I’ll just say what he said. There are some people you just help when they need it. Convenience isn’t a factor. If they need help, and you can provide it, you just do it. I’m glad he counts me as one of those people; I’d do the same for him.

Meg's friends in the ocean

Leo and his wife took me to dinner, gave me a place to stay, and showed me the sights of Boston. I’ll let the pictures tell this part of the story.

Random lonely chair in a field

Harvard

Boston Massacre Cemetery

Memorial for OIF/OEF casualties

USS Constitution mast

The rest of the photos can be found here.

Since I was rocking the sun as my main light, I broke out one of my 4′ reflectors for some fill and kept the sun behind my subjects. Eventually, we ended up using a large (oh, 80′ or so) white wall instead of my reflector. It didn’t get blown around quite as much as my reflectors were. Giant reflectors require an assistant, and I did not have one with me. Remember that if you plan on using reflectors. They’re great lighting tools, but you need a stand or an assistant (probably both).

There were quite a few keepers from the shoot, but below are four of my favorites.

Them Shades

Longing

Fight - Colby using the force.

Two

The rest of the set is here.

Since I will ultimately move up to larger 5gal batches, I decided to make another trip to DeFalco’s for a few more odds and ends. While I already had Iodophor for sanitizing my equipment, I did not yet have any way to dry my bottles after cleaning and sanitizing. I also lacked any way to really get a smooth, and controlled, flow of beer into my bottles to avoid aeration. In my last post, I really had no concept of how important any of that is to the final product. Fortunately, I spent about 10 hours in my truck driving across Texas and listening to Brew Strong podcasts. It all makes much more sense now. A bottling bucket, a bottle filler with some tubing, and a bottle tree came home with me.

Bottle capper and sanitized bottles

When I finally got home, it was time to clean and sanitize my equipment and working area. I would hate to make it this far only to infect my beer and have wasted my time. Iodophor should be used at a concentration of 12.5ppm for rinse-free sanitization. That translates to .50 fl. oz. per 5gal of water. Since I do not have much to sanitize, and did not feel like wasting that much solution, I made 2.5gal of solution to sanitize my bottles, the bottle tree, my caps, bottle brush, bottling bucket, bottle filler and hose. About a quart of the solution went into a cleaned and sanitized spray bottle so I could sanitize the outer surfaces of everything as well as the inner surfaces.

Once all of that was done, I made my priming solution. For a 5gal batch I would boil .75 cups of dextrose in 2 cups of water. I cut this in half for my 2.5gal batch, and added it to my sanitized bottling bucket. It was finally time to pour my beer into the bottling bucket, on top of my priming solution. This is when I wished I had gone ahead and purchased a racking cane and siphoning tube. Pouring, with any kind of control, 2.5gal of beer through the mostly useless tap on the front of a Mr. Beer brew-keg was an exercise in patience to say the least. It took forever, and exposed my beer to more air than I would have liked. Now I know. I will use a racking cane next time, for sure.

the bottom of the fermenter

The Beer

Bottling Bucket with my beer inside

My first beer, bottled.

Bottling went quite smoothly. My batch filled 16 12oz glass bottles, plus half another 12oz bottle and two ~33oz plastic bottles. I had my Dad tilt the bottling bucket towards the valve for me so I could get most of the beer out. In the end, only about half a pint was left behind. I can live with that. In a few days, I will check the two plastic bottles and see if they have hardened from carbonation at all. If I managed to make it through this whole process without screwing something up, I will be quite happy. Doubly so if the beer is drinkable.

For now, I’ll let Flickr do the work.

That said, Dave Matthews put on a hell of a show, as did Pearl Jam. It is well known that I will do stupid things to see either of those groups live. The end.

A rain cloud loitering in downtown Houston, TX

When I made the decision to move back to Houston and attend UH, I assumed I would move into a place closer to the school. This assumption was based on the ridiculous hope that the change in the G.I. Bill would provide me with sufficient funds to get a place without the need to be employed while finishing my engineering degree. No payments have been made thus far, so I stay with my parents and commute 360 miles per week to and from school. Parking permits for four-wheeled vehicles (to be referred to as “cages” henceforth) are so expensive I would not even remotely consider their purchase. As a result I get rained on, and I get rained on for many miles.

Ask any experienced motorcyclist what one must do to maximize one’s safety when riding amongst the cages, and the likely response will be something along the lines of “Ride as if everyone is trying to kill you.” Sage advice indeed. Today, no attempts were made on my life. I should likely purchase a lottery ticket, as days such as today are a rarity. Yesterday, on relatively dry concrete, I was forced to use the healthy application of both steering and throttle to avoid the absent-minded drifting of a woman in a late-model Nissan Armada more focused on painting her nails and talking on her phone than she was with driving her large automobile. Had the same thing occurred today, on a wet road, things might not have turned out so well.

Rarely do cagers see you on a motorcycle even on the clearest of days. Motorcyclists concerned with safety tend to deal with this by wearing bright colors and emitting (directly, or by reflection) as much light as possible. When it rains and visibility goes down the effectiveness of these tactics are, in my experience, reduced greatly. Things can get downright scary when riding in the rain.

Fortunately, a good riding suit, or even your regular riding apparel covered with a decent rain suit, can keep you reasonably comfortable and dry. This gives you the freedom to pay attention to the added dangers of riding in the rain. As an example the many on-ramps in the Houston area that are, for whatever reason, several feet below the level of both the freeway and the access road, happen to turn into mini-lakes when it rains for more than five minutes at a time. In a truck, you can just plow through these puddles and reasonably expect all to be well. On a motorcycle, you could quite literally kill yourself if you fail to traverse the pond slowly. Even then, as many of these ramps have lovely road paintings (that just so happen to get slick as ice when wet) to tell you exactly which freeway you have just entered, you are not sure to make it through without a mishap.

If you do not ride, or maybe even if you do, you are probably thinking I am insane by now. If you know me, there is a good chance you already thought so anyway. I love to ride, even if it is mostly limited to commuting on the super-slab of I-10. The risks are understood, and I do everything I can to mitigate those risks. If you plan accordingly, most weather you can handle comfortably in a cage does not present too insurmountable a problem on a motorcycle. Besides, I can ride the HOV by myself, go from 0-60 in a hair more than 4 seconds, and still get better fuel economy than a Prius (henceforth “smugmobile”, courtesy of @wildbill). Rain or shine, if I’m not already on it, I probably wish I was on my motorcycle.

My FJR covered in water drops