Some Tuesday things

Today might be our last day of bicycle riding for the season. Or at least my last day. Tomorrow will be below 0 (celsius) and it is not likely we will have many more ice-free days before the spring.

Speaking of Celsius. That man was amazing. He did studies of the aurora in the 1740's (along with Hiorters, another amazing Swede). I don't know why I didn't know about this before, but I am blaming the fact that their paper was written in Swedish, so it was sort of off my radar. Plus, just look at the wikipedia page (in English) for Hiorters. It is pathetically small. And the page for Celsius has one line about aurora which is hidden among all his other scientific achievements.

So anyhow. In two weeks from now, it will be the date of our huge snowstorm from last year. It was the only storm of the year when the buses stopped running. I'm looking forward to the snow, but I'll be disappointed to no longer be riding my bicycle. I need an adult tricycle for snow-riding. I could be okay with a little sliding on the ice as long as stability remains during that time.

Greg and I were discussing how it is a bit strange that Swedes have a reputation for being incredibly safe about things, but then winter rolls around and they are all riding bicycles on snow and ice like maniacs. And most of them don't wear helmets. Why would adults make it a law for children to wear helmets and then not wear helmets themselves?

Oh and there is this that I heard about recently, which NPR apparently got wind of yesterday. Fancy invisible helmet. I was wondering what the cost of that contraption would be.

Moving along then.

We are approaching the time to do some more brewing. A few weeks ago we bottled the two batches that had finished fermenting, so they should be reading for drinking soon. One is a Christmas beer and one is a pale ale. We already sampled the pale ale, and it might be a bit odd (unless of course you prefer your beer to smell really strongly of flowers). I am really hoping it will come around if we let it sit a little longer, but it is possible that it will be our first beer that was not really delicious. I guess that was bound to happen eventually? We will make another batch of pale ale, and Greg has made some adjustments to the recipe, so hopefully it will work out better. And then I found a recipe for an oatmeal stout, so we will make that as well. We haven't made a stout yet, so it seems like a good time of year to try that out.

And Greg promised that next spring we can make a pink beer and use pink bottle caps. I am writing this here so that no one forgets about it. Our technique for differentiating between our different beers is to use colored bottle caps. In the past we never had more than two kinds at once, so we would just mark the tops with a permanent marker. It was simple enough, but I really love the idea of different colors for different batches. The Christmas beer is red, obviously.