Scotland, Continued . . .

I know I'm not doing the weekly photo thing anymore, but wanted to finish up with the rest of the photos from our Scotland trip.  Enjoy!

Beer tasting at our friends' flat - I only had one. Guess which? Hint: it's the 1% alcohol one 6th from the left.

15th century chapels are cool (Rossyln Chapel).

Awesome chapel interior.

Justin checking out the chapel grounds.

This carving is crazy cool.

Edinburgh pregnancy selfie!

Found a great restaurant in Newington for our last night dinner. Leather armchairs, a wee stove, and an NA beer - what more could a pregnant lady want?

Happy lady.

2013, Week #22

Super belated photos from May 27-June 2. As I look back, it was a very busy week.  In addition to all you see here, I opened an exhibit at one museum, closed & deinstalled an exhibit at another museum, and my great-aunt passed away early Wednesday morning.  A roller coaster of a week, really.

Hot tubbing on Papa's birthday! 

The lake!

Brave boys (that water's ice cold).

Love the lake and this guy!

Beorn's first trip to the lake!

:)

The meadow by Sally's Pond.

"Work"

Hangin' in the backyard patio project with uncle.

Bedtime reading & toe pointing.

Team "Mucking Strong" after the Mountain Mucker (photo shamelessly stolen from my friend Natalie)

Beer sampler at the Flying Goose after the race (ditto on the photo steal, from my friend Erin this time)

More lake!

A well-deserved break at the lake the day after the Mucker

Busy weekend + high temps + highway driving = sleepy puppies.

Hammock Cape Codder in my new Mountain Mucker mug!

Birthday Musings

At 8:37pm, 29 years ago, I was born. A small ginger child with two loving parents and a big sister who would come to love me, but initially wanted me to live in the garden shed. ;)

At 8:37pm tonight, I turned 29 years old. I was on a walk with the dog, having just gotten back from dinner with said sister, her husband, and her two sons. I wandered up the street, nursing an Old Foghorn barleywine and missing my husband. We walked up the street a ways, then turned into the conservation area near us, which I refer to as "the field" in my head. I pulled the pup up a small rise, then plopped down to drink my beer and gape at the field and the stars for awhile.

At first, I just felt bad for myself. "I'm 29," I thought, "and it's my birthday. But my husband is far away. I miss him." But eventually, the night got to me and I came around. "It's a lovely night, I have a lovely dog, and I'm going to spend the weekend at the lake house with my parents, my nephews, and two lovely dogs. How much have I really to complain about?"

So that's the final word. :) Happy birthday to me.

My First "Session"

So I consider myself a beer geek/nerd/whatever. I am the person who brings "good beer" to the party & orders draft or cask ales when everyone else is pounding Buds. I don't, however, post that much about it. If you click on the label for "beer" at the bottom of this post, you'll get maybe four or five posts.

On the other hand, though, I happily consume the daily or weekly posts of a number of beer bloggers. Check out my "beer blogs" links in the sidebar to explore some yourself. And many of them participate in something called The Session. In essence, a different topic is chosen for each month, someone agrees to "host" (i.e. be a repository for links to all the posts), and whoever wants to posts about the topic.

This month, Boak & Bailey are hosting the Session. Here is the question/topic:

"We’d like you to write about the moment when you saw the light. At what point did you realise you were a beer lover/geek/enthusiast? What beer(s) triggered the conversion? Did someone help you along your way, or did you come to it yourself?

In short; how did you get into good beer?

If you can talk about a specific beer, so much the better — it would be good to see if there are any trends."

I never liked beer as a teenager. Even though my dad did some homebrewing, I seemed to always end up drinking warm canned Bud Light out of someone's backpack at a house party. Blech! No wonder I thought I didn't like beer.

Around the time I was 17, that started to change. My family's summer house is on Prince Edward Island, Canada. The drinking age there is 19 & many of my friends were/are two years older than me. So in my 17th summer, we drank a fair amount. ;) I started the summer drinking what I called "chick beer:" Mike's Hard Lemonade, Sublimes, and occasionally wine coolers. However, one night I tried a friend's Schooner. Now, I know Schooner is considered piss water by most Canadian beer drinkers. However, it was not Bud Light & that seemed to make all the difference for me.

Two years later, I started college at a small liberal arts school in New Hampshire. Due to its location & liberal politics, a lot of neo-hippies from Vermont attended my school & I became friends with them. These guys bought kegs of Long Trail Ale. Kegs! Of Long Trail! I realized what I had been missing in my beer - flavor. :) I moved from Long Trail to my next love, Sam Adams White Ale. I sprang for 6-packs of White Ale when it was out & toted them along to drunken college parties.

Two years after that, I spent a semester as a visiting student at the University of Edinburgh. The beer choices were astounding! While I didn't take enough advantage of them (far too much cider on far too many nights), I had caught the bug. I think it was Caledonian 80/- that really did it. Again, I know Callie 80/- isn't real ale or even the most creative or respected of Scottish ales. However, I loved the color, the flavor, and the way the pint glass felt in my hand. ;)

This was a fun post to write. I've told the "warm canned Bud Light" story to others before, explaining my interest in good beer. However, I hadn't really thought about the other components of my evolution from beer hater to quality beer lover. As I sit here with my Shipyard Blue Fin Stout, I'm glad I decided to throw my hand in.

You can also check out more "Session" posts here, here, here, and here!

No Time to be Social

Attention, other blog-nerds: This is what we have to avoid on weekends. ;)

Just kidding - I know you all like to drink beers in bars, too.

Cartoon courtesy of Geek and Poke.

Penultimate Day

Yeah, I used "penultimate" instead of second-to-last. What of it, sucka? ;)

Went out with kids from the history graduate department again tonight. This makes three nights this week I've grabbed a beer (or two) with other grad students. This is a good new habit of mine, I think. :) I like going out for a casual drink or two with friends who are just as poor as me.

For example, tonight my first beer was a $4 Unibroue Chambly Noire. It was lovely (malty & chocolatey & not too heavy, despite being a black ale), but my second & third beers were good ol' PBRs, $1 at the Barley Pub on Thursday nights.

Of course, I didn't pay for my second & third beers, so I guess that shoots down my theory a bit. However, it allows me to segue into who did pay for them, so whatevs. ;) At trivia the other night, there was a guy who was pretty cute, who knew some of my history grad buddies. However, we were on different teams for trivia & neither one of us paid much attention to the other.

Tonight, though, I did get to chat with him a fair amount & I think I am interested. :) Luckily, I think he is, too. He, another guy & I were the last ones to leave b/c we were talking so long, he bought me two beers, and he invited me to stop by the wine shop where he works for a wine tasting tomorrow afternoon. More to the point, my part-time job has public offerings of a certain kind and when I was telling him about them, he wanted to know which specific days I would be working them.

All of this is good, yes? Not that I particularly need another man to be thinking about - we're up to four now, by the way. However, I drove home grinning from ear to ear about this one. We'll see how things go . . .

Hooray!

My sweet, sweet internets are back. :)

Hope you're all well tonight. I went for a 2-mile run after work, had some yummy organic potstickers for supper, and am now enjoying my Sam Adams Pale Ale.

(Almost enough good juju to wipe out the stench of the Sox's 9-3 loss to the Royals. THE ROYALS, PEOPLE! The 40-53, .430 winning percentage, 16-games-behind-in-the-AL-Central Royals. Sigh.)

Drinking Local

(Image courtesty of beeradvocate.com)

As you might know, I've been making more of an effort this spring to decrease my impact on the earth. I'm starting with small steps, kind of like Vanessa of Green as a Thistle. One thing I've found out more about lately is the 100 Mile Diet. If you're unfamiliar, the basic premise is to make an effort to eat local foods due to the amounts of fuel used to get non-local foods to your table.

In the future, I will be making more of an effort to eat local, including frequenting farmer's markets & perhaps investing in a CSA share. My current focus, however, will be "drinking local." As much as I love my Belhaven's Scottish ale, I'm finding it hard to justify the 4,000 or so miles it has to travel to get to me. That's a lot of fuel oil, you guys. ;)

So the new plan is to make sure my beer is coming from local breweries. Since I live in New England, this is no great hardship. Below, I've listed just a sampling of New England breweries by state. Tonight's brew is the Fisherman's IPA, from Cape Ann Brewing Co. in Gloucester.

Anyone want to join me or add any names to the list?

MA:
Berkshire Brewing Co.
Cape Ann Brewing Co.
Concord Brewery
Harpoon
Paper City
Sam Adams

NH:
Nutfield
Red Hook
Smuttynose
Tuckerman's

VT:
Long Trail
Magic Hat
Otter Creek/Wolaver's (organic ales)

ME:
Allagash
Geary's
Sea Dog
Shipyard

"A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever"

So said John Keats. And look at how beautiful my pint is! :) It's actually Belhaven's Scottish Ale, but it's benefiting from the new Sam Adams pint glass. There's also no way it's lasting forever, either. I'm off to enjoy it! Have a good night, kids.

Starlight at the Funeral

It's tough, you know? Between the busy holiday season & the normal business of my job, I've found it so difficult to focus on good writing lately. For example, I know my blogging hasn't been stellar of late, despite lots going on. I've been longing to sit down, focus, and craft a really good post, as I know I can.

So, because the quality writing is apparently hiding somewhere in my head, here are some of my thoughts at the moment - in boring bullet form:

• Nick & I are heading to Manhattan on Saturday morning! We're staying with my best friend at her apartment in the city for the weekend. We're also attending a New Year's Eve party at the apartment of one of my friends from study abroad. She's tons of fun & I haven't seen her since she came to visit me in Boston in '05, so I'm really looking forward to it. I promise pictures next week.
  
• You know when you have a song running through your head but you don't mind because you really like it but you feel like it's really getting a bit much and maybe you should chill with listening to/singing it? Yeah. Right now, "Starlight" by Muse and "The Funeral" by Band of Horses are sharing that pole position. Why, yes, that quirky fact was the inspiration for my title, thank you for noticing!
  
• I heart Sam Adams Cream Stout. Not usually a stout kinda girl - but I'm liking it. Between the holiday samplers Nick & I have been . . well, sampling and the impending trip to Scotland, I'm looking forward to a good beer winter. :)
• This one's just for fun. I was watching an episode of 30 Rock tonight & here's an exchange I particularly enjoyed:
• Tina Fay's character: "Why did you think I was a lesbian?"
• Alec Baldwin's character: "Your shoes."
• Tina: "But I'm straight!"
• Alec: "Those shoes are definitely bi-curious."
  

COMIC GOLD, people. Tom, I take back my comment about Alec Baldwin not being that funny. ;)

That's all for now, kiddies. Catch you on the flip side of my trip to NYC, also known as next week/year! (As an aside, couldn't you just kill those people who leave places before New Year's Eve & cheerily shout, "See you next year!" Grrrrrr . . . . )

Sudsy Weekend

The overarching theme of the weekend was . . . good beer. Sounds like a quality weekend already, doesn't it? :) You're going to hear what I did this weekend with the "soundtrack" of what beer was involved. Because that's how I feel like doing it, see?

Friday night - BB & I went out for dinner at Cambridge 1. Beer = Post Road Pumpkin Ale. Not quite as flavorful as the Blue Moon Pumpkin, but good nonetheless. Pizza = steak w/ gorgonzola & garden sorrel w/ chevre (and yes, I realize that I ordered a pizza featuring leaves for a former football player. I made sure he was ok with it first!). After dinner, we headed down to the People's Republik, my favorite bar in the world. I hadn't seen the bartenders or regulars in a couple of months & I love them, so I got a little giddy. Beer = Harpoon Oktoberfest (plus a couple of shots).

Saturday - Slept in until noon (may have had a little company), then up to enjoy the sunny day. Showered & drove to Southie to see BB's apartment for the first time. It's nice, and surprisingly clean for housing two boys. We walked around Southie a bit, looked at some of BB's photos, had a great take-out dinner, hung out with BB's roomie, and watched some football. Beer = Sam Adams Oktoberfest (in lieu of attending the Harpoon Oktoberfest nearby).

Saturday night saw us heading into Allston to see a show at Harper's Ferry. Hooker, of blog fame, was playing bass for The Sharking. Jenny was there & we chatted with her for a bit. She promised to post pics of the show this week. Beer = Blue Moon Belgian ale, Magic Hat Circus Boy, and Sam Adams Boston Lager.

Sunday - Woke up around 8:30 (at BB's place) & had to haul my lazy ass out of bed to go pick up my bridesmaid dress in Abington. While I was getting ready, BB walked to the bakery & picked up coffee & danish for us. How great is that? :) Procured my dress & paid the seamstress, then headed to Sears to get shoes & earrings to match. Home for a bit in the afternoon, tutored a student, then home again for the last Blue Moon Pumpkin left in the fridge & some major couch/TV time.

In conclusion, the beer was good. The man was (is) better. I'm a contented girl. :)

Pints & Persiflage

Yay - my friend & former co-worker J. is home from Dubai. He likes to talk as much as I do (a lot), which is wonderful. He also likes the same topics - history, religion, politics, etc. Last night, we got burritos at Anna's, had a pint at Sligo, then moved over to the Burren for many more pints.

My all-time favorite beer is Caledonian 80/-. However, Caledonian Brewery doesn't export to the U.S., so I can only get it when I'm in Scotland (or when my Scottish mates throw me a bone). But all is not lost. Belhaven Breweries makes a lovely Scottish ale, which is sold in a number of liquor stores & pubs in Somerville/Cambridge. I've yet to meet a beer drinker who doesn't love this ale when I introduce them to it. Jason was no exception.

Once settled in on our bar stools, the conversation struck out on a long & winding path. We covered friends' (and ex-boyfriend's) upcoming weddings, blogging, job prospects, internet dating, new relationships, old relationships, whether or not I should leave my number for the cute Irish bartender (we decided against it), Christianity, Islamic fanaticism, and ended on deism.

After last call, we wandered over to my apartment building & sat in the courtyard for awhile longer. In this leg, we touched on WWII, the war in Iraq, the current administration (boo - hiss!), the West Wing, and child-rearing. We cut ourselves off around 1:45 a.m. As I mentioned, it's lovely to have conversations like that. I often have them with Kate (I love you, katy-did), but it's been difficult lately with her living in Northhampton. Cheers to long, rambling chats with old friends!