At 11:10 PM, Monday June 22 2009, Andrew Noah Warbiany entered the world. 6 lb 12 oz, 19 inches long. Picture below. Everyone is happy and healthy, and even Wyatt seems to currently be welcoming the addition.

I’m not going to belabor the post here, because I’m not sure whether I’m going to return to any sort of regular activity here. But for more, I’m still active at my facebook page, The Liberty Papers, and I’m the voice of The Liberty Papers on Twitter.

But today, I apply it to a very specific issue…

On the table is an envelope. Inside the envelope is a business card. On the business card is written whether the baby my wife is carrying is a boy or a girl. We haven’t opened the envelope — and won’t for a few more days.

So what is the sex of Baby W? From our point of view, there is no knowledge. So for at least a few more days, this is Schrödinger’s Baby.

But then there’s the love portion. First and foremost, my wife’s family is here, and with a young child and another on the way, I can’t imagine how we’d survive without them. Second, of course, is the opportunity. There are jobs and options here that aren’t available in less-populous areas. It’s that double-edged sword, where the price of having great job prospects and lots of stuff to do is large crowds at all times. And, of course, there’s the natural scenery of being surrounded by mountains, ocean, silicon enhancement, etc.

But as someone that grew up in the Midwest, one of my favorite differences is the weather. First, there’s no humidity (and thus no mosquitoes) in the summer. And the winter? What winter?

This is Wyatt and I, on January 31st. In Newport Beach, the weather topped 70. I doubt you’d see anyone like this on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago on January 31st…

Some days, I don’t think Wyatt understands how good he’s got it. For that matter, neither does Joanna.

Well, it happened again. Not to me this time, thankfully, but I’m still affected.

I’m here in Cleveland, enjoying the cold, blustery winter snow, and had just returned from a very productive meeting with a major prospective customer. We had been chauffeured around by our local sales rep, and the regional sales manager and I were getting back to the hotel to dig the car out of a snowbank and head out to Erie, PA for some further excitement — because not much is more exciting than Erie on a Wednesday night in January!

Unfortunately, some petty thief had other plans. I didn’t see whether the GPS was stored in the open overnight, but apparently it was enough of a draw to break a window. Inexplicably, the bastard took the GPS but not the power cord! So not only is he unethical, he’s also a moron.

I hate to wish ill will on anyone, but I hope he gets plowed into a snowdrift.

UPDATE: I hadn’t realized it, but my coworker just informed me that the GPS was in his pocket. So apparently the thief broke in LOOKING for it (after seeing the power cord/etc), but didn’t get a damn thing. Serves him right.

TJIC, who has apparently been where I was earlier and my life and understands where I am now, has this to say:

For a decade or so in my teens and early twenties I acted as if my internal mental state was not my choice.

It made me miserable.

It’s been a bit more than a decade since I decided that my internal mental state was my choice, and it was my responsibility to every day pick the mental state I wanted.

I’ve been a lot happier, and accomplished a lot more.

It seems like an easy thing to suggest, and it’s probably not as easy as it sounds. But it works.

When you absolutely realize that you have the power to choose, when that fact truly sinks into your head… It’s about the most powerful thing you’ll ever learn.

It didn’t last long, though because he got happy once he was back in the warmth of the cabin. Here he is with his cousin Patrick, happy because he’s playing with Patrick’s iPhone. Like his father, he tends towards electronics, even at this young age:

And I promised pictures of the view… I think this will cover it:

A short time ago, my brother-in-law Dustin and my wife’s sister Tara headed down the mountain, as Dustin’s sister is about to give birth to a little girl…

…but not all has been happiness this weekend. Some colossal bag of douche with the audacity to call himself a human being broke into my cousin’s car and lifted a lot of valuable snowboarding equipment from his back seat. Some people in this world deserve nothing more than a fair beating, and I think a few of us here today wish that we could find the culprit and administer such.

Other than that, though, we’re having a hell of a time. And the nice thing about being a Midwesterner amongst a family full of Southern Californians is that if I grow tired of this, I can always retire to the outdoors, as I’m more willing to deal with sub-freezing temperatures than these softies!

Surprisingly, I had no control over the camera (Joanna was taking care of it), but the below photo is the one that really gives the weekend the proper tone.

More to come when the weather subsides, as the view from this place is amazing.

…today is not one of those times.

Traveling into Milwaukee, I had a connecting flight in Chicago. Granted, connecting flights in Chicago are usually not a good idea, as a gnat’s sneeze is enough to get O’Hare into a 2 hour delay — and it was snowing today.

But hey, these things happen. Unfortunately, in this case it meant that my first flight got cancelled, and my second flight delayed almost 4 hours, and so I walked into my hotel room at 1 AM (should have landed in Milwaukee at 5:45 PM).

On top of that, American Airlines lost my bag. I’m not sure how, considering they had about 6 hours from the time I landed in Chicago to the time I left Chicago to figure out where it was going, but still they lost it, along with quite a few other folks on the flight. So it went from bad to worse, because not only were my work clothes in that bag, so was my coat. Did I mention that it was snowing?

Luckily I dressed in a sweater, and while I wasn’t in work clothes, I’m a little bit more presentable for my meetings tomorrow than I normally travel in summertime — shorts, a t-shirt, and flipflops.

But why do I have a problem with Milwaukee? I’m not sure how it happened, but three of the last four times I’ve been here I’ve had horrendous luck.

The first time, back in about June, I came here and had a night with nothing planned. Our rep suggested I join his sand-court volleyball league team for the evening, which sounded like a lot more fun that sitting alone in a hotel room. So I played. And I proceded to hit the land wrong while diving to dig a ball out, causing damage to my shoulder that still hasn’t 100% healed.

The second time, I was on a monumental driving tour of the midwest (Sioux Falls, Minneapolis, Madison, and Milwaukee), and the final day, my rental car was broken into during lunchtime. I ended up having my work laptop. a fair number of work items, my GPS, iPod Touch, and sunglasses stolen. I was able to get everything but the iPod and sunglasses replaced by my employer, since all the other things were business-related, but it rather sucked.

And now this. I don’t think I want to come back to Milwaukee.

Now would be a good time to order some Krispy Dips! Joanna & Tara are nearing crunch time for the holidays, as time-in-transit on shipments will make it difficult to get anything delivered by Christmas unless it’s ordered soon or expedited shipping is requested.

So if you’re interested, stop by the site. If you want to order but have special instructions or need to make sure it gets shipped by a certain time, you can always try them at 1-866-9-GET-DIPS, and [during business hours] you’ll hear from one of the founders themselves.

The Wiggles has been a godsend. It’s musical, it’s fun, and sometimes Joanna and I find ourselves getting sucked into it. But it recently had a change. A while back, the main guy who started it, Greg Page, had health problems and had to turn over his spot to a new person. The new episodes have just started showing up on Disney. And they suck!

Not only is it so hokey that Joanna and I can’t watch it any more, Wyatt doesn’t care about it any longer. It has completely jumped the shark…

So now it’s Higglytown Heroes, Baby Einstein, etc.

And yes, for those of you who know me personally — this really is what my life has become!

Here is Wyatt having his first haircut. He seemed happy until they pulled out the clippers… I think having a buzzing scratchy thing on your neck is probably a bit traumatic to a 16-month old. Below is Wyatt looking very forlorn.

We had a large family event at Thanksgiving… Here’s Wyatt playing in the grass (& mud, as it had rained).

And his new car!

Wyatt got to visit Santa… Again, not his happiest moment, but we got one picture where he wasn’t crying!

I picked up a pound of Columbus, a pound of Cascade, and a pound of Magnum. That’s a LOT of hops.

The pound of Columbus will be used for a single 15-gallon batch of my IPA. But that’s a hop-centric beer, so it works out fine. The Magnum will be used for general-purpose bittering, and will probably be good for 5-8 different batches. And the Cascades will be used for flavor and aroma, which should get me through 3-5 different batches. I’m about to do an Amber Ale, and will be doing my Rye Pale Ale within a fair bit of time, and both use Cascade, so I’ll go through a fair bit on those beers.

It’s just nice to know that I’m pretty well stocked up on my hops and I’ve got about 125# of base malt sitting at home. That will really help with keeping the costs down on my next few batches.

But I’ve been having the itch to create a new recipe, and I stumbled into 150 lb of free grain. 50 of those lbs of grain were Belgian Pilsner, so I asked myself what I might brew that’s heavily-dominated with some pilsner malt… And I decided on a dark belgian ale.

The recipe is pretty simple. I was looking at doing something darker than a Belgian Dubbel, but not as strong as a Belgian Strong Dark. I just took a grouping of dark malt flavors that I thought would be very interesting, and came up with the below. This is for 15 gallons (or thereabouts, I think we slightly undershot volume):

28# Belgian Pilsner Malt
1# Special B
0.75# Carafa I
0.75# Chocolate Wheat Malt
2 oz Cluster (7.7% AA) @ 60 min
2 oz Santiam (4.4% AA) @ 5 min
1 big slurry of Belgian yeast from The Bruery — Thanks Pat & Tyler!

And the final touch?

5# Homemade Amber Belgian Candi Sugar

Belgian Candi Sugar is a staple in many Belgian beers. It’s extremely fermentable, so it helps to lighten the overall body and flavor of the beer while adding alcohol. It’s usually used in a caramelized form, and typically sold as “clear”, “amber”, or “dark” (with a variant of the dark also available as a syrup). For this recipe, I wanted to add a little flavor, but didn’t want to go to a truly deep dark color, so I chose Amber.

But how to get it? Belgian Candi Sugar, purchased from a store, tends to run $5-6 per pound. That might be okay for a 5 gallon batch of beer, but when I need 5 pounds of it for a 15-gallon batch, it doesn’t quite work. So I made my own.

It’s a pretty simple process, actually. The point is to “invert” sugar, breaking the complex molecules into their much simpler-to-ferment components. This is easily done with a combination of [citric] acid — thanks again to Pat & Tyler for the acid — and heat. So how do you do it? Take a 5# bag of table sugar, add just enough water to make it into a nice thick slurry, add a few pinches of citric acid, and put it on the stove.

Of course, “put it on the stove” is a recipe for a sugar burn, a burn that would make this look like fun. So one must be very careful. You raise the temperature slowly to the point between hard ball and soft crack, allowing the sugar to boil, holding it there until the desired color is reached (or slightly before, as it continues to darken). 5# of Amber sugar took about an hour for me. You then raise the temp all the way up to hard crack, and pour it into a pan to harden:

I made a slight mistake on the sugar, in that I either had too much water or didn’t leave the sugar at hard crack long enough. Thus, when I went to break the sugar up and put it into bags, it didn’t “shatter” the way I’d hoped. It was still partly pliable. That being said, it’s not intended to be eaten like hard candy, so I wasn’t worried.

Once I had it all done, brewing went well. Efficiency (due to a very fine crush) was quite high, and my target gravity was definitely much higher than expected (partly also due to low volume, I’m sure). That means we have a nice Belgian Dark Ale (which may be classified as a Belgian Strong Dark Ale) coming it at about 8% ABV.

It won’t be kegged until this coming weekend, so I’ll update with some tasting notes in about 2 weeks or so once it’s cold and carbonated.

——————————————–

Sadly, that was the highlight of the weekend. We were down at Joanna’s family’s house at the beach. Joanna’s father wasn’t feeling too well on Friday, but we thought nothing of it. Then, at about 3:30 in the morning on Saturday morning, I hit the bathroom for some extraoral evacuation of my stomach contents. Not pretty.

I went back to sleep, and then earlier than usual, Wyatt woke up. He started spitting up everything he tried to eat. I was lethargic and couldn’t eat all day Saturday; he seemed to act normal (and ate normally) but couldn’t keep anything down.

By Sunday, I was almost 100%, and Wyatt was able to eat but had a case of Montezuma’s Revenge. That afternoon, though, Joanna started to catch the bug, and it’s been downhill from there.

Today, now, is one of the more trying days of my parenting experience. Joanna is still sick, Wyatt’s case of Montezuma’s Revenge has turned into the diaper rash from hell, and I’m sitting at home helping out just wishing I could be at work!

Here’s hoping we have a better day tomorrow, because my sister and her husband are coming in for Thanksgiving, and I don’t want them to come into this house full of sick.