When we bottle the Chianti I decided to make a quick beer from left over supplies in the Mr Beer kit and lager it in the wine fridge during the hot summer.  The Whispering Whea, Booster, and Cherries were boil for 10 minutes, allowed to cool a bit, and strained into the primary.  A standard yeast starter made with a scoop of must, cool tap water, and the yeast.  Fermentation was 1 week at 76F.  Then lagered in the wine fridge at about 48-55F.  I tasted on 9/5 and it needed sweetness and age.  The cherries don’t contribute much to the flavor.  The color is an red-amber.  On 10/1 racked into 2 1gal jugs and 2 26oz bottles. To each jug add 1 1/2 cp water + 3/4 cp demara.  The bottles were primed with demara and sat out a week.  Then placed in the fridge.  Fermentation restarted in the jugs at room temperature (~72F).

1 Can Whisper Wheat Wiezen
1 pkg Booster
1/2 cp Cherries
1 pkg K1 Lalvin yeast

Next, was a Peach Raisen wine recipe pulled from Jack Keller’s blog on 9/3.  Thaw the peaches and slice thin.  Slice the fresh peaches thin with skins.  Place fruit in a muslin bag.  Boil 1 qt of bottled water with 1 lb cane sugar.  Pour the hot, sweet water over the peaches.  Allow to cool to 95F.  Add 1 crushed camden tablet and 1 tsp pectin enzyme.  Add 1 large lemon.  Cover and wait 12 hr.  Test acid at 4.2-4.4 pH with test strips.  Make a yeast starter by boiling 1/2 cp tap water with 2 tbs cane sugar and 1/2 cp of cool must and 1 tsp yeast nutrient. Wait 1 hr and pitch yeast into starter.  Wait 1 hr and pitch the yeast starter.  Loosely cover the primary for 1 day.  Then tightly cover and airlock the primary.  After one week (9/10), I squeezed the crap out of the muslin bag (a serious mistake).  There was a huge amount of suspended material.  Added 2.55 lb cane sugar and racked to 2 1 gal jugs, not topped off.  On 10/1, racked off of heavy leese.  Added some disolved bentonite.  Topped off with 1 1/2 lt of Fuji water.  There were still significant lees on 10/13 and significant clearing, still hazy.

2 lb frozen peaches
~1 1/2 lb fresh peaches with skins sliced thin, no seeds
1/2 cp raisen’s diced
~1 lb cane sugar
1 lg lemon
1 camden tablet
1 tsp pectin enzyme
1 pkg Montrachet yeast
1 tsp yeast nutrient

We decided to make another kit for a Stagg Merlot on 9/24.  The Initial Gravity was 1.092.  On 10/13, we whipped with a bent coat hanger and added the clearing agents.  We had overfilled by a 1/2 bottle.  The Final Gravity was .992.  Make a ~13% ABV.

On 10/8 we started a Frozen Strawberry Wine again from one of Jack Keller’s recipes.  Thaw strawberries and grape juice.  Dissolve the sugar in 5 pints of tap water and boil.  Strain juice from fruit and save the juice.  Put fruit in nylon bag in primary and crush by hand.  Pour boiling water over fruit in primary and cool.  When 80-85F add juice, tannin, acid, nutrient, saved juice & 1 tsp tap water.  I held back 1 cp of saved juice frozen to add back for when the wine is stabilized.  Add yeast and cover.  Stir daily.  Initial Gravity was 1.094 and 2.0 pH from test strip.

4 lb frozen strawberries
1 11 oz can concord Welch’s organic concentrate
1 lb 8 oz light brown sugar
6 oz demara
2 tsp wine acid blend
1/4 tsp wine grape tannine
1 pkg Red Star montrachet
1 tsp yeast nutrient

Larger Raised Bed
~4 Petunias
2 Celosia

Small Raised Bed
1 clump of chives
~3 Petunias
2 Celosia
1 set of yellow granex onion
1 set of southern belle purple onion

We plan to put tomatoes and herbs in the smaller bed and beans in the larger bed. That still leaves various flowers, tomatillosm potatoes, shallots, scallions, etc. The raised hill will grow the squash; scallops(small bush) and zucchini type (yellow and green).

The drip lines to all three beds under the bedroom window have been laid out and adjusted. The two ground beds need to be setup.

One peach tree (larger) made it through the frost and is heavily loaded.

3 Black Simpson Seeded lettuce volunteered on their own around the yard and we are watering them a little to acclimatize and hopefully have more lettuce with no effort.

The parsley is taking over the ground beds and needs to be cut back heavily. Also rosemary, marjoram, and sage seem to survive the winters for a couple of years in a row and are continuing to grow around the yard.

There were a few discoveries. Like the box of Ethernet cable I left up there from last time, plus wire cutter and a drill. We used up that 500ft box and another 50ft of additional cable. I drilled one hole for the computer to discover that the boards were 6-8″ thick. When we went to run the Kitchen cable there was already a hole drilled. That really saved a lot of energy at the end. It would have been difficult with all the air vents and chimney.

All the major locations have a run to the attic hole. Some locations have other runs. Like between the old and new computer rooms and the new computer room and the kitchen. Though that last one was a mistake. Measure before you cut. The attic hole is close to the house phone line, before it splits. I’m very excited to cut it and rewire the house phones through a DSL filter and put the DSL router closer to the telephone box. So, all the runs to the attic are for getting Internet from one spot. I’ll drop a battery backup up there and run the DSL router, wired Router/Firewall, and Pogoplug off it. I’m really excited at the prospect of faster Internet by cutting out all the interference from the house telephone wiring.

The wall wired Ethernet should make it easier to plug in most anything. At this point, the house is basically networked. Yay.

Cdcovers.cc – Contains fan scanned DVD covers. Many are non-english and non-US and in a wide variety of resolutions.
Amazon.com – has small images and some have this zoom feature that makes them unobtainable and Flash-y.
Netflix – seems to have everything, but only in tiny 5 kb files. Last resort.

Just right click the image and save it. Don’t forget to crop it. Backsides from CDCovers and white edging from Amazon.com are annoying and unnecessary. Macs make this exceedingly easy with Preview.

The Cube by itself doesn’t have enough storage for the songs plus videos. That’s were the Drobo upgrades come in. Two new 1.5Ts in the big box put two 640gigs in the small box and two 500gigs came out without a home. These two can go in an external box and hold more than enough iTunes library to the Cube for the little AppleTV.

That means that videos aren’t limited to being played at my house. We can watch anything at Jennifer’s too. And it provides an offsite backup. Yay

It seems like my computers have sought to colonize every room in the house and to temporarily “go abroad”.

It makes me sad to remember raising Tiger, Dora, and Goldie. Only Tiger is left. Goldie ran away in March. Dora became quite wild while Tiger became docile. It seemed that we weren’t going to domesticate her or her kittens. Taking the to the pound seemed very cruel. However, as wild cats they knew how to catch food be afraid of people. It seemed better to take them out to a known cat colony in the country where they would at least have a chance. Hopefully Bella can be caught next weekend and moved.

I loved little Dora. Wish I could have saved her.

Tiger is a furry ball of purring love. He’s good with a few people and seems to get better all the time.

Mitten, my mom’s cat, still chases him and tries to rule the roost.

The other interesting item is the expanded Genius functionality. Not sure how well it will work, but it seems they have acquired a massive amount of data on people’s songs (54 billion).

Some stuff is kind of dumb. The LP functionality. Really? I’m supposed to want text and graphics that record labels stopped making 25+ years ago when we moved to tape. Uh, yeah, I’ve so been missing album covers and I would never have thought of going to the internet to look for that kind of stuff, because I’m so stupid.

And the sync by genre and artist functionality. What the? I thought Apple got it with the Genius feature. Show me music I like. Who cares who wrote it, sung it, or how it was arbitrarily classified. Most of my songs are ripped from a Windows machine anyway. There is no genre info on a lot of them and many are just wrong. Sync by playlist was fine. The rest just adds more complexity.