The weather was 60° and mild today, which for January in Maryland is kind of like a blizzard on the Amazon. Today was Father’s Day at Finn’s school, which the two of us have been looking forward to for months. Walking in, we were given our ties by the teacher, and I had Finn slip it over my head. Then she led me over to the play-doh table and she mashed shapes out of turquoise dough with three other children while the adults made small talk. After making pizzas out of construction paper and glue, we washed up and the kids began their day. We dads stood in back of the classroom and watched them run through their morning routine, offering quiet encouragement—hi there! turn around and sing!—in between muffled laughter—don’t look at me, look at the teacher!—and the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s pretty amazing how quickly that stuff comes back. I found myself with my hand over my heart halfway through “one nation under God” before I realized I was saying it out loud.

And then, just as soon as it had begun, it was time to leave. I got a big hug from Finn and told her I loved her, my nose pressed up against her clean hair, and then she was down on the floor and across the room, on to the next activity. I drive home with a hole in my heart the size of a 3-year-old girl—the one who jumps in circles by herself during the Potato Song.

My Daddy…
Favorite color is Green
Loves to eat ravioli for dinner
Likes to watch Bobble Heads on TV
Works on a computer at work
Comes home from work and eats dinner
Loves to play “tickle fight” with me
Love, Finn

This week has been a blur of sleep-work-home-sleep with no productive outcome. I spent about 3/4 of my work week in Photoshop compositing images for a client but we haven’t sold a concept yet. I broke up a three-week Scout drought for Wednesday’s commute, and was rewarded by a minor fender bender on the 395 onramp.

The keg of Dead Ringer IPA in the kegerator still hasn’t carbonated fully; there’s a hint of fizz in there, but not as much as I’d like. I have plans to brew with my neighbor tomorrow afternoon—he has two batches fermenting and a third to brew, as well as a propane-fired stove in his garage. He’s also my A/V expert, being an electrician by trade, so I’m going to finalize my television mounting plan with him.

I’m trying to motivate myself to start shooting pictures again. My commute has been a predictable figure-8 for the past three years, and as a result I don’t see new things for inspiration. The solution could be adding an extra ten minutes to my morning commute to find new routes into work, as well as more trips out with the girls to explore. I’m also considering the purchase of some 120 film to roll onto 620 spools so that I can shoot some black and white pictures of the girls.

I’m going to try and shoot for brewing my next batch of ale this weekend in order to get another batch ready by the middle of February. Brian forwarded me a weblog post featuring a homemade hot/cold temperature controller, which he’s going to be using for controlled fermentation, but which could also be used for kegeration.

Meanwhile, I’m a mess. My neck, which has been giving me problems for a few months now, is in the advanced stages of stabbing with icepicks, made all the more painful after curling up next to Finn Wednesday night to ward off bad dreams. And being away from the keyboard for a couple of days has wreaked havoc on my wrists; I feel like they’ve been sat upon for a couple of hours and then thrust into chilled water. Apparently the neck thing has something to do with an orthopedic pillow and the vertebrae being pinched, so I need to consider some PT at the little Polish guy down the street and a special pillow for sleeping.

All of this leads me to my next problem, which has been how to fit time for regular exercise into our family’s schedule. I’m acutely aware of my age and the fact that I’m living on borrowed time—given the history of heart and circulatory problems in my family tree, I want to add 1/2 hour of cardio to my daily routine. The issue I have is that I need to get it in either before Finn wakes up or after she goes to sleep, and it has to be quiet so that I don’t keep her up. And therein lies the rub.

Christmas itself was lots of fun; we gathered at the Lockard compound to wait out the fat man and eat lots of food, and he was very generous to us all. I got some boots that needed to be returned—Dr. Martens in a size too big—and some pants that don’t double as catamaran sails, as well as a new beer kit. Finn made out really well, with musical instruments, a digital camera, and a toy piano among other things. Jen’s composter is on super-backorder but should arrive sometime in the next week or so.

We bought Jen’s dad a dishwasher to replace his ancient model, and I spent the better part of Monday pulling the old unit and installing the new one. After some confusion about hoses and connections, I got everything sorted out, leaks tightened up, and a test load running before we left.

The roof and gutters on the Estate are finally done, and I wrote a Very Big Check to pay for the whole thing on Tuesday. My apprehension at seeing my bank account dwindle was mitigated when it started raining 1/2 hour after the roofers left, and we could see actual water emptying out of the downspouts, as opposed to pouring out of the middle of the gutter on the back of the house. I added some extensions to the downspouts and adjusted a few things, and hopefully that will move more water away from the house quicker. Tuesday was also PJ day for the three of us, and we took great relish in sitting around and doing absolutely nothing for the whole day. Mama and I finally caught up with the final Harry Potter movie after Finn went to bed, and we enjoyed it, but we’re sad to see the series come to a close.

Wednesday I crawled back into the coal cellar and finished installing studs, then insulated the entire outside wall. It feels warmer at the edges of the room upstairs to a pair of stockinged feet (and Tuesday evening’s sub-artic temperature was the real test). I’m glad to have that done—and my back is, too.

Thursday and Friday were spent cleaning the house in preparation for the Unbirthday Party, which was a qualified success. Jen specified Afghan food for the meal, and everyone stepped up to the plate to provide very tasty food. After dinner, we sat in the living room around the fire, drank, laughed, and had a great time with everyone. Saturday was another day of rest after the party, and we stayed in our PJs as long as we could.

Sunday I went back to Chestertown to continue working on the Scout bumper, which is documented in detail here. I also tacked our flat-panel mount together and dropped it off for final welding while I was out there. It’s a 1.5″ length of box steel that stretches from floor to ceiling, and two feet at the top and bottom will provide mounting points. I’m going to cut a hole in the back and at the bottom to feed cabling inside so that it will be out of view.

That picture is of a batch of IPA going into a freshly cleaned keg, which is now sitting in a newly constructed kegerator in the basement. There’s a tank of Co2 hooked up to a brass splitter and two shutoff valves, which will eventually feed two kegs. The brew I put in this afternoon is getting force-carbonated and should be ready by Monday afternoon. I’m currently without a temperature controller, but switching the keg on and off manually works just as well until I can get one.

For about eight months I’ve been unable to use Flickr’s built-in posting tool to add photos to my website. The content showing up on my site would be code minus the HTML symbol markup, so every post looked like Finn had started bashing on the keyboard in an open text field. The fix was to install this small plugin, which resolves an issue with the libXML2 version my hosting provider is running (and thus mangling my posts).

In related news, my batch of Dead Ringer IPA is just about ready for a move to the secondary fermenter, and if all goes well I’ll finally have the hose and tank setup sometime this week. I have to buy a jar of commercial cleaner and get my keg washed and resealed for the batch when it’s ready, but that can wait until the week after Christmas.

This is the latest addition to the home computer fleet: a used (and free) Lampshade iMac, circa 2002. I’ve already had it torn down once to drop a new hard drive in, and it will need a new optical drive as well (the unit it came with is not reading discs). It can only run up to OS 10.4, but it recognizes large drives and has a built-in monitor, so I’m going to repurpose it as a music server and swap out the trusty old G4 tower sitting under my desk at work.

Sunday afternoon I started work in the coal cellar putting up studs for insulation. I noticed a huge temperature drop the first time I opened the door, so I know it’s still not sealed up properly. The first order of business was to mix up a bunch of hydraulic cement and plug numerous little holes in the foundation as well as a crack running down the wall from the corner of the coal chute. Once that was done, I installed studs along the east wall and got about 1/2 of the south wall done before I ran out of lumber. I figure about four more 2×4′s and two rolls of new R-19 should do the trick. I also stuffed the coal chute full of insulation and found a sheet of plywood to nail up over the opening to cut off the airflow. Once the wall batts are up, I can put the overhead insulation back in place and call that room sealed. Then, hopefully, the den will stay warm.

Here’s your video:

Saturday also marked the first time I’ve dealt with leaves in the backyard since about 2006 or so; one circuit with the lawnmower made some finely-chopped mulch for next spring. The front yard still looks pretty good, although our hedges continue to collect and retain leaves from most of the surrounding counties.

Finn and I were on our own for dinner, so I took her over to the local Toys ‘R’ Us to scout out the Leapfrog lineup and judge whether or not it’s worth spending money on. Most of the merchandise I saw was 1-purpose stuff, made to do one or two things but not expand further which turns me off. Taking a chance on a $40 toy that might not help Finn read or learn numbers seems like a waste to me, especially as most of them spend more time highlighting other things—useless games, singing songs, etc. We fooled around in the store for almost an hour, and then went next door to the Panera for some dinner. Finn polished off a bowl of mac and cheese and then all of her yogurt, so I treated her to a cookie when we got home. After a shower, we read a few books together and then hit the sack clean and happy.

Sunday started with service across the street, and then a visit to the Gooch (our local thrift store in Irvington) for Mama to pick up some accessories for her christmas card design. Then, while my girls napped, I boiled water and got a batch of Dead Ringer IPA in the fermenter. While that was happening, I started pulling my keg apart to familiarize myself with the parts. I have new valves and O-rings ready but I probably need to buy some industrial cleaner to get the inside as spotless as I can. And, the pumpkin ale has had two weeks to condition in bottles, and tastes much better.

On the geek front, I spent a little time getting my old Powerbook 1400 online so that I could download and play a copy of ZPC, a freaky game from the middle 90′s that bent my head a little crooked. Describing it to my co-workers, I found a download of the CD image, and decided I needed to play it again. Getting the 1400 online meant I needed to bust out an older Airport Base Station that used 802.11b with no encryption, then find a way to get the files off the interwebs and decompressed correctly. (it took a modern version of Stuffit on my server and a burned CD, after I remembered I had a CD drive for it) but I have to rename the CD correctly to play the game. This got me thinking about playing some of my older games locally, and revisiting the issue of emulation on an Intel Mac. Looks like they’ve got it working in Lion with a few caveats, which is cool; it also reminds me just how much of my history is on discs that my current machine can’t read.