A Man's Man Weekend

I just have to spout a little about the goings-on in my arena of late. Last weekend was about as cool as they get as far as being me goes. First of all, I went climbing outside Saturday at this cool little sport wall called the Shagg Crag. I can't tell you how excited I was to actually be outside on the 2nd day of Spring. Maine is going to be a good place, methinks. Not as good as Colorado, but sure as hell better than Duluth! (Though Duluth definitely had it's pluses). The Shagg Crag has an overhanging granite wall (the only of its kind on the east coast I'm told by the locals, though I guess I'm a local too now). It was definitely worth the 1.5 hours of driving and .5 hours hiking to get there, as I had a pretty good day, on-sighting 5.12a,b, and c, and 1 hanging a 5.12d at the e.o.d. That's me in the red sports bra. Beautiful climbing for sure.

Next day, my bro-in-law, (heretofore referred to as "Jeff"), Matt and I got to work on fixing my truck. The past few weeks, every time I've gone above 40 mph and hit a bump of any kind, the front tires would begin to wobble back and forth, seemingly uncontrollably. Since this would rattle the entire truck, specifically the cab, to the point where it felt like the whole engine might explode, I had to bring a new pair of shorts every time I wanted to go on the freeway. This was good for no one. After googling "truck wobble," the only thing that came up was "death wobble." The name seemed fitting. I discovered that my truck (97 Dodge Ram) didn't have a very good track bar fitting, and would become loose over years, causing steering problems and sometimes, yes, you guessed it, a death wobble. Duh, the track bar. I should've known right? (Yes, that is sarcasm). It also always pulled to the right a bit. I found an after market kit called a Luke's Link that I ordered from Colorado and decided to put on myself to make it "better than new" (according to the website). After buying a bunch of new tools to be able to accomplish said project, making multiple trips to Napa and True Value Hardware, and pulling on a rusted bolt so hard I thought I would explode, we finally got the track bar off and fitted with the link (I won't disclose how many hours/days this took). I also fixed the airbag light that wouldn't go off, and Jeff put on a new horn. Driving on the freeway at 60, hitting a bump, and not feeling so much as a burp from Sampson (our truck), was pretty damn satisfying.

After that (Sunday being the culmination of the hours/days of work on the truck), Matt, Jeff and I brewed up a Marzen lager, Marzen being German for "March." It took about 5 hours, since we did a partial mash, but it is now fermenting in our basement. Since it's a lager, it will take about 2 months to finish. We will wait till the end of the week, and then transfer it to a secondary fermenter. Another week or 2, and then we'll bottle it, mixing it with local organic maple syrup as a bottling sugar. When I found out that Budweiser uses rice as their grain, I was thoroughly disgusted. The bastardization of fine arts in this country has no end. The greed of it all makes me sad. I bet back in the day Bud was a good beer, and that Mr. Weiser was a good dude who loved making beer and not vast amounts of money. Then the corporatocracy took over somewhere in there. Blah. Anyway, the brew shop in Portland is pretty cool. The guy helped us modify our recipe to accommodate our brewing tools as well as selling us the closest thing he had for hops and Irish moss to what we needed. We're going to call it Ahorn Marzen (Ahorn being German for Maple). I'm excited for this beer, since it's the first one I've brewed where we came up with the recipe on our own. It will essentially be our own beer, and not some kit that random dude at beer company threw together for noobs to brewing. Equally satisfying as the truck and climbing.

So like I say, it was a man's man weekend. And I listened to Man Man too.