productive...

publish first, ask questions later. this should have gone up on monday, but here it is anyway.

heather was out of town this weekend. normally, that means i end up riding and not doing much else, but this turned out to be a pretty productive & fun weekend. i...

• met up with jason, ryan, and rob for dinner and beers at the quarry house
  
• cut down a tree
• finished demolishing the shower stall in the downstairs bathroom
• started getting our bedroom ready for paint
• contemplated the cabinet installation in the basement (inconvenient stud placement & a poorly designed cabinet are causing problems).
• re-attached some quarter round upstairs that had been removed for painting
• went for a ride (saturday) and ran into evan in rock creek park
• had dinner at matt & katie's (josef & sam where in town)
• another road ride (sunday)
• brewed a batch of beer (dry stout, first partial mash)
• went to the MORE winter party (with heather, she got home just in time)

the first 4 items were with the help of my parents who came over to help out on saturday morning. getting the shower pan out of the bathroom was a big step forward. now all that's left is pulling up the hardwood floor. we'll probably leave the subfloor down until we start on the framing. that would require actual plans, though, and that's something we haven't managed yet.

the dry stout partial mash brew session went fairly smoothly. the strainer i was using for the sparge was only just big enough for 4.5 pounds of grain and and it was a bit too big to fit in my brew kettle. i ended up having to shuffle the strainer and pots of hot wort around a couple of times and in the process made a bit of a mess. gravity is a bit lower than expected (1.036, target was 1.042) but i sampled before mixing and aerating, and i've had some low readings before when the batch hadn't fully mixed.

i'd hoped to get the wall cabinets up in the basement on saturday, but there were some complications. the cabinet widths and stud spacing are causing some headaches and they're going to require a little extra work to make sure they're properly hung.