Where to start

When you are feeling low, it can feel like you are in a hole you can't climb out of. 

Depression hands you a shovel.

The feeling feeds on itself. You keep digging deeper and deeper, farther into yourself and away from the world. Where you used to be able to see a way out, and all you needed was a ladder, now the light seems impossibly far away. You stop looking up, and you don't even notice when someone throws you a rope.

Melodramatic? Maybe. But if you have gone through it, you understand. If you haven't, I don't know that a few more paragraphs will land any punches.

And of course, procrastination dovetails nicely into all this. The farther you dig, the more things back up, and the less you feel able to tackle anything - much less all of it. Vicious cycle.

Well, I have stopped digging. If I think about all I need to do to get out of the hole, I will be overwhelmed. I just need to start making steps in the right direction. If I can make positive steps, it will feed on itself just as the negativity that got me here. Attitude and perception are everything. If I feel better, I will see things better, and I will do better. Rinse and repeat.

I am starting with the basics - how I feel physically. For the first part of this year, I have been running haphazardly. If I felt sore or tired, it was all too easy to put off a run for another day. Though I have maintained a relatively healthy weight, I haven't been feeling all that good. I am running out of  "another day".

My friend Sean has run every day for a month a number of times, and it not only gave him a great physical base, but it ingrained the habit of running. There was no debate whether this was a running day or not. You just ran. I have never really been tempted to do this. Even at the height of training, I typically only run three times a week, and rarely two days in a row. I always felt that running more than that was inviting injury.

My roomie actually gave me the inspiration to make the leap. Matt has been running consistently for nearly two months. And when I say consistently, I mean every day. He has now run 51 days in a row, and has dropped over 35 pounds. You can just see how much better he feels.

So I have started a regimen of my own. I plan to run 30 days in a row, and today was day 11. Now as soon as I roll out of bed, I put on my running clothes (well, after feeding the insistent dog). Doesn't matter whether I feel like it or not, I just run. No putting it off, no procrastination. Habit begets habit. Things get checked off, the load gets a little lighter.

And I am checking things off on the backlog. I am eating a little better and the head is a little clearer. There is lots left to do, but the first steps are being made on the open road.

Shifting out of reverse

Lloyd Dobler: Why can't you be in a good mood? How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood once in a while?" 
Constance: Gee, it's easy.

~ From the movie, "Say Anything"

I have been in a funk for months, and I did not want to celebrate my birthday this year. I am not huge on birthdays in a normal year, but this year I just wanted it to slip by unnoticed. It wasn't any false modesty with secret hopes that my protests would be ignored. I really didn't want to be the center of attention for even a moment in my current state of mind.

I suppose to put a broad label on it, I am going through my mid-life crisis right now. It is not the sort where I snap and act out in a self-destructive manner (cheating, sleeping around, drinking, drugging, etc), or the sort where I make extravagant, impulse purchases to fill the emptiness, or reclaim my fading youth with a little red sports car. I do not wish to be any younger, and I am fine to be 45. No, it is the more quiet lamenting on how little I have done in the past four and a half decades.

I am sure this is nothing particularly unique. Most of us thought we would be farther along at this point in our lives. All of us had secret, or not so secret dreams that never came true, or that we failed to even pursue with any passion. But of course, to me, it is terribly unique. It is my failure, my falling short of my own particular ideal.

But even the ideal was poorly formed. I did not clearly visualize what I wanted my life to be at any point along the calendar. There were no pictures pinned to an inspiration board. I did not plan to make my first million by the time I was 40, dream of having pool in the backyard, or a vacation home in Hawaii. I just wanted a home, a yard, a wife, a dog, and enough money to get by with a little cushion for the unexpected.

Though the vision of my future was never particularly clear, I know at 45 I am nowhere near where I should be. I definitely imagined I would be farther down the road by this point. I have not only been coasting for too long, I have actually been going in reverse. Feelings of failure, despair and depression have been my companions these past few months. I have wallowed in it, and made myself more miserable for it.

But I am blessed. Blessed by a wonderful family, and terrific friends who would not let me hide away in a cave an sulk. When I said I did not want to celebrate my birthday, they would have none of it. They dragged me somewhat kicking and screaming to spend a lovely afternoon on a patio in sunny San Diego. There was good food, great beer, and even better friendship and conversation.

When it comes to family and friends, I have won the lottery. When I think of you, I have nothing to complain about, and the joy that they have brought to my life has made me a better man. You will always be my priority, but I need to make some changes. I am only making myself miserable, and by being miserable, I am doing no good to these people that I value so much.

Thank you dear family and friends. You change this guy:

to this guy:

And I am forever grateful. I will try to bring this guy out more often.

45

Um, Er, Well...Huh

Getting crafty

I don't consider myself to be a particularly creative person. I am not one of those people who looks at yard as a blank slate, and can picture how I would landscape it. I don't walk into a craft store and imagine all I can do with the bits and pieces in bins. Food in the fridge aren't ingredients unless a recipe is nearby. Rather than being a "vision" guy, I tend to be more on the production side of things. Give me a set of plans, and I am on it.

I do have an occasional corner of my world where I try to stretch my legs. In the past, I made DVDs at the end of each year, and I enjoyed laying out the pictures, movies and music to try to tell a story. When I wrote my novel, there was a front and back cover to design, photos to stretch and twist, and a website to arrange.

These days when I have a project, creative or not, solutions can generally be found online. CreateSpace, Kindle Publishing, and PubIt made it possible to produce the various versions of my novel. I found a great (free) program in GIMP that allowed me to design my book cover myself. YouTube videos have taught me how to fix appliances, re-key door locks, and snake drain lines.

When I started brewing beer, I found lots of creative people willing to share their knowledge and excitement. I have spent (too) many hours surfing websites and message boards looking for every bit of information I could find. Once I get this homebrewing down a little better, I will look to create my own versions of beers, but for now I am sticking to the recipes.

In the meantime, I have been pouring a little creative energy into the stuff surrounding the actual beer. I found plans to make beer crates quite cheaply out of scrap wood. I will use these to store the beer in the crawlspace, away from the summer heat. The guy who drew up the plans also showed how you could antique the wood with a little steel wool and vinegar, and imprint a logo with a color printer and an iron.

Here is how they turned out:

Plain crate

Logo imprint

Antiqued and filled with beer

While I was waiting for the beer to ferment and condition, I created a label for the bottles.

The little QR code on the right will lead you to a webpage with the statistics, recipe, my brewing experience, lots of other beer nerdiness. There is also a link to the website in the sidebar (if you're into that sort of thing).

I opened the first beer last night. Mistakes were definitely made during my first batch, so I was a little worried that the beer would be undrinkable. In the end, it was just okay - not great, not terrible. It was a little flat, and I was little disappointed that the hop character didn't come through. Afterward, I opened up a Red Hook ESB, which is what the recipe was based on, and I realized that my version wasn't as far off as I thought. I guess I remembered Red Hook being better than it was.

So far, I am really enjoying the brewing process, and having a small creative outlet. I already have another batch of beer fermenting, and I can't wait to see how it turns out. I know that I love the beer the recipe is based on, so I have higher hopes.

I have also started using the website Pinterest, which is an endless stream of inspiration and creativity - crafts, recipes, re-purposing and re-imagining everyday objects. Kristy has bookmarked lots of cool projects already. Who knew there were so many things you can do with wine bottles, mason jars, and wood shipping pallets?

I am starting to see little glimmers possibility in the bits and pieces, and I now find myself stopping more often at the local fencing company to look through the scrap pile. I just need to keep looking over the shoulder of those creative types until it really takes hold.

Boxes full of memories

Your house is on fire.

Fortunately, your spouse, roomie, dog, cat, houseplant and pet Goldfish are all on a field trip to the zoo. Everything alive is already safe. You have 30 seconds. What do you grab?

The answer for most people, is pictures. They are the record of your life, a visual diary, the moments that make up the whole. My Mom would have to have a large cart to haul out all of her photo books, but now for most of us, that would mean grabbing our computers. Pictures are digital bits rather than squares of paper sitting under a protective sheet of plastic. This usually keeps them better protected, but at the same time, they are locked away, rarely seen or shared.

Of course storing them digitally is not a perfect solution. Computers crash, hard drives fail, and they are just as vulnerable to heat, water and other methods of destruction. My housemates recently lost several years of their (photo) life when the backup drive stopped working. Gone were several years of photos, including the ones during the first year of their daughter's life.

For more than a year, there was this hole. They tried to access the photos in multiple ways to no avail. They put off a trip to a computer shop, delaying what they felt was the inevitable judgment that all was lost. When they finally enlisted the help of an expert, they learned the external drive was indeed toast.

I have felt something similar the past three years. The photos from the first few years of my marriage were pre-digital, and the only copies were those we had developed. Camping trips, cruises, parties, random moments, and of course our wedding - they all sat in a box a thousand miles away in J's storage unit. When things were split up, it was understood that I wanted copies, but actually making that happen kept getting put off. I don't know if I would have gone through them soon after our divorce, but the fact that they were missing made the hole in my past even larger.

The scanning of copies was a big project for her, but I think the delay was more related to not wanting to go through them. I can't know what they meant to her, but I am sure she anticipated some sort of pain during the walk through the past. I understood her hesitance, but would bring up the subject every six months or so. I think after three years, the lines of diminishing pain and increasing insistence crossed on the graph, and she sent them to me last month.

We exchanged some friendly emails in the process, and she remarked that the job she had been dreading ended up being somewhat enjoyable. Two large boxes were soon on my doorstep. My housemates were going to be out of town for a few days, so I set them aside for a week until I could go through them in privacy. I wasn't sure how they would hit me, and it was something I needed to do alone. The first night they were gone, I opened a nice bottle of wine and broke the seal on the box of memories.

One box had the wedding photos, and the other everything else. Not knowing which was which, I opened the wedding photos first, but immediately set them aside. For a couple of hours, I went through piles of photos, loosely grouped by event, but with a little bit of random chaos mixed in.

She had initially separated out photos of herself in some hopes sparing me painful surprises.While I appreciated the sentiment, I told her it was unnecessary. I didn't go camping or take those trips alone. This was the time we were together, and there is no magic eraser to take her out of my memory, or the pictures that hold them so tightly. Even if there was, it would be just one more hole in my past.

I looked through them with a mix of feelings, of course. Smiles, regret, surprise, wistfulness and warmth. Even with the photos filling back in the hole in my life's timeline, there was still a lingering vacancy. The feelings behind those captured moments are now different, but it was still a blessing to look through them. Although nothing is clearer than it was three years ago, time has done some of its work nonetheless.

After going through the first box, I hesitated over the second. It was getting late, and I debated saving the wedding for another day, but decided to press on. More regret, but still more beauty. We had put out disposable cameras on the tables, and there were some good candid shots, but oddly the staged, professional ones seemed to capture the day best. As much as I had wanted to see them a couple of years ago, it probably would have been a semi-masochistic exercise. They still grabbed me looking through them now, but with a gentler hand. I imagine the next time I go back to them, they will look different all over again.

Fortunately, my housemates were able to recover most, if not all of their photos a couple of weeks ago. The other Sean had made copies of the photos when he was setting up their Apple TV and creating some slide shows. Before he arrived with a stack of DVDs, I had burned some as well with pictures that I had from that era. Going through those sort of prepped me for the boxes on my doorstep, and made the walk through the past a little easier.

I am glad to have the pictures back, for all they represent. I will still stumble over it, but the hole is filled in a little bit.

Just a few moments in time, starting with a couple of old ones that were mixed in.

A much younger me

My brother during our 1992 Japan trip

 A couple of kisses on my first Caribbean cruise

Some good friends

Camping goodness

(I had just eaten dirt-encrusted Jello off the ground)

Wedding day

  And to finish, Sierra in her younger days

With Holly

With young Carson

And in the chair where she waited for us to come home

There are more photos from even farther back, languishing in my own storage unit. I need to dig them out before anything can happen to them. I can only imagine what I might find, and anyway, they shouldn't be locked away, never to be seen. These moments are who we are, and once in a while it does some good to remember.

Quote of the day

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

~ Pablo Picasso

Relax. Don't Worry. Have a homebrew

So after learning more about quality beer, I finally decided to take the plunge on brewing my own. Homebrewing has been clanging around in the back of my brain for a decade or two, but I never pulled the trigger. The other Sean has been back to homebrewing for more than a year now, so along with the inspiration of the brewery tour, I had been hearing about his first hand experience. I had also been sampling his homebrews, including the excellent porter he created in honor of my birthday last year.

I found a good brewing kit on Craigslist for about a third of the price of what it was at the local shop. The kit was actually sent out as a prize from a Sam Adams contest, but the winner passed it along to her son, who then sold it to me. I had nearly everything to brew all in one big box, including a book and DVD on how to do it.

I watched the DVD, read the beginners section of the book, and then helped (watched) Sean brew a batch of his own. Seeing him in action made it less intimidating. At its core, brewing beer is remarkably simple - you prepare a sugary mixture, add some yeast, and the yeast converts the sugars to alcohol and CO2. There are only four basic ingredients (water, malted grain, yeast, and hops), but of course you can make it as complicated as you want.

With thousands of recipes in books and online, each with variations on types and amounts of grains and hops, you can get overwhelmed by the choices. My kit included the ingredients for a basic ale for the first batch, but from the shipping label it looked like it had been sitting around for 9 months. I decided not to risk it, and planned to get fresh ingredients.

But what to brew? I decided on a recipe that said it was a clone of Red Hook ESB, one of the early craft brews and a staple back in Seattle. Recipe in hand, I walked into the local brew shop and fessed up that I was a newbie. The guy was happy to help me out, locating the appropriate grains, and showing me the proper way to measure and grind them. He chatted me up about my approaching first attempt, and even gave me a 10% discount on ingredients and tools. Here we go.

The Complete Joy of Homebrewing describes in great detail all the things that you need to focus on to make a good homebrew. You need to pay close attention to time, temperature, and most of all, to sanitation. He emphasizes the importance of each step, but then puts you at ease by saying, "Relax. Don't Worry. Have a homebrew." Although these things are important to the beer coming out right, it is forgiving of a little variance. Relax, it is just beer.

So the basic process is to steep the grains, much like making a large cup of tea.

Add in extra sugary goodness (unless you are only using grains)

  Measure out some hops for bitterness and aroma.

Then boil it all for 60 to 90 minutes.

(You are encouraged to have a beer, while you are brewing beer. Preferably it would be similar to the one you are brewing, but the store was out of Red Hook. Since it was originally a Sam Adams brew kit, I thought it was a good second choice.)

After the boiling, the mixture has to be cooled (preferably quickly) to about 70 degrees. Each yeast strain is a little different, but if the water is too cool, the yeast won't activate as well. If the water is too hot, you risk killing the yeast before it ever had a chance to do its thing. Things have to be just right, more or less (relax, have a homebrew).

Once the yeast is in, the soon-to-be-beer is sealed up. A one-way valve is attached so the CO2 can get out, but no contaminants can get in. It perks along for a couple of weeks until a majority of the sugars are used up.

You can transfer it to a new container half way through to get it away from some of the sediment, which is what I did this weekend.

In another week or so, it will be time for bottling. The beer conditions and carbonates in the bottles for two weeks, and then it is ready to enjoy and share with your friends.I am excited to see how the first batch turns out, and I am already searching for the next recipe.

This could turn out to be a fun hobby. Similar to cooking, it combines the structure of a recipe, with the freedom to modify and be creative when you get more confident (or when you make a happy mistake). There is lots of measuring equipment reminiscent of a chemistry set, and lots of numbers to track if you are so inclined (which I am). And like so many other hobbies, there is a passionate community ready to nerd out with you. Again, you can make it as complicated as you want, or you can simply relax, and have a homebrew.

Stop by in three weeks, and I will have a cold one waiting for you.

I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I'm usually standing on a concrete floor

"Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza."

~ Dave Barry

San Diego has a large, and growing number of craft breweries. Some have made it big, like Stone Brewery that now sells its beers across the nation, and has grounds worthy of a state park. However, most are probably not known much outside the area, and are typically housed in an industrial warehouse looking something like this

With big fermenting pots on one side of the room. 

And tap handles drilled into the wall of a refrigerator on the other side.







As indicated by medals earned in the world competition this past week, their humble settings are not an indication of the quality of their brews.

Most all of the San Diego breweries have banned together to form a guild to help increase the visibility of these hidden gems. Since most of them are tucked away in industrial business parks, they are difficult to just stumble upon. The guild put out a flier, complete with a map, and Sean and I have been doing a little tour over the past couple of years.

While one warehouse room looks much like the next, and though many of them put out similar styles of beer, each brewery approaches them from a slightly different angle. Most are open only a few hours a week (adding to the "speak-easy" feel), and are restricted to serving 4oz tasters. While I can't afford to drink really good wine anymore, I can spend a couple of hours sampling really good beer, and walk out for under $10 most of the time.

Most have chalkboards similar to this one from Ballast Point

Each beer listed has information not only on style and alcohol content, but also more detailed information on the grains used, their original & finishing gravities, and a a measurement of bitterness called an IBU. You begin to learn that there is a lot more to beer than "Rocky Mountain water", half-time commercials, and bottles that change color when the beer is cold. (Not that there is anything wrong with a nice macro-brew once in a while).

After tasting all of these fine beers, my palate is improving a bit. I won't claim to be a connoisseur, but all the chalkboard information and chats with the brewers have been educational. I have learned that Belgian style beers are not my favorite, that I prefer Pales and IPAs with an IBU at 70 or below, and though I don't care for scotch, Scotch Ales are quite tasty. Of course, nothing can beat a good stout or porter.

In a couple of the breweries, you will see something like this

What are these you ask? Why, they are bins filled with grains you can buy to brew your own beer. And that is just what I have started doing...