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Last weekend we were still enjoying a run of beautiful weather. Nearly every day dawned with some fog that cleared in the late morning. After that we had sunny skies and temperatures in the seventies until early evening when dark would fall and temperatures would head towards the lower fifties. For weeks we had no threat of rain, so every single day it was like living a California summer all over again.

We took advantage of that fact to get out several times over the weekend.

We started by purchasing a new baby backpack. Our previous model was OK for short jaunts around the neighborhood and smaller babies, but for actual hiking with larger babies, it wasn’t the most comfortable. So, we invested some money in a much more comfortable pack that is more appropriate for longer hikes with bigger babies.

We took the pack out to an orchard and Garrison got his first experience with apples fresh off the tree. There isn’t a large variety of apples ripe at the moment, but we plan on going again sometime in October. Interested parties can see photos that we took while apple picking in the Photo Gallery.

We also took the time for another picnic and hike. We went out to Governor Dodge State Park and enjoyed ourselves for another afternoon. Garrison got to roll around on the picnic blanket, suck on some more apple slices, and fall asleep in the new baby carrier. Dalla got to run around and look for critters to hunt (she didn’t find any). Sarah and I got out to enjoy some of the early fall color. Again, there are photos from the trip in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

Sunday, Sarah and I both wanted to get out of town for a while and Sarah’s idea of taking a picnic to Devil’s Lake State Park won out. Sarah put together lunch while I loaded the car and off we went.

We stopped on the way and bought some cheese (for home) and some cheese curds (for the picnic). About an hour after we started, we pulled into the parking lot. The park can be fairly crowded in the summer as it is the single most popular state park in the Wisconsin. On Sunday, while there were plenty of people there, it was far less crowded than it often is during the summer.

We spread out our blanket in the shade under some trees and enjoyed a pleasant picnic. Garrison played with plastic lids and a carrot that Sarah brought along for him while Sarah and I ate our lunches. Dalla spent her time waiting for hand-outs and patrolling the nearby greenery for critters.

After an hour or so we brought our picnic gear back the to car, changed into our hiking boots, and hit the trail. Sarah put Garrison into a new baby carrier that she made and he was asleep relatively rapidly (he didn’t manage to take a nap in the morning so he was pretty cranky and tired by then). She hauled his sleeping self uphill for the better part of a mile as we climbed up the East Bluff Woods trail. At the top she transferred him to me and I put him in the baby backpack that we have. He spent the rest of the hike on my back and most of the time he was asleep.

The weather was extremely pleasant, with temperatures in the upper seventies and sunshine. A handful of trees were turning, and many of the plants on the forest floor were browning up, heralding the arrival of fall in the next couple of weeks.

After hiking for a couple of hours, we started back to Madison. Everyone, except Garrison, was tired from hauling water, food, and/or an infant on their back up and down the bluffs. We took the scenic route back to Madison, with the windows down the entire way, and took the Merrimac Ferry across the Wisconsin River. We had to wait twenty minutes or so to get on-board, but it made for a pleasant end to our trip.

There are a few photos from the trip in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

This weekend I brewed my first all-grain batch of beer. I decided to brew up a pale ale, and after reading plenty of recipes, decided to brew this batch by the seat of my pants, went out in the yard, and started brewing. Six and one-half hours later, I had everything put away and a batch of beer in a fermenter. In the future, I expect it will take less time for a simple batch like the one I did this weekend, but given the complexity of the setup, I felt that that time window was not half-bad.

In the picture below, you can see 2/3 of my all-grain brewing setup. The hot liquor tank is on top of the propane burner on the left, while the mash/lauter tun is in the middle of the frame. The boil kettle isn’t shown, but it looks pretty much identical to the hot liquor tank. There is a pump on the chair below the mash/lauter tun that is recirculating hot wort through a heater on the right side of the tank, and back into the top. On the right side of the bench my counter-flow heat exchanger is visible. If you want to see the picture in greater detail, you can click on it for the original size.

Now that Garrison has started at day care, we have our own personal disease vector. He came down with a runny nose and the sneezes over the weekend and it wasn’t more than a day or two until both Sarah and I were sick, as well. When he first got sick, he would sleep for more than an hour or so in his crib until the mucus would inhibit his ability to breathe which, naturally enough, woke him up. We traded off turns keeping an eye on him, so one or the other of us was up all night for the most part. Eventually, I got wise to the problem and stuck some rolled up blankets under one end of his crib mattress. Once I laid him down on his back with his head slightly elevated, his breathing eased and he was able to sleep for longer periods of time. Unfortunately, we’re all still varying degrees of sick.

Garrison also started to refuse any sort of bottle, sippy cup, or solid food over the weekend from either of us over the weekend. He generally refuses bottles from the ladies at day care, but would eat solid foods when they were offered by the teachers, however. This flat-out refusal of both went on until Tuesday evening when Sarah, with great effort, was able to get him to eat some solids again. Wednesday afternoon we took him in to see a nurse practitioner. She did all the requisite poking, prodding, listening, and examining before declaring that he had ear infections and that they were likely the reasons that he was refusing the bottle. She said that we could put him on antibiotics or wait and it would likely clear up in four to seven days. The fact that he was eating again likely meant that it was clearing up already, so we decided to wait (prescription in hand, should we need it).

He’s still quite actively refusing to be fed by me. Wednesday night Sarah went to the grocery store and he woke up shortly after she left. He absolutely refused to even consider the bottles I made for him, so he had no choice but to scream his little heart out until Sarah got back. That wasn’t fun for Garrison or me.

Yes, I finally broke down and joined the accursed Facebook. For those of you wondering if my posting here will end as a result, the answer is a resounding “no.” I have no plans to make a habit of writing anything on my Facebook page.

The biggest problem with Facebook, from my perspective, is that it is a bit like a roach motel for personal data. That is, “Your data checks in; it never checks out.” I know of no good way to get pictures, postings, comments, etc. out of Facebook. While I have to suffer through the headache of maintaining software on my own website, I always know where my data is, and I can do whatever I want with it. In other words, by maintaining my own website, I own my data.

So, while I now have a Facebook account, the only reason is so that I can read the postings of other people who do write there.

There are a handful of new photos in the Photo Gallery of Garrison as he approaches seven months. We haven’t been as diligent about taking photos of him lately, so there weren’t many worth posting.

For years, I’ve used software called Geeklog to manage my website. It was functional and secure, but a much larger package than I needed for a simple blog. It was also a major pain to upgrade and to change its appearance. So, I rarely upgraded it as a result.

Recently, I discovered a method—that wasn’t perfect but was pretty good—for moving my data to a different software package. So, I made the switch. You’ve likely noticed the change in appearance and functionality.

The hope is that I can upgrade this software more easily than the old stuff.

It’s certainly been a while since I wrote in this space, and a whole bunch of things have happened since then. In fact, so many things have happened that I’m not sure where to start. So, I’ll write down news as it comes to mind. Order in this instance does not imply importance. That is, if I thought of something before something else, that doesn’t make the first more important than the second.

Garrison started day care last week. He’s now in day care Tuesdays and Thursdays. The school has a picture on their website if you’re interested in what his room looks like. He’s probably the biggest baby in his class, though there is one older than him by a couple of weeks. He seems to like it there, though he’s currently having trouble concentrating on his bottles there. His sold food goes down fairly easily, but he get so distracted by all the goings-on around him that he sometimes comes home with just as much milk as he had when we dropped him off.

He’s also creeping towards crawling. He has figured out how to get from a sitting position onto his belly without smacking his face on the floor in the process, as well as how to roll around the room and move backwards and forwards. He moves backwards by lying on his belly and pushing with his hands; he moves forwards by lying on his belly and pushing forwards (generally off something) with his feet. We’ve already started baby-proofing the house since it is obvious that he’s going to be a real terror once he’s fully mobile. Tuesday, I had him ready to go to day care and I put him on the floor near the garage door while I put a collar on the dog. As I was putting the collar on Dalla, I heard the tell-tale “splish-splish” of little hands playing in the dog’s water dish. Then, I heard the metallic splash that the dog’s water dish makes when an infant pulls it over. Finally, I heard the squalling of a wet baby who was lying in a rapidly expanding puddle of dog water. He’s gotten into cabinets, has discovered that some furniture is on wheels (very fun to push and pull), and is already eying other areas where he can cause trouble.

Dalla remains very tolerant of Garrison and his shenanigans. She never threatens him with nipping or biting, even when he pulls chunks of fur out of her tail. She often moves away from him if he ends up near her and we’re not handy to patrol his grabby fists, but otherwise is doing quite well with the invasion of her den. She is also busy doing her best to remove varmints from the face of the planet. She got another rabbit a few weeks ago and caught a mouse recently, as well.

We pulled all the tomato plants out of our garden a week ago due to an infestation of late blight on the plants and fruit. That was very disappointing because we were on track to have a bumper crop this year and now we’ve got almost none left.

On the upside, we’re still getting a good number of oversized zucchini, some cucumbers, broccoli, kohlrabi, raspberries, and peppers. There are some pumpkins on the pumpkin plants and some butternut squash that will hopefully ripen later this fall. The tomatillo plant looks like it will still produce a good crop. I harvested my hops a couple of weeks ago. Due to a lawn mowing mishap, I didn’t get as many as I hoped, but I still got some. I should get a bigger crop next year.

On the brewing front, I recently invested some money in a fairly large, all-grain brewing system that I bought off someone who didn’t brew any longer. Using grain instead of extract should help me to make a wider range of beers more cheaply. For instance, I used to spend somewhere around $20 per batch for extract and specialized grains. Using an all-grain system, I can expect to spend somewhere in the range of $6-10 per batch on fermentables and get better results.

We visited South Dakota a couple of weekends ago and stopped to visit some relatives on the way back. It’s a long drive both ways and I spent the whole time wondering why anyone would rather drive than sit on a train.

Sarah’s parents visited us in July and we took a day to drive up to EAA’s AirVenture in OshKosh. While past years have been quite fun, this year was something of a dud due to rain. It was also the first full-day of the show and many of the unique aircraft the show draws had not yet made their appearance. I’m definitely going again in the future, but I would rather go on Friday than on Monday. We took Garrison with us, and he wasn’t too impressed. I brought along some hearing protection for him, because some of the flybys are pretty loud. When I put the muffs on his head, the first thing he did was take them off, which meant that it became a struggle between the two of us and neither one was happy as a result.

We helped my sister move in mid-August from a duplex on the southwest side of Madison to a home near us. Her new house is a Lustron, which is a type of metal house built after WWII. It’s got big windows and plenty of light inside which is a bit of a change from her last place. The neighborhood is also a bit nicer.

We’ve had an extremely mild summer this year, which has been great for personal comfort. We’ve probably only run the air conditioner five or six days all summer. This week, in particular, has been great with sunny skies and temperatures in the lower to mid seventies. It’s a bit like an extended Indian summer.

For those interested parties, I’m not planning on visiting the South Pole this year. I’m on the passenger manifest as an alternate to the alternate, which is just fine with me.

Sarah recently made a YouTube video of Garrison at seven months.