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Now that the holidays are past us, it’s time to buckle down for the dark heart of winter.

We haven’t really had any significant amounts of snow since we got fifteen inches in early December. Since then we’ve had freezing rain, some above freezing temps, some well below freezing temps, and most everything in between. All of that has turned the snow pack into a solid, cementitious base that is now slowly being turned yellow by dogs and grey by cars and airborne dirt.

We spent the holidays at home after deciding that none of us would be very happy cooped up in the car for ten hours (each way) visiting our families. Garrison, to say the least, would be extremely unhappy with that much time strapped into his car seat. That turned out to the be right decision as there was plenty of adverse weather all around Madison that made staying home much safer than braving hundreds of miles of frozen interstate highway.

My sister joined us on Christmas day for a casual dinner. Sarah made her (always excellent) eggplant parm, and my sister brought over her (always excellent) pecan pie. I served some homemade pinot noir, and everyone seemed happy with the meal. After dinner we opened gifts and had a couple of Skype video sessions with our respective families.

Our New Years Eve was predictably low key as Garrison was in bed by 20:00 and we were guaranteed an early wake-up call the next morning from our progeny.

The last week of December both Sarah and I had state-mandated furlough days, plus two more days off, so we had a nice break from our respective jobs.

Now that January has started, the Christmas decorations are down and our house is back to some semblance of normal.

Garrison’s eleven month video is now up on YouTube.

Now that December is upon us, there has been no shortage of snow to remind us that winter has arrived. Two weeks ago we got fifteen inches of very heavy wet snow in less than twenty four hours. That heavy snow weighed so much that a large number of sizable tree branches in our neighborhood fell due to the weight they were carrying. Unfortunately, several of those branches fell in our yard. So, not only did we have to clear the snow from our walks and drive, but we had to break out the chainsaw to cut up those limbs. Sarah and I worked a combined six hours clearing just the walks and drive after that storm.

Garrison has taken a blue-collar approach to walking as he practices several times a day, every day. We bought him a truck that he can either ride or push and he loves to push that truck around the house. He walks lap after lap going out the north door of the kitchen, into the living room, through the entry way, into the dining room, and back into the kitchen through the south door. Initially, he couldn’t really steer his truck very well, so if he ran into something, he was basically stuck until someone freed him. In the last week or so he’s gotten the hang of steering the truck, backing up when necessary, and even switching ends when needed. He likes to walk around looking at the various flat surfaces in the house that are within his reach, looking for new items and things don’t normally belong there so that he can play with them. All that walking and browsing is faster and easier than crawling over to a piece of furniture, climbing up it to see what’s on top, and repeating as necessary until something fun is found. It is going to be a while yet before he can walk without some sort of support, but that day is clearly coming.

On the dental front, he finally has a tooth. After numerous false alarms, a tooth broke through his lower gum a couple of weeks ago. Neither Sarah or I has been able to get a good look at it as he’s really not crazy about having people poking around in his mouth (understandably). We know it’s in there because we can feel him bite spoons with it and it leaves a solitary tooth-mark in apples that we let him have.

As I reported last month, Garrison seemed to be trying to say “dalla” and we’ve decided that “dalla” is, in fact, his first word. He still uses it fairly frequently and incorrectly, but he uses it often enough in the proper context that we’re sure that he knows that Dalla is some sort of “dalla”. Now what exactly “dalla” means is open to interpretation. He doesn’t call all dogs “dalla” so it likely isn’t a general term for dog. He says it when she isn’t around, and often when she is but he isn’t looking at her. However, there are times when I call the dog and he does his best mimicry of my call and then looks for the dog to come running. It’s actually pretty funny when he does it.

In Decembers past, we baked or six different types of Christmas cookies and treats. This year, we baked just two. I had no interest in putting up a big Christmas tree, but Sarah wouldn’t be without one, so she bought a small (four feet tall) tree and put it up on a table in our living room. We put two strings of lights outside (which we don’t normally do) and that’s been all that we’ve done for Christmas decorating this year. I guess the Christmas spirit has yet to infect Sarah and I like it has in years past.

If you’re looking for our annual Christmas card, don’t bother waiting around the mailbox. If they go out at all this year, they’ll be late.

Garrison’s ten month video is now up on YouTube.

We’ve been absolutely blessed with great November weather this year with temperatures often in the fifties and even in the sixties and seventies. Given that our October was so cold and wet, November has been a pleasant revelation.

One of the nicest things about the great weather has been that we’ve been able to Garrison outdoors on a routine basis without much hassle. We’ve been out hiking several times over the past few weeks and have been out in the yard with him often on the weekends. He loves to swing in his swing, practice walking around the yard (with our help, of course), hold on to the chain-link fence and practice standing, and sing out to the world around him.

We’ve been busy getting the yard and the house ready for winter. The yard has been raked a couple of times now (thanks for your help, Mike), the leaves have been spread on the gardens, the gutters have been cleaned, the summer yard tools have been put away and the snow shovels have been taken out of storage. The lawn mower is empty of gasoline and the snow blower has been checked for service.

While we were out and about this weekend we saw many guys out in their driveways enjoying the sixty degree weather and getting their snowblowers ready for winter. We made sure to get the oil and the gas for ours so that when the first big snow falls, we don’t have to shovel out the drive so that we can go get all the requisite fluids for the snowblower to function. It’s somewhat depressing to think about the long, dark months of winter that lie ahead of us, but that’s the price we pay for living where we do. If we wanted gentle, easy weather year-round, we could always join the hordes in Florida or Southern California.

Our freezers are stocked to their capacity at the moment as we got our yearly 1/4 bison and 1/4 hog in the last two weeks. This is the fourth or fifth year we’ve gotten a 1/4 bison from a local farmer and it is unlikely that we’ll stop next year. We like the taste of bison; we enjoy the healthy eating aspect of consuming bison; we like supporting a local farmer; we think that raising bison is more environmentally sound; and we truly enjoy opting out of the e.coli lottery that is the US food supply. This is the second year that we’ve gotten a 1/4 of a hog and that’s something else we’ll likely continue into the future. The ham, bacon, and chops you get from a locally produced and slaughtered pig just taste better than whatever you might get from Oscar Meyer and their vast processing plants. It might have nothing to do with the pig, and everything to do with the processor, but we’re not all that interested in what separates one product from the next, we just know that the local pig tastes better.

This run of nice weather gave me the opportunity to brew up another batch of beer before I put away my big beer brewing system for the winter. Saturday I spent a few hours brewing up a batch of golden, fairly hoppy English Special Bitter in the garage. It can join the Mild brown ale in the basement until I have a chance to bottle them. At the moment, my beer brewing is outstripping my beer drinking. I’ve got almost ninety bottles of beer ready to drink from my last three batches alone, plus the 100 represented by the Mild and the golden Special Bitter, plus leftovers from numerous other batches. There are also somewhere around 80 bottles of mead in the basement that either soon will be or are ready for consumption. Clearly, I’m not going to go thirsty if we get snowed in for a week this winter.

Garrison is battling through his third ear infection in the last two months. Pretty much every time he gets a cold his ears get infected and this most recent cold was no different. Fortunately, the antibiotics are working their magic and he’s already feeling much better again. We just can’t wait until he grows a bit bigger and he loses the physical traits that make him prone to ear infections.

He’s a real hurricane of destruction these days as he tears around the house. He mastered crawling in the last month or so and he can make surprisingly good time when he’s properly motivated. In recent days he’s taken to practice walking by pushing chairs around while he’s standing or by walking and holding on to stationary object. He really enjoys walking around the house and yard while Sarah or I hold him upright. It will likely be at least a month or more until he’s actually able to walk and stand on his own without assistance.

On the dental development front, the word is: no teeth. Periodically we think that he’s teething, but nothing ever pops out of his gums to prove us right. The doctor confirmed that there are teeth in his gums so we’re waiting and assuming that when they’re ready, we’ll see some teeth.

Garrison is definitely a binge eater. Since he’s started eating more solid foods, he’s shown a real preference for certain foods, often preferring one food over all others. For a while, he would eat nothing but bread. Then he got hooked on puffed rice. Recently, he’ll discard those two and eat only toasted oats (a Cheerios knock-off). The only problem with his addiction to toasted oats is that it takes a long time to eat a serving when you eat them one at a time. You’ve really got to plan on spending forty-five minutes or more in the dining room with him when he’s eating so that he gets enough time to eat all his cereal.

He’s starting to string more syllables together. Sarah thinks that he may be trying to say “Dalla” at times when the dog walks into a room where he is. He can’t actually say “Dalla” yet, so it comes out more like “ahh la”. Could be coincidence; could be deliberate.

He had me laughing pretty hard the other night when he demonstrated, out of the blue, that he understands how to turn pages in a book. As part of his bedtime routine, we read him three our four books. One of those books “Goodnight Moon” is probably a bit long and advanced for a boy his age, but we read it to him anyway. I had just started reading “Goodnight Moon” when he started flipping the pages as quickly as he could. Clearly, he just wanted to be done with the book. Since then, he’s demonstrated several times that he knows how to turn the page, he just doesn’t know when yet.

Both Sarah and I started curling in the last couple of weeks. At the end of this week she will have already curled five games while I will have curled in only one due to a bye, a bonspiel, and some crazy circumstances well outside of my control.

Our plans for Thanksgiving are fairly modest. I’ve got to work Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursday we’ll make a ham from our pig and go for a walk in the woods somewhere. Friday is a mandatory furlough day for both of us, so we won’t be working or getting paid. I’m sure that we’ll find some way of keeping busy.

New photos of Garrison at ten months are available in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

Our next story here on GNN (the Garrison News Network): a new video on YouTube shows some scenes from Garrison’s life at nine months.

More photos in the Photo Gallery. The most recent set features photos taken during our visits to local state parks and natural areas during the month of October.

Tonight I posted some new photos of Garrison in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

This past weekend Sarah, Garrison, and I flew out to Massachusetts to see some old friends. Some of Sarah’s friends from college were throwing a baby shower for one of their number, and we decided to go out as a family for a mini-vacation.

We stayed with my friend Mike and his wife Michele at their place in Winthrop. It is almost impossible to overstate how much more convenient it is to stay at someone’s house than a hotel when you’re traveling with an infant. Mike borrowed a pack’n'play from a co-worker so that we didn’t have to bring ours with us or rent one once we got there. We were able to put Garrison to bed in our bedroom on the third floor of the house, and stay awake with Mike and Michele on the first floor. If we had a hotel room, we likely would have been stuck sitting quietly in a dimly lit room once he went to bed since we probably would have had just one room. Mike’s place had a fridge where we could keep Garrison’s medicine, a comfy sofa on which we could sit, a sink in which we could wash the boy’s dishes, and numerous other little perks. Thanks again, Mike and Michele, for having the three of us.

We spent most of Saturday at the baby shower, where the new mom-to-be was showered with all manner of baby gifts. On our way back to Mike’s we stopped at Nick’s House of Pizza, and brought back a pizza and a pair of calzones for dinner at Mike’s. Nick’s was among our favorite pizza places when we were in school, so we always like to stop in and avail ourselves of their mouthwatering calzones whenever we have the chance.

On Sunday, we helped Mike and Michele install a new chandelier in their dining room, since the previous one was broken. In the middle of that process, we decamped to Plymouth, MA for a mouthwatering lunch at the legendary Lobster Hut. I ate both a fried scallop roll and a fried clam roll. It has been a long time since I’ve eaten at Lobster Hut, and will probably be even longer until the next time, so I had no shame about ordering two sandwiches absolutely overflowing with fresh, fried seafood. Mike and Sarah showed a bit more restraint, but everyone (with the exception of Garrison) left the lunch table stuffed full of fried seafood.

After lunch, we took a long walk on Plymouth’s Long Beach. Sarah and I enjoyed walking on the beach when we lived in Plymouth, and we still like to take walks on it whenever we get back to Massachusetts.

Some people might be wondering how Garrison did on the airplane flights. I would say that he earned a B, overall. He is just too independent-minded at the moment to enjoy being cooped up on our laps for long periods of time. He won’t nap when he’s put in stimulating environments like an airport and a plane. He often won’t eat when placed in those same environments. That meant that he was extremely fussy on that last flight home. Would we fly with him again? At this point, we wouldn’t consent to take him on a flight that lasted over two hours. That’s about his time limit. After that, he starts to meltdown and everyone on the flight suffers.

For interested parties, there are photos from the trip in the Photo Gallery.

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.

In his latest attempt to become the dominant Cute Baby on YouTube, Garrison’s new video depicts him at five months.