Check Out Those Cans

Beer!  Home beer.  In cans!

Coalition Brewing in SE Portland was hosting a canning event for homebrewers this past weekend.  Oregon Brew Crew got a discount.  $20 and you get your 5 gallon corny keg put into 16 oz cans.  Of course, we got two.  We signed up, paid, and got our time slot months ago.  Then, we decided to move.  The ideal time to get our brew on would have been moving day.  But, we were moving, which didn't lend itself well to making new batches of beer.  And we had paid.  So, we came up with a couple ales that would ferment fast after we got to Hood River and would be ready for canning in a few weeks.  We also wanted to make a couple beers that we had already done, and we knew were tasty, because, well... we were about to have a lot of cans of beer.  So,

Prepping for summer: home, river, and booze news

First time ever we live in a house and not a condo- no shared walls, no neighbors with windows looking into yours, and we have a lawn!

The weather has been phenomenal the past 2 weeks. It was in the low 80's but it was a dry, hot 80's and the breeze was warm too. We both got a little sun despite wearing sunscreen. On the drive to work there is a distinct weather line just west of Multnomah Falls and when the Portland area is clouded in this is where you seemingly go through a portal to another world... one with a 500' ceiling of clouds. Meanwhile east of there is nice and sunny. We've experienced this from both directions. We're so happy to be living in a sunnier region!

Litter Box Project

When I was little we had a door between the dining room and the living room and I would make a point of slamming it shut whenever I went through. My parents were at the wits end after telling/ yelling at me to stop slamming the door. Finally, my dad said "The next time you slam the door I am taking it off it's hinges and putting it in the attic." Of course I walked over there and slammed it. The door spent the rest of the time we lived in that house in the attic. It was a pretty effective way of resolving the issue without just spanking or scolding me. You can't slam the door if there's no door to slam. 

Since bringing the cats home, we've gone through various phases of cat-proofing attempting to do the same thing- remove the things they find to cause problems. This works for the most part. We don't follow the rules on the litter box though. They recommend having 1 more litter box than you have cats, which would put us at 3. We've barely had room for one box, so this was never an option and we're typically too busy to clean it more than once a week. Lucy shows her disapproval by making an art of getting as much litter outside the box as possible. Her success is astounding and baffling. For example, we now have 3 floors and the litter box is in the basement. She manages to spread it all over the basement floor, up the stairs and somehow gets a little all the way to our bedroom and into the bed. We can't exactly remove the litter or the box, so when we discovered our friends had a top entry litter box and said it really cut down on the litter tracking we were thrilled! On Amazon, they cost about $40, which is absurd. That's double what I paid for the boxes we have and it's nothing more than a glorified storage tub. So, here's the how-to in pictures for building your own (should you find your self in need) for $10 each. [...]