Anne and I have been busy with the yard lately. We've been moving some plants and adding a few here and there and also trying to grow some food plants. We moved a lot of the peonies and tulips last fall and they seem to be doing well in their new location. A few tulips we missed and moved early this spring, they didn't like that so much, we'll see if they come back next year I guess.

We got a ton of hostas from a lady selling them on craigslist and planted those along the fence in between a lot of the tulips that we moved last fall, then we put down mulch around them, it looks pretty nice!

We also went to home depot and got some yews to plant in the front of the house. That area was looking pretty bad, part of it was sort of being overrun by irises, but none of them were flowering, probably because they're almost always in shade. We dug up and moved some of the larger irises and just kind of turned the rest into the soil and planted our yews and then mulched the area. It looks a million times better.

Next to the rain barrel you can see one of my vines. Speaking of, my vines are doing really well, lots of new shoots and leaves. They also all have produced a number of clusters. However, since they are young and in their new home this year, I want them to concentrate on growing strong roots and good cordons, so I removed the clusters from all of my vines. I did leave one, I just couldn't bring myself to remove them all, I want to taste my grapes!

Four years ago today Anne and I got married. It doesn't seem like it's been that long, but it also seems like it's been longer? Does that make any sense? It sort of feels like we've always been together, possibly because we will always be together. Either way today is the 4th anniversary of the day of our marriage if you're living in the dimension of time.

I love you Anne!

A week ago I brewed up some Irish Red. It took off at first bubbling the airlock like crazy for a few days and then the weather turned cold and it cooled off and slowed way down. So I took the wort up into the attic where it's nice and warm, and then the weather turned hot again and it got really hot in the attic which is also not good for the poor yeast. I then moved it to the attic staircase which is cooler then the attic and warmer than the house. It seemed to be doing okay there, though now it's gotten cold again.

I checked the wort last night and it had a gravity reading of about 1.020; down from the original gravity of 1.044. So it's more than half way and it tastes pretty darn good. One thing that does worry me a bit is that the fermenter had negative pressure when I took the bung out to retrieve wort for the gravity measurement. This I assume is because of the temperature drop. What worries me is that the yeast wasn't producing enough CO2 to stave off this negative pressure; has the yeast stopped fermenting and gone dormant? Now there is oxygen in the top of the tank so unless the yeast keeps fermenting it could be bad news for the beer. I will check it again tonight and perhaps put a space heater on it if it needs to warm up.

Probably I'm just worry about nothing and the beer will turn out just fine. I'm thinking I may name the beer Lucky Dog; seems even more appropriate now that it's future may be in jeopardy.

Earlier this week my Marquette grape vines arrived on our doorstep. I'm currently soaking their roots and will be planting them tonight. That's exciting! What's not exciting is that I won't really have a decent crop of grapes for another few years.

Wine making is a great way to teach patience.

We recently closed on our refinance. That's seems kinda weird considering that we bought the house less than 2 years ago. But, as you know, interest rates are much lower now than they were a couple years ago. We bought the house with an 80/20 loan, 80% of the loan in a traditional mortgage and the other 20% in a home equity loan. We had a few goals when looking to refinance:

1. Lower our monthly payment
2. Get rid of the home equity loan with a rate that is due to adjust in ~8 years
3. Lower the amount of total interest we'd be paying over the life of the loan

To be honest, we were already on track for goal numbers 2 and 3 without changing anything. We had been paying about $150 in extra principal every month and had a schedule to increase that amount as other money became available (like finishing paying off my student loans). This would have accomplished paying off the home equity loan before it's rate adjusted and we would have paid the whole house off in about 20 years instead of 30; saving us quite a bit in interest. So the main motivation was to lower our monthly payment while still holding onto those two other goals.

They say (not sure who 'they' are) that generally a refinance is worth it if you can go down a percentage point or more. Our mortgage loan was at a rate of 6.875% and our home equity loan was at at rate of 8.25%. We got a quote for an FHA loan refinance at 5.0%; that's a significantly lower rate!

So we had to have our house appraised to make sure that it made sense as collateral for the loan. We we're pretty hopeful considering the improvements we've made to the house, such as the completely new kitchen and appliances, new hardwood floors, new light fixtures, new patio, new paint, etc. Of course balancing all of this stuff out is the fact that the housing market has gone to crap in the last year or so. To our dismay, our house appraised at just $2,000 more than what we originally paid for it, we were expecting a bit more. What this meant, is that we would have to pay down an additional ~$1000 on our principal in order to get this new loan, additionally since our loan to value ratio was higher than 80% that means we get to pay PMI until it gets under that.

Even with these set backs, we still ended up saving around $160 per month in minimum payments. Since we were paying an extra $150 on top and I plan to shift that to only $50 per month additional we're actually saving $260 per month on our mortgage. We're also saving about $7,000 in interest over the life of the loan (on top of what we would have saved with our previous pre-payment plan), not a whole lot but it's something, of course this is assuming we never increase the amount of extra principal we're paying down each month. And of course our interest rate will never change so we don't have to worry about that either. In less than a year our monthly savings will have paid off the extra money it took to close. So overall a pretty good deal.

One thing to keep in mind with an FHA loan: FHA stands for Federal Housing Assistance, which means there is an insane bureaucracy pulling some strings on your loan. The government has some extra requirements that a private lender may not have. We ran into this with our loan. Our house has a wooden porch, it had been painted a number of years (decades?) ago and the paint was peeling off pretty badly. We hadn't addressed this because I'd prefer our house to look as miserable as possible from the exterior for the property tax assessor. Additionally there are other problems with the porch we wanted to address before bothering with repainting. Things like shoring up one of the sinking foundation posts, replacing rotting wood, etc. These plans were skewered by the FHA loan that required us to scrape the paint and repaint any exposed wood on the exterior of our house. That was a fun chore at the end of March in Wisconsin, let me tell you! We did manage to get it done between the rain and snow storms. So if you're looking into an FHA loan, keep in mind they may have some insane tasks for you to accomplish before they'll give you the loan.

I finally got around to brewing again about a month ago. This time I sort of made a beer by the seat of my pants. I like dark beers, and I don't like too much hops so I got a 2 cans of John Bull English Dark Malt Extract, one hopped and one unhopped. I figured together it would make for a mildly hopped dark beer. Also, since we keep it so cold in our house during the winter (57° when we're home, 53° when we're gone or asleep) I obviously had to make a lager since ale yeast won't function at those temps.

It turns out that there are a few styles of beer that are similar to what my taste and situation demanded (not a big surprise really). German Dunkel beers are dark, mildly hopped lagers, however they are also made with German malt and a process called triple decoction that's done during mashing. Since I'm just working from English extract and I doubt there was any decoction, never mind triple, going on in the making of the malt extract, this isn't really a Dunkel. There is also another style of German beer called Schwarzbier literally translated: "Black Beer" which does fit the bill for what I've created.

It really is quite black, as you can see in the photos, which is why I decided on the name Black Dog Lager. It also tastes really good to me already, I'm looking forward to completing this beer and having a glass. This weekend I plan on bottling it and it should be ready to drink by mid-late April. Of course I'll have to make a new label for this new beer as well.

More photos

It's a light replacement extravaganza, or quite possibly a bonanza. The fact is, we've had a bunch of these lights that we've been meaning to replace for a long time now, some close to a year. We'll we're finally getting around to it. Today we're featuring a brand new foyer light as well as a new dining room light. Next is the bathroom light which I hope won't utterly suck. These have actually been getting easier? maybe?

Starting with the foyer, it was a very difficult decision to replace this beautiful fixture that showed off the light bulb itself as the focal point of the fixture. It was especially nice with a twisty CFL in there. Anyway, as usual it was sporting the crazy cast iron box and extra misc wires as well as a wealth of vermiculite insulation to pour out on me. This fixture was installed on a rafter, which I actually prefer since I can just get a low profile box and screw it into the rafter. It's better and easier than those 'old work' blue plastic boxes with their little plastic flaps.

We got this light for a crazy awesome price from someone on craig's list, the only problem was the cord coming out of the light was cut really short. Fortunately there was a bunch of excess cord in the ceiling fan that I had cut out so I replaced the cords in this light with those, yay recycling! It looks awesome and provides light, what more can you ask for?

Additional foyer light photos

The new dining room light also came from someone on craig's list. The supports were originally metallic aluminum but Anne painted them bronze and then did some nice dry brushing over the top for an awesome antiqued look that matches with the rest of the house. She also added a little yellow glass paint to the back of the glass and added the prairie style lines that really add character to this fixture. The former light was a seriously ugly number from the 60s that we were glad to see go.

This box was also nailed to a rafter in addition to the iron rod that had to be hacksawed, luckily I only had to hacksaw one side of the box instead of both due to the rod not going all the way through. Long story short, the new light got installed, Yay!

Additional Dining room light photos

I'm starting to become a pro at replacing the lights in our house. I'm still not a fan of hack sawing; don't think I ever will be. I've described before the electrical 'box' that the existing lights use. This crazy cast iron thing that's embedded in the lath and plaster that I have to hack saw to remove.

I'm also a huge fan of the number of wires I have to deal with. A simple hot and neutral would be way too easy, instead lets have three neutrals all stuck together, one hot, and three others (one black two white) that are just together for the fun of it! It's like a little party inside the new box I installed!

Luckily the placement of the box in the ceiling was right next to a rafter so I could attach the new box to that, when you're putting in a fan it's important to make sure the box is well secured and that the weight and motion of the fan isn't going to cause it to tear out of the ceiling at a later date. To ensure this I installed the first plate of the fan to the box, it has a hook on it to hang the fan motor on while you're wiring it up. I filled a backpack with 40 pounds of weights and hung that from the hook for about 30 minutes to make sure it was secure. It didn't budge, much to my pleasure. Sorry, I forgot to take a photo of that.

In the end, of course, all the hassle is worth it. The new light looks and works great. More photos

Yes, it can be done.

The key, thus far in my experiments, is to buy the vacuum sealed strips, they tend to be juicier than the large packaged stuff (which is very dry). Fry it up in large quantities of butter and oil, give it time to absorb the oil and get tender, cutting it into small bits facilitates this by increasing the surface area.

So there you have it, a new ingredient for your culinary creations, similar to bacon in it's legendary awesomeness.

Brian and I were chatting this morning about how much our government sucks. We both agreed that it doesn't make sense that most bills introduced to congress are hundreds of pages long when our country was founded basically on one oversize sheet of parchment. Here's the Constitution and Bill of Rights. If you print that off, it's 17 pages; 7,679 words.

There should be a law that all bills introduced and passed into law can't exceed that length.

Lawmakers, if this great country can be founded in 7,679 words then 7,679 words should be more than enough to explain your law and it's parameters. If you can not do that then you have failed as a law maker.