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!

Last Sunday we opened our home to foster a rescue malamute for IAMRA (the rescue we got Dora from). He's a big male about 6-7 years old, he came to us from the Milwaukee Humane Society his name used to by yukon but he doesn't seem to know his name, we've decided to call him Yuki which in Japanese means "Late winter snow" and/or "happiness."

Yuki is heartworm positive. The human society gave him a double dose of heartworm treatment which is basically a (generally) non-lethal amount of arsenic. This kills off the heartworms and hopefully doesn't kill the dog. You have to keep the dog calm and relaxed during the treatment though, over excitement can cause a heart attack. That means Yuki and Dora are not allowed to even meet. Dora was actually fairly clueless about there being another dog in the house for a day or two.

Yuki is a real love bug, he loves, loves, loves being pet. He's actually quite pushy about it if you stop. He also loves being on beds and loves being around people. He cries and whines when we leave him alone at night in the other bedroom. Last night it was pretty bad as he started clawing at the door. Eventually Anne ended up sleeping in that room with him to keep him from getting too worked up.

Hopefully once his heartworm treatment is done he and Dora will be able to get along well enough to allow Anne and I to spend time together in the evenings. I also hope he ends up going to a great home where someone will love him and pet him forever.

More photos

I hope all of my four loyal readers had wonderful Christmases. Anne and I had (and are still having) a wonderful time in Michigan visiting her parents. In fact, we were having such a great time that our car decided we should extend our stay by breaking down and leaving us stuck here until we can get it fixed (hopefully today). Either that or the Big Three have turned to the desperate measure of using voodoo on foreign cars that venture too close to Detroit.

I just got a call from the mechanic. We need new spark plugs and wires and we may have melted the catalytic converter but he won't know until he gets it running again. If the CC is busted it is supposedly under warranty for 80,000 miles which we are about 1000 miles away from. I hope it's not broken but at least VW should pay for it if it is.

UPDATE: The catalytic converter is fine but the distributor coil is also broken so that needs to be replaced. It should be fixed by 1 or 2 and then we'll hit the road.

UPDATE: UPDATE: The catalytic converter is partially blown out and needs to be replaced but the car can run and we got home just fine. I will try to get a VW dealer to replace it for free since there is a federal mandate of warranty on catalytic converters for 80k miles and our car is only at 79500!

Last year, Anne's parents gave us their old snow blower. It's a two stroke engine and thus requires that you use a gasoline/oil fuel mixture in the fuel tank. We didn't use it last winter because we are idiots (or at least I am). This year I got fuel for it and got it running (eventually).

It is awesome.

It's not huge or anything and it can't handle the really wet snow but it really reduces the amount of work I need to do to clear our walks (not to mention the time it saves me).

Another thing that's awesome about it is it's seriously environmentally harmful exhaust. I hope it helps to warm this planet up because global warming has so far been pretty freaking cold.

Brian and Melissa have announced that they are also pregnant! They are due May 9th.

Congrats you guys!

Big Three CEOs Flew Private Jets to Plead for Public Funds

On a related note, the Speculist had an excellent article about how instead of bailing out the morons and idiots who got us and them into this mess. We should be rewarding those who made wise financial choices.

What is everyone missing?

What about supporting and even growing the economy, personal consumption, AND put a floor under housing prices? How? Reward the 93% of the US population who have been prudent and still have (rapidly disappearing) equity in their houses, have good jobs, have low debts and savings. Why reward them? Because it is in everyone's interest to do so because they are the smart and prudent workhorses of our society and they will stay smart and do the right things if we encourage it. How? Use the full faith and credit of the United States to allow such persons *before the end of this year* to refinance their mortgage rate to the same rate as the 30 year treasury - ie 4.17%. On a 500,000 mortgage, this would save each household $7,200 annually in house payments compared to current mortgage rates. No tax credit needed, no hocus pocus, no bailouts, no rebates. This kind of thing has been done before, notably during the return of soldiers from WWII. In that time, you could get a below market loan from the govt and it generated a sustainable housing boom, brought the US out of a major post war recession, and started perhaps the longest boom in the history of the world and made the middle class the most solid group of taxpayers and producers the world has ever seen...and it was seen as a justifiable REWARD to the greatest generation. Now, let's save ourselves by rewarding THIS generations best and brightest families and breadwinners.

This is only a week or so late in posting, actually I'm behind on posting about a lot of stuff from about a week ago. Last week Anne and I dog sat for two dogs, Lily and Oliver. They were good dogs, though they loved being on furniture; not a big deal.

Lily is the little black and white sheperd/terrier? mix and Oliver is the white husky.

More photos here

Well, technically Cathy is pregnant. Either way, congrats you guys! How exciting!

I think it's official now, Anne and I have exited the wedding phase of our life and are now in full blown baby phase. Many of our friends are pregnant or have had a baby, and I have a feeling more will be following suit in the near future. Maybe even we will be, who knows? But we're still not ready for that yet.

In addition to the wine I also tiled the kitchen this weekend. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, though it did take nearly all weekend to complete. Also, Anne painted the trim in our bedroom white (formerly pink) it's like a whole new room!

Things left to do to the kitchen:

• tile edges of the tiled area (after painting)
• grout tile
• paint walls
• paint trim
• install new light fixture
• add second light switch
• kick board with vent
• connect water to fridge for ice maker

Soon.

This weekend was busy! Anne and I took Friday off of work because AT&T was coming to install our new internet (and TV, which we'll be canceling when our free preview is up) We also wanted to get some stuff done around the house.

First order of business, on Friday morning the Specific Gravity of the concord must had fallen below 1.030, and you know what that means! Well probably you don't. But for the recipe I'm following it means it's time to remove the juice from the grape skins and pulp. This is what's generally known as pressing, however I didn't actually use a press. One, because I don't have one; and two, because I'm reusing the pulp I wouldn't technically be losing any wine by not pressing it out.

I scooped it out with a strainer.

Once I had removed all of the floating pulp and skins I attempted to rack the remaining liquid must into a 5 gallon carboy. This did not work well because the siphon kept on getting clogged by remaining pulp and gunk on the bottom. I ended up using a large cup to scoop the liquid out and pour it through the strainer and into a funnel into the carboy. When the strainer got too coated with gunk it was deposited in with the rest of the skins and pulp. The gunk got thicker as I got towards the bottom of the barrel, and there were tons of seeds as well. This all went back into the primary fermenter for the second batch. Soon the carboy was full to over flowing. I removed some of it to make room for the bung and for any small foam ups and put that into a small container to use for topping off when I rack this wine. It was bubbling away merrily the moment I put the fermentation lock on it.

Apparently, and I'm not too surprised about this, there is enough flavor in concord grape skins and pulp to ferment two batches of wine from them. Actually as I read a bit more this is not an uncommon practice (with any grape skins/pulp) for making table wines.

Friday night I put together the second batch of concord wine. I'm going to need to name these two differently somehow so as to distinguish them once they are bottled. For this second batch, I added to the existing gunk, a bunch of water, four cans of concord grape juice concentrate (from the grocery store), a bit of grape tannin, some acid blend powder, and ten pounds of sugar. Stirred it all up and let it go. No yeast this time, the pulp from the previous fermentation already had plenty. I'll let this batch ferment until the Specific Gravity reaches 1.010 and then I'll press again (and for real this time) and put this second batch into a carboy as well. Of course before that happens I'll have to get another carboy...

Each year IAMRA, the rescue organization where we got Dora, has a homecoming and fundraiser even called Malawalk. Basically all the adopted out malamutes (and their owners) are invited to a big malamute picnic. We went down this year with Mitch, another IAMRA adopter who lives in Milwaukee, and two of his Dogs, Lance and Molly.

We had a lot of fun. Dora had a great time and behaved very well considering the amount of dogs there. She participated in the bobbing for hotdogs event (she got her hot dog) and also competed (and sucked it up) in both the kissing and singing contests.

More photos here

Yesterday, Anne saw a craiglist ad for free grapes in someone's backyard in Menomonee Falls. So I called them and went out there to harvest some grapes in the hopes that I'll be able to make some wine from them. They had a huge arched arbor that was covered in vines and loaded with grapes. I think I got pretty close to 50 pounds of grapes. There were still plenty of grapes on the vine when I left but they were difficult to access and hard to see since it had gotten dark.

I'm not totally sure what kind of grapes they are, probably Concord. They're very sweet and a few of them were literally bursting out of their skins. I'm hoping they'll make some good wine. I guess we'll find out.

So now, in addition to the millions of other things going on this weekend we'll also be crushing and destemming these grapes and getting them ready for fermentation.

In other winery related news, I believe the milk jug wine is about ready to be bottled. Though there will probably only be one bottle of it. The cherry wine is still very sour, I'm gonna try adding an antacid to see if I can cut down on that. Worst case scenario it gets turned into sangria. I racked the zin again last weekend, it's tasting even better and I'm excited to be bottling it maybe in a month or so.

I also made a couple of potential labels for my bottles:

I'm trying to wean myself off of allergy medication because I'm pretty sure that allergy season is over for me. However, when I stop taking Zyrtec for a few days my skin seems to get really itchy at times and no amount of scratching will make it stop.

What's that about?

In two days, God willing, my awesome brother-in-law, Steve, will be married to his wonderful fianceé Nicki. I think they're great together and will be happy to see them married.

They're getting married in East Lansing, MI. Anne and I are both in the wedding, so tonight Anne, Dora, and I are going to be driving to Anne's parent's in Brighton, MI. I'm looking forward to it, Anne's family is cool and always fun to hang out with. I wonder if we'll have time for a game or two of Euchre?

UPDATE: The wedding was great despite the torrential rain all weekend. Steve and Nicki are now in Mexico on their honeymoon.

Here are photos I took at the rehearsal and wedding.

This weekend I racked the Zinfandel since primary fermentation was pretty much done with, if not completely done. As must ferments what's happening is that yeast is going crazy eating all the sugar and converting it into alcohol. Eventually either the yeast creates too much alcohol for it to continue to survive or it runs out of sugar and starves. Either way the yeast dies off and settles out to the bottom in a layer of gunk called the lees. Racking is when you siphon the wine off of the lees. Gravity is on our side as dead yeast and other remaining gunk in the wine slowly (over a matter of months) settles to the bottom allowing us to siphon off the good wine on top. This process is known as racking. You generally want to rack your wine a number of times (with a number of weeks or even months between rackings) to eliminate as much dead yeast as possible which gives you a better tasting wine.

One thing that was kinda interesting during racking was in the measurements: the sugar % reading and the brix (which are really just different scale readings on the hydrometer) both came out negative. What does that mean? Other than the specific gravity is pretty low, I'm not totally sure really.

Racking measurements (8/31/08):

• Wine: 5 gallons
• Brix: ~ -1.5
• % Sugar: ~ -3.0

So to get the alcohol % you are supposed to subtract the initial sugar % measurement with the measurement after fermentation. So 12 minus -3 equals 15. So the wine should be about 15% alcohol or so. So if I hadn't added that extra sugar to the must at the start to raise the sugar % from 10 to 12 would I have a 13% alcohol wine instead? I'm starting to question the accuracy of my hydrometer, or maybe I should measure by the specific gravity scale and calculate from there? Regardless it was a change of 15% points on the scale so it should be about 15% alcohol which is all I'm trying to measure with the hydrometer anyway, right?

Other things of note:

This wine is my first 'large' (large being relative) batch, and I noticed it was much easier to accept that some wine at the bottom was just unrecoverable from the lees. The fact that I had already filled a 5 gallon jug with wine made it easier to let go, compared to the liter bottles I've been filling so far.

This wine tastes much better than the previous two, which I also racked. The cherry wine is still very sour and I may have to augment it by adding back some sugar to make it drinkable. The milk jug wine is decent/drinkable but nothing spectacular.

Can dead yeast and lees be used as a fertilizer? We will soon find out as I dumped them in the back of the yard/garden/over grown area.

The grapes on the vines in the back are starting to turn purple, but they're not very large at all and there aren't very many of them. I'm guessing I'd be lucky to get 6 ounces of juice total from the whole vine.

I saw this billboard truck outside after lunch today and I couldn't not take a photo.

As most of you know we live pretty much right next to the St. Francis Seminary though there's a bit of forest between our house and the seminary grounds proper. Well on the other side of the seminary grounds there is more forest that we had neglected to explore until last night. Now we're regretting waiting so long.

The sign reads: "Seminary Woods Wildlife preserve endorsed by Milwaukee Audubon Society protected by state and federal laws" which is good. Hopefully that means it's unlikely to get turned into condos.

We wandered through the woods on a whim, at first our path led us mostly along the fencing at the back of St. Thomas More High School and the elementary school next to it. After walking a while we started to move further into the woods themselves and came across a creek of sort. Initially it was coming out of a sewer pipe; one of our neighbors who works for MMSD once told us that there are a number of streams and creeks in the area that have been moved underground or routed through sewer ways. As we continued to wander the path grew wider and more maintained, we went across a bridge over the small creek and then we came upon a clearing which held a cemetery.

Apparently the Seminary has a small graveyard out in the woods where it buries it's nuns and priests. Most of the graves were dated in the 19th century. Many of them were very simple markers, though, as you can see, there were a few very ornate stones as well as a big metal crucifix.

Unfortunately we didn't get to linger long in the graveyard, the mosquitoes were running rampant in there, while they had been pretty much non-existent in the forest. We left on a different path than we had entered so as to continue to explore the lovely woods. Just inside the woods from the cemetery clearing was a little grotto with a sitting area and a spot to have a fire, at first I thought it was some sort of Catholic shrine or something but it was just a big fireplace.

The woods were so huge and beautiful and peaceful, it was hard to believe that we were surrounded by city and only a 10 minute drive from downtown Milwaukee. We continued our stroll through the woods and eventually came out onto the Seminary grounds between the convent building and the main building. There were a few fruit trees growing here, some apples and some plums hanging from the branches; not yet ripe. We headed home having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and with plans to return very soon.

more photos

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of Anne and I getting our house. Since then we've been very very busy and we're nowhere close to done. But all in all it's been a good experience and I'm happy with our choice.

Here's the current to-do list:

• put up cement board and tile kitchen backsplash
• replace kitchen light fixture
• finish installing foot board on kitchen cabinets
• replace switches and add light switch in kitchen
• get or make LED under-cabinet lighting
• paint kitchen
• paint woodwork in our bedroom
• replace light in entryway
• install ceiling fan in living room (pray there is electrical in the ceiling cap)
• get or build new vanity for bathroom
• install new sink in bathroom
• install new in-wall faucet in bathroom
• replace light fixture in bathroom
• finish making light fixture for dining room and install it
• paint back and bedroom hallways
• replace lights in back and bedroom hallways

Whew! That's a lot of crap! Though that should pretty much take care of the first floor renovations and we can take a nap afterwards and start saving up lots and lots for creating the second floor space.

Well as you all may or may not know, the author of this blog has finally reached 3 decades old! You are a great husband, friend, and guy. I hope and pray God gives you many many more decades to spend with me...your nagging wife:)

This weekend we finally finished the patio. I am glad to have that done and I don't ever want to make another patio myself again. However, considering the money we saved doing this ourselves, I may have to...

We went from this...

...to this.

Once we got the foundation in it wasn't so bad...

...and went rather quickly.

And, we're done!

The fireplace.

More Photos

I never wished Anne a Happy Birthday last friday via the nerdy medium of the weblog! So without further ado:

Happy Birthday Anne!
I love you!

Hopefully the real life stuff I did on time makes up for this oversight, I'm sorry.

On this day three years ago Anne and I got married.

It's hard to believe it's already been three years; seems like it's only been a few months.
It's also hard to believe it's only been three years; we've done so much since then.

I wouldn't trade any of it in.

Anne, I love you so much and I'm so glad we found each other! I also want to thank God for bringing us through everything thus far and pray that he continues to strengthen us into the future.

Here's to three years.

Love,
Matt