Homebody

I'm back in Madison! The Vermont rundown: awesome place to live, made some great friends, learned that I don't want to bottle my beer, glad to be home. Madison: splitting time between brewpub research and being a housewife, planning an early-February trip to New Zealand, taking Oscar to the vet to have his pink eye examined (irritation is probably due to lodged poop particles). My cell phone is turned off and my voicemail will kindly remind you in case you forget. Rachel and I are tightening our budget, which means that bagged 40s of Olde English are in and martini bars are out.

Vermont in the Fall

Otter Creek in Middlebury, VT

I made my final trip out to Vermont before Joe comes home. Good timing too. The scenery was beautiful! Unfortunately, I took most of my photos when it was overcast and you can't get the full effect. Trust me, Vermont is gorgeous in the fall.

How to Blacken Tilapia

Outside
Originally uploaded by RachelSuzieRN.

As soon as I threw the fish on, the cast iron skillet started smoking like a car on fire. There were actually sparks in the pan, and the smoke was so thick that I couldn't see the fish. Four minutes of cooking led to the scene pictured here. I moved into a new apartment for the last three months of my trip, by the way.

Happy Birthday Rachel!

Big 28, woohoo!

Congratulations Chris & Natalie!

They got engaged today!

Bird efficiency

Had a new furnace installed today. Inside one of the old ducts coming from the chimney to the old furnace was a petrified (dead) bird. According to the furnace guy, birds will fly above, get attracted to the warm air coming out of the chimney (which includes carbon monoxide), fall into the chimney and their only way "out" is to flap their way into the duct work and meet their demise. Fabulous. He assured me that this will not happen again with the new chimney liner. I don't know what it is with my house but birds keep falling from the sky.

I did take a couple photos to show Joe. But I promised Kate that I wouldn't be sick enough to put them online. You can use your own imagination instead.

Vermont in August

I flew out for a slightly longer visit this last Wednesday to meet up not only with Joe but also Linda and her man, Aaron. We had a really fun time. It was great not only to see Joe and Linda but also to meet Aaron, his sister Alana, and some of Aaron's old friends from Middlebury (featured in some photos in this trip's set on my flickr page are his friend Heath and his adorable five year old, Caleb). Caleb and Linda became great hand holding buddies.

While Joe was slaving away at the brewery, I took a couple short hikes with Linda and Aaron in Green Mountain National Forest.

We also took a morning while Joe was still at work to go see some of Aaron and Alana's old homes. Their favorite (and you can see why in the photos) was a house they rented on an apple orchard farm. It has since grown dramatically and the owner/farmer of Champlain Orchards, who rented to their family and remembered them fondly, graciously let us walk around the farm as we pleased, pick a few apples and raspberries, and say hello to their hogs and their new piglets. What a beautiful farm and what gorgeous views out across the countryside and Lake Champlain.

It also helped that we had a great tour guide for the farm--a yellow lab named Pippin who likes sticks, getting muddy in the local pond and eating apples.

We spent a day hiking a portion of "The Long Trail" near Stowe. The total Long Trail starts in southern VT and goes all the way north to the Canadian border. Part of the southern Long Trail overlaps with the Appalachian Trail. The portion we hiked climbed up to the highest mountain in VT--Mt. Mansfield. Quite a strenuous hike. Destiny, one of Joe's fellow Otter Creek Brewers and originally from VT, also joined us and has had a lot of experience hiking those trails. At some points I wasn't sure if I could do the hike but we all made it and it was well worth it despite the steep ascent, rock climbing and scrambling, fog, wet trails, cold and high winds. The fog lifted up a bit just as we neared the peak and we were able to see out to lake Champlain. My muscles and knees are still feeling that hike. After we finished, we treated ourselves at a local brewpub called The Alchemist, had Belgian fries and (what else but) great beer.

Badger State Trail

Old Railway Tunnel

Sara, our Dad and I went biking yesterday on the Badger State Trail, starting in Belleville, WI. The best part of the trail was the long, old railroad tunnel that we needed lights in order to get us through.

Montreal and Kickapoo

Don't be vulgar, it has nothing to do with how I feel about French Canadians...the Kickapoo is a river in WI.

Joe and I spent overnight in Montreal last weekend. It's a fun ciy. Lots of beautiful old architecture, interesting culture/history, beautiful riverside park, and a lot to do. There were numerous festivals going on at the same time. We didn't get pictures, but happened upon the "Just For Laughs" festival the night that we were there. Puppet shows, street performers, random parades, strange 'Totoro' looking characters, people running around with devil horns on theirs heads...it was bizarre but fun. We found ourselves a small outdoor French style cafe/bar and holed up there for the evening while we watched the festivities.


Old Downtown Montreal

This weekend, Sara and I headed for the beautiful driftless area of Wisconsin and rented a canoe for a 3 hour trip down the Kickapoo River. First time I rented a canoe from a bartender. The kid running the show for canoe rentals within the bar at the supposed "Kickapoo Yacht Club" had the intelligence of a newt (or less), but otherwise this was an easy way to rent a canoe and spend a beautiful day in the Kickapoo Valley. We ran into a couple of large groups--in particular one large college group (one of their canoes was dubbed "The Titanic"). However, we were otherwise pretty much alone on the river, saw pretty bluffs, king fishers, Great Blue Herons, muskrats, lots of small fish, and only got stuck about ten times on logs and sandbars in the low level river.

We ended the day by driving back up highway 14 and stopping at Peck's farmstand. Unknown to us, they have a decent size petting zoo there. I fed some corn to some happy, wagging goats. Disturbingly, they greatly reminded me of Honey. There was a camel and zebra also kept in the zoo, but the only way to feed them was by ways of a very long PVC pipe. The camel has yet to figure out how to spit up the pipe. Prairie Dogs were also in a circular pen, but they were more concerned about digging their holes. One looked like it was making progress on burrowing its way out.

Great Blue Heron on the Kickapoo

Annual "Wife Carry"

Damn. If only Joe were here tomorrow so we could compete in this. Maybe next year.

Pitiful

Enough said...

Piece of Home

The coolest thing I've ever seen is located five miles south of Brandon, VT:

Vermonting

I've been here for about two months now, and things are going reasonably well.

The positives:

-I've adapted quickly to the tasks that I've been trained in: brewing, cleaning fermenters and counting yeast cells. I have a ways to go on lab work and want to learn to work the particular filter we have, and I'm sure I'll get my chance.
-My social life is better than I expected. It's tough to hang out with the other brewers when we're all on different schedules, but everyone has been really thoughtful about inviting me out when it's possible. So far I've gone out to lunch, hung out at a couple of bars in Burlington, been to a party and taken a road trip. This Friday I may be going to see a hippiegrass band called Hot Buttered Rum and opening act Luke Eriksen, who draws comparisons to Neil Young. We'll see about that. On Saturday, it's another party.
-The area is beautiful. I'm between the Adirondack and Green mountains, with Lake Champlain to the northwest of me. Forest is abundant and New England towns are really cool looking. I biked to work yesterday, which made me feel good, even though my back derailleur shifted on its own terms.
-We brew excellent beer and you should try it!
-The apartment has worked out nicely. I could use a vacuum cleaner and screens on my windows, but my landlord has otherwise been really accommodating.

The only real negative, aside from the giant but expected bummer of missing Rachel like crazy, is that I don't like the job very much. Here's why:

-I perform the same few steps of a process several times a day and pass the results on to somebody else, as opposed to following each beer from beginning to end and doing something different each day to support it. It's like working on an assembly line. I had to do more grunt work at Whitney's, but it was part of something that I was excited about and in direct control of. This job is way more mundane.
-Despite the boring nature of my tasks, the stress level is pretty high. Whether I succeed or fail on a given day is determined by how much I can accomplish in the 5-minute gaps between frantic activity. Somewhere in there, I get hungry and want to eat lunch.
-The guy who I was so excited about working for is never there. He spends about fifteen hours a week at his desk, and the rest of his work life is devoted to running his brewing school from a different location. I still think he's a really smart guy who I could learn a lot from, so it's unfortunate that I've had almost no contact with him beyond polite greetings and time-off requests. My training hasn't changed since I was passed off to my peers on the first day. The other brewers are great people, but it's been like going to vocational school when I expected a university education. Given that I've never worked a job that was designed for my benefit, I think being showered with knowledge was a silly expectation on my part.

Hopefully most of my dissatisfaction is due to the fact that I'm still adjusting - I'm competent enough to do the job but not comfortable enough to do it effortlessly. Once it's effortless, I'll be able to alleviate the repetition by goofing off :). Whether it gets better or not, I'm not exactly breaking my back or going poor here. Overall, this has been a good experience and I still believe it'll repay me in spades down the road.

Family Photo

(From left to right) Eliza, Miriam, Linda, Craig, John, Granny (Joyce), Margie, Tom, Rachel, Karen, and Joe.

My Grandfather's (Jerry) funeral was last weekend. Here's a photo of some of our family that met up in Milwaukee.

The lovely, always generous Lizz sent us a fun present for Oscar! A woman in NYC makes these bottle cap collars for pets. This particular collar features bottle caps from Joe's current brewery (Otter Creek) and some other New England microbreweries. Thanks, Lizz!

Joe in Vermont

Joe at Lake Champlain in VT
Originally uploaded by RachelSuzieRN.

I flew out to Vermont this last weekend to visit Joe. Our photos are on our flickr site.

Winter Storm 2007

Oscar

Happy 27th Birthday, Joe!

Hopefully I don't burst into flames...

Since Joe has had such good news lately, I felt inclined to try to match my husband with my own good news. I just accepted a new RN job position! Not only is it in a great woman's health clinic within the same organization that I'm currently working, it is DAYTIME hours, NO weekends, and NO major holidays (not including the "eves"). It pays less than the hospital, but I'll be working more hours, I will no longer feel like I'm living in a perpetual haze and, as my Dad said in somewhat similar words, I may actually be a person other people enjoy spending time with. Evidently, I don't make a very friendly vampire during my off hours/shifts. I'll miss my night staff, but not the night hours. I'll miss watching the most amazing sunrises over the city, but it will be nice to see the sun on a regular basis when it's higher than just a couple degrees above the horizon. Closing in on almost two years of straight night shifts! I think I've done my time. Now, if only Vermont was just a little closer to Wisconsin...

Vermont Update

I got the job! The eight of you who read this have earned exemptions from the ensuing mass email; way to go team :).

Vermont

As most of you already know, I'm in the running for a 9-month job at the Otter Creek brewery in Middlebury, VT. I've already had a phone interview, which went well, and I'm flying out there on Tuesday to meet the crew in person. It sounds like I'm in the lead for the position, and that meeting them next week is mostly just a sanity check for all parties. The job is slated to start on March 1st so, if I get the job, I'll be leaving Madison in about a month. Now for the backstory.

For a while now, I've been planning two breweries on paper: a brewpub and a packaging brewery. I want to have both options open if the right opportunities arise, but going the packaging route is more attractive to me at this point. The problem is that I don't have any experience with packaging, or the design and operation of a brewery that accommodates it. There are several ways to educate myself about it:

-Take a hardcore brewing course. The class I took in Chicago was a two-week overview of brewing operations. What I'm talking about here would be 4-5 months. At UC Davis, in California, the cost would be about $13K plus living expenses.
-Hire a consultant, who would be paid by the hour. I'll probably work with one regardless, to get quick answers to very specific questions, but there's a lot of money to be lost by using a consultant as a teacher.
-Find a job and get paid not only to learn, but to learn by doing. The downside is time.

Working at Otter Creek is ideal for many reasons:

-Rachel and I want to stay in Madison for a while. Knowledge-wise, I got what I needed out of Whitney's after 2-3 months. A 9-month job is the shortest I've ever seen advertised, and there will be no expectation for me to stick around afterward.
-They brew 50 times the amount of beer that Whitney's brews each year, but their brewing equipment is only 4 times the size. The do so by brewing 5 times a day, and transferring (moving beer into bottles or kegs) at the same time as they brew. The equipment at Whitney's could kick out one brew and two transfers each day, or two brews and one transfer, but not a brew and transfer at the same time. In the case of both breweries, "each day" means "in a 24-hour period". It'll be fascinating to learn how Otter Creek's equipment is set up and and how the brewers operate it.
-They brew a line of organic beers, which is an idea that I've been playing with. The brewmaster wants organic brewing to become a movement (as opposed to just his competitive edge), and told me that he's more than willing to help me get into it. His knowledge and industry contacts will be really valuable down the road.
-In addition to his work at Otter Creek, the brewmaster runs a brewing school! It's called the American Brewers Guild and I considered taking their online course before I won a scholarship to Siebel. In other words, I'm going to be exposed to all kinds of science at work. My current boss knows the science, but doesn't much use it.

I'm not at all excited about leaving Rachel for 9 months, but everything else about the job is exactly what I want. The good news is that Otter Creek will pay me way more than I'm making now. The extra money alone will be more than enough for an apartment, and hopefully enough for a lot of plane travel. When I get back to Madison next Dec/Jan, I'll make opening a brewery my full-time job. That is, if I get the job :).