Yeah, it's been a while since I've written...again. There's just a ton going on, and not much of it is blog-worthy. Not that this is, either, but... I like to write. ;)

I guess the "biggest" thing would be that we've purchased all the equipment we need to begin homebrewing our own beer. We've wanted to get into the craft/hobby for about 10 plus years, so we finally took the plunge. We got one of the complete starter kits from Great Fermentations down in Indy, so we're all ready to go in style. This is the kit with everything, including an immersion wort chiller, bottles, bottling bucket, primary and secondary carboys, all the measuring instruments, yeah, everything. And we got the ingredients for our first brew. It's one of them that GF puts together, called "Black Hole IPA." We'd had a sample of it when we were there before, and it's fantastic - and we don't usually "like" IPAs all that much! Expect pictures/posts as we get started with this adventure.

As far as gaming, I've had to keep it pretty limited due to time constraints. MMOs in general aren't exactly friendly to small blocks of time. My run in EQ1 was fun, but I was really mainly using it as a chat room to talk to some good friends that don't use email or IM. All I've got active now is a free 14 day reactivation of WAR, and it's fun because I can log in, jump into the Scenario queues, and usually within 5 minutes I'll be in a Scenario with guaranteed action and fun, and then in 15 minutes or less, I can be "done" if I need to be. Or I can just re-queue if I have another 15 minute block available. WAR is fun, so this works well for me for right now.

We haven't had a lot of action in the radio department. We do have our DX-CC up, as well as the 2m/440 base antenna. We have played around on HF, and I did get my first HF contact, K2TTT in New Jersey, on 40 meters, which was cool. We're not hearing "the world," but definitely all over the US. I suspect it's a band condition issue as a lot of the HF bands are in the toilet, basically. That and we don't have the south side leg installed "properly" yet; it's just laying in the tree. ;) We'll get to it.

I'm also looking to get back into R/C flying, but since I sold every bit of support gear I had - including transmitter, chargers, power system analyzers, all that - it's going to be a while. I have to re-buy all that, then get a plane and everything needed to get it in the air. It's a bit-o-cash and it'll be a while!

I'll close with mentioning a post series idea she came up with! I'm gonna call it for now, "CD a Week." We both have hugely diverse musical tastes. If you were to look at our media library, you'd go "what the...!?!?!" We also are lucky enough to have a real music store here in town. I don't mean a Best Buy, or an FYE, or any of that cookie-cutter corporate crap. I mean a real, actual music store: the awesome, cool, JL Records. The people that own the place/work there love music, and know just a ton about it. So, her idea was to go in once a week, ask for a recommendation on a "cool" album to get, get it, and then listen to it, and write about it here on the blog. We'll try to make it once a week, but if it the cost gets too much, we'll back it off to every other week, or once a month, or whatever we've gotta do. But, we both feel people don't really branch out enough, musically. ;)

Until next time (and hopefully it'll be a shorter delay this time)... :)