ben.parmeter

Yup, I had to jump on board with this old internet thing.  Checkout many more here…

I guess this is just part of being a homeowner… plumbing.  My patience is being tested.  Thoroughly.  While I feel pretty confident when it comes to carpentry, or electrical work, I’m woefully incompetent when it comes to plumbing.  Maybe it’s just a confidence thing, but it certainly seems to be something that escapes me.

Why all the sudden rants about plumbing?  Well, I’ll tell you.  I have recently acquired a new kitchen faucet, which I love, from e-bay for less than half the cost than a retail shop.  It’s brand new, beautiful, and actually quite simple to install.  However, before I was able to install this, I had to tackle the water valves underneath the kitchen sink.  The water valves you see, are a different size thread than the shiny new faucet.  So, it was time to replace them.   At least one of the them probably needed to be replaced anyway.  It was very old anyway and the internal rubber gaskets were actually quite deteriorated.

Allow me to just get this off my chest.  Water valves are designed in the seventh level of hell, by retarded monkeys.  (hopefully I didn’t just offend all of my readers with that statement, especially my retarded monkey readers)  They work by actually destroying the copper pipe that comes out of your wall.  Thats right, destroying the damn pipe that comes out of the wall which are, I might add, impossible to replace without paying a big hairy sweaty man without a properly fitting belt who charges $100/hour. These valves actually compress a little brass ring which squeezes the copper pipe and deforms it such that the little brass ring becomes a permanent piece of pipe jewelry.  Replacing these brass rings is not possible.  Don’t do it.  Take my word for it.  Because no matter how careful you think you are, you’re gonna bend that pipe and then, you will never get a tight seal.  Leak city.

I have spent two evenings and an entire morning on awkwardly crammed underneath the kitchen sink, arms reaching around pipes, cursing and grunting.  Valves!!.  I had to take a break – for fear that my anger would take over and I would go on a pipe-wrench rampage underneath the kitchen sink.

Curse you valves!! Curse you!!!

Just as I had mentioned in previous post, I have stepped up and made good on my plans to brew beer. Today, I peeled myself off of the couch and went down to the local home-brew shop. There I was confronted with a vast array of confusing choices of equipment and brewing materials. I quickly made friends with the guy running the place, who himself had just started brewing beer a couple of months ago. I told him what I had wanted to do – and we started off trying to keep it simple and cheap and then escalated from there.

First, I chose a beer kit which consists of all the delicious ingredients to make the actual beer. I chose the “Strong Nut Brown Ale” which comes with all the grains (Pale Liquid Malt Extract LME, Victory Malt, Chocalate Malt), Hops (Northern Hops from the UK, and Willamette Hops from Oregon), Irish Moss for flavor, Turbonado sugar for brewing, yeast for brewing also and bottling sugar.

Next, I chose to purchase the actual fermenter (5-Gallon Bucket) and gear from the same shop. This is how things started to escalate in price. As we chatted over the course of 45 minutes, we slowly began piling on item after item. It started with just the fermenter, the airlock, then the rack and bottling bucket, the siphon, the tubing, the bottling tube, and the list goes on. Not really all that terrible when you consider after purchasing all of this it was still around $80 with about $35 going to the actual beer kit contents.

The brewing process is relatively simple, but very precise. In a way, I feel a bit like a cop-out by not actually doing the process from scratch – actually selecting the ingredients one by one and preparing the malts, etc. However for a first timer, I think that going with a kit is a wise choice. Maybe if I really enjoy this, I’ll start to experiment with more complicated brews.

Thankfully, HopTech has some great instructional videos online which helped me immensely. I learned some new stuff that wasn’t in the instructions from these videos. They really helped me visualize what I needed to do during the entire process.

In two-three weeks, I’m hoping to have 5-gallons of delicious, delicious beer. Wish me luck.

It’s been a long, long time. Sorry I haven’t written you, internet. Life gets busy you know. With work and the house, and a fast paced lifestyle there hasn’t been much time to jot down my thoughts, whims, musings, etc. But let me try and make up for it. I know it’s not much but I have a few pictures from a recent attempt at the John Muir Trail here in my gallery. And how about a couple random paragraphs?

Random thought: Winter Beer Season is coming soon bringing with it a bevy of delicious dark yummy beers. I’ve been talking about it for a really long time now, but I think this year I’m finally going to do it. I want to brew my own beer. It’s been a fantasy of mine for a really long time – to start my own brewing operation and eventually work my way up to a microbrewery a’la McMenamens in the Pacific Northwest.

I’m going to Japan in a few weeks and thusly needed to pull the old monkey suit out of the closet. That old suit is over five years old, hard to believe. Knowing that the suit is now a tight fit (I’ve put on a few pounds over the last 5 years, ok, jeez), I decided to take it to get altered. The whole experience was very humbling – and really put my weight gain into perspective. I’ve literally gained about 4-5 inches around my mid-section. Shock! And so I ended up walking out of the store having donated my old suit to charity and purchased a brand new suit. Am I a complete sucker?

Hopefully that holds you over for now internet. Sorry about the cold shoulder – can we still be friends?

I’m a guitar hero. I have to admit, I’m hooked. Suzy and I were first introduced to this game at our friends Beth and Steve’s house. I was really skeptical at first because it looked like just a rehash of the dance-dance revolution, a game which I completely despise. I mean, dancing and techno music? Two of my least favorite things. But that’s a story for another time. This game slowly grew on me with each passing level. And finally, as my fingers began to learn the keys without my brain intervening, it was as if I was truly playing the guitar and I began to bob my head to the beat. It’s like ultimate air guitar. I can’t explain it, but you truly feel like you’re shredding a face-melting guitar solo in your own living room. Songs that I wouldn’t normally enjoy, I was finding myself mesmerized by the intricate notes of the lead guitar. I have a whole new appreciation for the genre now. The game is dead simple. Strum each note as it whizzes toward you on the simulated guitar neck on the screen. You have five colored buttons that represent each note on the screen. They sort of symbolize frets – but don’t get me wrong, you will not be able to play a “real” guitar after mastering this game.

Suzy and I bought two of these guitars for our Nintendo Wii, and we’ve been playing co-op mode which allows us to play both the lead and the bass (and on some levels the rhythm). We’re just beginners right now but I’m sure that with enough practice we’ll be banging out hard core licks like butter.

And check out this kid play the hardest song in the game. Inhuman.

Suzy and I were watching the food network today and saw a segment on the history of french fries.  To my surprise, they mentioned the name Antoine August Parmentier.  According to this website (beware of popups), Parmentier is an alternate spelling of Parmeter (or vice versa) my family name.  After some quick internet searching I was able to dig up this fascinating nugget of information:

“It was in Germany, too, that the potato met it’s greatest ally. Antoine August Parmentier was a French chemist who served as a soldier in the Seven Years War, and was fed only potatoes while in captivity there. When he returned to France, he made it his mission to popularize the tuber, which he felt had been unjustly rejected by his countrymen. A skillful public relations man, Parmentier published a thesis, “Inquiry into nourishing vegetables that at times of necessity could be substituted for ordinary food” in 1773, and soon afterwards brought a bouquet of potato flowers to the birthday party of King Louis XVI. Graciously accepting the gift, the King promptly placed the flower in his lapel, and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, wore them in her hair, and potato flowers quickly became a fashion among the aristocracy. Still, Legrand d’Aussy wrote of the potato, in his 1783 Histoire de la Vie Privee des Francais (History of the Private Life of the French) “The pasty taste, the natural insipidity, the unhealthy quality of this food, which is flatulent and indigestible, has caused it to be rejected from refined households.”

Parmentier, however, was on a roll. He began throwing parties for the French upper-class, at which he served as many as twenty dishes at a time, all containing potatoes. Then, in a display of marketing genius, Parmentier obtained permission to plant an acre of potatoes in the French countryside. He had the plot fastidiously guarded by day, but at night left the land unsupervised. Acting exactly according to his predictions, the peasants assumed that anything watched so closely must be valuable, and they stole the plants by night. Soon, potatoes were being planted all over France. It became a staple food as well as a status symbol, and by 1813, almost one hundred and fifty years since it’s introduction, the potato finally gained acceptance in Scotland, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Thanks to the French, potatoes were finally deemed chic enough to eat.”

Excerpt taken from “The Secret History of French Fries” over at stim.com.

It seems that there is the slim possibility that I am related, directly or indirectly to the guy who is credited with marketing the potato.  When I was a kid, I do remember someone in the family mentioning that the parmeter name was related to potatoes.  I believe one story even claimed that Parmeter was a direct tranlation of potato in french.  As a kid, that sounded plausible.  But translate.google.com tells me that potato is actually pomme de terre in French.  Suzy and I are going to whip up a batch of garlic fries for dinner tonight in honor of good old Antoine.

Until next time…