Pining for the Fjords

The first Saturday evening in September saw us heading to McDowell Mountain Regional Park with our friends Jake and Keeli to race in Aravaipa Running’s Javelina Jangover* night trail run.  “Shut your face!  This race is named after me!” This was the fifth and final race in the Insomniac Trail Run series for Aravaipa, the same series in which we ran the Vertigo 10K (blogged about here ), the run now known as the one cancelled due to crazy extreme weather that occurred on the night the canopy in our backyard collapsed.**  If you’ll allow me to indulge in a bit of foreshadowing, it seems like Aravaipa might need to burn some sage or something, as their recent night races seem to keep offending the weather gods…but more on that later. We drove up to meet Jake and Keeli at their house, just off the I-17 near Carefree Highway.  They knew of a super-secret back way to drive to McDowell, so we hopped into their XTerra and headed out.  For the few days before the race, we’d bee

As you well know by now, we’ve been home brewing beer for the past four years.  Every time we brew, we boil all of the ingredients together, pitch the yeast, send the solution through primary and secondary fermentation, and then we bottle the beer.  We bottle condition our beer, which means we add priming sugar to the finished beer, then place it into individual bottles and cap them.  They sit there for 2-3 weeks, during which they eventually carbonate as the yeast in the beer eats through the bottling sugar and excretes the CO₂ that gives us the bubbles in the beer.  Tiny bubbles… There are a few large scale breweries that also bottle condition their beer, and Sierra Nevada is one of the best known.  Other breweries force CO₂ into their beer during the bottling process, so the carbonated beer actually goes into the can or bottle to make it ready for drinking.  Home brewers can replicate this by kegging their beer and linking it up to a CO₂ canister, so it can pour off a t

Need to catch up on Part 1 ? When we last checked in with our intrepid group of Vegas explorers, we had just gone to bed after a night of revelry.  Too much revelry it turned out, as several members of our pack weren’t feeling too awesome the next morning, myself very much included.  As is my tendency, I woke up super early and went for a jog around the Strip to avoid waking anyone else up for another few hours.  Afterward, I chilled out at one of the Starbucks inside the Luxor* and read the paper, and when I returned back to the room, a few of the ladies were starting to move around. We got ourselves ready, then headed out onto the Strip, to stroll down toward Mon Ami Gabi, our lunch destination, in the Paris hotel.  Mon Ami Gabi is this cute little French bistro with excellent food, and it’s one of my favorite places in town; I always try to eat there when I’m visiting Vegas.  It’s all dark and Parisian inside (I assume, never having been to actual Paris), but there’s also

The weekend after we headed to Seattle for Megan and Kristen’s wedding, I had the opportunity to fly out again, this time to Las Vegas with a group of girlfriends for a few fun nights.  It was a lot of travel in a short period of time, but it was worth it!  Backing up just a bit… A few months ago, I happened to be walking back to work from the gym with my friend Taira, when we started discussing how much vacation time we still had left for the year.*  I only had a few days (for use in Seattle, as mentioned earlier), but Taira had a good two weeks, and she mentioned she was planning on spending part of that in Las Vegas with our mutual friend, Erin.  I immediately wanted to go, but not wanting to crash their party, I mentioned that if they wanted a tagalong, I’d be happy to go – you know, just to help them split the cost and whatnot.**  Taira texted me the next day to let me know I was in!  What I found out a little while later was a very similar situation occurred with Trisha,