… no, not at the same time.  :)  Last Friday was Winterfest, the annual fundraiser for the MN Craft Brewers Guild, and the first one I’d been able to attend.  It was awesome!  (despite a very chilly half-hour wait in line outside – they only had one person checking IDs at first!)

Not sure I could pick a favorite from the evening, but Town Hall won a deserved victory with their Chocolate Raspberry Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout.  Pretty incredible.  Really, that’s half the fun for me at events like this – getting inspired!  (Sorry about that pic, Sierra – you look sober in the one before and after, but everyone else looks better here!)

I got to talk to the brewers at a number of the tables and got some good tips on their processes, especially regarding fermentation temperature – more on that in another post, I’ve got some small but vital additions to my brewing process.  Pic at left:  gee, it’s like they’re speaking from experience!!  (but the capitalization…?)

So that was a great start to the weekend.  The next morning we happened to go into Kitchen Window where I lusted after their enamel-coated pans (no more teflon!) and we managed to find a perfect size dog biscuit cookie cutter.  Inspired, Karen researched a few recipes, and by Sunday evening was turning out trays of the cutest little dog treats I’ve ever seen!

Not only are we saving money (somehow those treats are expensive), but we know exactly what’s in them and that it’s all good for him.  No preservatives, no filler, no corners cut.  Hooray!

What a whirlwind!  We got back the 30th after leaving Christmas eve for Colorado – J&J, Sierra, Steve, me, Karen, and Bruno in a rented Suburban driving cross-country.  We intended to go straight through, but we ended up crashing for the evening in Columbus, NE, with Karen and Steve’s brother Dean.  His wife Daniele managed to conjure up stockings for us all in the morning, it was amazing!  And Bruno got to play with Maceo, one of their dogs (the other one had to stay in her kennel).

Back on the road to CO the next morning we hit some pretty bad weather in the last 1/4 of Nebraska…  A few white-knuckle hours later we crossed into Colorado where everything cleared up, and mere hours later we were opening gifts with the family!  I got a sweet shirt, the first issue of Make magazine, and some Climitts for my frozen fingers on my bike – I can’t wait to try them out tomorrow!  Karen got a giant muffin pan, women’s work gloves, portable speakers for her iPod, and some hand / wrist warmers she’s already raving about!

The next day we went snowshoeing up in Rocky Mountain National Park at a trail I don’t know if I’d ever been on – but it was so cold and windy I neglected to take any pictures!  The wind died down a bit in the trees and the mountains were beautiful.  It was a great break from all the running around.

Bruno and Te Beagh reconnected and had a great week playing in the snow.  Regan, two years older than last time they met, was a little less receptive this time – she ended up snapping at Bruno a few times and one time caught him pretty good on his ear.  I taped some gauze on it so it wouldn’t bleed when he shook his head and he never seemed to mind – heck, he’s an 85 pound dog!  Now if we could just teach him to listen when other dogs say they don’t want to play…

Thursday we headed to New Belgium brewery for a few samples, then back home for the now-annual Jeopardy game!  This year, instead of making noises to "buzz in" we made colorful paddles to lift.  Laurel drew a nice Christmas tree that ended up on fire – you know, to get the judges’ attention – and I decided it needed a message from a (super-ripped) Smokey the Bear.  Unfortunately that was the pinnacle of our genius for the week – I think we came in dead last in the Jeopardy game.  Ah well, next year!

Friday (I think!) we had a nice lunch with Troy and Scotty at Coopersmith’s and got to sample some of their great beer.  It was awesome to see those guys again, even if just for a short time.  Scotty, come back!  Troy, come visit!

Early Saturday morning Laurel and Freddie took off driving for LA via Las Vegas.  Crazy kids! The rest of us went by my Grandparent’s new place in Fort Collins for a visit and some snacks.  They miss Chicago but seem to be settling in well.  Then off to City Park to break in Justin’s new sled!  Quentin went over a jump a few times on his stomach and I thought he was going to faceplant, but we all survived without injury.

That night Karen and Steve’s aunt and uncle came up from Denver for another visit to Coopersmith’s – perfect, since they had so many beers I wanted to try!

Early Sunday morning we were back on the road, and this time we took full advantage of the DVD player built into the Suburban – everyone watched (and I listened to) the first 12 episodes of Lost!  Crazy.  Good weather the whole way, Bruno was perfect in the car, and we got to meet Dean, Daniele, and Trevor for lunch in Omaha.

Finally home and collapsed into bed.  Great to see everyone and celebrate together!

Whew.  I wasn’t sure if I’d find time to post until after the holidays!  It’s been a little hectic around here, for sure.  A quick recap for those wondering what Duoteam’s been up to:

• Celebrating Thanksgiving in Nebraska at Karen’s brother’s house.
• Karen helped decorate and overall spread good cheer for her office’s holiday party.
• We’ve both had colds.
• I haven’t biked to work since the day before Thanksgiving (see above – but I intend to soon!)
• I finally started brewing again after blowing my supply at the wedding.
• It snowed!  We’ve had two storms in a row, and more forecast for tomorrow.  After a disappointing winter last year, we’re off to a good start.
• Bruno turned 3!  He got to have a little friend over for some massive bouts of tug-o-war.  Fun.

I’ve also been tweaking the mostly-working-perfectly wakeup system, just today I adjusted the sensor to determine when the alarm is going off and fixed a little bug in the light timing.  I had to program it to start about an hour before we want to get up since it takes that long for our house to get up to the temperature we want – it’s been near zero in the mornings for the last few weeks.

Not sure who’s interested in the details, but in the pic at right you can see the components that went into this.  From roughly left to right: the cannibalized innards of a 5V power supply ($2 at Savers!), the kit I put together to fade the 120V light, and on the right is a barebones Arduino board soldered into a little PC board I got from Radio Shack that’s also holding the rest of the circuitry I designed.  Nothing too complex, and I know I could have gotten it in a smaller box, but this one holds the light nicely.

Pretty nice in action, too.  It’s nice waking up to some light instead of bleak & cold darkness.  I’ve found it’s much more of a psychological effect (for me, anyway), where I’ll wake up with the light and the sound and know that there’s more time in the cycle before I’m "supposed" to get up, but I’ve been making an effort to not be tied to this "scheduled" wakeup time.  If I’m awake and it’s close enough, I get up!  Hard to break myself of the "but the alarm won’t go off for another 10 minutes!" thing – but I think that just leads to bad sleep in the morning.  Anyway.  Good progress, and I definitely like it better than any other alarm I’ve used.

That’s all for now!  Keep bugging Karen, maybe she’ll post!

Had a blast this weekend up on the North Shore of Lake Superior — we would normally avoid it on a popular holiday weekend, but it ended up being basically the only weekend we could squeeze it in.  And we really needed to research / start to flesh out some of the wedding plans.

Get Flash to see this player.

In the video you can see Mr. Man exploring the lake and the beach.  He was pretty shy about the water at first but really enjoyed — drinking only, no swimming for this guy yet! — the rivers and streams running into the lake.  Next is a clip of this cluster (herd?  pack?) of swallowtails all landing in the same area – it was right where a car normally would park, so I’m hoping it was some naturally occurring mineral deposit and not antifreeze they were after.  Pretty cool, anyway.  Finally, looks like there’s been a change of plans and Karen has to marry Bruno now.  Hee hee.

The first night we were scheduled to meet with Michael and Maureen, the innkeepers at the Cascade Lodge, so we put Bruno in his kennel in our cabin and headed down.  Just as we reached the lodge Karen remembered she’d forgot the walnut bread we meant to give to them as a gift, so I ran back up to the cabin to get it.  As I got near the cabin I could hear Boo Boo crying, and at first I thought he was just howling since he was alone — really crazy, since he’s never made a peep like that since we got him.

I got to the door and could see inside to the kennel and realized he was crying so hard because his face had gotten stuck in the door of the kennel!!  I almost broke the door down getting in and quickly saw that he’d somehow tried to push the door open and gotten his nose out, and now his lower canine tooth was hooked on the metal door which was smashing the rest of his face back into the hard plastic.  He couldn’t close his mouth so he was drooling and crying and panicking really bad and I couldn’t seem to get his tooth unhooked or get the door open.  Karen arrived and tried to calm him down while I worked on the door and eventually got it open.  The poor little guy!!!  It was really, really terrible seeing him like that, totally stuck and freaking out and in pain.

It turned out that in transit the metal latch on the door had bent and wasn’t properly closing on the top half so he was able to pry it open a bit.  I fixed it, but we decided to let him stay in the room without the kennel for the rest of the trip, after his bad experience with it…  Whew.

The meeting with Michael and Maureen went extremely well, even better than we could have hoped.  They’re great people, loved the bread, and it turns out he’s a homebrewer!  Not much lately since they’ve been busy, but in the past, and he was raving about the water from their well being the best for brewing.  I think I heard them mention it had even crossed their mind at one point to open a brewpub in the restaurant and I told them to sign me up!!  Heh.  First things first, but man would that be awesome!

Hopefully Karen will post with more details, I want to wrap this up before it becomes a novel.  In short, great weekend, great place, very relaxing and fun, and some fantastic progress on the wedding planning process!  Sneak peak on the right:  I snuck up a bottle of the sparkling cranberry mead and we sampled it.  Fan.  Tas.  Tic.  Awesome.

Bruno got a chicken.  It’s supposed to be indestructible.  It’s not.

The raingarden is looking awesome as it starts it second year of growth.  I can’t wait for summer.

1. We’re back!  Ghana and Scotland each deserve their own post, but the brief summary is: unbelievably cool.  Really interesting, educational, and fun, great people, great scenery, and delicious food and drink.
2. Broomball is back!  This week we had games on Tuesday (we won 3-1, I scored by batting one in out of the air and Peter K had two amazing goals), Thursday (we won 2-0, I scored from the edge and Jason worked some serious magic), then have a makeup game scheduled tomorrow!  (plus normal games in the week, plus my team at work is playing Monday)  Holy broomball, Batman!
3. It’s cold.  Really, really cold.  -9F air temp when I walked Bruno this morning, we only made it two blocks before his little paws got full of ice and he was limping so we hustled back — too fast, it turned out.  He got all excited running home and saw our neighbor and picked up speed and I caught my boot on the sidewalk and wiped out really hard on my bad knee.  Damn.  Probably ok, but man did that dog walk suck.
4. Yep, cold.  The next three days the high temp is going to be maybe 0F with windchills in the -20 to -30 range.
5. Karen got a job!!  She can post more, but briefly in her words: "I get to be outside in beautiful places, working with people and ecology, educating and raising awareness about issues that are important to me, and facilitating restoration and land conservation.  I pretty much feel like I just won the lottery.  Like I can’t believe I get to do all this stuff AND get paid for it!"
6. Her having a steady job is actually a really excited new phase for us – when I arrived in St. Paul she had just quit the nonprofit she’d been with for years and picked up temp work before deciding to go back to school.  It’s been a hectic three years, and I gotta say I’m looking forward to this next step – and super proud of her.  Way to go, kid!

More as we continue to catch up and recoup from our trip – we’re both still fighting colds, her more than me.  Stupid colds.  Peace and stay warm!  Go Bears!