The Lutheran church has a strong German heritage. So when October rolls around, it’s time for Oktoberfest! Our church puts on a pretty good party with everyone bringing homemade German dishes to share. We also had a pie baking contest, a beer judging event and hammerschalgen. Any day when I get to eat a bunch of sausage and taste 11 different beers is a good one in my book.
Top Beers
I was recently asked what my favorite beers are. To the data we go! I have tried over 400 different beers and they’re all rated in Untappd. Here are the only beers that have received a perfect score from me.
| Brewery | Beer |
| Aslan Brewing Company | Batch 15 IPA |
| Northwest Brewing Company | Hoppy Bitch IPA |
| Fish Brewing Company | Fish Tale Full Blast |
| Wingman Brewers | Ace IPA |
| Worthy Brewing | Worthy IPA |
| Sumerian Brewing Co. | Narcissism IPA |
| Laughing Dog Brewing | India Pale Ale (IPA) |
| No-Li Brewhouse | Born & Raised |
| Worthy Brewing | Worthy IPA |
| Firestone Walker Brewing Company | Luponic Distortion: Revolution No. 001 |
| 10 Barrel Brewing Company | Joe |
| Cascade Lakes Brewing Company | Hop Smack |
| Sumerian Brewing Co. | Pale Ale |
| GoodLife Brewing Company | Descender IPA |
| Redhook Brewery | Big Ballard |
| Hale’s Ales Brewery | Supergoose IPA |
| Oskar Blues Brewery | IPA |
| Mac & Jack’s Brewing Company | African Amber |
| Deschutes Brewery | Red Chair NWPA |
| Gallaghers’ Where-U-Brew | Galley Mac Amber |
If you don’t like IPAs, then you might not be thrilled with this list, but right now I would rank Oskar Blues IPA and Deschutes Red Chair as the best of the best. You can only find Red Chair from about January to May so it’s a special treat each year.
And while we’re on the topic of alcohol, how about a refresher on my list of top rums?
- Sipping rums. Mt. Gay Extra Old is my go-to standard, but there’s a new entry on this list from a distillery in Woodinville: Puget Sound Rum Company C&C Honey Rum.
- Mixing rums. If you’re mixing with Coke (or Coke Zero as I prefer), look no further than Kraken. If you’re mixing with fruit juice then grab some Mt. Gay Eclipse.
Monorail
Since we only lasted about an hour at the Lego festival and we were already down by the Space Needle, I thought we should fulfill one of Elijah’s long-time wishes and ride the monorail. I’ve never been on it before. Now I have. It’s not that impressive. Elijah thought it was cool for a little while but I think he was underwhelmed. It’s only a 2 minute ride that covers about a mile. So as a sight seeing adventure, it’s not really worth it. But if you’re walking around Seattle and you want to quickly transport between Pike Place and the Space Needle, it’s a good option.
BrickCon 2016
BrickCon is a big Lego convention held in Seattle every year. Tyla and I attended in 2009, but I haven’t been back since. This year I thought that Elijah was old enough to get a kick out of it and Logan was interested too so we headed into Seattle to check it out.
It was busy in 2009 but wow it was PACKED this year. It was pretty difficult to keep Elijah interested when we were two or three people deep just to see the displays. I had to keep him on my shoulders for most of it.
We only lasted an hour before he was done, but we were able to quickly scan most of the displays. It is incredible how much time and detail people can cram into these creations. You have to look so closely to see it all.
I imagine this won’t be the last time we go, but next time I think I might try to go a little later in the event to see if the crowds are a little slower towards the end.
Movember
It has been six years since the last time I grew a mustache for Movember. Tyla just loved it so much that I feel bad that I haven’t done it again for her to enjoy. (I’m not sure the full weight of that sarcasm can be communicated in plain text.) Plus, I think Elijah would find it amusing to see me with more than a little bit of stubble when I don’t shave for a while. So I’m putting the call out now: who’s with me for another Movember? Remember that the overall point of this is to raise awareness and money for men’s health so it’s for a good cause. In addition to growing that mo’, why not throw a donate a couple bucks too?
Here’s what I propose:
- Leave a comment and let everyone know you’re joining in.
- You’re welcome to get a running start on your mustache. Feel free to grow a full beard and start whenever you want.
- Shave off that beard and let that mustache shine in all it’s glory during Thanksgiving week. I’ll probably go to work with it at least one day.
- Send me a photo of your beautiful mustache and I’ll include it in a post here on my site.
Go forth and grow that mo!
Thursday Night Football
It’s fun (and frustrating) to slowly see media companies making their way to the online space. This year, Twitter bought the rights to stream ten Thursday Night Football games. It might seem like an odd purchase, but Twitter thrives on live “chat” so getting a bunch of people together to watch a live event makes sense. You can watch free for yourself on tnf.twitter.com. It looks like they only have the games that are also on CBS or NBC, but it’s still nice to have when you’re out and about.
Or at least I assume it’s nice… I can’t watch it on my Windows Phone. In a few months I’ll have an Android device and then I’ll be good to go.
Best Of YouTube
Jimmy Diresta starts off this week’s collection with a demonstration of a cool new CNC tool. It’s a standard router on a small handheld platform. You move it in the general direction that it needs to go and then it uses a camera to know where it is and make small adjustments to perfectly cut the design you loaded into it. This device has been in the works for quite a while and it looks like they are making a press push this week so there are lots of other videos available from other makers if you want more info.
The crazy Colin Furze is at it again. He built an ENORMOUS 360 degree swing in his back yard. The axle is the same height as his gutters. I hope his life insurance company doesn’t watch this. If you like this video, check out the two videos right before it on his channel where he shows you how he designed and made it.
And finally we’ll end with some mind bending physics talk. How can time be faster and slower at the same time depending on your observation point?
Truxedo Bed Cover
You may have heard that we get a little bit of wet weather around here in the fall, spring and summer. That means that there will be a lot of tarps in my future to cover up loads in the bed when we are taking trips or even just transporting stuff around town. I wouldn’t mind having a cap for the back of the truck, but I have no good place to store it, so I started looking at rollable covers. Jay has a Truxedo model and they had good reviews so I went for it. The specific model I got was the Truxedo Lo Pro QT.
Installation took about 30-45 minutes as I figured it out and adjusted it, but now I could probably do it in 20 minutes by myself or even less if I had another pair of hands. Two rails are clamped onto the top of the bed sides and then the roll clamps to one end of the rails. You can store it rolled up or quickly unroll it and get it locked in place. There’s a tension adjustment so it stays tight and they say it will hold 300 pounds on top of the cover (so you don’t have to worry about snow load, etc.)
I would have preferred one of fancier models that rolls down into the bed, but those were about four times the cost. This was a good deal and I think it will work really well.
Puget Sound Basins
When we booked the stay in the caboose, I looked at a map, noticed it was on water in the south end of Puget Sound and I assumed it was on Hood Canal. Wrong. It turns out that the sound is divided up into a bunch of different “basins” and Hood Canal is just one of them. We were actually staying on the “South Basin”. The Wikipedia article about Puget Sound has a very nice map showing the different basins and I’ve included that map below.
It felt like the difference between high tide and low tide was huge while we were down there in the South Basin, but surely the tide is the same everywhere, right? Nope. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia: “The difference in height between the Higher High Water and the Lower Low Water averages about 8.3 feet (2.5 m) at Port Townsend on Admiralty Inlet, but increases to about 14.4 feet (4.4 m) at Olympia, the southern end of Puget Sound.” It has something to do with all the interconnections and interplay between the basins, but I couldn’t find any good info explaining the physics of it.
The shoreline is over 1300 miles long! That’s roughly the driving distance from New York City to Miami. We’ve explored only a tiny portion of it, but there are lots of great spots for further investigation in the future.
Church Speakers
Finally, it was time to upgrade. The only catch was that I had no idea how big of a system we really needed. I didn’t even know how to find speakers that would work with an amplifier. I spent some time learning about resistance, RMS, amplifier wattage, and how to pair an amp with speakers and made a wild guess.
We ended up with a QSC GX3 300 watt amplifier and two Mackie C200 speakers. The speakers are rated for 200 watts RMS and the amp can drive 300 with one of these speakers on each channel. The speakers are mounted to the wall with some simple, custom speaker boxes that I made with plywood, pocket hole screws and black paint.
Our church is roughly 75 feet long, 40 feet wide and 30 feet high at the peak. My hope was to get a system that would be at about 30% total power to get the right volume under normal conditions. I failed that, but the system is still a success. This setup is loud. When the church was empty, I got it turned up about 1/3 of the way and it felt like a rock concert. I seriously wonder if more power could blow out some windows.
So yeah, overkill. But you know what? It feels AWESOME to have a system that really works and isn’t straining to sort of meet our needs. We have had a lot of births in the last five years so church is a lot noisier than it used to be and it’s nice to have the ability to drown out the kiddie buzz if we need to.