Fall in the Emerald City

Well Fall is here and the clouds are moving in. Although, this started out as a pretty mild Fall for us so we actually had the leaves change color. Some Falls are rainy and the leaves turn brown and fall off in the rain and wind. Not like the one's in Tennessee. That was amazing.

That is a self portrait of me. I put my face on a van parked across the street...for fun. I am keeping busy and trying to stay out of trouble these days. Staying in more and working on freelance design, ebaying misc. odd items, reading and making my craft brew. Summer is typically a break for some home brewers because we are just too busy enjoying the sunshine and don't want to be slaving over boiling gallons of beer for hours on end. Now it is chilly and the brewers are back in action. Brewing with grains is hard hard work and takes lots of concentration and on-the-fly adjustments. My last brew session had me waking up at 6:30am to gather my equipment, double check my calculations and etc. and then I was finished brewing and added my yeast by 5:30pm. Seriously. Currently up is 'Howling Wind Winterspice Ale.' Should be ready by end of December. Then a heavy dark stout for January which will be nice after coming in out of the rain or after hitting the slopes.

That's a photo of Tamara and our buddy Todd taking photos of a collection of old casino signs in Vegas this past summer. Tamara is settling into her new job with the arts part of the city and she is liking it except for her more regimented time schedule. All in all doing well. She is also taking part in a 'Write a Novel in a Month' website. She is now past 30k words! The idea is just to write and write and write until you have a novel of so many thousand words at the end of the month. Then, your reward is that you actually wrote a novel. That is great and I am proud of her. It is expected to be rough around the edges. You don't have time to really edit as you go to meet your quota. Almost all novels are written and rewritten and rewritten and so on. Maybe it is a future classic? All I know is that it is set back in the early 90's. A meaningful time for both of us.

That's it for now. Next time we will post some photos that may be more relevant to the blog- I just had these handy. Take care. Love you all.

-Joe

November in a Nutshell

Hi Family,

November has been a pretty eventful month. Let's start with the fact that baby girl wants to come meet everyone sooner than expected. Last week Brenna started feeling more contractions than usual and went to her doctor. Well, we find out that our little girl is trying to be born 6 weeks early. So they prescribe Brenna medication to stop the contractions. Our plan is to try to put off the birth until end of November when the baby will be developed enough to not need the ICU. Well the medication does not stop the contractions and the doctor ups Brenna's dose and puts her on half day bed rest. So far that is working and we are biding our time till after Thanksgiving.


We also continued to have issues with those pesky rats. This time it was an ominous odor coming from the attic. Well we have two rooms on each side of the house with attic access, one in the kitchen and one in our back guest bedroom. So I went to our handy home depot and got suited up for digging around in insulation looking for dead rodents. I crawled into both spaces suited up like the feds searching for ET. I found the corpse of a long dead rodent in the area we smelled the offending odor but it seemed to old to be producing such a stench. Then we got the idea that maybe the smell was coming from below the house. So I got down into the crawl space and tried to locate the next. Again, I found the remains of a long dead rat. We had to postpone the search due to the baby stuff and the need to get all the preparations in order. The smell since has began to subside but brenna's legendary olfactory senses continue to detect interlopers about. I will keep you informed. We miss you guys and hope the fall is treating you well. Keep up the effort to try to use the blog.

Love,
Paul, Brenna, Jack and Baby Girl

p.s. the names we are thinking of are Molly, Elizabeth or Anna Marie