Julia is ONE!

Tuesday June 26, 2007 Julia Rose turns one year old.

What can I say to fit this good and happy occasion?
Julia is a jewel to me.
She is already showing that she has a sense of humor, and can often be found giggling with her brother. Her favorite part of our evening VeggieTales video ritual is the opening song. She watches it intently and bobs up and down.

She babbles quite a bit, and sometimes I feel like she is telling me a whole story. She loves to hang upside down. And she is getting more comfortable with being held by other people. She thinks doggies are really really cool.

She likes to eat meat. She is Steve's girl.

She has survived a year of her big brother's attentions. She has survived her parents' chronic busy-ness. She has survived our old farm house and the various treacheries of our yard.

We will be celebrating her birthday on Saturday with family. I so look forward to watching her grow as the Lord allows.

A Man's Weekend

With a little help from Sarah & David, I was able to brew my first all-grain batch of beer on Friday afternoon. From the time I started heating the first bit of water through cleanup it probably took about 5-6 hours, but I've got a little over 5 gallons of "Awesome Amber Ale" fermenting away in my basement. Most of the devices I made for this endeavor worked like a charm, though I definitely found a few things that'll need to be tweaked for next time to hopefully speed things up a bit and make a couple of these steps go a lot smoother.

After brewing all afternoon Friday, I found myself roasting another pig all day Saturday at a friends' house. They were hosting an office party and had requested our services in providing the food. We went overboard on the cooking time for this pig, so it was by far the most done and the easiest to pull apart of any we have yet done. It also helped that our somewhat persnickety propane burner ran fine all day with no problems, so we were able to keep the heat up more consistently. All in all, we provided a fine meal and a good time was had by all.

On Sunday we had some friends over for lunch after church. After showing them around the farm and recounting my adventures of the weekend thus far, Dan declared that I'm living the man's dream out here, and that I had nearly completed what most men would consider an outstanding weekend. I had to agree, especially as I was able to squeeze in an hour nap after they left. What a fine weekend.

Friday...Brewing Day

As some of you may recall, for Father's Day last year my gift was my initial set of equipment from which I could brew my own beer. I've made several batches since then, each one improving on the mistakes of previous ones. But each time I've been buying pre-packaged ingredient packs that contain malt-extract syrup. This is the simple man's just-add-water sort of approach to brewing. The outcome is pretty good, but its hard to produce great beer with them. So I think I'm finally ready to take that next step in my brewing experience, all grain brewing. For this I'm actually buying already malted grains, grinding them up, and starting my beer from that.

This additional phase in my brewing rite of passage, of course, requires extra equipment. One piece of equipment that I'm still constructing is a combination mash-tun & lauter-tun. This device is used to hold the malted grains & water at a specific temperature for a period of time, and then filter the grains out of the created liquor when the time is complete. The other piece of equipment that you can see in the picture, is a double-immersion chiller.

When brewing with all grains one is forced to boil a much larger quantity, 5-6 gallons as opposed to the 1.5-2 gallons with an extract brew. When the boil is complete it is desirable for the quality of the beer to chill the boiling liquid to less than 80 F as quickly as possible. With the smaller extract-brew quantities you can simply immerse the brew kettle in an ice bath to chill it. However with the greatly increased volume of the all-grain brew, that would simply take too long. So folks far more clever than I have devised all sorts of different ways to achieve this quick chill. One of the more common ways is this double immersion chiller. The first coil is immersed in an ice bath & the second in your just-boiling liquid. You then run tap water through the apparatus, which first goes through the ice bath to get really chilled, and then runs through the hot liquid to suck the heat away.

Pretty cool, huh? Allegedly, one can achieve cooling times of less than 10 minutes with this apparatus in a 5 gallon batch, which is really good. If you wanna see me use it for the first time, I'm planning to start brewing after lunch on Friday. I can always use an extra set of hands when I'm brewing, so stop on by and watch me stumble through my first all-grain brew.

Hoppin'

As you can see from these pictures, most of the hop vines are doing pretty well. Though its a little tough to see, the far one is actually nearly to the roof of the barn. And you can sort of make out in the second picture some cute little cones forming. These happen to be on the biggest of the vines, which is the Cascade variety of hops. Cascade is a low-to-medium bitterness, aroma-type hop, typically used in American-Style Ales, especially Pale Ales, IPAs, Porters, & Barley wines. Come August, it looks like I'll get a decent harvest of these and probably an okay harvest of Nugget & Willamette. The puny one is Sterling, and its looking like I'll be lucky to get much of anything off it this year. This is just their second year, so hopefully if I treat 'em right in the off-season they'll come back even more vigorous & hardy next year.

Drying Up

I'm not sure I remember when the last decent rainfall we had occurred. It was at least 2-3 weeks ago. And boy has it been warm. We've already had several days in the 90's, which is unusual for us this early in the summer. Those two things together mean everything is drying out. Our grass is brown & crunchy. Any plants or small trees we have must be watered every few days or they start to wilt. And most importantly, it means we've been forced to water our garden to keep it going. Fortunately, I found several weeks ago that I only needed to buy one more 25' length of hose for us to have enough hose to stretch from the house to the garden. All the same, its a bit disappointing to have our first big garden in such a poor growing year.

We fortunately got our peas planted early enough that we got a few good weeks of peas before this hot & dry has pretty much finished 'em off. There's nothing like fresh garden peas, too...those were definitely enjoyable. You can kinda make out what's left of 'em in the picture, they're the tall things in the back that are turning yellow and mostly overgrown with weeds at the bottom. I suppose its about time to plow 'em under.

You can also make out in the picture (with a little imagination) the cabbage, lettuce, onions, corn, & gourds. The cabbage was looking pretty good, but the last several days has seen a proliferation in the cabbage worms that has left several of 'em looking like doylies. The last couple nights I've gone out and picked several worms off of each cabbage plant. Nuts! We've actually started picking & eating the lettuce about a week ago. So far, as long as we keep it decently watered, its looking good and tasting fine. The onions are fine and nearly ready for some green onions to be picked to thin 'em out a little. The gourds, squash, cucumbers, & melons have mostly come up pretty good, though the melons have been a little slow. The corn has come up very spotty & I'd be surprised if we get much out of this years crop. I talked to a neighbor who also planted corn and he's having some of the same issues. Apparently its just been bad timing with the lack of rain since planting about 5-6 weeks ago, darn it all.

We've also got carrots that are doing well when we can keep the weeds back from 'em, and lima & kidney beans that are coming up decent. If I can ever get a little time to finish the gates to adequately secure the garden from small varmints, I'll get some of the tomatoes & peppers & such planted out in the garden again. Unfortunately, the weeds don't seem to mind the hot & dry, so I'm spending most of my garden time trying to keep them in check. We might have to punt on getting the peppers & tomatoes out in the garden, and find pots to put them in instead. Oh well, it was a nice thought. Maybe next year.

Steve Kuhlman - Warrior Dad

I'm coming to see that there is a warrior lurking in the hearts of men. An impulse to be provider and protector. Working daily in a cubicle might be an ungratifying way to fulfil that impulse, but it takes a lot of self discipline and a degree of courage to face the hum drum of providing for a family without losing your spirit. Steve's home and church life, fortunately, provide a little more adventure.



And yesterday, Father's Day, we called on Steve to be a warrior and protect his family from peril.

I had been playing outside with the kids. Paul was placing pieces of gravel in the bottom of the downspout on the southwest corner of our house. The next thing I knew, he was holding his hand and saying, "It pop me!" and an agitated wasp was flying around.

I hurried him in the house. At first he didn't seem too upset, but as we got into the house, he was acting more and more like his hand hurt. I quickly mixed some meat tenderizer and water. Rather than trying to apply the paste to Paul's little fingers, I just told him to stick his fingers in the whole bowl of paste. It was time for our evening downtime anyway, so we sat and watched "Hermie the Caterpillar" with Paul's fingers dipped in a bowl of meat tenderizer paste.

Later I told Steve what had happened. Neither of us could see any actual evidence of a wasp sting or bite on Paul's fingers, so that was good. Then I told Steve, "Now you go kill that wasp that stung our son. Defend your family!" Steve kind of chuckled.

After the kids were tucked in bed, Steve did some more work outside. When he came in, he announced that he had killed the wasp for me. ( I wasn't about to go after it myself because I have a reaction to bee stings.)
Steve said, "I went out and tapped the downspout, and a wasp came out. It flew around for a while and then went back inside. So I tapped the downspout again, and a wasp came out. It flew around for a while and then went back inside. So I went inside, grabbed a can of foam [for killing large mean flying insects] and tapped the downspout again. And a wasp came out. It was a great little study in cause and effect. But it's dead now."
Sarah said, "Yayyy!"

Baby-zilla

As Julia approaches her first birthday, she is getting increasingly independent. Here are some of her latest tricks.

After some coaching, she is starting to put both arms up in the air to signal that she wants up from her high chair.

She is getting increasingly independent about crawling from room to room. One of her favorite places to go is the North porch where there is no end of shoes and crud to put in her mouth.

She has developed a taste for bananas. If she sees us even reaching for one, she starts convulsing like a Tickle-Me-Elmo. The other night she was expressing her desire for one when she verbalized, "Buh-buh-buh - NA-NAHHH" It might just have been her first word.

She is starting to have fun rough-housing with Paul. We have to monitor this very closely because Paul is not good at knowing when too much is too much. But he has wrestled with her a little bit, and her reaction has been to grin and giggle. It does my heart good to see them playing together.

She climbed the little set of stairs between the office and the nursery a while ago. Last night she crawled over to the bottom step of the big staircase and eyed it for a while.

She has decided that the inside of the training potty is a magical spot to which she must gain access. Mommy disagrees.

She has just begun to blow kisses.

She has begun to plant big loud baby zerbitties on people.

And lately she's been doing her best Godzilla impression. She pulls herself around the coffee table or whatever shelf she happens to be near and pulls everything off of it. Once she has made a terrible mess, she grins and moves off to the next spot. Our living room looks like Tokyo in the hands of Ray Harryhausen.

I am very proud of all her new skills.

Paul is also giving us a run for our money. He has started taking phrases from books and TV and applying those phrases new contexts. For example, one book uses repetition and the word real. Example: That got Zed scared. Real scared.
Paul has started using similar phrasing. Example: Julia's sad. Real sad.

He also used a phrase from his favorite movie, Cars, in a way that made me laugh. In the movie, the race car is in such a hurry during a race that he won't let his pit crew change his tires. He says, "No tires. Just gas!"
So I had Paul on the potty the other day and he told me he was going poopee. I looked in the toilet and said, "No, Paul, I think you just passed gas. There's no poopee in the potty."
To which Paul replied, "No tires. Just gas!"

What a Party!

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that came out and supported us at the pig roast yesterday! We were pleased and humbled at the amazing turnout ... more than 100 folks came out to the farm to enjoy the gorgeous afternoon and the excellent vittles. It seemed like everyone had a great time eating, playing cornhole, sampling the pig, chatting, and chasing the kids around. The kids really enjoyed seeing the chickens, playing on the playset & sandbox, and especially the face painting. We got a bunch of complements from folks today on how good everything was and how much fun they had. Thank you to everyone that helped out buying & setting up food, painting faces, cooking, setting up & cleaning up chairs & tables, and probably a bunch of other details that I'm not even aware of. This party would not have been such a great success without so many folks pitching in and helping. But best of all, thanks to all of you for the tremendous outpouring of support...after expenses, we raised over $3,000 for this year's team to go to the Czech Republic to support the English camp ministry there. Praise God! Through all of you and in all the details of the day He showed us once again how He blesses us more than we can ask or imagine when we are doing His work.

Congratulations Uncle Paul!

This past weekend my Uncle Paul celebrated 30 years of being an ordained Lutheran minister. For the past many years he has been the pastor of Immanuel Lutheran church in Suttons Bay, Michigan. But he spent much of the early years of his ministry as a missionary in Argentina. Also, Sarah and I had the honor of having him preside at our wedding nearly 6 years ago! It was very cool that my dad was able to fly up to Michigan this past weekend to surprise his brother at the large bash his church threw for him. I really wanted to make it up too, but there's just too much going on here right now to get away for a weekend. But I wanted to take a moment to express my joy at having such a wonderful, Godly uncle who loves the Lord and faithfully proclaims His word every Sunday, as he has for the past 30 years. Thanks, Uncle Paul, for the blessing you have been to me and our whole family.

Tractor Problems...Part Deux

While the picture may not adequately portray the prickliness of the subject to the casual observer, this item has been a thorn in my side for far too long.

Last fall, near the end of the mowing season, I started experiencing some overheating issues with my tractor whenever I was using it to mow. Before I started having all the electrical issues this spring, I noticed the overheating issue getting worse. I surmised, somewhat hopefully, that the problem was with the thermostat. So I purchased a new thermostat and new hoses, and while the tractor was apart for the electrical repairs, I was able to replace these items. It seemed like the first couple mowings after all that work everything was doing fine. But before the last mowing I noticed a small puddle under the front of the tractor. About half-way through the last mowing (~1-1.5 hours) I noticed a little steam coming from under the engine. So I quickly shut the mower off and drove the tractor back to the barn. By the time I shut the tractor off steam was really pouring out, almost as fast as the curses and expletives pouring from my mouth. After throwing my hat down in frustration...and then picking it back up again, I went and found something else to do for a while so the tractor and I could cool down a bit.

When I checked back later I noticed a rather large puddle under the front of the tractor. And when I opened up the hood I noticed that the belt was strangely not on the pulleys. Out of curiosity I pushed on the fan and quickly realized that the water pump was seized up. No good can come from that. So I got to order a new water pump. It fortunately came in before the weekend, so I was able to, once again disassemble the front part of the tractor, replace the water pump, and put it all back together again. I should've done it when I had it all apart before, but the thermostat solution was only $15, while the water pump solution was $100. So I also didn't want to be replacing the water pump without knowing for sure that was the problem. Well if confirmation is what I really wanted, that is indeed what I got. At least I managed to finish mowing the grass this weekend....