Beer and Oranges!

A few things today, our first batch of beer, the beers code name was Lexie after my friends yellow Labrador, was finally ready to be bottled, which was an event in itself. After playing around with the auto-siphon and coming to terms with the fact that the one we had was either broken, or that we were too dumb to figure out how to get it to work properly, we were forced to use the racking cane and tubing to siphon to the bottling bucket. This was another comedy of errors, to prime the siphon, you fill it with sterile water and lower the end below the level of the original container, like siphoning gas from a car into a gas can. We had 3 false starts, due to not filling the siphon up enough to get the vacuum started, these were punctuated with much swearing and accusations of deviant lifestyles. On the upside we now have a proper digital scale and a few other implements that will make the beer brewing process easier, though the important things we don’t have are only becoming more obvious ie. a refractometer. Come Friday we will be bottling our second batch of beer, codenamed Daisy, also named after a dog, with some luck that will go a bit more smoothly.

On the paintball front, a teammate got a new gun today, a Chipley Custom Machines S6, in gloss orange and chrome. It’s quite lovely and I now want one rather badly, even though I preordered a Metadyne Pump marker recently (when are they going to name that gun). I have wanted a pump gun for some time now and haven’t seen one I really like, they are often somewhat plain, and I like my guns to be flashy. It is possible that means I am shallow and have poor taste but I am willing to accept that, besides I have poor taste in many other things so no surprise there. The S6 is a full block autococker (google it if you are curious why they look like), thus one of the downsides is the back block can whack you in the nose every time you pump it to chamber a ball, that could be a deal breaker for me so I will just have to play with it and see. I was also asked to take a few photos for the paintball store, for use on their website, it reminded me just how little I know about taking still life or product photography. Though I can certainly see a charm in doing it and I would like to do it more often, I will just have to see how well, or poorly, those turn out.

The last thing of note that happened today was, well, a job offer of sorts. As I mentioned last time, I have had quite a lot of time off of work recently and I dislike sitting around doing nothing and not making money, though who does? One of my teammates asked me if I wanted to work with him on a few things he has going on. I somewhat excitedly agreed, both the chance to make money and work with my friend was too good an opportunity to pass up, I just hope I don’t disappoint. The drive will be a little more obnoxious then I am used to, but I won’t have to get up any earlier than normal so it all balances out. I will find out tomorrow what the word on it is, here’s to hoping it’s good news.

I also just noticed in the last entry I didn’t mention why I picked The Lever of Archimedes for the name of my blog, despite my two paragraph rant on names. Well, Archimedes has a famous quote "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” I rather like that quote and in the case of my blog it would go something like "Give me a blog long enough and an audience on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Mostly an amusing play on the quote, tragically it doesn’t sound quite as clever now that I am forced to write it out.