Three Beautiful Things 02/25/17: A Luxurious Day Gets Underway, Listen to the Wind Blow, Beer Tasting

1. I was up at five this morning. The corgis stubbornly and ruthlessly demanded that I get up and feed them and take them out and I surrendered. Then I stayed up and so began a long and luxurious day of a little bit of cleaning up in our apartment home, working a couple of puzzles, enjoying a visit from Molly, Ana, David, and Olivia.

2. When Molly and the children left, I was going to go grocery shopping, but when Molly invited the Deke and me over for spaghetti dinner, meaning I wouldn't be fixing dinner tonight, I decided to stay home, listen to the thunderstorms, and make this as fully a day of inactivity as possible.

3. I took a bag of beer over to the Diazes and Molly, the Deke, and I did some beer tasting with my 6 oz. flight glasses. My favorite beer of the evening was Stone's Empirial IPA, which had been their 14th anniversary beer. They reissued it as an encore selection in celebration of their 20th anniversary. It's a British-style IPA and because I'm so used to hops grown in the USA and to American beer making styles, Empirial took some getting used to. Molly and the Deke were indifferent about this beer -- they switched to Double Duckpin -- and turned their unfinished 6 oz glasses over to me, and the deeper I dove into this bottle of beer, the more I enjoyed it and slowly old memories of drinking beer back in England in 1975 and 1979 came back, as did those sessions at 16 Tons when I'd grab a Belhaven out of the cooler or other days at the Bier Stein or at the Chip Shop in Brooklyn, NY or at The Highland Stillhouse in Oregon City when I'd order a pint of Old Speckled Hen.

I remembered back to September, 2012 and that British guy at the old Bier Stein location on 11th Street in Eugene who heard me order an Old Speckled Hen and proclaimed from the other end of the bar: "Looks like your a man who knows his beer."  I wrote about this moment, here, when I refrained from telling this man that I didn't really know beer very well at all, but that I was going to drink the Old Speckled Hen for my own personal and spiritual reasons.  Cheers! That was a fun moment and fun to have come back to me at the Diazes' dining table as I relished this bottle of Empirial IPA from Stone Brewing.