1. I enjoyed, after being absent last week, meeting up with Ed, Jerry, Buff, and Scott for breakfast this morning at Sam's. There's really nothing special about Sam's pancakes. All the same, I think about the pancake I order with my breakfast all week long. After not having one for a couple of weeks, this morning's pancake really hit the spot.
2. Little things. I moved my socks and underwear out of my suitcase and into the hanging storage box that arrived on Thursday. Our front bedroom is a cluttered mess of things we need to make decisions about and I moved books out of there and put them on the bookshelves we not have in the living room. I cleaned out a small box of cords and other miscellany and freed up more space in the hall closet. Our house started to heat up a bit today and I turned on the furnace fan that blows cool air from the basement into the main floor of the house and it made a significant difference. All little things, but all things that helped me feel more settled as we organize our house after the remodel.
3. Shawn, the Deke, and I had a beer club meeting late this afternoon in the kitchen. We had decided on Tuesday that we'd focus on rum today. Shawn brought a bottle of Zaya rum and we each sipped 3-4 ounces of it. It was awesome. Then I broke the wax seal and popped open a true heavyweight beer: Deschutes' The Abyss (2017), aged for ten months in rum barrels and weighing in at 13.9% Alcohol by Volume. Drinking this beer was an ecstatic experience. To begin, as I poured us each 3-4 ounces, it was like I'd found an elixir drilled from a black hole in outer space. It was so black that no light could escape it. Then I tasted it. The sweet cane sugar booziness of the rum barrel perfectly complimented the deep flavors of vanilla, licorice, molasses (my favorite), and black cherry. The taste was so profound, so perfect I nearly wept and part of me wanted to take a nap between each sip to slow down our consumption of this Imperial Stout and to test whether I could dream a better tasting beer. (I'd say no, I could not.)
Having drunk some of The Abyss as purists, we then put about an eight of an inch of Zaya rum in the bottom of our glasses and poured The Abyss over it, further deepening and enhancing the rummy sweetness of the beer. We unanimously declared this experiment a wild success and, had we thought of it, we could have adjourned our beer club meeting with a prayer of gratitude and thanked God for the brewing ingenuity that created The Abyss and for the brewer who thought to age it for 10 months in rum barrels. But, we didn't pray. We said farewell. Shawn headed home after a week of remodeling in Wallace. We have not yet decided when the next beer club meeting will be. But, to quote Chuck at 16 Tons when I told him I was buying the box of beer I purchased there for our beer club, I have "plenty of ammo" for our next meeting.
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