Snow Day = Sugar Cookies

At 7:00 this morning, I received the phone call I'd been dreaming about all night: my office decided to close for the day. With a small cheer, I grabbed the dog and bounded downstairs to continue watching the news broadcast on this iteration of Snowmageddon. After about 30 minutes, it hit me. What, exactly, was I going to do all day?

After shuffling around the living room and brainstorming for a few minutes, I realized nothing could make the morning more complete than a batch of warm, fresh cookies. My only hurdle was a lack of ingredients. For the most part, I consider myself a cook and not a baker. I like the randomness of cooking - being able to take a few basic ingredients, throw in a few random ones and (for the most part) have it turn out. Baking is so...directions follow-y. I make cookies once every 2-3 years - the last time being in 2009 during that year's Storm of the Century. Luckily, I was able to scrounge up some sugar (lumpy, but workable), flour (I keep this on hand for lefse, duh) baking soda and vanilla. Bam! Sugar cookies were in my future.

Adam worked from home, but he managed to help me measure some ingredients before "clocking in"

Hard at work

Proof of our snow. It might not seem like a lot, but considering I saw facebook status updates such as "it's up to my knees!" while I had nothing, I felt pretty good about the 2-3" we accumulated today

Due to my previously mentioned lack of baking experience, putting the dough together took some time and pep talks on my part. An example conversation (with myself) went something like this:

"Combine butter and sugar and whip with a mixer until light and fluffy. Light and fluffy? How the h#ll do I know when it's fluffy? Alright, then. Batter, let's do this. Let's grab the mixer. Oh that's right. Let's turn it up a speed. You can do it. Fluff it up. Would you consider this fluffy? Who even knows. Keep mixing."

Adam considered it more of a trash talk to my dough. But hey - there was a large amount of uncertainty on my part and only so much lumpy sugar. I only had one shot.

After I successfully finished the dough, and let it sit in the fridge for an hour and a half, I started the rolling process. The first couple times I did it were sketchy at best, but after a few rounds of cutting out shapes and remixing the scraps, I got the hang of it. Thankfully I ransacked my parents' old kitchen in Everett years ago, and had in my possession all the cookie cutters from my childhood, plus a few I seemed to have collected over the years.

My first attempt at rolling the dough - not so great

First round of cookies in the oven. Yum!

I'm getting better at rolling, though making a huge mess

Once the cookies were out of the oven and cooling, I attempted some frosting. In my head, I was going to make 4 or 5 different colors, use my sprinkles, and get super creative. I quickly realized I was not making enough frosting to do more than 2, my feet hurt, and my sprinkles were somewhat lame. I chose what was supposed to be mint green and purple. 

A little treat for Adam and I once the cookies were complete

All in all, the cookies were a success. After all the rolling, mixing frosting and epic kitchen cleaning, I took a nap to celebrate. Happy Snow Day!

My first shot at homebrewing

Making my own beer has always been a hobby that is in the back of my mind. I drink a lot of beer, why not make some myself? My friend Jon and my father-in-law Barry both homebrew regularly, and I've definitely drank more than my fair share of their labors. It's time to return the favor.

But, but... baby steps! Anything that has any sort of process (be it playing a game, building a Lego model, or cooking anything [yes, even ramen]) tends to lock me up. I look over the instructions numerous times before I feel like I'm ready, even if the smartest thing to do is to just dive in and learn as I go.

Thankfully, Woot put up a Mr. Beer kit a few weeks ago, and I took the bait. I like to think of it as a paint-by-numbers for making beer. A trial run at homebrewing, if you will.

I was kind of kicking around the house this morning, wondering what I was going to do with my afternoon. When I opened the door to go get the mail, the answer was sitting on my doorstep: Mr. Beer had arrived.

 

Included in the kit is a 2 gallon keg, 8 1-liter bottles, a bag of "booster" (which it turns out is just corn syrup solids), a can of hopped malt extract (West Coast Pale in this case), a little bag of yeast, a packet of sanitizing solution, some stickers, and my favorite: the instructions! The keg and bottles are all plastic to keep it simple and reusable.

Here's a few shots of me inspecting the kit. Nothing really exciting going on here.

First step: reading the instructions! Seems easy enough: sanitize your stuff, put some water in the keg, mix the booster with 4 cups water, boil it, add the HME, throw it in to the keg, add more water, add yeast, cap the keg, then wait two weeks.

Second step: sanitize your stuff. This involves putting water in the keg, dumping some powder in it, swirling it around, and putting all your brewing tools (measuring cup, can opener, whisk) on a plate that you also sanitized. Here's a couple of non-action shots of this step:

Third step: put some water in the keg and some water in a pot. Mix the booster with the water in the pot. This took forever, as the instructions say to pour & mix the booster SLOWLY (in scary capitalized and underlined text) in to the water. It didn't really clump up like other mixes do, but it took a long time to dissolve. After that, I cranked up the heat and waited for it to boil. The booster apparently adds both alcohol and body as its packaging states, which is what beer definitely does to you when you drink it.

Fourth step: juggle!

Fifth step: add the can of beer goop to the boiled boosted water. The can of beer goop, officially Hopped Malt Extract, looked and smelled like teriyaki sauce. I love me some teriyaki, but if my beer ends up tasting like it I'm not going to be thrilled. I put my trust in Mr. Beer to make my beer not taste like teriyaki.

Sixth step: throw the mixture into the keg, add more water, then add the yeast. Pouring the hot, goopy liquid into the small hole at the top of the keg was a bit tricky. I came this close to pouring the crap all over the kitchen. When I added the yeast it started to get all bubbly and looking like I actually made Real Beer.

Seventh step: wait a couple weeks, storing the keg out of direct sunlight in an area between 68-78 degrees. I opted to put it over by our fireplace, which has a little pilot light which tends to keep the area right around it a little warmer than the rest of the house. That spot is also shielded from sunlight, so it meets the criteria.

So there it will sit, for two weeks. At that point, I'll sanitize the bottles, add a bit of sugar to each bottle, then fill it with beer. Then I have to wait another two weeks to condition the beer (a.k.a. just wait more), which takes two more weeks! Mid-February is when I'll be enjoying this.

All in all, this process took me a little over an hour and I had as much fun as you can have stirring and boiling water. I've watched Jon do The Real Thing and it is much more exciting and of course you can improvise a lot more than you can when you are pouring a can of goop into a pot. If this works out okay, I'll get a few more kits from them. Then, I'll do it The Real Way, without all the weird, canned beer goop.

Here's a preemptive "Cheers!" for six weeks from now.

2011 in review

Wow, what a year 2011 was. It was such a blur that I needed to look back through my various social networking sites to jog my memory. I won't bore you (and honestly, bore myself trying to write it) with all the details. But here's a list of highlights:

-January saw the return of Dana and Jon to Washington for a week. Dana came out to take care of some wedding planning, and Jon came because the flight was cheap and Dana was coming. The Group got together to hang out, catch up, celebrate January birthdays, and generally be awesome. 

-In April, Katie and I went to various places in Colorado. We went to Denver, Colorado Springs, and Boulder. All these places are places I could see myself living. Except for Colorado Springs: people get around from place to place there by running!

-Two of my best friends got married: Toby in April, then Dana in September. Both ceremonies were beautiful. I had the privilege of being a part of both of their bachelor parties: Toby's was up at our mutual friend Walker's family cabin in Roslyn, and Dana's I totally took over and made everyone go to the Penny Arcade Expo. Welcome to the club, guys.

-I took up two old hobbies that had long laid dormant. First was playing trumpet, which lasted about a month before it fell to the wayside. The second was playing Magic, which I've embarrassingly discussed here way too much. How can you tell if a post is authored by Katie or I? Does it mention Magic?

-We went to Sunriver, OR, with Katie's folks the last week of June. This was a trip they did pretty much every year when Katie was a kid, so seeing this place I've heard so much about was really fun.

-In late September, Katie and I took an impromptu road trip down to The Dalles, OR, to see Counting Crows play at Maryhill Winery. Not too impromptu, as she bought tickets a month or so before. But impromptu for me, since I forgot about it. Along the way, we stopped at Powell's in Portland, because That's What You Do When You Drive Through Portland. While at Powell's, I went off on my own to try and find something for myself. Five minutes later, I returned to Katie to find this. Now the reason why I parked in a 1 hour spot on the street became crystal clear.

I'm sure I missed a few things here and there, but so much happened that even stuff that happened last week feels like ages ago.

And what good is a year-in-review post without some forward-looking statements? Here are some of my personal goals for 2012. Call them resolutions if you want. Or "action-items," if you are in to corporate-speak.
-Lose some weight. It's not a New Year's Action Items list without it.
-Stay focused on whatever it is I'm doing. I switched browser tabs at least 100 times while writing this post alone
-Play more board games more often. I've played Catan and Pandemic dozens of times. It's time to dust off all those other games in my closet I've neglected.
-Participate in or run a tabletop game. This is in the same vein as the one above, but it's different enough to get it's own bullet point. I went to Crazy Town almost two years ago and got a bunch of D&D 4e materials and a pound of dice. Then to top it all off, I received the Pathfinder Beginner Box from this past Christmas. It's time to crack that nut.
-Be a more patient driver. I can be aggressive at times trying to get out of downtown. Katie would probably strike "at times" and replace it with "all the times."
-Be more patient in general. The last few months I've put on my grumpy pants a few too many times than I would care to admit. I can trace this to things going not-exactly-to-my-specifications. And it's not even stuff that anyone should get mad about ("What do you mean we are getting whole wheat bread?!"), it's just me being dumb.

Yes, I'm Still Alive

Well, as promised, I am not so great at this whole blog updating thing. I will have no trouble coming up with a new years resolution! At this point, most of my recollection of December is now in bullet point form:

- I finished reading Mindy Kaling's book and loved it. I was hoping there would be more tidbits from The Office (there was really only one chapter that dealt with her being on set). The show is one of my all-time favorites, and I could probably read a whole book just about that. Mindy Kaling's book was fun, though, and left me wanting to go out and do something girly and gossip wildly with some girlfriends. I settled for a mani pedi.

- My office had a holiday party on December 16 at El Gaucho downtown. It was quite good, and pretty standard as far as holiday parties go. Because our office is so small, we do a gag gift exchange every year. Adam and I came home with a gingerbread house kit which we immediately swore we were going to build and chronicle on our blog. Judging by the lack of posts since then, I'm guessing you know as well as I that Christmas has passed and it's not happening. Look for that in the Jackson 2012 blog update.

- Kirsten Terry came back to the homeland from Michigan on December 17 and I immediately challenged her, Adam and Sean to a game of Catan. In classic Kirsten style, she built basically only roads and cracked herself up for most of the game. It was the best and made me realize how much I've missed her these last four months. For the record, I ended up winning the game of Catan (thought no one even got close to Kirsten's longest road).

- I was very excited for Christmas this year. Not that I haven't been in the past, but this was excited like 8 year old style. It ended up being a success and I am well on my way to my goal of making an epic scrapbook of all Adam and I's adventures from 2011. I started picking out pictures yesterday afternoon and I'm pretty excited.

- Though Adam will likely mention this in one of his posts, he built me a Magic deck from Christmas, and I can't wait to head down to Cafe Mox and try it over a sandwich. I wasn't expecting any gifts so it was a wonderful surprise - especially because I had no idea where he'd found the time to put it together!

All in all, December has been a good month. I didn't get all the Christmas-y things done I would have liked (didn't bake a single batch of cookies) but it was a great holiday. I won't pretend that I will be on the ball enough to post again before the New Year, so cheers to 2012 and learning how to use this thing more effectively!

Results from the Magic Pro Tour Qualifier

I wanted to write a quick follow-up to my last post about Magic where I mentioned I planned on going to a big tournament last weekend.

Well, I went. Here's my report.

I woke up early Saturday morning and met my good friend Toby and a group he knows through his work and various Magic exploits at Gamma Ray Games for breakfast at the 5 Point (NOT the 5 Spot as I kept confusing it with). It wasn't nearly as sketchy as I had made it out to be in my mind. The food was good, the coffee was hot, and I did not get stabbed. A good start.

The PTQ was a little slow getting started because the turn-out was much larger than the organizers had planned for: 295 people. A fair amount of neck beards were in attendance.

This particular event used a format called Sealed. Typically with Magic, you bring your own deck of cards to play with. But with Sealed, they give you the cards there and you build your deck right on the spot. This is something I am terrible at. If you've ever played Dominion with me (where its core mechanic is to build a deck), a game where I don't place in last is a pleasant surprise.

Anyway, I got my 6 packs of 15 cards each, and the 30 minute deck building phase began. After flipping through all 90 cards about a half-dozen times, I couldn't even tell you if the cards were printed in English I was so lost. I only needed to pick 23 cards from this pool, it shouldn't be this hard, right?

It was an extremely intimidating and humbling experience to be that guy at the table who obviously had no idea what he was doing. But, I've played Magic for years, I can swing this! So I calmed down, fanned through my card pool one more time, and started to see some connections. Toby finished his deck before I did, and he came over to see how I was doing and gave me some very vague tips to help me with my final card choices.


A few minutes passed and I finally settled on 24 cards, turned in my deck registration sheet, and started shuffling while I waited for the first round to start.

Ever since I started playing again earlier this year, every event I have gone to I have finished at .500, and this one was no exception. I lost the first round, then proceeded to win, lose, and win again. There were no blow-outs, all the games pretty much came down to a final turn and were a lot of fun. My opponents were nice, though a few made some underhanded cracks about my slow and deliberate playing style.

With 295 players, there were nine 50 minute rounds. By the time the 4th round ended, it was close to 4:00pm. A 1st place finish was far out of reach with two loss notches on my belt, and having to play another five rounds to see if I could make the top 64 (and winning some packs in the process) did not sound especially appealing. So, I ducked out early to go drink beer with my wife.

It went okay.

magicwiththejacksons.com is still available

My hobbies tend to come and go in super-obsessed, condensed phases. I get really in to something (like playing Fallout 3 for about 22 hours over the four day Thanksgiving weekend), and then, well, it just goes away. Whether it be playing video games, reading books, watching a particular TV show, blogging, or getting back to playing the trumpet, no time-sink is safe.

However, there's one exception. The one hobby that has stayed with me for the better part of a decade has been Magic: The Gathering. If you haven't played, or even heard of the game, here's the gist from the Magic's lead designer, Mark Rosewater: "Magic is a strategy card game representing a magical duel between two players." Still with me after that? Okay, great! It basically invented the Collectible Card Game genre, paving the way for things like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Think of it like Uno, except you get to build your own deck to draw from, and every so often new cards come out that do more than force your opponents to draw two cards.

Since my parents got me the Portal gift box for Christmas back in 1997, it's always been a part of my life in some form. Sure, as soon as I got some cards, everyone I knew that played the game stopped playing. Minor setback. Then in high school when we'd see people play it in the lunchroom, we dismissed them as outcasts and nerds. We're way too cool for that. Then sometime during Senior year, I don't exactly remember the catalyst, but everyone that used to play came to the conclusion that we should try to play again all around the same time.

And so it began.

What followed were dozens of visits to Crazy Tony's shop on Casino Road in Everett, countless late nights in my parents' basement playing gigantic, multiplayer free-for-all games on the pool table (heaven forbid we ever actually play a game of pool!), and an incalculable amount of hours pouring over thousands of cards. I spent so much of my disposable income (read: all of it) at Tony's during that first year or two that he thought I was some hot shot VP over at Boeing. The toupee he wore was older than me, so I don't know what ever gave him that impression.

For whatever reason about 4 years ago, I stopped playing, buying cards, and reading about the game. It wasn't a cold-turkey situation, the game just drifted away and in to the shadows over the course of a few months. Life pulls all of us in various directions, and the stars just weren't aligned for a while.

When I got back in to the game this past spring, fueled primarily by Card Kingdom and Cafe Mox opening up down the street, one of the projects I tasked myself with was organizing my collection, which had been scattered across multiple closets around the house. It took me about the first 3 seasons worth of Parks and Recreation to finish - about 16 hours. Lots of late weeknights.

This is what my collection looked like in the final stages before I put them all in long 5-row card boxes:

There are 5 boxes, just like the one in the pictured above, filled with cards. It's kind of a sickness.

The reason I bring all this up is this weekend I'm going to head over to Seattle Center and participate in a Pro Tour Qualifier. It's a feeder tournament for the Pro Tour in Honolulu. Yes, this is a competitive Magic tournament. You see, when you started reading, you didn't even know this game existed, and now look at you! If I win (extremely unlikely in a field of hundreds of players), I get an invite and a plane ticket to the PT Honolulu. Lose or lose (just being realistic!), it will be a fun way to spend a Saturday morning.

Wizards of the Coast has a fun little website where I can track my competitive progress. Here is my page. They call it Planeswalker Points, because you represent a super-powerful being called a Planeswalker when you play the game. Sure, it might be a little dorky.

But I don't care. I love this game.

In the Christmas Spirit

...or, why I should not quit my day job to be a wreath maker.

As I mentioned I hoped to do in my last post, I spent my Sunday afternoon making an ornament wreath. You may have predicted it would end up being more complicated than stringing ornaments on a coat hanger and, well, you were right. 

My journey started at the Ballard Fred Meyer, where I purchased a set of red and a set of silver ornaments. First of all, I learned something that was not in my wreath tutorial: cheap ornaments made with a crapload of cheap glitter = mayhem. My living room now looks like an 8-year-old's dream birthday party. Even the dog is covered with glitter due to a stray flung ornament. She thought she was just going to stand by her dish and wait for dinner, and instead BAM! - pelted with a 3" globe of sparkle. 

Aside from the glitter, which I will be sweeping up until the day I die, the ornaments also tended to...fall apart when I tried to bend the wreath into a circle (which really ended up being a trapezoid, or oval at best). In all fairness, the tutorial did warn me that I would regret it if I didn't hot glue the ornament tops on but, being the craft master that I am, I blew that advice off (I also have no hot glue gun, which was definitely a factor).

Once all the ornaments were strung, the challenge became how to bend the coat hanger back together and into a circle. Every time I tried to twist the metal, PING! an ornament hit the floor. Adam suggested the ultimate go-to "Dale Fix" (a term coined by my father due to the numerous projects growing up which needed on-the-fly adjustments) and slapped a zip tie on there. Once I strung a ribbon bow on top, you can barely see the zip tie (another fun tidbit I learned - I am terrible at bows. The worst.).

At any rate, it's hanging in my living room because I'll be damned if I'm going to spend an afternoon fiddling with glitter and wire and whathaveyou to not have something to show for it:

Note the top where the coat hanger end could potentially harm you. Don't worry, though, it's zip-tied

Two examples of my (lack of) bow skills

Also on the subject of getting in the holiday spirit, Adam and I hung our Christmas lights this afternoon. I thought they were quite cute, but both Adam and Tommy's responses were more along the lines of "wow, that's ghetto." We have limited space to hang Christmas lights, what with our roof being four stories high and frightening, so I thought we made the best of it. Plus, you may not guess, but it is three whole strings:

You say ghetto? I say pretty

Note Adam's detail work on the pillar

 All in all, things are pretty Christmas-y here at the Jackson's. I still haven't listened to nearly enough Christmas music, and I am itching to watch Elf and the Grinch (the original, mind you), but all in due time.

Our mantle...Adam still needs a stocking

The tree. So far Greta hasn't peed under it this year

Other highlights from our Sunday include:

• Walking around Ballard, including a trip from Golden Gardens up the stairs to 85th. Quote from Adam: "You asked me if I wanted to go for a walk, not if I wanted TO DIE."
• Nursed our walk wounds by testing out the new Red Mill Totem House across from the Locks. Delicious fish and chips, I would definitely recommend them.
• We got the world's slowest meat slicer at the deli again. This isn't really a highlight, but my OCD requires that I list three items.

-Katie