Our latest happenings and some beer

Just to keep people up to date, Jenn returned safely from the United states, although not without incident. Due to construction in Chicago, her bus from South Bend was delayed by almost an hour and she missed her check-in for the flight to Calgary. You can imagine the stream of increasingly agitated texts that I got. The good folks at United Airlines were good enough to stand her by for the direct flight to Edmonton leaving three hours later, which still had her home 45 minutes early. The bottom line there is that the only reason she wasn't on that flight in the first place was because it would have been an extra $300 if we had booked it that way.

When she got home, Jenn started in on Physio for her arm, which has been going well - and her arm is now out of the sling most of the time. She did have a bad ear infection, a flu, and what appears now to be a lung infection. I haven't caught any of this yet, but I assume it is only a matter of time until I do.

Jenn's work has been winding down as she is now supervising exams and shutting down the classroom for the summer. She won't be taking over the Mat Leave she had been promised and pressured to take, because they found a Catholic candidate at the last minute. She has, however, set up a program where she will be teaching band for distance-learning students throughout Edmonton, which means that she has a foot in the door at Edmonton Public. She has also applied to teach summer school and to do a few other sundry things to scrape together what (If I were to be earning it) I would call Beer Money, but I'm sure she would be more likely to spend on other more useful things.

At my work, a new articling student started at the beginning of the week, which has been kind of interesting. It really makes you appreciate how steep the learning curve was for you at the start of your career to see someone else go through it. I have also started taking new clients again for the first time in about three months.

Finally the beer News - After careful consideration of our ongoing likelihood of selling the house on any given day, I decided that my need to make my own beer outweighed my need for a spotless house, and I had Nick the Mighty Brewer over for some brewing. We hit Style 8B (English Special Bitter) with the following recipe:

4.4 KG 2 row pale malt
227 G Dark Munich
227 G Med Crystal
60 G Chocolate Malt

Single infusion Mash at 153 F

11 G Warrior @ 16.3% 60 Min
11 G Fuggles @ 4.5% & 7 G Hallertau @ 3.7% 20 Minutes
11 G Fuggles @ 4.5% & 7 G Hallertau @ 3.7% 1 minute

It seems pretty good so far. I'll let you know when I bottle if it tastes any good.