Had my fist home made beer after a hot shower at 10:30 tonight! The home brew batch I had made had been potentially ruined due to the yeast dying sometime between fermentation and bottling, leaving nothing to make the carbonation process work. I went to a local home brew shop for advice and the owner advised me to add some activated yeast to the mix and rebottle. This meant opening 63 bottles of beer and dumping them into a bucket, adding some yeast mixed in a cup of water and a spoonful of sugar and then rebottling and waiting an additional two weeks.
A few days early of the two week mark I opened the partially filled last bottle I capped, which was room temperature, to see if there was any action. There was too much! The beer immediately began to foam up in the bottle and disturb the sediment present at the bottom of all home brew bottles! 
Crestfallen i thought the batch was ruined again for good this time but my father-in-law suggested I wait and open a full bottle, properly chilled, at the two week mark.
Tonight was the night I the verdict is success! I just drank the last sip of the tasty cream ale from that bottle and may even have another!
Published on
April 14, 2009 in
House.
This long Easter weekend we have focused on the window trim, bathroom tile and later on today concrete floor finishing. The windows have all their birch plywood sills cut, installed and finished finally, and there are 8 windows boxed out with trim on the first floor. Only 6 to go on the first floor and 13 on the second!
The first step to cutting the plywood sills was to cut a piece of cardboard of cardstock or paper to the depth of the sill.
Second a compass is set to the widest part of the curved stucco wall the plywood sill is to match up with, which in the case of our windows was the front edge.
Start at the wood stucco stop…
And keeping the compass parallel with the edge trace to the front.
Cut out the template and test fit and trim as needed, then you can transfer the pattern to the plywood sill! Do this for both sides and then measure the narrowest point (at the stucco stop) and places the templates that far apart on the sill.
Of course some of the sills fit better than others and the slight gaps will have to be trimmed somehow (maybe rope, maybe with drywall compound and paint…) but all in all the sills turned out great!
The tile in the bathroom was started yesterday as well, with keith doing half the bathroom in the morning. The large 12″ x 24″ tiles look great and we can’t wait to grout and put our tub in place!
Hopefully, the window trim will be done by the time I go back to work on Thursday!
I think we can take the
dam collapse at Scales Pond over the weekend as a lesson of the real effects of climate change. I have admittedly not been on this earth long, but all of my 32 years have been lived on PEI and the concerns about flooding (i.e. this past weekend and the flooding last August) would not be commonplace when I was young.
We also have been having stronger and stronger summer windstorms and more exotic weather occurances such as funnel clouds and water-spouts. I have no hard data to back up my anecdotal observations but I know many people younger and older than I have noticed the change in the weather patterns in recent years as well.
The results I think you will see is a differnt manner of planning and constructing infrastructure, agriculture and building to deal with forces and variables we never had to consider before. I hope it also drives home the seriousness of climate change (whether it is man made or natural) and that warmer winters for PEI may sound good but there will be serious negative side effects as well.
