Brewfest!

For my first Father's Day, Amy took me up to Snowbird for Brewfest 2013.  We enjoyed perfect weather and a beautiful backdrop to complement the exceptional local beers.  I have to say, this was a great event.  $20 gets you a mug and 15 tokens.  Each token gets you 3 ounces of beer (supposedly).  Every brew-stand I visited was friendly to the extreme and had a bit of a sticky tap (I would guess 6 ounces per token is more accurate).  I got to try beers from all over Utah.  My favorite beer may have been Rooster's Polygamy Pale.  The guy from Roosters informed me that it was an IPA recipe.  Very balanced pale ale.  We enjoyed lunch together outside at 10,000ft while I sipped beers and my boy fed himself.  I will be back next year!

Work has been interesting lately.  I have transitioned to some smaller projects in the interim between big projects.  It has been nice to have some shorter term projects to wrap up quickly. 

I am very excited for our upcoming trip to Oregon.  We will be taking our bikes and hope to get some good activities in!

Listening to: Deer Tick - Awesome band that I randomly found based on a recommendation from Rhapsody.  They do a really cool cover of "What Kind of Fool Am I?".

I am so lucky to have Amy as a wife and mother to my boy!  What a great Father's Day weekend!

Hello From Mountain Country

Hello All, it has been too long again.

Amy and I are doing very well. We are adjusting to the Salt Lake area nicely and finding it full of nice surprises. I am stoked to be attending two concerts this month: The Airborne Toxic Event and The Arctic Monkeys. Both are at the top of my iPod not only due to alphabetical order, but also musical preference. These shows are going to be incredible!

I have been playing softball on Monday nights. Slow-pitch softball is great fun, even for a former hardballer. Fielding the ball is the same after all, and the short base paths make for a pretty fast paced game when you have skilled players. You get the occasional guy who takes it way too serious… Come on Beergutsky, get "Glory Days" out of your head and stop yelling at the umpire who is paid like an indentured servant. It is for FUN! That doesn't mean I don’t get competitive, because I do, it just means that a dose of reality could be beneficial for these people. Those are cub scouts in the stands, not Cubs' scouts.

Work has been great! I am working on a very big project that I get to make my own. For this reason I love spending time on it. I think I was born with an entrepreneurial (thank you spell-check) mind that really enjoys a degree of independence. Lots of structural engineering and FEA to do on this job. ANSYS is the software I am using primarily; it is pretty stellar I must say.

SLC area is pretty great. We have been up skiing a few times and the resorts here are exceptional. It is so cool to be close to all these great mountains. I think I may go this Sunday, yes, that is right, Sunday May 29th. The mountains also double as a great backdrop for the city. I am still mesmerized by them, something I hope doesn’t go away. This is a great place to live. Amy has been substitute teaching and has found some very impressive schools.

On a more serious note, there are some really good breweries down here. Epic brewing is probably my favorite, with Uinta a close second. Epic's IPAs are fantastic, and Uinta's barley wine is exceptional.

We miss all of our friends and family! Come see us!

Did you hear some wack-job thinks the world is going to end this weekend? I think Bruce Willis will save us… (cue Aerosmith)

The Hood

Saturday I helped a co-worker move into a new place. I really enjoyed the day as I got to see some new parts of the region. The country outside of Washougal is beautiful, especially up on the hill with jaw dropping views of Mt. Hood. My co-worker moved to a small town in the Northeast Vancouver area, which was really cool too. Being a newbie to the area it was refreshing to get out of town and see the beautiful surrounding area. After moving, we enjoyed steak, brew, and BS which is a combination of quality you would be troubled to surpass.


We went on a small day trip Sunday to Multnomah Falls and Hood River. We met up with our friends Kacy and Jennifer for the hike to the top of the falls. We also were all able to take our dogs, which is always nice. The hike was really pleasant, paved all the way to the top with plenty of switchbacks with some area to stop, turn around, and take in the Columbia River.


A few pics of the falls.

After we finished the hike and got back to the cars, we hit 84 East towards Hood River. By this time, the dogs needed a toilet break so we pulled into the waterfront park on the Columbia. This small park has a really cool swimming beach we will have to try out when the water temperature creeps somewhere above “arctic summer”.

Hood River is a really cool little town, with an interesting layout and great vistas. As enjoyable as the town is to look at, I was there for one reason: Full Sail Brewery. Their pale remains my favorite pale ale, so I was pumped to check the place out. It did not disappoint! We arrived twenty minutes before the tour was supposed to start, plenty of time to go through a sampler tray. The tray was full of treats, but the biggest surprise is their dark lager, Session. This is a fantastic dark lager they are apparently struggling to keep up on production. They aren’t even kegging this beer yet and it is winning medals all over the world. If you get a chance to try this stuff, check it out.

Great Motto!

The tour was very high quality. The tour guide was funny, informative, and very interactive. He covered all the basics and really drew the crowd in. Full Sail is a cool company. The 47 employees mentioned on all of their merchandise represent the 47 employees who bought the company to make it employee owned. They actually have somewhere around 80 employees now and are hiring more in March as they tool up to make more Session. The facility was in tiptop shape, with high quality manual equipment and minimal automation. They still hand craft all of their brew, which is crazy when you see the throughput they require.


The restaurant also exceeded expectations. Everyone enjoyed their meal, and my beer battered halibut sandwich was so good when paired with some of their restaurant exclusive porter my waistline is thankful we do not live closer.


We keep trying new things up here, and the Portland area keeps on delivering. We are lucky to live in a place like this!

Coastal Tidings

Amy and I took a short trip to Newport Oregon this last weekend where we met up with my parents. Our hotel allowed dogs, so we brought Ruger and Riley along with us. This was the first time we had taken dogs with us to a hotel, and as we are weird dog people now, we really enjoyed that. The weather was great, a real rarity for the Oregon coast. With only a few shots of that famous coastal rain and a large share of sunshine, we were able to enjoy quality views of the rugged coast line. The dogs enjoyed the sand and let their humans enjoy some sweet barley nectar.

Speaking of barley nectar, you didn’t think I would go to Newport without visiting one of the world’s top breweries, did you? Well, I didn’t miss this opportunity. We toured the Rogue brewery on Sunday. The tour wasn’t the greatest, pretty quick and dirty, but I guess not everyone in the group was an engineer wanting to climb in to tanks and discuss their material handling. The beer we bought from their store however, was top shelf. My mom bought a Mom hefeweizen, dad bought some John John beer aged in a bourbon barrel, and I had some of their mocha porter as well as some Double Dead Guy Ale. I think I might have succeeded in turning my parents into beer snobs! Well, they have at least passed “Intro to Brew Snobbery”.

Touring Rogue brewery made me think a little bit about engineering philosophy. This brewery was not high tech, using a lot of repurposed equipment and in some cases insulating tanks with non-clad foam. The plant layout appeared to have been given little thought. Despite all of this, they produce some of the finest, award-winningest beer around. This focus on product quality is something I think some of the biggest companies have lost. Product quality is your public face, and regardless of how good you are at making a bad product it is still a bad product. Now, couple this quality with solid manufacturing technique and you really have something.

Another stop on our trip was the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Being the nerd that I am, I was uber-stoked to walk amongst some of the strange creatures of the ocean. This is the closest I will ever get to these animals though. SCUBA is not for me, something that is reinforced with every episode of Shark Week and every visit to an aquarium. You can tell me odds all day for getting attacked/bothered by a sea creature, but I prefer land. Humans swimming was obviously a design afterthought, added at the last minute. Probably at the last human design review someone said “oh, and we should probably give them some way to get back into the boats they will build” with the lead designer saying something along the lines of “web their hands a little bit and call it good”. The best among us, Michael Phelps, would become a nice treat for a fat, full, and lazy shark.

Engineering seems to be integrating more with architecture at a crazy pace. Lately it has been a hot topic here at work. Has anyone else in the field experienced this? BIM, Integrated Project Delivery, AIC, other three letter acronyms. Anyone digging into this stuff? I wonder…

Ms. Alaynious

Well here at Engineering, Film, Music, Books, and Brew it has mostly been engineering and a little film for the past month. I am enjoying my new job and I am thankful to be in an environment that is pushing me to learn new things and practice a little outside of the usual for me. Most of my experience over the past five+ years has been in machine design. Granted, I have ventured into some process design and evaluation, but the majority of my work has been in machine design and automation. For my new position, that is just part of the job. In my first few months I have done heat transfer, building ventilation and temperature control, Air duct sizing for pressure drop at elevated temperatures, thermal expansion analysis, AISC Structural Design, and more. It has been a nerd’s delight. A career in engineering, it would seem, is anything but predictable.

Vancouver/PDX area has been great for Amy and me. We have enjoyed downtown Portland on the weekends, hitting the Pearl for some brew and dining at some killer spots. We went to a great brewpub in East Portland called Hopworks, which has arguably the best black IPA around. For some reason, all I want to drink now is IPA. Maybe it’s just is a phase.

There is a theater in Vancouver, Cinetopia, which has theaters for adults only (wow, that sounds really bad. It is adults only because they serve alcohol there… perverts). This place is awesome! The chairs are comfortable, the screens are the latest and greatest, they have ottomans to put your feet up, and a pretty good beer selection. My favorite feature though, is the theater is 21 and over. I realize and embrace the fact that I am turning into a crotchety elder (I am 25 this coming week after all), but the theater was not filled with people texting and whispering to one another. There was, of course, the staple “Johnny Commentary” as I call people with brilliant in-movie color commentary such as: That was funny, Oh no!, Did you see that?, Oh jeeze!, etc. The length of the cord connecting their brain to the mouth must be short and filterless.

Beer at a theater seems out of place (well it does when it is not snuck in), but it is awesome! Rather spendy though, I didn’t think they could sell something that makes theater popcorn seem like a bargain; they pulled it off.

Movie Reviews:
Amy and I watch a ton of movies, especially lately. The more movies we watch, the crappier most of them seem. It has made it something special when a good one comes along. This last month, we watched two memorable movies: Up in the Air and 500 Days of Summer. When reading below, bear in mind that I am NOT a movie critic; just wanted to mention these.

Up in the Air was a great find. We ended up seeing this in the theater simply because it was playing at the right time and was in a 21+ theater. This is the best acting I have ever seen from George Clooney. I liked him in Burn after Reading, but this performance trumped. Basic story is a middle-aged man, portrayed by George, is a professional hatchet-man flying about the country firing people for companies lacking stomach for the task. This part of the story lands because of the economic sitch, but it is just part of the stories framework. Clooney’s character is a professional business traveler, and is written so perfectly I could not help but think of the three people I know who behave the same way. With these people it’s all about flyer miles, knowing which airline to fly with, which airport to fly into, which rewards program you are on, etc. This is spot on stuff. The story is excellent and I won’t go into detail in case you want to see it. I recommend this movie.

500 Days of Summer: I had no idea what to expect when I got this movie in the mail. Amy had wisely moved it to the top of our queue, and I sat down to watch it with no idea what it was about. This movie is a keeper. It doesn’t ever feel predictable or formulaic. If you feel like watching something entertaining that will draw you in, check this one out. The leading man, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, should be a star. I really liked the writing, sort of bizarre and doesn’t cram romantic garbage down your throat.

We went to Bend last weekend and visited G-man. Good time had by all. What did we do? Not a whole lot; and it ruled. Movies, beer, food, repeat. (Order varies)

New category for EFMBB is titled OOK, short for Oregon Outside of Klamath.
OOK:

The Costco up here had tables full of designer jeans. I found this hilarious.

In downtown Portland, you either need to ride an awesome new bike or the crappiest, most bizarre bike you can find. The middle ground is unacceptable.

If you do not wear a funny hat in downtown Portland, you do yourself, in fact, look funny.

Hope all is well with everyone. We miss you all (well, most of you (you know who you are)).

Wedding Time

This past weekend saw Amy and I head over the hill to Medford again for another wedding (We apparently lack the ability to stay home for a weekend or pass any length of time greater than two weeks without attending nuptials). This one was for one of Amy’s lifelong friends and I must say that it was a really nice time with people, food, and adult beverages that set a lofty standard for such an event. The weather for the wedding day (Saturday) was really nice if you are a reptile or if you are water desiring to enter the gas phase, but as a Klamath Basin person I was basically “Melting like a toasted cheeser” (thanks, Hambino). The wedding was in a nicely air conditioned church, and it did cool off significantly for the reception which was held at Cedar Links Golf Course. The course was a great venue, and the delicious Kona pale cut the edge off the heat. They actually had enough of the pale on tap to get me to dance to a few fast songs, something I generally avoid for the sake of ladies with high blood pressure or a history of heart problems. Actually I dance like a hearing impaired river dancer with a smaller comprehension of what to do with my hands than Ricky Bobby in front of a microphone. Despite my archaic artistic interpretation of dance, Amy and I really had a solid time.

I only have one complaint and that is the DJ never played “Look at You Girl” (Chris LeDoux). All my Jr. High dance memories had to remain non-relived (maybe I should be thanking him really). He partially made up for it by playing “Tougher than the Rest” (LeDoux). I am really not a country music fan these days. I think the way Kenny Chesney and Keith Urban play non-rural-often-beachy-soft-rock-self-indulgent-garbage (NROBSRSIG) would cause Johnny Cash or Buck Owens to roll over in their graves. I think LeDoux was country music’s last real hope of returning to a day when simple, non-preachy, modest songs hit home for real country people in small towns or even big cities. It always seemed like he was just singing about himself and his life, similar to what Johnny Cash could do even though their music is worlds different. Chris Ledoux will definitely be missed. Wow can I ever digress? While I’m on the subject of music…

For those of you wanting to try some mellow and simple tunes that will make you want to quit your job and buy a ukulele, check out Little Joy. These guys meld old styles with new method to create a cool sound. The Strokes’ influence is subtle but definitely there. The Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti (cool name) is a founding member and the band's drummer. This is Canadian whiskey music, no chaser required. For those wanting something with a little more bite that might require some cheep beer to chase, I recommend getting something from The Black Keys. These guys really know how to grind out some tasty bluesy rock. Finally, for those looking for something a little further out there, I have been revisiting “The Moon and Antarctica” by Modest Mouse. Something about these songs takes you to a cold, foreign place (Aptly titled, then).

Now I will get back to the real world, outside of my media ramblings. On the morning before the wedding I went on the ride shown below in Figure 1. It was a nice and easy ride, one of those where you rack up some saddle time without killing the legs. Basically, I look at it as one of the best ways to actually wake up instead of just getting out of bed. Note that the ride is not exactly right but an approximation as the bike path does not show up in Map my Ride.



Figure 1 - My ride from 07/27/09

Note 1: Spell check will let you turn anything into a compound word with a hyphen, even if the combination makes no sense. Example: foot-snorkel. Usage: I was at the pool today, when I realized I had forgotten my foot-snorkel. Seriously, MS Word spelling and grammar is cool with this.

Listening to: Little Joy, The Black Keys, Flight of the Conchords, Foo Fighters “The Colour and the Shape”, Melefluent

Watching: Almost no TV

Important lesson learned: Do not pass out in a lawn chair at 2:00am (best estimate) as you will likely not wake up until 4:00am at which point you will be quite cold and have a sore neck.

Coming up: This next weekend has a company softball game as well as me staying home for a weekend finally!

Parting Question: How does blogging make you feel? (Ex: self-important, powerful, lame, awesome, like a talentless hack, like someone contributing to the demise of printed word, etc.)