Since Michael was going to New Jersey on Friday I asked him to swing by the Porterhouse Restaurant and Brewery to grab a growler of the Belgian Frostbite that I love so much. He went out of his way to get there, and when he arrived he learned they had RUN OUT OF GROWLERS! Egads! How does this happen? He was able to get a 6-pack though, which was enough to make me happy. We held movie night and Bob brought over a couple bottles of Victory Golden Monkey, another belgian style ale that I love. And then last night we went out with Bob to John Harvard’s in Wayne. It’s one of the last on breweries in Southeastern, PA in Lew Bryson’s book:

Triumph New Hope
Porterhouse Restaurant and Brewery
Crabby Larry’s Brewpub, Steak, and Crab House
Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant, North Wales
General Layfayette Inn
Sly Fox Brewhouse and Eatery, Phoenixville
Sly Fox Brewery and Pub, Royersford
Rock Bottom, King of Prussia
John Harvard’s Brew House, Wayne
Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant, West Chester
John Harvard’s Brew House, Springfield
Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant, Media
Victory Brewing Company
McKenzie Brew House

I wonder if we should visit all the local chain locations for continuity. Regardless, Triumph and McKenzie we still have to conquer.

Now on to my review of John Harvard’s!

It’s a chain, started in Massachusetts in 1992. I try not to hold the chain thing against any brewery, Iron Hill and Sly Fox are technically chains now and they have some great beers. I really like the atmosphere of John Harvard’s, the tables are nicely spaced so it’s not too noisy. The food was good, I got a cup of lobster bisque, stole a bunch of Bob’s Pub Nachos, enjoyed an entree of their delicious old-fashioned chicken pot pie and finished with a brownie sundae (brownie had nuts in it though, meh). And it was all typically priced for upscale pub faire, Michael’s burger was about $9, my pot pie was $11.

As for the beer, Bob got a sampler which helped get an idea of the place. I was struck by how amazingly smooth all their brews were, but was disappointed by a lack of character.

Their featured beer, the “Munich Helles” dark German Lager had nothing to it, very weak.
Their IPA had far too much of a citrus taste for me to properly enjoy it.
Their ESB was good (and I’m not much one for bitters) with an interesting hoppy finish that doesn’t taste much like the beer itself.
Their Belgian Trippel was average, and strangely light in color for a trippel. Still, this is the beer I had two glasses of and took home in a growler.

In all? If I happen to be on the Main Line and need to grab a bite this is not a bad option, but it’s brews certainly don’t live up to some of the great breweries in this area.

And now I have 3 microbrewed belgian style ales in my refrigerator. Rock.

Yesterday Michael drove to New Jersey to pick up a Sun E250 from a guy on the PLUG list. He’s wanted a Sparc for years and this is a nice machine, plus he deserved it after all the hard work he’s been doing these past few weeks.

Upon reflection, this now means that we have 8 computers up and running. So I thought this would be a good time to stop and document this moment in our computer-owning history – with pictures!

decade: The newest arrival, weighing in at 118 pounds, Michael’s new Sun E250 server. Right now he’s installing Gentoo on it, no concrete plans for what we’ll actually be using it for.

r2a6: My Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop, running Ubuntu Breezy Badger.

century: Michael’s HP laptop, running Windows XP.

minute: 733mhz Dell Optiplex, currently running Gentoo Unstable. This was our primary web/mail/dns/etc server, but is being phased out. No plans for what this machine will do next.
evening: 233mhz(?) PowerMac, monitor at the top of the picture belongs to this. It’s our firewall and runs Debian, probably the most well-behaved box in the whole house, runs like a tank :)

hour: My Dell workstation, runs Debian Etch.

r2d2: Our MythTV box and media server (using samba), runs Gentoo and used to be my workstation before I got hour.

r2q5: Audio server (yes, it’s face down on the floor) that Michael uses for his radio show, runs Windows XP.

I intended on getting a lot done last night, but the appointment at the doctor had left me feeling pretty crappy and work made me even more tired (next time I schedule such an appointment I must take the whole day off!). When I got home Michael made dinner (which was great!) and cleaned up, folded laundry, and probably did a half dozen other things around the house that I was too busy snuggled on the couch with Caligula watching TV to notice. The laundry got put away, and while watching Wallace &Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit I was able to do some much needed sewing on of buttons. I didn’t check my email all evening (gasps!). Michael and I turned in early.

I got at 6AM this morning feeling much better and decided to tackle some of those things I didn’t get to last night. Checked and replied to some important emails, got the checkbook balanced and some paperwork done. Before I knew it I had to head out to work.

Tonight we’re hopefully having a few people over, we haven’t seen the normal movie night crew since came to visit a few weeks ago and I miss them :( I’m going to swing by the grocery store on the way home to pick up some of the greatest chocolate cookies on the planet and stuff to make guacamole.

3 more hours until weekend! Yippee!

It’s been a busy week. Lots of new projects at work, things to attend in the evenings. I just got showered and am now waiting for a guy from the oil company to swing by and do the annual inspection and cleaning of our oil boiler. At 9 this morning I have to leave for a doctors appointment, which will hopefully wrap up in a timely manner so I can get to work before noon.

On Valentine’s day we broke out 4 year tradition of getting sushi and Michael took me out to the General Layfayette Inn and Brewery. I was able to leave work at 4:30 that afternoon to get home by 5 and have “plenty of time to make it for our 6PM reservations.” But, as I’ve encountered in the past, Germantown Pike between Norristown and Conshohocken was like a parking lot, and it ended up taking over an hour to get to the Inn, which made us late for our reservations. Once we were all settled in and the grumpiness from the drive up had dissipated, the dinner was amazing, they sure know how to cook fish. The beer was good too, but as Michael writes here a mixup caused the terrible result of enjoying a fabulous beer and then not knowing which beer it was, arg!

Traffic getting home wasn’t bad, and shortly after getting home I plopped down in the TV room and scooped up my laptop. On top of the laptop was a notebook of mine which Michael had written “I love you” – awww! I picked up the notebook to move it and Lo! There was a Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit DVD! YAY!!! I had asked for it but didn’t know he had actually found time to pick it up with all the work he’s been swamped with lately.

Last night we had our shaman class. My stomach was feeling a bit weird and I didn’t eat much of the yummie fish dinner that Michael made, but attending the shaman class is always a priority. I had a good time, and for a 3 hour session it sure gave me a lot to think about.

Tonight I probably have to work until 6. We don’t have any going out plans once I do get home, but there are a dozen things that I haven’t done that I would really like to. Balance the checkbook, put away laundry, resew some buttons, do email and journal stuff, redo my nails, work on the weather program that I never got to on Sunday… No doubt some of these things will pour over into Friday evening and the weekend, but I hate having things a mess like they are now and would like to get a majority completed.

It seems my measurement from the top of the roof was inaccurate because of all the wind, we got at least 16 inches, probably closer to 20. Michael wrote this yesterday talking about the Thundersnow that we got, I slept through it.

Caligula isn’t quite sure what to think of the snow. When we were outside shoveling he was meowing to come outside, but when given the opportunity he decided it was too cold out to explore the strange white stuff.

Sunday went by too quickly. Michael spent some time migrating our email to a new server and I got mutt reconfigured and mail archived. Other than that I didn’t get much done and we spent the later part of the day snuggled in blankets watching movies.

I gave myself plenty of time to get into work this morning, it took about 10 minutes longer to get into work because of the state of the roads. Several times during my drive in I encountered spots in the road covered in ice. No fun. The traffic was minimal though, a lot of people must have decided to stay home.

I spent the morning today just doing email and things, my sister Heather bought her wedding dress and emailed me some pictures, its nice. We chatted some about her wedding plans, and about mine.

I checked my gmail account this morning and found that the Google Talk thing within gmail had been enabled for my account – neat! So I bothered DarkSol a bit to try it out:

Google Talk in Gmail “popped in” browser
Google Talk in Gmail “popped out” of browser

It’s pretty neat, but not worth anything beyond the novelty of it.

Eventually I got to cleaning the house while Michael went out to the grocery store (no, we weren’t stocking up on bottled water for the storm, we just hadn’t gone shopping in two weeks and the only things we had to eat in the house were potatoes and strawberry jelly).

The flurries started shortly before 2PM and we decided to go out to The Roadhouse Grille in Skippack. It wasn’t busy, we ordered a bottle of Charles Krug Merlot and I ordered Crab Bisque and the “Jumbo Lump Crabmeat, Shrimp & Scallops with Fresh Basil and Cherry Tomatoes in a Rich Roasted Red Pepper Cream Sauce over Black Fettuccine.” For dessert I got the “Chocolate Damnation” cake, which was very good. Yum yum!

While eating dinner I brought up the topic of embarking on some new perl project. Michael wisely suggested I take a look at Perl/Tk and get myself familiarized with writing a GUI.

We got home around 4 and bundled up for the storm, outside was looking like this by 5:30PM:

I spent the early part of the evening playing with Perl/Tk, which is pretty fun and much simpler than I expected. The plan is to take R2D2’s irssi Weather Script and make it into a GUI weather application. I got myself familiarize with text placement and alignment, and after about an hour I had an obnoxiously colored app whose only functionality is quitting. The obnoxious colors are due to my playing around with text placement and needing to see where things landed when I messed around with it. I’ll work on it more tomorrow, it won’t be difficult to edit R2’s current script into a subroutine that can be easily plugged into the app.

And now I’m sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace with Michael enjoying a bottle of Tröegs Nugget Nectar Imperial Amber Ale. They say we’ll be getting about a foot of snow with this storm. I love snowstorms.

I had the creepiest dream last night.

Michael and I were living in a large house on a lake, we had a dock and friends would come over all the time to use it for their small boats and swimming.

I came home after being out and when I walked into the house Michael was very upset. He told me that a close friend of mine had been swimming outside that afternoon and went missing. He said she was probably caught in the undertow that was very bad about 15 feet from the dock, and was pulled under.

For whatever reason, I decided to go out and investigate by jumping into the area where the undertow was bad. I was immediately pulled down to the bottom of the lake, and stuck in the mud. I struggled but couldn’t move. Then my dead friend walked past me, her skin was rotted and her hair was green.

Then I woke up.

That image of that dead woman (not someone I actually know) walking on the bottom of the lake stuck with me all morning. *shivers*

Earlier today I was walking through the office when a woman I work with stopped me and said “You look good, have you lost some weight?” This is the third time in the past week someone has said that, yippee!

We don’t own a scale, partially because I don’t want to get wacky obsessive about weight loss, but I knew I had lost some. Michael said he could tell, and last week I was easily able fit into the pants I wore when I started doing the office job thing in September of 2004.

It’s actually pretty surprising that I was able to lose enough that people are noticing, since it’s only slight diet changes that I’ve made (not starving myself), and I’m still not exercising like I should be.

I’ve been really good at avoiding bad snacks around the office. I’m only eating when I’m hungry (no more “it’s time to eat $meal because that’s what you’re supposed to do at $time) and sticking to smaller portions. I have granola bars, instant oatmeal and fresh apples at my desk for when I get hungry. I enjoy a fairly light lunch (but not too light, salads make me hungry too quick). Dinner hasn’t changed at all, but Michael and I eat pretty healthy anyway.

I haven’t backed off enjoying myself while eating out, when we go to a brewpub I drink the beer and enjoy something delicious and packed with fat and calories – perhaps even eating a dessert! But this is maybe once a week and it satisfies my cravings for all that bad stuff.

I’m still not down to my “look-hot-in-wedding-dress” target, but I am feeling good enough about myself to start shopping for dresses. Getting into an exercise routine and having the weather get nicer so I can take walks at lunch again will be important, as I know these first few pounds I lost are the easy ones.

Last night we did the Superbowl thing.

We hadn’t planned on it, but at 5:55PM Michael said something about it and suggested we head up to Sly Fox to watch.

It was chilly out, which immediately put me into an agreeable mood. We arrived at Sly Fox around 6:30. We got a couple beers and some nachos and watched the game at a booth in the bar area.

I am not into sports, and don’t particularly like football or commercials. But you know what? I had a lot of fun. It was the perfect excuse to get out of the house and chill out.