Reupholstering done!!

We picked up these bar stools online when we built the new kitchen island. Only back then, they were covered with a lighter brown vinyl cover. Over the years, they started splitting, exposing the batting underneath. It was time to re-cover these darned things.

We finally were able to head to Joann's to pick out some new fabric for the seats. I liked a nice cinnamon fabric - simple and did the job. But I was eventually persuaded to pick up the embossed alligator print. I must admit, it looks pretty nice. We were fortunate enough to get the fabric at 50% off provided an instant coupon I got when using the Android application.

When we pulled apart the stools, I wasn't expecting the sheer number of staples that were holding the old covers on. I wanted to be thorough, so I tried to pull out all of the staples. Tammy tried the quick route and just cut off the existing cover. Given the amount of time it took for me to remove all of the staples - I conceded and we proceeded to do the rest of the stools Tammy's way :)

A few recorded shows later - the stools are done. Hopefully the covers last a bit longer. They should - the fabric is pretty thick.

Craigslist is your friend

We have successfully sold our first item over Craigslist. A little bit ago, the dryer finally went kaput. We went the upgrade route and picked up a brand new set of LG high efficiency appliances. They work great, but I can't help but miss the old trusty agitator. With all of the technology that goes into the machines nowadays, there has to be a point where just the physical nature of the 'back and forth' is enough to get the job done right.

Since the dryer failed, we couldn't turn around and sell it. But we decided to try and sell the washing machine. We had a hit immediately, but the buyer never re-contacted us. After a few more weeks, Tammy got another call and with a couple of days of back and forth making sure the unit was what they were looking for - we sold it.

The buyer showed up, gave us our money and brought a friend to load up the machine into their truck. Easy transaction.

I'm sure not all Craigslist buys are this easy - but it's nice to know that it does work.

Another day, another brew

Brews a plenty here in the Toguchi household lately.

Let me catch you up on what has been going on with the Imperial Stout.  After I finished up the primary (see previous post on what happened with that), I transfered the stout to the carboy and let it clarify for another 10 days.  That was pretty uneventful, but it was interesting to see the beer ferment a little more.  I boiled up my priming sugar to prep for the bottling and cleaned up all the tools to get the job done, including all the darned bottles.

First things first though.  I had to get the final gravity reading.  Since I don't have a nice long test tube or anything narrow and cylindrical, I use the holding tube for the hydrometer to take my readings.  I know, it's pretty ghetto, but it gets the job done.  Siphon a bit of the brew into the tube, drop the hydrometer and take a reading.  The final reading is exactly what was expected!  (whew)

After transferring the goodness over to my bottling bucket, I found out that I lost over a gallon of liquid during the great beer blowout of 2011.  Oh well, not much I can do about it now.  I ended up bottling about a case and a half of beer total.  I used the Oxygen resistant bottle caps this time.  They say to use these caps if you want to have your beer last a little longer.  Given that these suckers are 10% abv, I would expect them to last longer than the Scottish Ale that is completely gone.  I would expect to be able to crack open one of these babies in about a week.  I'm looking forward to it :)

Beer Blowout!

I'm currently brewing my 3rd batch of beer.  First being the IPA, the second was the Scottish Ale, and this one is an Imperial Stout.  I'm not doing all grain yet, as I want to get a better feel of how things work and how the flavors meld before I jump to the more involved side of brewing.

This beer is a little more involved and contains more ingredients, but the concept is basically the same as the other brews.  Boil, ferment, bottle.  This Imperial Stout has a much higher alcohol content than other beers I have brewed.  This sucker is supposed to come out at above 10% ABV, which is 2x more than your regular beer.  It's very understandable that this beer has a bit more alcohol in it given the larger amount of sugars that are added to the brew.  The grains that were steeped had some darker grains in it, including chocolate.  It smelled glorious.  I added a bit of sugar and molasses on top of that along with the dark malt.

After cooling down the wort, I transferred it to the fermentation pail.  Once it reached 75 degrees, I pitched the yeast, covered it up, put it in my plastic tub, covered with T-shirts and added water to keep it nice and cool.  Of course, I put the air lock on to be sure no air crept into the pail while fermenting.

The next morning, I checked the air lock and to my surprise the fermentation process was already starting!  Less than 8 hours and it was already gassing up.  I figured it would be a regular fermentation cycle where I would just watch until the fermentation stopped then transfer to the secondary carboy.  Uh.  It wasn't.

I checked on the beer when I got home from work, and the fermentation had really kicked it into another gear.  So much so that it was bubbling and overflowing into the air lock.  I did a bit of research and I learned that I should use a blow-off tube to better control the overflow.  This is basically just a tube that is at the top of the fermentation pail that feeds into a bowl/bottle of water.  So the air goes through the pipe and into the water, and the water prevents air from going back into the pail.  All good?  Nope.  I rigged up the contraption and left it to continue its fermentation.  BOOM!  The lid popped off the pail.  ugh.  Not sure why that occurred, I cleaned everything up and hooked it up again.  The air was feeding through the tube just fine and then after another hour, BOOM again.  I figured that my tube was too long, resulting in the pressure from the escaping gas not being enough to move through the tube with the bubbles and foam being generated.  After cutting the tube shorter, it looked like it was working better.  BOOM! yet again.  The fermentation just wasn't slowing down.  It was going so fast, I decided just to take off any air lock of blow-off tube and let the beer go on its own.  The rate in which the gas was being produced and the fact that tons of foam was releasing from the pail, there was a small chance of air getting back in.

I let it go like this for about 18 hours until it finally slowed down.  Even after cleaning things up and putting the air lock back on, the beer is still fermenting at a solid rate (but not as fast as before).  I'm hoping I was careful enough to keep things clean enough to prevent any bacteria from being introduced and ruining the beer.  I guess I'll find out soon!

Some time at home...

Sometimes you just need to be able to enjoy a regular day at home.  After all of the traveling we have been doing the last few weeks, it has been a good break to enjoy some time at home.

We have both Gabrielle and Dallas staying with us this weekend as Tonya and Carl enjoy some time to themselves.  We have still be able to enjoy the day and just basically relax.  Decided to have an impromptu smoke of a chicken and sausage as well.  Mmmm...  I would have to say it was quite tasty.  I certainly does help that chicken and sausage don't take as long to cook in the smoker or we would have had a change in plans for dinner.

Day at home, smoked meat and a homebrewed scottish ale.  It's been a good day

Orlando Trip, July 2011

Our latest family trip is complete.  This year, we headed out to Orlando Florida.  Yes, this is the second time we have been out here for a vacation, but the goal of this adventure was to enjoy our time at Universal Studios.  In particular, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  We are all big Harry Potter fans, and with the movie coming out right around the corner, what better way to cap off the final movie of the series than to visit the theme park designed after Hogwarts castle and Hogsmeade.

We planned this trip well ahead in advance, mainly so we could properly coordinate with Ed and Maria, my mom and Mark and Christa.  The last get together trip we had with Ed and Mark was about 3 years ago, so it was about time we planned another one.  We also had Briana bring her friend Alex with us, so it made for an entertaining week.

We had a week to trade in for ourselves, in which we got a nice 3 bedroom place near the Marriott Grand Hotel.  We also traded a week for my mom, where she stayed at a very nice Marriott with a Nick Faldo golf course.  You know, even though time shares do cost a bit of money, you can't beat the amenities at the vacation resorts.  It makes coming back from long days rather relaxing.  You aren't cramped in your hotel making sure you properly schedule so everybody can get cleaned up, etc.

We left on Sunday, July 3 nice and early in the morning.  Arrived in Orlando in the afternoon, jumped in our rental mini-van and headed to our hotel.  After checking in, we met up with my mom had a nice dinner at Nick's Grill then proceeded to hit the hay for a busy 4th of July.

I'll entertain you with details of our 2 days at Univeral in this blog entry.  If I feel like it, I may enter another post that will provide insight of the days we spent at Disney, the resort and the beach.  Who knows if I will actually get to that post though.  I don't have a good track record at this point with multi-day entries (see post about the 2 days of running for Zane, when I only entered day 1)

The first day was the full day at Harry Potter land.  We arrived bright and early, proceeded to forget our tickets at the hotel and had to head to customer service to get our tickets reprinted.  :)  What a way to start the vacation, eh?  We met up with Ed, Maria and Edison at the entrance to the park and immediately headed in - straight for Harry Potter.  First stop?  Ollivanders.  This is where they do a small presentation of a wand maker going through the motions of finding a wand for a wizard (or in this case, a boy from the audience).  While waiting in line, we met up with El Marko and had ourselves our very first Butterbeers.  Yum!

After the wand show (Joshua didn't get picked :() we perused the wands, robes and other knick knacks at the Owl's Post.  We picked up a wand for Briana and Josh - and also got a robe for Josh.  You can see more of these pictures in my picasa web album.  From there, we headed to the main ride attraction at the park, which I don't remember the name off the top of my head, but you are riding a 'broom' following Harry, Ron and Hermione around in a pretty cool adventure.  This ride is situated inside Hogwarts Castle, so while you are waiting in line, you get to see all the things they replicated to match from Hogwarts Castle.  You see the entrance to Dumbledore's office, the Pensieve, some pictures, that one mirror, etc.  It's all very cool and the design is top notch.  The ride is fun too :)  We were able to do a kids swap with Ed and Maria so we all got to ride the ride.

We hit a variety of rides while in the area.  Flight of the Hippogriff (we did this one many times, as it was one of Joshua's favorites and the line was relatively short) and the Dragon Challenge, which is a dueling roller coaster ride which had virtually no wait.  That was much of the morning until we had a lunch date at Mythos.  Mythos is ranked one of the top theme park restaurants anywhere so we had to check it out.  Ed made reservations 1 month in advance to guarantee us a seat.

That afternoon, we visited other areas of the park.  We rode on Spiderman 3D, the kids rode one of the raft rides twice.  Ed and I hit up The Incredible Hulk as well.  As the day wore on, we rode on more rides then headed to what we thought were going to be fireworks.  Unfortunately, we already missed them so we were just sitting with everybody else just looking at the lagoon in front of Universal Studios.

Once we didn't want to sit around anymore, we headed out.  Stopped by Wal Mart on the way back to get our needed groceries and finally got to sleep pretty darned late.

The next day, we decided to sleep in a little.  This made the second day at Universal a bit more tolerable.  We met up with Ed and Maria at Twister and the day begins.  We watched Jaws, walked around more taking in the various sites at Universal.  The kids got Airbrush tattoos on day 1, so we followed up with Henna tattoos at this part of the park.  We watched Shrek 4D, took in some Nick toons stuff and rode what was the best coaster of the week.  The Rip Ride Rocket.  I went with Briana and Alex.  They have individual MP3 players setup in each seat so you can listen to whatever you want when you are riding.  On top of that, if you sit on the LHS of the ride, you get your whole experience video taped if you want to buy a DVD.  Pretty neat.

After that, we headed back to the Islands of Adventure part of the theme park and met up with Ed and Maria again to do one last ride on Harry Potter.  We closed out the park that day - and what a day it was.  :)

Rocket Picnic - Fffwoooosh!

Hey look, it's another scouting outing. This time, the entire Pack 132 got together for the annual rocket picnic. All of the scouts and siblings put together their own rockets and are allowed 2 launches during the event. We put Josh's rocket together about a week and a half before the event so we would make sure that all of the glue was dry.

Before everybody lined up to launch their rockets, we enjoyed a potluck style lunch/dinner anchored with hot dogs. Standard fair all the way around so there wasn't anything extraordinary in regards to food. All the kids were briefed on the rules of the rocket launches and they lined up for their first launch.

After the launches (Josh only did one, as he just wanted to play with his friends) the held a garbage cleanup contest with a 'prize' for the most garbage picked up. Not a bad idea to get all the kids to do a little bit of good for the park.

It was a good day.

We Are the Knights, Jedi Knights...

This year's theme for the Pueblo Scout camp was space. Never to disappoint, the den leaders organized the weekend and put together great costumes and camp site. Their den cheer was top notch too! Just ask Tammy, she'll recite it from memory.

We did the usual things: Archery, BB guns, Swimming, and other miscellaneous things during the camp. The boys always have a great time and put together great memories for themselves. Of course, I need to blog about it or I'm going to forget about it completely.

Sadly, this is going to be the last year of this camp, as they are going to be organizing a longer multi night camping trip for next summer. Now that one should be quite the adventure.

Frisbee Golf

One of the outings we had for Scouts was to play Frisbee Golf. The event was actually tagged as 'Ultimate' so I was ready to get some exercise. I was surprised to find out that it was Frisbee Golf. I probably would have prepared a little better (with proper frisbees at least) to participate in this event, but we had a good time regardless.

Josh used the ultimate frisbee, and I used the Tron replica throwing disc. Let me say this - the Tron disc is AWFUL. It's downright impossible to throw straight if you want to toss it more than 20 feet.

It was an afternoon of fun in the sun, which is usually the case when it comes to the Scouting outings :)

Pinewood Derby

This marks the second Pinewood derby that Josh has participated in. This is actually the first one that I have participated in because last year I was unable to attend with Josh as Tammy and I were fattening up in San Francisco.

I would say that this years event was a success, even though Josh didn't win any of his races. He came in 2nd in all of his races. I would have to say that I am getting a bit more accustomed to what is needed to be done to the cars in regards to prepping and making sure that it does as well as it can. I'm looking more forward to next years race now knowing what I know from this year. :)

Beer me

I have finally produced my own beer.

The picture above is a snapper of the bottles just after bottling. One more week and I will be able to chill and enjoy. Of course, there is the whole hoping it came out first before actually enjoying, but the journey to get there has been fun.

Tammy, my wonderful wife, bought me a brewing kit for our anniversary. It's not one of those 'Mr. Beer' kits either. I'm not quite ready to do everything from scratch, so the amount of brewing I'm doing consists of steeping the grains, boiling the wort, transferring to the fermentation container, transferring to the secondary fermentor (clarifying really) then bottling.

My first batch is a 'San Diego IPA' which is a recipe kit that contains everything you need in terms of ingredients to make a beer. I won't get into the details of the brewing process but it was a fun time and I can't wait to do it again.

Next up? Scorpion Tail Scottish Ale.

Oh, I'll post results of the first pour when it happens in a couple weeks.

Gymnastics - Level 2

Over the years, we have tried numerous activities for the kids to enjoy in their spare time. This time around, we decided to give Gymnastics a try for Joshua. He was introduced to the sport while attending a summer camp at USA Youth Fitness Centers last year. We signed him up for recreational boys level 1 gymnastics. After a few months he was bumped up to Level 2. He is still in Level 2 and is having a good time with it.

They move throughout the gym, trying different things along the way. Josh seems to have the best time on the trampolines, but also does quite well on the rings. They also get to have some fun time at the end of the session where they swing on the rope and jump into the foam pit.

We hope he sticks to it. We want him to succeed in whatever he does but at the same time continue to enjoy it.

Tree Choppin

Hmm... Now that I look at this picture, I'm thinking we should have gotten an ax instead of a little camping hatchet.  We had to chop down the last tree that we got for Tammy for Mother's Day many years ago.  There was something wrong with it and it just wasn't growing right anymore.

It took quite a number of swings to finally get the tree down.  I think Tammy was a bit over zealous with the hatchet though, as she hurt her hands in the process...

After chopping down the tree, we wanted to cut it into smaller pieces quickly realizing that the hatchet was just taking too long.  So, as predictable as ever, I go online and buy an electric chain saw.  :)  Once that arrived, we commenced to cut up the tree into smaller pieces, which we will be using for firewood in our fire pit.

A little fun at the Science Center

We are always looking for something to do as a family. Instead of just sitting around at home, we decided to take a trip out to the Arizona Science Center to enjoy the day. The kids had the most fun in one particular room. This room had quite a few things to check out. From bouncing a ball against an angled platform, predicting the path of the balls path, to laying on a bed of nails. As you can see in the picture above, Josh gave the bed of nails a try. :)

Other things in this room included an energy transfer spinning thingy... Yup, that's the scientific name for it. You basically get on this spinning platform and get yourself spinning. As you pull yourself in, you witness the transfer of energy and you spin faster. We had a bit of fun on that one.