wideeyedfunk

Tag: beer

  • The House Brew

    Brew pubs offer finely crafted, house made ales and lagers,– more or less hoppy, light or dark, crisp, earthy, or silky smooth. Sometimes a drinking establishment of quality and personality will specially offer a select microbrewery batch, maybe something nutty in the fall, something grassy and bright in the spring. These pints are spendier than the general population beers, they demand the respect of being savored as the goal, rather than acting as the plastic-bottle-bourbon shot chaser.

    The point is, the house beer is generally acknowledged to be something special. Something a brewmaster synergized effort, experience, and science to create. A house brew is a signature accomplishment perhaps, and stands as a signal of the class and quality of the establishment. Even having a house brew evokes the sense that a business has catalyzed a personality from the mystique of the brew and the patrons who love it.

    BigFlatMyDeskMy encounter with Big Flats 1901 Premium Beer was laid on such foundational expectations. Big Flats, brewed in both La Crosse WI and Rochester NY, claims a crisp, fresh flavor with a clean finish, suggesting perhaps a bare hint of mouth puckering and only mild after taste. Big Flats the name is meant to prompt nostalgic memories of early settler times when supplies came via river boat on the mighty tributaries of New York State (BigFlats1901.com). It troubles me only a little that the same rivers today commonly are festering cesspools of agricultural runoff and sewage, not anything you might want to imagine in your house beer, but nevermind, this is nostalgia not harsh reality.

    Big Flats 1901 Premium Beer is the house brew of Walgreens Drugstore. And at $3.33 per six pack, Big Flats is by no means the cheapest beer in the house. I know, who knew Walgreens would make such a significant investment in the general well-being of their customers? Laden with our half price Christmas wrapping paper and clearance rack razors, the WideEyedSpouse and I stood awed and indecisive next to the towering stack of Big Flats case packs. The decision was up to the Spouse, he is our resident beer drinker and the responsibility for tasting Big Flats would lie in his belly.

    DeskBeer“I’m having it,” he said, and added a six pack to his armload of drugstore swag. Now the catalyzed personality of a hard-used Buffalo Walgreens and all who patronize that established join our WideEyedHousehold. I don’t think it’s doing us any harm. Ask the Spouse tomorrow.

  • Budget Sequestration Made Me Eat Cheap Peanut Butter.

    The WideEyedHousehold must make decisions about financial sequestering by prioritizing categories of expenditure. Just as our Senate is divided in debates about preferential priorities, so we are. Just as our nation must make difficult choices, so we must. “Compromise” in the WideEyedHousehold results in unpalatable solutions, as it does in our nation.

    As you may know, I dreamed of an exotic winter break far from snowy Buffalo. Last week during spring break, we ate lunch at the Ikea just outside of Toronto for our international vacation. The basic parameters of an exotic, international locale with regional cuisine were met. They were met stupendously if the rumors about horsemeat in the Ikea meatballs are true. How intrepid of us to eat the little meat balls all unknowing, even with an unconcerned panache.

    As you may know, the WideEyedSpouse likes beer. I like to eat. He feels that beer sort of is food. I feel that food is food. The Spouse prefers good beer. I prefer organic, limited ingredient, small batch peanut butter. Our preferential priorities battled at Wegman’s. The beer lobby won. I still got the peanut butter, but at radically reduced funding. Evidently the beer drinker’s lobby in the WideEyedSenate is far more powerful than the peanut butter eater’s lobby.

    I fear for the next battle. I mean “compromise”.

  • Nice to see you. What books did you bring?

    Wide Eyed Funks visit one another every now and again, even though leaving the comforts and libraries of home is difficult for us. We are happy to see each other even if the joy of the family visit is tempered by the knowledge that a certain amount of reading time is going to be sacrificed for actual human interaction. It is, at best, bittersweet.

    We have developed a solution to the problem. And what I can’t decide is this: is our solution – mutually enacted, endlessly repeated –  conscious or unconscious?

    When a visit to or from a Funk household is impending, the book stack begins. What might the visitor like to read, what might be passed on to the host from the far-flung family collections? Once the visit begins, the discussions about “what have you been reading” are far more interesting than accomplishments, work activities, household life events, yah yah yah. That stuff comes and goes. The books, they linger. And, the best part, since everyone has new books to read, no one is left out when an entire room of Funks is lounging, reading, quiet. That’s the part I can’t figure out: do we bring books to keep other Funks quiet? Or is the happy quiet fortuitous? I suppose it makes no matter.

    This time a mixed stack of books came from one set of the Virginia Funks. A mixed stack will go home with them – some which originated with the New Jersey Funks.

    Snack. Beer. Book.

    To Virginia:

    Island of the Lost

    American Lion

    Honolulu

    Cold Mountain

    Moon Called

    The Good, the Bad, and the Undead

    Getting Stoned with Savages

    The Year 1000

    Soulless

    To Buffalo:

    Red Earth and Pouring Rain

    While I Was Gone

    One the Occasion of My Last Afternoon

    The Virgin Queen’s Daughter

     There’s more to say – there always is with books, but really, I’ve got some reading waiting for me. And yeah – maybe I need some snacks and a glass of wine too.

  • Twenty things I could have bought with the $20 I lost yesterday.

    1. 2,000 pieces of penny candy. Two thousand.

    2. 20 minutes of satellite phone time to talk to the Spouse from the remote fieldwork location.

    Strawberry Shortcake Donut, with Angel Cream.

    3. 2 dozen Paula’s Donuts. That’s 24 items of pure deliciousness.

    4. Two tickets to a Buffalo Bisons game.

    5. 20 Mega Millions lottery tickets.

    6. A shovel.

    7. 6 bags of Family Size potato chips.

    8. Gas for a scenic drive to Olcott and back, with a stop at Reids Hot Dogs.

    9. A really big bale of toilet paper.

    10. Contact lens solution, pickles, potato chips and fair-trade coffee at Target: the intended purpose.

    A dog needs a good chair.

    11. A dog chair.

    12. A dog license renewal.

    13. A marriage license (17 years ago).

    14. 180 dukie bags for dog walks.

    15. 2 completely drinkable bottles of wine, or one wine-in-a-box (Equivalent of 4 bottles – stays fresh for a month. Just saying.).

    16. 2 6-packs of quality beer.

    17. Almost 3 months of Netflix.

    18. Approximately 60 showers, 8 dishwasher runs, 5-10 loads of hot water laundry (whites and dog beds) – in other words, a summer month gas bill.

    19. An emergency room copay. The Spouse got rollerblades for his birthday.

    20. 48 vegetable plants.

     If only I had used my wallet to house the $20. All of that could have been mine.

  • You say that like beer would somehow impair my ability to be awesome.

    Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken.

    Probably it’s completely safe.

    We were having a rainy and cold Saturday evening. The husband was fussing with the 1920s ceiling light we found at Buffalo Reuse last weekend. It was tucked up in a back room of that cavernous, dark, and very, very grungy retail outlet for parts yanked out of “green” demolition projects. Stacks of tiles torn from bathroom walls (the husband is still fighting an infected cut from one of those), old toilets (I mean used toilets, really really used toilets), doors, windows, tin ceiling chunks, and other house bits are piled next to only slightly worn tanks of corrosive fluid.

    Anyway, the husband had just discovered that with careful use of Bon Ami he could remove the filth crust of nearly 100 years to make the molded milky glass of the light gleam like new. All that remained was to replace the dangerously inept 1970s era rewiring with new, legal, and safe wiring and we (meaning “he”) could hang it in the upstairs foyer. The wiring he took out of that poor light fixture was thick and patinated, melted copper wire forcibly shoved through the historic porcelain sockets. I can’t believe the whole thing hadn’t caught the house it lived in on fire – although maybe it had. It was at Buffalo Reuse because its old house had been torn down as too useless for even the crack and meth demons.

    So on this cold Saturday evening the husband wandered from the dining room, where the lamp was laid out in bits, into the kitchen, where the beer is kept. I heard the fridge door open and shut. A few steps and the bottle opener drawer squealed open. Fzzt. The bottle cap clanked onto the counter. He wandered back into the dining room and drank some beer while looking down at the lamp bits. Deciding something, he plonked his beer down in the mess of lamp parts. He picked up one of the bulb sockets and inspected it. With his other hand he gave himself some beer. Plonked the bottle back down. This went on for a little while. I wasn’t exactly watching events, but it wasn’t a real exciting night around the homestead so I was, well let’s say I was aware. There may have been more than the one beer. It is at least possible that there were a few beers. That can happen on a Saturday.

    1920s ceiling light, during beery rewiring.

    The husband settled himself at the table and picked up the coil of new wiring. He sort of held it up to one of the sockets. Measuring like. I thought about that for a moment. I flashed it through in my head, seeing him wiring the lamp, putting it back together, hanging it upstairs, admiring it, and then I imagined the cascade of sparks showering from it because maybe, just perhaps, something went a little wrong, a little beery in the rewiring. The husband is sort of like a savant with this kind of stuff, but I kept thinking about the beer.

     I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “Do you think it’s smart to do that when you’re drinking beer?”

     You know what he said.

     And now you can wonder about that lamp, the house, his ability to be awesome. And you might be examining the image for the kind of beer. Because obviously, some beers lend themselves to rewiring antique ceiling fixtures and awesomeness better than others.