I'm no Deadhead by a long shot, but this sure is beautiful:

[stills from The Grateful Dead's Sunshine Daydream, 1972, Veneta, Oregon]

The Morgan Library

I went to the Morgan Library during my lunch break last week. It's not a huge actual library but rather a museum of a preserved library of its former tenant - the Mr. Pierpont Morgan, grandfather of J.P. Morgan of banking fame. The man had a study with velvet-lined walls, a steel vault for rare books, the original manuscript for"Yankee Doodle Dandy," and a death mask of George Washington. Insane!!

Cuneiform tablets

A gilded bible from the Carolingian era...

A Gutenberg Bible... ::drool::

The library

More library

A busy week

At least we have a date on Friday! (We're going to see "Lincoln.")

Label designs

I was thinking up some label designs for our cider (Circus Mouse Cider) and our beer (Fat Wizard Wheat). We've been painstakingly removing labels from all of our collected bottles and will soon replace them with our own, along with custom-designed caps -- the first step to legitimacy! Which ones do you like? I think we might go with the top one on each page.

HALLOWEEN

"The Price is Right" contestants

A Black Swan

The man on the left: "I'm just a woman."

Captain America

The Madonna and Child

Notes from NY

View through a fence: abandoned lot on 1st Avenue, East River.

Hilarious bulletin from the church my orchestra rehearses in

Don fishing for blue crabs in the East River

Rudy's Barbershop: 29th St., Manhattan

A finished persimmon

The Legend of Zelda

You need to watch this.

Cider!

We brewed a cider! We didn't press the apples ourselves (maybe someday...) but the fermentation and bottling was all us. We used 2 gallons of orchard-fresh cider and champagne yeast, which gave it nice small bubbles and a really clean taste. We dry-hopped one gallon -- poured the cider over a bag of dry hops as we bottled it -- and you can taste the piney hops a little bit. It's strong, too, and extra dry. 100% fermented success on the first try!

We're planning on doing many more batches, so if you have any creative ideas, send them our way! A ginger cider/beer, pear cider, and honeydew melon cider and are potential next batches...

We have one more batch fermenting in the closet right now: 3 gallons of Apple & Eve apple juice dumped on top of a German yeast cake from our last batch of wheat beer. It's pretty stinky... fermentation looks healthy, though!