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!

RIP Sax Russell

Mr. Sax has died.

Our landlady turned off the heat at night, and we didn't have a heat lamp for him. I was asleep when Don came home and found him hibernating -- a deadly coma-like stage for African hedgehogs like Sax.  He tried to warm him up for an hour and a half, and he looked like he was improving a little bit. But when we woke up the next morning, his body was stiff. Our little hedgehog is dead.

Nowhere in our hedgehog research, nor in the care package provided to us by our breeder, did anyone mention hibernation. Temperature was casually mentioned ("your home's room temperature is typically fine") but no recommendations were made for heat lamps or extra insurance against the cold (i.e., anything under 65° F). No one mentioned that if your hedgehog begins hibernation will he die within hours. We were clueless new hedgehog owners and now our little guy is dead.

We buried him under a tree in his coconut shell home in the backyard. We cried. The Wizard is confused. 

RIP little man -- you were a great pet.

I'm sick

Orange juice
Cinnamon stick
Grated ginger
Honey
1 shot Jack Daniels

Heat. Serve.