Oh no... time warp is getting worse....

Yeah, so... I thought April and May disappeared but June and July seemed to go faster. Scary.

Managed to brew a lot of beer and drink a little - the saison yeast culturing experiment worked quite well. The results were greeted with mixed opinions (tasting it pretty young it almost seemed like a belgian sour - lots of esters) but i think it did hit the style closely. A couple more czech pilsners got cranked out before the temp in the downstairs started climbing along with a hack at a 'chelada" style (mix of barley and corn malt extract, lime peel, and some light agave nectar). Its pretty "refreshing" but a bit too bitter (too much lime peel) and the agave is completely lost.

The hearth in the game room got completely rocked and grouted and turned out looking pretty nice. We've still got the mantel to do and have the plans pretty well down - its not going to be too fancy or complicated. Some 6/4 hickory with big finger joints on the 45s and some pseudo arts/crafts supports in a few spots along with a top shelf of 6/4 hickory.

Work outside has include the beginning of the assembly of the kids playset - we opted to go ahead and contract someone to rebuild the supports and framing for the deck (should start around the first of Sept) so we needed to move all of the parts to the playset somewhere.... might as well just try to move them once. But it required a pretty good sized retaining wall (12 RR timbers and 6 tons of fill dirt) to try and level the space out for it.

Scott took a week off from all of this fun to build a mandolin at the Rockygrass academy (http://www.bluegrass.com/rga), we were very pleased with the result. Here are a couple of pictures of it in various stages of completion...  and one with Darol Anger (bluegrass musician -although usually he's on the fiddle) playing the finished thing.

And the token picture of the kids sacked out, stareing at the tele.

We did manage to get up to Breckenridge over the weekend and came back over Boreas pass through Como - more pictures to come from that.  Hopefully not 3m from now.  :-D