A Lot Happens in Nine Months

I was looking around today and realized that I had not written a new entry in a long time. Since I wrote last, the following notable things have happened:

• The Lodge was burglarized at the end of October, with the thieves taking my laptop, an XBox 360 and almost all of our jewelry.  They were caught approximately two weeks later and while they had gotten rid of everything else they still had my PC (I think it was because they didn’t know how to get rid of the Linux bootloader). The PC was just returned this week,
• The wiring in the Wife’s vehicle was attacked on three separate occasions by squirrels at her work. In the end, the damage totaled over $1600, although that figure is slightly inflated (in my opinion) because the first mechanics we dealt with sold us unnecessary parts when the issue was actually related to the wiring. We have now found a good independent mechanic and will be taking our vehicles to him all the time.
• In December, I managed to not only carry a new water softener down a flight of stairs by myself, but also successfully installed it.
• The Girl continues to grow like a weed.

I’m going to try to keep this up-to-date, although I can’t make any promises.

Fall Cider

After a hard couple of hours of stacking wood in the crisp fall air, it’s hard to find anything other better than a nice glass of homemade hard cider. It’s pretty easy to make and can pack quite a punch depending on what you put into it. The cider at right is probably about 7% alcohol, and has a fairly sweet taste compared to other ciders I have made. For whatever reason, however, it is not particularly effervescent. If I were to guess, I’d say that there was probably too little active yeast remaining in the cider when I bottled it. If this is the case, it would explain not only the lack of carbonation but also the relative sweetness of the cider (as the sugar normally consumed by the yeast to generate carbonation would be left in the cider). Alternatively, it is possible that the one bottle the Wife and I split was an anomaly. I guess we’ll have to drink a different bottle tomorrow to test that theory…

Update: We cracked a second bottle of cider and it seems that the first bottle may have been an anomaly.

Road Geek Adventures – Two more routes complete!

Since I last blogged, I’ve continued with my State Route project in a few important ways:

• On a trip out to Syracuse, I picked up a New York State atlas at a Barnes & Noble in Central NY. The Girl and I were there to visit a family friend who works at B&N while the Wife was off doing matron of honor things before a friend’s wedding, so I was able to score the nice, spiral bound atlas using her employee discount.
• I also picked up some erasable highlighters (possibly one of the coolest inventions ever) to use to highlight the routes I have completely and partially driven in the new atlas, thus giving me a visual reference of what I have driven and what I have yet to drive. I tried to create something in Google Earth to let me do this, but it was a little too complex and also isn’t as portable as an atlas.
• Last Saturday, I took my first drive specifically to complete a route that I had only partially driven before. I had a few hours to kill before a friend’s wedding while Jen was busy, so I went out and drove the portion of NYS Route 290 that runs from NYS Route 257 alongside the north end of Green Lakes State Park to the Hamlet of Mycenae. Oddly enough, I have a lot of friends and family in this area but had never had occasion to drive that section of road. It only took about ten minutes to drive and with that, NYS Route 290 became my first route that I drove just for the sake of completing my list.
• The second route came today after church. The Wife was performing a concert after Mass, so the Girl and I took off because she hadn’t slept on the drive into church and was getting quite cranky. Of course, she fell asleep five minutes after getting in the car so I had to come up with a way to add at least 25 minutes to our usual 20 minute drive to church. After quickly consulting Google Docs on my phone, I saw that I still needed to drive a portion of NYS Route 155. I got off at a slightly different highway exit and proceeded to drive Route 155 from its eastern end in Watervliet to its intersection with Central Avenue/NYS Route 5 in Colonie (I’d driven the rest of the route many times before). The end result? One more route down and one happy, well-rested daughter!

State Route Project – Phase One Complete!

A few days ago, I indicated my intention to drive every one of New York’s state routes. Working from the list of Wikipedia, I have determined the following:

• There are 637 state routes.
• Of these routes, 149 are not active routes, so that reduces the number of active or proposed routes to 488.
• Of those 488 routes, I have driven 42 of them completely. Not surprisingly, most of these road are located in either the Syracuse area (where I grew up), the Southern Tier (where I went to college) or the Capital Region/Hudson Valley (where I now live).
• Of the 446 remaining routes, I have driven the partial length of 112 additional routes, which means I have not driven on 334 routes.

Now that this part of the process is done, the next step will be to start planning some trips to drive on the remaining routes. I may have to come up with a Google Earth map to make this work.

Fall Is Here

After church today, the Daughter, the Wife and I took off for the local apple festival. We ate some extra yummy foods, although we didn’t go too hog wild. The Daughter was very impressed by the baby goats and chickens in the petting zoo, and thoroughly enjoyed the fresh apples they were giving away at the gate. All in all, a great little excursion! Now off to do laundry and continue planning my state route project.

Driving New York’s State Routes

For a while now, I have been trying to figure out an interesting way to see almost every part of New York State. While I’ve been to parts of every major region of the state, I wanted to find a way to see the small towns of our fair state. After thinking about it, I have decided that an interesting way to do this would be to drive every numbered state route in all of New York. Given that there are several hundred routes in New York that I haven’t driven even partially, this will be an endeavor that will take probably a decade or two to complete. Still, I want to try and the Wife is excited enough by the possibility of taking a lot of small trips that she is on board as well.

First step, figure out where I’ve been and then figure out where I am going!

A Cool Find!

When running errands for the Wife at Wal-Mart this morning, I noticed something really cool there that I have had a really hard time finding – apple cider that doesn’t contain the yeast-killing preservative potassium sorbate. This chemical, which is added to juice and wine to stop yeast and other assorted critters from reproducing, makes it impossible (or impractical) to turn most apple ciders from “soft” cider into delicious, alcohol-containing hard cider. While my friends have brought me appropriate cider from New Jersey before, I have been unable to find a local source. While the cider in Wal-Mart isn’t from a local orchard, I’m certainly going to have to give it a shot once the batch I currently have fermenting in glass wine jugs in my upstairs closet.