Beer Brewing

So I’ve wanted to brew some beer for a really long time now. When I was in college I lived with 7 guys in the basement of the Center for Christian Study and we had a rule in our housing contract that stated we weren’t allowed to bring alcohol onto the property if we were going to live there. Eventually I stumbled upon a pretty easy recipe to make wine out of a gallon sized milk container, 2 cans of welches concentrated grape juice, a balloon, some sugar and a 75 cent packet of wine yeast. After this discovery we spent a good bit of time trying all sorts of variations on the original – trying different fruit concentrates, different amounts of sugar, etc. I had a blast, and we drank wine during every meal.

After college I didn’t think much about it, but eventually I got a bug in my head to try brewing beer and I begged my wife over and over again to bless my endeavor. She never really liked the idea, and still doesn’t – but she said I could do it, and I found a deluxe kit on craigslist for 100 bucks that had everything I needed to brew some beer. A friend gave me an extra “Smashing Pumpkin Ale” kit he had acquired, I bought some yeast from a local brewery and last Saturday I woke up at 6 and started my first brew.

1: I boiled about 5 gallons of water for 10 minutes in the kettle to make sure it was clean and made a santizing soak in my bottling bucket to begin sanitizing everything that would touch the beer wort. I sanitized everything for about 10 minutes, and placed everthing on a saran wrap covered pan to keep it clean – prior to using everything I would again dip it in the sanitizer solution and shake it off. Keeping everything extremely sanitary is the most important part of brewing a good beer. Beer is made from beer wort – which is a perfect environment for beer yeast to live and reproduce in, and also all other types of bacteria – so it’s important no other bacteria are present.

My daughter Esther helping me :) 

2: After sanitizing everything I kept 3 or so mason jars full of the boiled water to cool and began boiling my 2.5 gallons with the hops (1/2lb briess caramel 40) in a large mesh bag to steep till the water reached 170^oF. Once my mason jar of clean water had cooled to 70Of I re-activated my dry yeast in it, and covered the contained in saran wrap while I got the wort ready for the yeast.

3. Once the water and the hops had gotten to 170o I removed the hops (took about 18 minutes).

4. After the hoppy water got to boiling – 212o, I removed the pot from the heat and mixed in 1 can of pumpkin, 3 pounds of amber malt syrup, a small packet of cluster hops (1oz) and 1lb of pilsen dried malt extract.

Fermenting Beer in my Glass Carboy

5. After boiling for 45 minutes I stirred in my remaining  3 lbs of amber malt syrup.

6. After 60 minutes of boiling I mixed in 2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie all spice and put the pot of wort in an ice bath in my sink and put a sanitized bag of ice in the wort to cool it as quickly as possible from 212oF to 70oF. It took about 30 minutes, and a lot of stirring and replenishing cool water from the faucet – I also used all of the ice in the freezer.

7. I filled my 6 gallon glass primary fermenter carboy with 2 gallons of cold tap water and then syphoned the wort from the kettle to the primary fermenter. I pitched my previously prepared yeast into the fermenter and filled it up to the 5 gallon mark, filled my bubbler with a little vodka and sealed the fermenter and moved it to my closet. It started fermenting after about 12 hours.

8. Once the bubbler stops bubbling fermentation will be complete, after about a week and I will move the brew from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter to prevent the dead yeast cells from giving the beer an off flavor.

Testing the Gravity after pitching Yeast

9. After a couple of weeks in the secondary fermenter I’ll syphon the beer from the secondary into my bottling bucket with the attached spout and mix in a little bottling sugar that the remaining yeast will use to carbonate the beer when it’s in the bottles.

10. After bottling and aging in the bottlles for a couple weeks at room temperature the beer should be ready to drink. Wallah.

This will produce about 5 gallons of beer, or 48 bottles. Northernbrewer.com sells kits for anywhere from 20-30 dollars a piece, making the beer cost somewhere between 40 cents and 80 (60 cents average) cents a piece.

The starter kit costs anywhere from 80-200 depending on how advanced you get. Nicer beers cost anywher from 8-10 bucks for a 6 pack, 1.33-1.67 (1.5 average) per beer – showing a savings from .90 each.

My kit cost 100 bucks, which makes the investment pay back in about 112 beers – or less than 3 brews. That’s really not a reason to do it – but I like it.  

Fermenting in my closet after 12 hours

Transitions - Laid Off

I meant to write an article about this a long time ago, but I ended up getting rather distracted and never putting it together. This is an article about getting laid off in March of this year and how I transitioned to my new job a few weeks later.

 First off – getting laid off was not the only thing going on in my life when it happened. I was married in January of 2011 to my sweet wife Ashley (my greatest accomplishment in life was wooing her heart over our short dating/engagement period of about 6 months). I registered to take the professional engineering exam in April of 2011 – and found out my wife and I were pregnant with twins shortly before that. I was scheduled to sit for the professional engineering exam (an 8-hour full day test I had been dreading from the time I was first made aware of it in college) on October 27^th. My baby girls were officially due on October 13^th, and I was also finishing out my Masters in Business Administration in December of 2011. The twins were born on 9/23/11, I took my P.E. on 10/27/11 and graduated with my MBA in 12/2011. I heard back that I had passed the P.E. in December as well. I was laid off 3 months later in March of 2012.

Adding to all of this, I had bought a foreclosure in Collierville which was well-known as a bachelor pad for most of the 3 years prior to me being married. With the aid of my father, we furiously spent our weekends attempting to make my bachelor pad into a home suitable for my family prior to Ashley’s due date.

 Now that I've set the scene:

 I was already aware that my company was doing poorly – work got slower and slower and it was tough to stay busy. Our department was seemingly way overstaffed and from what I could tell the company had been poorly managed for some time. I had started as an intern in 2007 and had been working for around 5 years when a board member walked over to my desk and asked me to come with him. I joined 2 younger engineers from different depatments and instantly realized I was being laid off as I could think of no other reason the other 2 young engineers, two board members and I would all be in a meeting together. My head got hot – stress instantly rose within me and I began frantically thinking about how my life was about to change tremendously.

 There are many reasons for why I was chosen to be laid off, I’m sure – I don’t feel that is relatively important to this article – so I am purposely leaving that out.

Thankfully when I walked into that last meeting at Allen and Hoshall my wife and I had been contemplating for some time paying off her new honda civic and the only reason I hadn’t up till then was because I was worried there would be layoffs soon at my current job. That caused us to have a healthy amount of money in our safety fund and I knew we would be okay for the short term. I was told I would be paid to the end of the month – I think that was about 28 days when you factored in my untaken 2 weeks of vacation pay. Since I was a little worried about layoffs I had recently burned every possible piece of data I might ever want from the company servers onto a collection of 9 dvd’s and had stashed them at home. I had also already been very discontent at my job and had been looking pretty seriously into finding a new job for some time, had met with a technical recruiter who helped me revise my resume and had already looked into several leads unsuccessfully. The very last thing I believe was God’s total favor being that I had stumbled upon an audiobook copy of a book called “what color is your parachute” and had listened to it very closely the previous week. This book is all about preparing for being laid off, and it really helped me to think very critically about my possible plan while I was calm and unhappily employed the week prior to being laid off.

  

Immediately after hearing the news and prior to collecting my things, I called my wife and told her the news. Her reaction astonished me… she simply asked “why did they lay you off?” as she was rather surprised. I told her I wasn’t sure, and I loved her and would be home as soon as I could be. She didn’t sound worried at all, and looking back now I know she wasn’t. She knew the whole time that God had plans much greater than ours. That he knew when he gave us the twins what we would need, and he would be our provider. She simply knew that God watched us closely, and he was aware of our situation. That conversation was the absolute best way for her to help me in that moment and it was exactly what I needed from her. It was amazing and made me smile in one of the darkest looking days I have ever seen.

 I packed up my jeep, and drove home – after a few minutes of total bliss realizing that I would never have to return to my dreaded old job – I prayed out loud for a few minutes then picked up my phone and started calling everyone I knew that might know of anything. I told them my situation, what I was looking for, and asked them to please let me know if they heard of anything that might fit. I had quite a few soft leads after that first day and spent most of that night at home looking online and updating my profile on job search sites and emailing out my new resume with a new fresh cover letter. During the meeting where I got laid off one of the board members had told me he was aware of a couple companies looking for a mechanical engineer and wrote their numbers down for me.

After a couple days, and absolutely exhausting all of my contacts – even posting my situation on Facebook, I had 4 pretty good opportunities lining up. I began interviewing the following Wednesday, and had 3 interviews at companies I wasn’t very excited about before I had scheduled an hour long phone interview with the company I really wanted to pan out. I had actually already sent in my application and spoken with HR at Barnhart about 3 months prior to being laid off, but I had seemingly been brushed off and nobody really told me why. I sent in my resume again, and one of the people I had emailed called me and told me to look at Barnhart. This was one of my favorite MBA professors at Union, Keven Westbrook.

 Amazingly so, Keven had recently started training the sales staff at Barnhart and had a pretty solid relationship with some important people at Barnhart. He called to ask why they hadn’t hired me already, and the human capital VP gave me a call that night and set up the hour long phone interview. During our phone interview I remember him saying if we had gone to college at the same time we would have been best friends. We had very similar background, both coming from reformed Presbyterian churches and our thoughts on everything lined up perfectly. I told him I had a few other offers to look at and he told me he felt pretty certain he wanted me to come to Barnhart quickly, and I could come in the following week for a face-to-face interview.

  

In the meantime I had interviewed with 3 other companies, and had firm offers from 2 – each for substantially more than I was making previously. The stress had already started to subside and excitement was building quickly. My interview at Barnhart was intense, I interviewed with 6 senior engineers for 45 minutes each – and left feeling good about things, but mentally exhausted after telling my story to 6 different highly intelligent men. I took an engineering aptitude test that had 5 questions on it – 3 of which I solved easily and 2 of which I had no idea how to solve but did my best to show I knew how to set up problems really well… I was moving from a background in refrigeration to a completely new field much more kin to steel design and civil engineering type work.

 That Friday Barnhart sent me my official offer letter and I called and accepted. They said I could come to work whenever I liked, I told them instead of coming the very next Monday – I wanted to take another week to enjoy with my wife since I hadn't really enjoyed the prior 2 weeks since I was so stressed.

  

After all of this I don’t feel this is exactly the typical layoff story. I don’t feel anything I did really prepared me for this or helped me to get through it faster. I really think God ordained everything and I am so greatful he had a wonderful plan that brought me to where I am today. I calculated it later – Allen and Hoshall ended up paying me for 28 days after I was laid off – I started at Barnhart on the 29^th day. God watches us closely. 

Resume

Yesterday – while listening to a Danny Silk sermon (http://podcasts.ibethel.org/podcasts/follow-your-favor) about finding your favor, I was thinking about how important it is to know that thing you do better than anyone else – and by knowing that to direct your life in a way that you can use that skill or skills as much as possible.

Really this is a lot like learning to write your resume – just instead of trying to use it as an annoying calling card for employers nationwide – you only use it yourself to manage your life. When I was laid off and for a good while prior to being laid off – I spent a little time asking my closest friends to tell me what they thought I was supposed to do with my life. I felt very unhappy with my current job and I spent most of the ride home every day praying that God would remove me from it and give me something new to apply myself to. Typically I would start my prayer with “again…. Please give me a way out of there Lord”…. Wondering why I would pray this prayer every day after work and I still felt trapped and every way out I had tried so far had failed. I struggled with these feelings most of the time I was there – and wavered between trying to “love” my job by telling everyone I was content and happy and hoping these feelings would just become my actual feelings and being miserable and feeling trapped forever in this job. I do feel this prior job had an important purpose in my life, and I wouldn’t change my past – but God’s timing is always perfect and I know I will continue to learn better and better to just trust Him and stop struggling so much to control everything.

Anyways, I believe God uses time to generally move his people towards the things they are meant to do with their life – I think often we fight that flow by trying to organize our life ourselves and not listening to God’s voice or our friends and family who tell us what we shine at. I feel in retrospect that if I had taken time to look hard at my own interests and what made me feel passionate instead of worrying about income and what other people wanted to do with their lives, I might have noticed sooner that my old job was not where I was supposed to be. I tried to make myself fit into that job – but really I should have realized that I needed another, my old job was only a stepping stone to something else.

When you write your resume, you put everything in there that will convince this employer that you are absolutely a must-hire. When you think about your own future and your personal resume, look at what it is in your life that you get excited about. What makes you want to stay up late exhausted working on? What makes you want to jump out of the bed in the morning when you realize excitedly what is waiting for you. Work is something that should be wonderful – it isn’t something we should dread. Sure – sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to because we’re working towards an ultimate good, but I sure don’t want to dread waking up every day for the next 38 years – I’d rather just sell everything I own and go get a hotel in Peru for 35 cents a day. Guinea Pigs are cheap and a delicacy – and the view is spectacular. 

Engineer Budgeting

First of all I know this borders on being OCD – when I talk about this people roll their eyes. I think it’s important and I enjoy doing it – I’m sure there are easier ways of getting the same kind of accuracy. I don’t think everyone needs to be this precise, but I thought it would be a fun article to write and non-engineers might find it amusing. I use Yodlee.com quite a bit – it does a snapshot type deal of all your financial accounts and keeps track of bills. I’ve used it for years and love it. You don’t have to visit each site, but just log in here and it shows you a dashboard of everything. As far as security is concerned yodlee probably already has your log on information since it manages this for many large banks and it’s security record is stellar.

One of my passions in life – embarrassingly so sometimes, is that I love watching and keeping track of my finances meticulously. I never really cared much about money growing up, I did have a small lawn-mowing gig growing up where I did make a lot of cash – at least 15 year old Kyle thought it was a pile… but other than that, I pretty much grew up with my parents providing what I really needed and I got a lot of what I wanted by begging or mowing grass.

The real lane changer financially happened during my senior year of college. I had an opportunity to sign up for a class called “Personal Finance” that only 4^th years were allowed to take due to the high demand. I was a little worried about my future – knowing in the next year I would suddenly have a lot of financial responsibilities with very little financial know how. I would watch my parents balancing checkbooks and paying bills and I never really took the time to ask about the specifics. Regardless, I felt very unprepared going in to this class for my post-college financial world.

An older lady taught this class, and she was very thorough in her methodology. She taught us all the basics, simple budgeting, 401k, Roth IRAs, Mortgages, Interest Rates, the future value of money – I was stunned. We did everything in excel and she made us make pretend budgets and keep track of our spending and create reports and in the end I felt pretty confident that I knew how to manage my finances as an adult.

In my first job – I started as an intern and while they kept me pretty busy doing busy work I would eventually run out of stuff to do and have to wait for an older engineer to give me more work.

During this time I couldn’t really “not work” and had to work pretty hard at staying busy. Since I did work in spreadsheets often, I started working on creating a more useful spreadsheet to keep track of my finances. I started with something simple I pulled off of crown financial and it quickly got very complicated, then I would spend hours making it simpler and adding features as my needs got more and more complicated with time. I liked the idea, but since I was single and living at home I really didn’t need to budget very closely – I had plenty.

After a few years, the economy started to stutter and my company lowered our salaries by 10%, I had already begun the process of applying for an MBA program that would add a substantial increase to my monthly bills, so I felt very unsure about things financially and decided to forego the MBA and hope the 10% returned soon so I could get back on track with getting an MBA.

Today Kyle knows – that because I did not keep a close eye on my finances that uneasiness was really rather conservative. Eventually I was told by the MBA program that if I did not sign up by the following semester I would have to take an extra semester of pre-requisites to qualify for the MBA program. So I buckled down for a few months and started inputting each receipt into my spreadsheet so I would know if I could handle the $650 increase in expenses each month for the two and a half years it would take to finish the MBA. After that I never stopped putting every receipt into the spreadsheet – sorting them into fixed expenses and non-fixed, and then into all the different categories they could be. Doing so allows me to understand where the money goes and knowing where the money goes allows me to make intelligent decisions about how I spend my money daily.

It does not make much sense to try to explain the spreadsheet – I decided I would just post a default one (I used a make-up salary of 30,000 and made up everything else on it… FYI), so if anyone wanted to play with it they could. My old job paid salaries on the 1^st and 15^th, so I had structured the budget into a monthly budget tab. My current job pays our checks every Friday, so now I switched to a weekly budget.

Download Link: (It does have macros in it, so you'll have to enable them to use the cool button features)

Budget Spreadsheet Example

There are 7 tabs in the spreadsheet:

Budget – where a weekly budget is kept, at the end of the week you simply push the “Next Week” button and the excel sheet automatically creates a new week and moves any excess “Banked” money in the budgets to the next week. This way you can watch your banks – when they grow or shrink too much you can adjust your budget to be more accurate in the long term – or know you need to move money from one category to another.

Summary – Summary simply keeps track of your monthly low point financially, for me this occurs right after our mortgage is taken out. I like knowing this because if something does happen – say I get laid off, I know I have that much money clear and free at any point during the month. I try to keep a nice big safety fund in there (When I was laid off in March it took a lot of stress out of my life). It’s also a good measure of how each month went – if the summary gets bigger and bigger then things are well, if you continually lose money then your budgets are working out correctly.

Utility – utility keeps track of utility bills, I did a lot of energy conservation type work in my old job and found it extremely interesting to track my utility bills and notice how it changed with the seasons, or when I made an improvement like installing insulation upstairs or adjusting thermostat settings. I also compared my utility bill costs – kwh/sqft or therms/sqft to national averages to see where my house stood. If there is any interest I can talk about this more later.

 Annual Bigs – Annual bigs is the tab that keeps track of anything big that happens once a year, like insurance costs, vehicle tags, life insurance, cell phones, gym memberships – stuff like that. I also use this sheet to keep track of home repair costs, vehicle repair costs and some other etcetera stuff I like to record for posterity’s sake.

Mortgage – this sheet keeps track of my mortgage, I actually molded another person’s spreadsheet to this and it keeps track of extra payments made… stuff like that. Pretty self explanatory. I ended up making the decision to switch to a 15yr mortgage right before I got married… because I keep so close track of my finances – I could make an intelligent decision, know that I was capable of doing it – and it will save us a ton of money in the long run. I should have the house paid off a few years before the twins enter college, which will be helpful…

Retirement – this sheet simply keeps track of retirement, the cool feature here is that you can adjust what your pre-retirement interest rate (I used 8%) and your post retirement (4%) and see how that affects your retirement salary – it will automatically calculate this by giving you a inflation raise every year and depleting retirement by the time you’re 99.

DebtsPlan – the sheet is used to plan debt pay offs, it’s very simply created. Just pay off one debt at a time and watch the debt disappear.

Choosing a Wife

How does a man come to a place where he sees a woman, and decides he wants to wake up and see that woman's face every day for the rest of his life?

I remember pondering this is high school, and thinking I had never thought that about any person in my life, how would I ever come to feel this way for my future wife. Somewhere around there I decided I had better get a plan B formed - since plan A seemed bleak.

Since I'm the author of this here article, I make no apologies for my perspective. If you feel differently about this stuff, you're wrong. No apologies, just honesty.

I remember the very first girl I felt attracted to. This happened in 2nd grade, and her name was Alicia Norris. I thought she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen, she made me super nervous - and I could barely talk to her without looking straight down at the ground. That day I had little knowledge about just how much of my future would be devoted to thinking about, talking to, talking about, looking at, trying not to look at, and worrying about girls, ladies and women.

Discipleship leaders would tell us to not worry, everyone that wants to get married will get married. They would tell us to focus on school, cars, fishing... whatever else might get our attention diverted from the pretty girls we went to church with, school with, saw at the mall... they were everywhere. All of us guys knew the leaders just didn't understand, they were all old men that didn't know what it was like to be young and full of testosterone, trying to impress our lady friends so they would notice us and let us hold their hands and kiss them.

All in all my journey from that point to marriage was fairly smooth. I dated a girl in high school that ended up to be dating another boy at the same time and that pretty much made me decide to leave girls alone till college. Once I was in college, I lived with 7 other guys - I studied engineering, and the girls I did have time to date didn't seem to want the same things in life that I did. I knew I wanted a wife that wanted to be a wife and a mom most in life, the girls I ended up dating would tell me they wanted to be doctors, art museum curators, aerodynamic engineers and chemists. I knew I wanted a family, and my wife would have to want to be a mom. I wanted my kids to have a mom at home - and a lawyer or doctor wife would have a hard time fitting the bill.

I had other criteria, but all this other criteria bowed to the most important criteria of all - I wanted a girl that I was extremely attracted to... and I wanted a girl that I felt I had won. I remember hearing a distinguished speaker once say that of all the things he had accomplished in life, the one thing he was most proud of was wooing and winning the heart of his wife. When I heard that man say that - I knew I wanted that to be true for me as well.

That started a theory in my head, I call it the "dead deer" theory. It didn't become fully realized till I was married, but I'll share it now because it fits. When a man hunts, he does not want to go to his back yard, pull out his mighty man rifle and shoot at a deer that is taking a nap 10 feet away. A man wants to hunt for his deer, a man wants to chase a fast strong deer through the woods - lose sweat, tears and blood... maybe even break a limb and lose a couple toes to the hunt, then through his might and skill somehow manage to fall out of a tree on to a mighty stag running at full speed with a dull bowie knife take that 32 point beast down - cook it right there, and celebrate the mighty hunt with all of his cave buddies that just witnessed the most incredible exhibition of what a hunter can possibly do. "For another example see the hunt scene in "Last of the Mohicans")

So saying that, I think most women and maybe even men don't understand that you can't have that story without playing the game. A man or woman can become a dead deer with time... you get tired of being chased or chasing, and you just want to take a shortcut... get on some website, find the perfect match and go make yourself happy. You can do that, but you have to sacrifice that awesome chase... the most awesome chase you will ever accomplish, chasing that pretty wife and being stabbed in the heart, then relentlessly pursuing and romancing her till she finally tells you you've won her heart.

So far we've covered only two things, the girl should be beautiful... so much so that all your friends see her, see you - and wonder how much money you must have. The girl must not "need" you initially, you need to hunt her down - and she has to be completely content without you... not to mention you have to be completely content alone before you're ready to be content with someone else. Marriage doesn't fix anything... you and that woman will still be exactly the same broken people after marriage that you were before. So fix yourself before you sign up to put together a marriage.

These are barriers to relationship - things just won't go beyond these not working out. Beyond this, for me - the most important thing is finding a woman that loves God more than she loves me or anyone else, if I find a woman that is obedient to God and loves Jesus more than I think I do, then I know I have my work cut out for me to spiritually lead this woman. I'll be challenged for my entire life keeping in front of her spiritual maturity and remaining the spiritual leader in the household.

I don't think it's crucial that the girl has exactly the same theology - as long as all major "salvation" issues are covered and you can physically stand the idea of going to their church... marriage will settle some of the smaller worship tastes and smaller issues. There are already so few girls that love Jesus and are beautiful and are not dead deer to weed any more out by making sure they are exactly the same Christian denomination that you happen to be.

For me - after these qualifications were met, all I was looking for was a woman that I felt at home with, that I was comfortable just being quiet with - because I reasoned over a 60 year marriage there would be points where we just wouldn't have stuff to say... so I wanted to feel comfortable just being with her.

Sure, it looks like I don't have many qualifications... not nearly as many as the "list" Jon and I made up in high school had. But more than what I was looking for, I think what helped me decide to walk away from more girls than that what I "was" looking for was what I "wasn't" looking for.

Most girls I dated would do things in less than a week that shot a flare up over my head and yelled at me to run away. Sometimes it wasn't a flare, but maybe just a small whisper saying, this just isn't right - I envisioned my future with several of these women as living with a constant dripping faucet.

I always thought I would just "know" when I met the right one. Eventually I started to think that I wouldn't, and I would just have to choose one. I now think that would have been the single worst decision (cut corner) I could have made. I know for me, I just needed to feel right about it.

So when I met Ashley - I finally felt that feeling, after I had chased her, she dumped me once (made sure I knew she was no dead deer and she wasn't finished running), I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out again, we dated for 6 months - she was just right for me. I felt at home with her, I knew I wanted to see her face every morning... in fact not only that, but I knew if I didn't marry this woman I would be thinking about her and comparing every girl after her to her till the day I died. I remember after she dumped me the first time thinking about how I had gotten over so many girls prior to this... and I knew none of that would work anymore, it was time for plan B... I should pack up the jeep, and head for the mountains - because I would never be happy with any other woman after I had spent a few months getting to know who she was and those feelings grew very quickly. She was perfect for me, she was what I had always been looking for and praying for - and I would not be happy with anything else.

It would be like eating a perfectly cooked steak, sweet potato and blue moon with a juicy slice of orange in it... then going home and on the way home ordering a cheeseburger and a flat coke from mcdonalds and washing that wonderful meal out of your life forever.

That's how I knew when I had found my wife.

Transition Pre-Game

So the Wolvinator has officially flaked out, stating he isn't "feeling it" right now. He just started a new job.

I thought about restructuring, but then I figured - let's just let it roll. I think it's time for a new article, and I figured I'd go ahead and put this up for everyone to see.

This isn't going to be about my life. That's what diaries are for, and I'm no princess... I'm a big hairy man that rides motorcycles and breaks things. I want this to be a place to explore ideas and stretch my head and creative muscles. I think the best blogs are places where several people interact and you see posts from more than one person, and anyone that reads this and wants to write - just send me something and I'll put it up.

I've been filling lists with ideas about what I want to write about, and honestly I have so many things I want to explore, It's tough to choose - but I hope to make creative writing and exploring a much more often habit in the near future.

Anyways this is a bit of a transition article, just wanted to clarify things a bit more, and establish the blog thesis before going forward with the first real article. Mission Accomplished. Tarry Forth.

The Jethro Bowl - Introduction

The coolest thing about this blog is that it really doesn't matter if anyone reads it. These conversations have evolved from email conversations that span hundreds of pages of correspondence over much of a decade throughout our friendship. It is truly good for us to spend time debating and understanding regardless of who's listening. Thankfully, making a blog costs nothing - so Jon and I thought we'd post these online for our friend's entertainment. We hope whoever reads this is intrigued and that our thoughts cause new and interesting thoughts to rock your fragile little world. 

A brief history of our friendship would quickly explain how Jon and I grew up in Chesapeake Virginia together. Our moms forced us into friendship and neither of us much liked one another at first. Jon had been home schooled to that point (about 8th grade) and I had spent my time touring the country's public school system in Ohio, Texas and Virginia. Jon loved music - I loved math. We eventually formed a very strong friendship that followed both of us from middle school through our first significant relationships with girls to college and finally to our first careers and marriage (oh and for me I've also managed to populate my house with twin girls).

The coolest thing about our friendship - from my perspective, is that it totally shows how great a friendship can be - and how two completely different men can come together and form a bond, that is extremely rare among men and manages to sharpen both men and have vast beneficial consequences that ripple outward in our lives much like jean valjean's life did in Les Miserables. This blog will have two rules - Our posts will be approximately 1 page long each, and will abide in our current thesis statement (It's over to the right of the post).