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I can't wait to work on my bar tomorrow. It's coming along nicely. If I had to guess, I'd say I'm about 40%-50% done with construction. This doesn't include the time it will take to finish it.

Once the bar is done, I have a couple small little fun projects I want to do, then a book/wine shelf.

A video we made at work. I didn't have much to do with it, except let them use my truck and maybe give a small bit of advice here and there on how to build things, but it's an example of what goes on around here.

Doing some more experimentation with my new lens. I have a bunch of cut semi-precious gems laying around from a project I thought up one time, started on, but didn't finish.

I bought a new lens (from Jamie) for my birthday and it came in the mail yesterday! It's a wide angle lens with a macro feature which allows me to take extreme close-up pictures like this one...

Thanks Jamie!
(and Mom and Dad, I used your money too.)

After new years, I made some resolutions. They were pretty simple. Clean my shop, clean the garage, and finish the bar.

I've cleaned the shop and organized all my tools, which helped me get back to work on the bar. I used all the wood that was down stairs, so now I need to get to the wood in the garage. Last night, I made a pretty big dent in cleaning the garage in order to get to the wood, but there is more to do. I think what we really need to do is take everything down from the storage shelf I built, and reorganize it and throw out everything we don't need. We also need to build a shed in the back yard. That would be a huge help actually. I guess some of these things will need to wait for spring. Hopefully I'll have my bar done by then.

It's our favorite time of the year, Halloween! Sunday was filled with pumpkin carving and costume making. Here are two of our pumpkins (Abby & Jamie's in that order). Check out more pictures and descriptions on our flickr account.

Conner and Abby have the week off of school. Must be nice.

I did a little work on the bar yesterday, but more importantly we got the keg fridge finished! Here are some pics.

Tonight was beer night. We brewed another batch of our American-Style Pale Ale ("Hitched" from our wedding), bottled a gallon so we could use Stuarts labels again, and put the rest in our keg. Once finished with that beer, we move on to the next one that was waiting in the primary fermentor. We siphoned the second one, "Bold Series California Style Imperial Pale" which I think will be VERY hoppy, into our secondary fermentor. That will rest a week or so until we get another keg to store it in.

We've also decided that we're going to need a few more kegs for backup. We'll have two in the fridge, but since they take about 5 weeks to age, we figure it would be best to have two as backup. Maybe that will be too much, who knows. But my guess is we'll go through beer a tad faster as it will be so easy to access.

We're also looking at a mid to late October kegger. The beer will need time to age, and I have a lot of work to go on the bar. Hopefully this weekend on Sunday I'll have some time to work on it. Saturday is Conner's birthday and the Husker football game. We're playing paintball, adults vs. 7th graders. Should be fun. :)

One last thing I just remembered, I went to home depot tonight and bought some nuts and bolts. I think someone tried to "fix" the door handle at one point, and instead screwed it all up. There are square holes where there should be round holes. Anyway, I made my own square nuts out of some aluminum I had lying around, and put the door pull on. It fits perfect. If anything, it's a bit too snug but that's far better then too loose. Hopefully it will loosen up a bit over time. Anyway, door handle is on and functioning better then it has in years.

Yesterday, I drove up to Columbus and helped my dad put our fridge back together. The new seal was a bit tricky as I had to 'weld' it together at the corners. Also, it took three attempts to get the door latch installed correctly (which meant removing the door panel 3 different times - a big pain). My arm is a bit itchy today from the new insulation we added that was in the door by the latch. All the chrome on the fridge cleaned up great too. Once put back together, we loaded the fridge into my truck.

After some scratches in the wall and some tense moments on the stairs, the fridge is now in our basement. Here are some pictures.

The pictures however don't do the refrigerator justice. It looks awesome and I can't wait to put our first keg in it. Thanks Dad!

I have to go to school. I don't like school. It's not like I don't think it is unimportant or anything like that. It is just that the teachers ore either crazy or really boring and drag on and on about the same thing. And that amount of homework. Do kids really need to do 40+ math problems to get the lesson in our brain? I don't think so.