Bottling Season

Tis the time to bottle the blackberry! In late summer I picked a ton of wild blackberries and began brewing a batch of blackberry wine. It's finally done fermenting and has fallen clear. I love the color. It smells like fresh blackberries. It's not a sweet wine, but I did add a little extra sugar to accentuate the blackberry flavor. I tried to stop fermentation on this batch at 11%. The yeast were having no part of my plan. Despite two efforts to kill 'em all off with sulfur dioxide...they kept eating the sugars and producing alcohol. The did so until they were eventually poisoned by their own byproducts (the alcohol). Alcohol starts to becomes poisonous to the particular yeast I used at around 14%. The little buggers plodded on until the A.C. hit 15%, and then they finally died off and settled to the bottom of the carboy leaving me with really strong, really dry wine. I siphoned it off the sediment and added back some of the sugar that the little guys had devoured. Last night I bottled a portion of it. Look at that color! This is the first batch of wine I've made from actual fruit as opposed to juice or a kit. As far as non-kit wines go, I think it's my best work yet!

Zero Image

I've been playing around with pinhole photography for a few months now and have had moderate success. I now have a light meter, and that will no doubt improove my chances of getting nice shots. This whole time I've been using a camera I made myself form a tin can and a magnet. It produces pretty distinctive images and I don't plan on giving up on it, but it was time to upgrade. The Zero Image company in Hong Kong makes amazing wooden pinhole cameras that take beautiful images. The cameras themselves are beautiful too. Teak wood. Shinny. Nice. My parents got me one for my birthday. Yippy! Took it out last week to shoot a test roll. I love the results so far. Here are a few of the images from the camera along with pics Ryan took of me taking the pics. Click on the images to see them bigger.

Birthday Yum

My birthday was back on September 18th. It was a Tuesday. Weekday birthdays aren't as much fun as weekend ones. People work and can't stay out late. Being a student, I have a flexible schedule...not everyone else is so lucky. Had a low key, but enjoyable evening at home. Had a few friends over for a BBQ. I had called it a BYOM (M is for meat) event and was going to pick up something for Ryan and I on my drive home from work. I was about to pull into the market when Ryan called to tell me not to. Our friend Jeff had apparently gone a little overboard at the store himself, and said there was plenty for all. And he was right. He brought over four of the biggest steaks I'd ever seen. In this picture, you might be tempted to think I have a small, cheap grill. No. It's a full size grill. The steaks are just so big they make the grill look puny. Mmmm...birthdays are yummy. Thanks Jeff, for bringing the cow!

Back in March I bought a new sleeping bag for backpacking trips. I wanted something lightweight (2 lb or less), and that packed down really small. As with all ultralight backpacking gear, you pay pretty heavily for every ounce you shave. The best deal, by far, was the REI SubKilo bag. I pail just under $220 for mine and that's after I used a 20% off coupon. Unfortunately, the women's bag doesn't come in a left zip version, only right zip. I tried and I tried to make it work, but to no avail. I'm a left side sleeper. When I'm in a right zip bag, the zipper is at my back and I can't adjust it without rolling over. I also couldn't get over the feeling that I was trapped. Getting out of the bag quickly was simply not possible. I'd struggle to roll over, find the zipper, and unzip myself. After waking up to a bear sniffing my feet and not being able to un-bag myself last Fall, I decided that my next bag simply had to be a left zip. (See my previous post, http://awaitingrevelation.blogspot.com/2006/11/does-chris-poo-in-woods.html, for the bear story.)

All the preface aside, after this weekend's backpacking trip I decided I simply couldn't put off getting a new bag any longer. Aside from being a right zip bag, my SubKilo also tends to leak down feathers much more than is acceptable. All down bags leak, but not this much. Ryan has the men's version of the SubKilo, and his doen't leak anywhere near as much. And on top of all of that, I simply don't think the bag is rated correctly. It claims to be a 15 degree bag, but I seriously doubt it would keep me warm at even 20 degrees. It's a good bag, but it simply won't suit me. Thus I returned the bag to REI, and the research began.

Like I said, these bags aren't cheap so I did a whole heck fo a lot of research. I'd look at a bag, read all about it, check out the specs, and read reviews. In the end I had a grouping of 7 bags that I was considering, but I was having a tough time making the plunge. I knew that after using my return credit, I'd still be dropping at least another $140 on the bag. Big decision. So I resorted to the only real decision making system I've ever used; making a spreadsheet. I listed all the bags and their relevent specs such as weight, stuff size, and inner diameters . I ranked the different spec categories accordning to their relative importance in my decision. Then I ranked each bag in each of the spec categories. As you can see from the graphic, I used the tried and tested (by me, of course) rating system of "woo hoo" for great, "eh" for acceptable, and "boo" for, well, boo. In numerical terms, a "woo hoo" earns a ranking of 3, "eh" scores a 2, and "boo" gets a 1.

In my system, the bags recieved scores for each category. The scores were calculated as the product of the relative importance of the category and it's ranking on the woo hoo-eh-boo scale. The scores for each category were added up to give each bag a total score. A perfect score is a 63. The worst score possible would be a 21. Sure, I could have normalised the scored to a more intuitive numbering scheme, metric perhaps, but that would just have been over the top. I'm a geek for sure, but ya got to draw the line somewhere.

Clearly there's one bag that stands out with a perfect score. That's the Marmot Helium. Just one problem...this bag isn't being produced anymore so it's pretty tough to find. I had to get my bag at an REI in order to be able use the credit from the old bag towards the new one. The Portland REI had none in stock and wasn't expecting to get any more but their display model was still up. The Tualitin store didn't even have a model on display any more. I asked customer service if they could call the Portland store and hold the display model for me, and they did. Then I checked at the Beaverton store, and they actually had one in stock. (Keep in mind the guy at the Tualitin store said the bag wasn't even in the system anymore so no store in the area would have it. Shows what he knew.)

I immediately snatched up the bag at the Beaverton store. New beats a display model any day. I had never actually tried the bag, I just knew my analysis said I should love it. I got right down on the floor of the store and tried it out. My spreadheet was right! It's far roomier than my old bag. The down is loftier. I love the left zip. It's as close as perfection as you can get for less than $400. Ryan took a couple of pics of me trying out the bag with my phone camera, but Sprint is being super slow tonight and I can't upload the pics to put here. Maybe I'll update this when they finally make it to my inbox. In the mean time, I just may sleep in my new bag tonight.

Seeing the Light

Just a few days ago I acquired an object that I've been in search of for several months; a light meter! I had gotten to a point where I couldn't progress any further with my pinhole photography because I couldn't get a handle on lighting or exposure times. I'd say I've been lucky to get a decent picture only one in every five or six tries thus far. That's because the exposure times I was using were determined by the not-so-sophisticated method of guessing. Cloudy weather, 30 seconds. Sunny skies, something less than that. Highly lit subjects got less time, and shadowy ones got more. Not exactly a sure fire method.


A few days ago I was at a really dingy thrift store. I was itching to get out of there, but Ryan spotted something in the display case. A light meter. We took it out and had a look, and sure enough, it worked! For the meager price of $9.99 I walked off with a 1946 model GE exposure meter. Ryan even found a scanned copy of the actual user's manual online.


It's not ideal, but it's a huge step in the right direction. Since I'm using a pinhole camera, my f-stop is way higher than any of the values on the exposure dial. That simply means that I can't use the dial to calculate the necessary exposure time directly. I'll have to play around with it a bit and make my own light values/exposure chart. It'll take some time, but in theory it should work just as well. In the next week or so I hope to do some research and play around with the meter a bit. With any luck, I hope to use this puppy to get my success rate up as close to 100% as possible.

Solitary Winemaker

A few weeks back I had picked 4 or 5 gallons of wild blackberries on one of the nearby disc golf courses and started a batch of blackberry wine. I intentionally added less sugar than would normally be called for so I could keep the alcohol percentage below that which becomes toxic to the yeast. That way, I could have complete control over the end stages of fermentation and finely tune the alcohol content and the sweetness of the wine. I stopped fermentation at about 11.5% alcohol and still had a dry wine because I skimped on the sugar. That way I could kill off the remaining yeast, and add back some sugar until I achieved the perfect amount of sweetness...semi-sweet, but not overly sweet. I know fruit wines should be sweet, but I'm a dry wine fan, so I wanted to produce a minimaly sweet wine that still brought out the blackberry character.

Here's the problem with trying to achieve wine perfection when you are working alone trying to add just the right amount of sugar, but not too much: You have to go by taste. Add a dash of sugar. Let disolve. Chill. Taste. Repeat. The problem comes in the repeat part. Trying to sweeten a 4 gallon batch of wine by adding small doses of sugar takes many cycles of adding sugar, chilling, and tasting. By the 10th go around, it's hard to tell you're even drinking wine, nevermind trying to determine whether it's achieved sweetness perfection. Half way throught the process I couldn't go on. It's warm today. I'm short on sleep. I probablly haven't totally rehydrated and recovered from backbacking. I decided to take a 45 minuted nap. Then I made a few phone calls. Finally, I got back around to business. Add sugar. Let disolve. Chill. Repeat.

I think I finally got the wine to where I want it, but I'm not certain. I need another opinion. Or maybe I'll just wait until tommorrow and give it another taste. As for now...I think I need another nap.

A Good Visit

For the last week, my friend Jocey and her boyfriend Jason have been in town visiting from NH. After weather delays pushed their arrival back by two days, they finally arrived and we started off on a backpacking trip less than 12 hours later. We did a 4-day loop in the Columbia River Gorge and it was great! The first leg of the trip was a more or less uneventful 9ish mile stretch that parallels I84 for a ways before climbing out of the Gorge. The first campsite was nothing to write home about, but it served its purpose. The next day is when the real adventure began.

We knew day two would be a tough day; lots of elevation and around 11 miles. After a wrong turn early in the day, we found ourselves at Casey Camp. All the Gorge trails are connected so it wasn’t too big a deal. The wrong turn ended up shaving a little distance off our trek, but adding pretty significantly to the terrain difficulty. To get back on track, we took the Casey Creek Trail, which we later found out climbs just shy of 3000 feet in only 2.1 miles. From what we can tell from maps and such, it’s the steepest trail in the entire Gorge, and it was tough. 20 steps. Stop. Breathe. Repeat.

After a rest atop the ridge, we continued on through an awesome forest to our camp alongside Rainy Lake. It was a beautiful camp on a secluded lake. It made the climb all worth it. That night there was a lunar eclipse and we all woke up to watch it. What a great treat! The stars in the wilderness are so much brighter without all the light pollution from the cities. Watching the eclipse and catching glimpses of a few shooting starts was definitely a trip highlight.

The next day we trekked onward to the shores of Wahtum Lake. Along the way Mt Hood showed itself to us and it sure was a sight to behold. Rainy Lake was beautiful, but Wahtum Lake had it beat. Our campsite on the shore was surrounded by blueberry bushes. We had blueberries and granola for snacks. Yum!

The last day, we hiked out 13 miles along the Eagle Creek Trail. We passed too many waterfalls to name and went for a dip along the way in a pristine swimming hole. We arrived back at the trailhead just before 4 pm and were all pretty tired and ready for showers. Over about 40 miles of trials, we had seen several deer, snakes, and slugs. We even found a pretty big bear print and some mountain lion scat.

After a day’s rest, we headed out for more fun, but this time we traveled by car. We went to the Tilamook cheese factory and then to the Oregon coast. We stopped at a few state beaches and parks along the drive North to Astoria. We visited a few of the spots where the movie, The Goonies, was filmed. Then we ate a fantastic meal at a place called The Silver Salmon, in Astoria. With full bellies, we headed back to Portland.

On the last day of Joc and Jason’s visit, we slept late, ate breakfast, and then wandered around downtown Portland’s Chinatown, and the Saturday Market. It was a great visit, and I was sad to see them go. I don’t have any pictures because I didn’t have a camera, but Joc took plenty so when she sends me a copy of the picture disc, I’ll post some.

I’ll finish with one of the more memorable quotes from the weekend:

Jason: “It’s pretty hard to starve to death. You’ve got to really want it.”