the rest of 2015: a hellacious summary

It’s 2016!  And here’s an exciting fact: 5 days in to 2016 I have already taken time to sit and write some fiction snippets one two separate occasions, which is probably more than I bothered to do in the entirety of 2015 – uh, oops.

So I did some pretty cool stuff in the last quarter of the year since the last time I ventured on to this corner of the internet (AKA September), including but not limited to:

Central/Western Day in Kzoo
I haven’t been to a WMU football game in probably 7 years (since I graduated), so this year we snagged some tickets & made a day out of it that included nitro coffee, breakfast beers, seeing some alum friends I haven’t visited in ages, and a mini-brewery tour of some local (but new to me!) breweries.

This is how to do a flight.

Toronto Cask Days 2015
Cask Days was one of my very favorite events of 2014, so I was more than stoked to go back in 2015, especially since we got early-in tickets, & I have, in the past year, learned to pace myself so that by 5 PM at a beer festival I am not a stumbling mess that can’t stay awake to meet for dinner later on.

Also involved in this trip was my very best Ottawa friends, my very best Toronto friends, a fancy ass whole wild boar dinner (listen: flaky pastry crust with an apple & bacon filling, cranberry coulis & vanilla ice cream), late night post-Jays game burritos, me spending $50+ at David’s Tea, and a few new delightful Toronto breweries.

Starting the trip off right in Sarnia at 11 am.

One of my all time favorite breweries (Bellwoods); ALL of my all time favorite people.

I thought I was completely stuffed until someone brought me this apple bacon wonder.

Red Wings Season Ticket Holder Appreciation Night #2
The auto industry came through for me again - I was hoping to get a handful of extra pucks signed for a giant display in my living room, but the entire arena was SOLD OUT??? Of pucks???  Regardless, it was a fun (free) night of skating on NHL arena ice, my girlfriend got a bunch of signatures on the onesie I gifted her at a baby shower & luckily my real goal was still accomplished:

Montreal!!
I spent American Thanksgiving with my very favorite travel partner in Montreal accomplishing not only a new NHL arena (I’m at 11/30!), but also (among many others) getting to grab some evening beers at Dieu du Ciel!, which is a brewery responsible in large part for some of my deeper diving into craft beer styles & which I always swore I would make it to eventually, and doing forearm stands in front of a bizarre architectural anomaly that I inexplicably researched & wrote about back during my senior year of college.

Also, Montreal has some gorgeous architecture, bomb street art, solid breweries, and CAT CAFES.

(Also – this trip allowed for a brief little jaunt down to Ottawa to drink to excess & see some of my absolute favorite people.)

The original Montreal smoked meat. I desperately miss this.

My lil' babe Luna :)

Turkish brunch!

Christmas / New Years
I’d just like to show off that I made the actual most amazing gorgonzola, cranberry & walnut stuffed beef tenderloin with a molasses/bourbon glaze & I have perhaps never eaten something so delicious in all of my prior life.  And then when that was over, I made crème brulee cheesecake with an actual torch.

Also we went fowling, and to a whiskey distillery WITH DOGS!!!

Noble Fish forever.

Rye & Rue <3

Here’s this other thing that happened: I went to a semi-fancy NYE party that culminated in a wild(ly terrible) rendition of “I Think We’re Alone Now” sung in to a bottle of champagne at midnight, followed up with some wrestling. I’m an adult & you can’t prove otherwise.

bell's funvitational 2015

The point when I realized it was too cold for shorts.

There are a lot of beer festivals. Like, a lot of beer festivals, especially because we live in Michigan, where there's a new brewery every twelve seconds (okay maybe more like twelve weeks) and there's nothing the vast majority of Michiganders like better than looping twine through giant sourdough pretzels & packets of beef jerky to maraud around in a field/parking lot/park/etc., potentially soggy & freezing or sweaty and what feels like actually melting, to taste tiny samples of weird ass beers while "accidentally" forgetting to turn in their tokens.

So, there are a lot of beer festivals in Michigan. I have been to a lot of beer festivals in Michigan (and elsewhere for that matter - shout out to Indianapolis, Chicago, and Toronto!), but nobody else yet has done it the way Bell's did it for their 30th anniversary.

Granted it certainly helped that I had three of my favorite people in the world there with me (I have always had this sort of weird tender and fiercely possessive love for my place in my closest friendship as the only girl among a handful of boys, but this time around there was the added delight of introducing them to my boyfriend & watching the lot of us act like we've all been friends for the entirety of our lives), but you guys. Bell's does it like nobody does it.

The festival didn't start until 4 pm on Saturday evening, but registration & check in started at noon, so we sauntered in around 1ish after hearing that we could bottle share in line - and when we got there we were astonished to find we were literally only the second group in line??? Which ended up being fantastic for multiple reasons including:

• The line surrounded a football field, so we dragged a large team bench over to the beginning of the line and thus for three hours we had a place to chill, lounge, and drink beer with the masses.
• We made friends with the guys in front of us who not only shared huge amounts of delicious rare beers but also had secret friends inside who broke the news about double barrel Hunahpu to us which meant we had plenty of time to indulge before the keg kicked.
• At one point just before the doors opened for the festival, we realized we had a few scattered bottles left that we wouldn't be able to drink before being let in - and the rules were bottle sharing in line was allowed, but bringing in any alcohol, opened or no, was not, which, while being a crappy rule, did lead to the greatest moment of my life which was: standing on a shaky aluminum bench a little bit tipsy holding up a bottle of Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout and shouting FREE BCBS WHO WANTS SOME?? At which point the masses converged on me and I felt something akin to the Jesus of Beer. (This feeling returned later on when multiple people we didn't remotely know but whom we had shared beer with us found us inside the festival and showered us with extra beer tokens.)

My boys <3 <3 <3

So as I'm standing there pouring to the lot of people behind us who hadn't gotten there three hours early and weren't already like 15 tastings into the evening, the greatest thing to ever signal the beginning of a beer festival happened, which was AN ACTUAL MARCHING BAND LED US IN TO THE BASEBALL FIELD. No, really. A raunchy sounding slapdash marching band dressed in gold & black nonsense. I have never actually been more pleased. Until like three minutes later while halfway through my Hunahpu and standing in line for some Russian River Supplication I realized there were actual Bell's 30th Anniversary party hats, and they were free.  And then like an hour later when I realized both Spruce & Double Two Hearted were happening in my exceptionally blessed life.

ACTUAL MARCHING BAND.

I just don't know why people thought we were all so drunk already????

My literal only regret is that I was too busy tasting beer to play Giant Skee-Ball, but the opportunity will present itself again some day, I'm certain...

In conclusion, basically every beer festival should probably follow the format of: Giant pre-party, marching band, super huge lineup of tasty rare beers, giant funk/soul dance party back at the brewery afterward.  (With a small break in between for us to acquire the best shawarma of my life.)

Funk soul brothas.

I'm looking at you, Michigan Brewer's Guild.

this outdoorsy thing i did!

Oh little blog, so much has happened & so little has been recorded of it.  Thus begins a series of blog posts chronicling events that happened between May and August, in no particular order, but which I want to remember enough to put them into words.

One of my “resolutions” this year was to go camping for the very first time – no, seriously, I have never gone. My family, despite that my mother and father took cross-country (even cross-Canada!) motorcycle camping trips before I was born (which is something I can picture my father doing but NEVER my mother???), the closest I’ve ever come to what you could consider camping is That One Time we stayed in a cabin when visiting family up in Canada (or was it Cheboygan? I was tiny!).

Luckily I have an extra outdoorsy boyfriend who promised to take me; and thus began a birthday road trip of epic proportions that changed about six thousand times between its inception and its actualization.  It’s been over a month since this trip occurred, and I have no idea how to be succinct when it comes to words, so the below archive of five days spent delighting in beer and mountains will probably be lengthy and scattered, but if you can bear with me, I promise there are a whole lot of pretty pictures.

Day 1 – Denver -> Durango -> Mesa Verde

I got up at the crack of dawn for a mostly uneventful flight (seriously people, Spirit is not the devil people make them out to be) to Denver, where Nate met me with hot coffee (this is how I know he truly likes & understands me) and then loaded me up in his car and we commenced the Longest Drive Ever.  The positive thing about driving in Colorado is: EVERYTHING IS LOVELY AND MOUNTAINS.  The other positive thing was bananas and almond butter.

A few hours in we happened upon the glorious act of serendipity that was the discovery that we were like six seconds away from Elevation Brewing Company – so of course we stopped for some libations to tide our weakening selves over until we hit Durango to hit up Ska Brewing Company, home of the Actual Worst Designed Logo, but what might be one of the coolest views I’ve ever had from a brewery patio.

From there we were back on the road to Mesa Verde National Park where we camped out & built an $18 fire, drank some incredible sour birthday beers and took a walk on which an outrageous amount of wildlife happened in ridiculously close proximity, and then curled up slept in the delightful outdoors (the verdict: I am pleased by camping).

Your intrepid road trippers.

No one with any history in graphic design made this.

My first lil' camp site :')

$18 fires & Russian River sours; this is how I want to always spend my birthday.

Day Two – Mesa Verde -> Ouray

We woke up early and I ate approximately 8 pounds of trail mix for breakfast while desperately creating camp coffee and trying to tame my greasy, unwashed camping hair (eventually a ponytail did the trick….sort of), and then drove ourselves further out into the park for a couple mile hike through some ruins to see some seriously cool petroglyphs. 10,000+ steps by 10:00 am, baby!  Also at some point during this hike I decided to try doing basket/bound headstands at a precarious cliff edge and succeeded for the first time ever without a wall to support myself, so you’re pretty badass, Colorado wilderness.

Midday we set out on some twisty turny windy rainy mountain roads (seriously the temperature drops between morning to afternoon to night in this state are outrageous) and made our way to this tiny little town nestled in the mountains called Ouray, where we found ourselves a camp site and then ventured down into the (rainy) civilization to go to a brewery that was literally called “Mr. Grumpy Pants” (aka the Ourayle House), as well as the actual Ouray Brewery, and then investigated the local hot springs (ALWAYS hot springs) before trekking back to camp where Nate made me some incredible burrito concoction and then we ate Bon Bon Bons, investigated a river, and drank a truly fantastic quad until I was too frozen to do anything but curl up and sleep until sunrise.

I also did a headstand here.

Petroglyphs!

Why are there all kinds of cars pulled over on this terrifying mountain road? Oh, because GIANT WATERFALL.

Day 3 – Ouray -> Glenwood Springs

Again, randomly, Colorado mornings continued to be absolutely sunny and beautiful, and after I repurposes leftover burrito insides into scrambled eggs we went on a morning hike around the area.  Ouray in the winter is home to a huge ice climbing park, so we were basically clambering all around a bunch of cliffs & rock formations lined with modified sprinkler systems & giant pipes to transport water that freezes everything over in the winter.  As the world’s most amateur ice climber ever I was transfixed with desire to come back and show everyone just how bad(ass) I am at scaling frozen over rock walls.  Someday, Ouray.  Someday.

After our morning excursion we popped into a super cute little coffee shop where I had a cappuccino with house-made brown sugar cinnamon sauce (MORE PLEASE) and a slice of almond-flour blueberry coffee cake (ALSO MORE) and then headed out to what was originally going to be Redstone, but ended up being Glenwood Springs because we couldn’t find a campsite.

The weather in Glenwood Springs took a crazy turn for the OUTRAGEOUS DOWNPOUR, but I was a thousand percent restless after being trapped in a car for so long and I whined about it for long enough that Nate indulged me in waiting it out so we could hike Hanging Lake Trail, which ended up being SO worth it.  The damp, slightly rainy weather actually made the hike really enjoyable – at some points it felt like we were actually traversing through a rainforest.  The whole hike out was uphill, but the view at the end was SO worth it.  Plus after a sweaty descent there were more (bigger than football field-sized) hot springs in our future, so life was delightful.  (We also stopped at the Glenwood Springs Brewery afterward, and a beer bar where I got tequila barrel aged IPA, which is probably the best possible way to follow up soaking in a giant oversized natural hot tub for an hour).

I’d promised to provide at least one gourmet camp dinner, so that night we ate fancy soba noodles by candlelight (and more bon bon bons and beers beers beers) and then passed the fuck out.

That sunrise, though...

Got that freezing cold camp cooking on lock.

Now picture climbing up this when it's covered in ice.

Hike a soggy mile and a half uphill for this? Yes.

....now come on, Colorado wilderness, just stop.

Hot springs for dayssssss...

The worse food photo I've ever taken.

Day 4 – Glenwood Springs -> Denver

Because he is the greatest human, Nate found – seriously – what was basically a Scottie Dog fucking convention and (after an incredible Cajun breakfast that included bison meatloaf) delivered me to basically an ARMY of adorable little black old men dogs for a late birthday present.  Possible greatest most ridiculous moment of my life (don’t ask me why but I’ve been obsessed with Scotties since I was tiny – I think it has to do with Walker’s Shortbread but don’t quote me on that).

Following the Actual Scottie Dog Celebration Picnic, we headed up into the city to go drink allllllllll the sour beers at Crooked Stave, followed by a mini city brewery tour that included the best Devils on Horseback I’ve ever eaten (made with peppadew peppers instead of dates!) and a Czech restaurant where I buried my face in svickova and Pilser Urquell.

LITTLE OLD MEN DOGS <3 <3 <3

This was someone literally ordering a flight of EVERYTHING.

I salivate just LOOKING at these. Can someone tell me where to find peppadew peppers in Michigan?

Be still, my little quasi-Czechoslovakian heart.

Day 5 – More Denver

Okay yeah, camping is over at this point, but a thousand other things are not so shut up and bear with me.

After fancy coffee and a walk through downtown, we went and had breakfast at Ophelia’s, which I had never heard of before, but which is this fantastic sprawling former-brothel decked out in fancy string lights, old vaguely sexually explicit posters and bathroom stalls made out of yardsticks, where I ate lingonberry duck meatballs over PARSNIP GRITS dear god I love parsnips.

Following this we urban hiked our way up to Epic, to Ratio (that strawberry berlinerweisse, though), Spangalang, and then a handful of bottle shops so I could load up my suitcase (this bitch came in at 49.1 lbs – the airline limit without extra fees is 50), and Sugar House Bakery because ARTISAN POP TARTS.

Oh my gosh the difference a shower makes.

The haul!

So, long story short: camping happened.  Glorious nature happened.  Beer happened.  Mountains happened.  I was distraught to return to extra flat Michigan, but my kitties were pleased to see me home.  Next adventure please!

7 month check in??

I had this idea to do a mid-year check in on all the goals I set at the beginning of the year (and the other day I listened to a podcast with Chalene Johnson on push goals and how to be successful at setting and maintaining goals that reminded me again), but now it’s August, so it’s kind of less a mid-year check in and more….a mid-year plus a little more check in.  The good news is I’ve been doing productive sorts of things in the meantime!  Mostly!  But anyway!

• Practice yoga more regularly – I started the year off REALLY strong with this, going 2-3 times a week and just loving it.  I still love yoga (especially a really awesome juicy hot vinyasa class with enormously loud music where I can just lose myself in my body), but…..it’s summer, and being in a 100 degree room full of other sweaty bodies is just harder to find the motivation for right now.  BUT I’ve still been going around once a week, and putting in a lot of work on the “flashier” aspects – after months of trying, I finally nailed getting up into & holding bound headstand without any sort of wall! (Actually my first successful bound handstand with no wall happened on a precarious cliff edge at Mesa Verde in Colorado….

• Incorporate more strength training – YES!!  I’ve been going to barbell-based group fitness classes two days a week, which have been fabulous, even though they use simple iron grip equipment & not full size bars – I’ve definitely seen large strength improvements. My squats, chest & back have gone up exponentially and I’m slowly dragging my biceps along as well.  I just started a new boot camp program and let me tell you what, outdoor tire flips & prowler pushes ALL DAY make you feel pretty bad ass.  My new goal is to get into my gym’s Alpha Training (similar to Crossfit, with Olympic lifting & WOD-style workouts) by the end of the year!

• Read 50 books – I’m at 36! Definitely on track to finish 50+ by the end of the year.  Reading is something I haven’t done that much of in the past couple years, and it has felt REALLY good to get back into it.  I’ve been carving out an hour or so at night to do nothing but read from the comfort of my bed (I’ve even in the past week been starting to leave my phone OUTSIDE the bedroom charging through the night, which I never thought I’d be able to do…) and it’s such a nice way to wind down at the end of the day.

• Get more done – I’d say this is about 75/25.  I HAVE been doing much better at planning out my days to make the  most of my time, and I’ve gotten a lot of things done that I’ve been wanting to/planning on and at forcing myself to just get up and accomplish a task, but there are still those 5-10 minute jobs that I just can’t find it in my not to procrastinate on…

• Write more – PFFT. Moving on.  

• Run at least 6 races – I’ve done 3 so far (The Color Vibe, Hightail to Ale, & Insane Inflatable 5K) and have another one scheduled tonight (Glow in the Park!), so I’m almost there J  Looking at a Halloween race as well as maybe something closer to winter (Hot Chocolate 5k in Columbus is a possibility). I actually really like running when it’s colder out!

• Brew one batch a month – I’ve kept CLOSE to this. I’ve also gotten a lot more scientific in my brewing & started doing a much better job monitoring the process & my efficiencies, which I think has made a pretty substantial difference in overall quantity.  I’ve made a few really quality brews this year, and I’m pretty excited about this barleywine that I’ve got fermenting away right now, as well as the watermelon gose that’s currently in the works!  The second half of this goal was to seriously look in to an apprenticeship or volunteering at a brewery, which I have NOT put time and effort into yet, but I have one lead (a friend is head brewer at a brewery that is expanding) and one potential lead (a brewery run by a guy in my homebrew club is slated to open in a couple months), so the possibilities are out there….  

Bon bon bons & beers beers beers <3

•  Go camping for the first time ever! – YES!!  This happened and it was fabulous!  I went out to Colorado over my birthday and was treated to some glorious company, incredible beer, mountains to die for and also an army of Scottie dogs (no, really).  Despite the fact that it happened over a month ago, I still want to write about the experience so maybe someday…

Overall I think I’ve made some pretty decent progress – obviously there’s some things I’ve skimped out on, but 2015 has been MUCH more good than bad when it comes to personal improvement, and there’s still 5 months left!