Can people help me clear something up? It's bothered me for a long time, and I'm honestly not trying to be a jackass:
If God is all-knowing, and all-wise, and has a plan (which is implicitly perfect) for how history will unfold, and if it's vain and irreligious to question His will, then how/why is prayer supposed to work? If you ask nicely enough, often enough, He might just change his mind on your behalf? Isn't it vain an irreligious to think that you know better than He what is best? How is prayer not blasphemy?
I see that Nebraska is splitting its 5 electoral votes, but despite Trump only getting 60% of the popular vote he's getting 80% of the electors. My guess is that the two electors each state gets as a participation trophy aren't being proportionally allocated but instead going to whoever "wins" the state?
Nice thought, Nebraska, but you kind of half-assed it here.
Bottled my ginger-lemon cider. It was very dry after 11 days fermenting so I added 112g of brown sugar and bottled. It'll burn off some of that making bubbles, but it should still come out slightly sweet.
I just bottled the cranberry cider. With just over 100 ounces I was able to fill 5 18oz bottles, plus a little extra. The little plastic bottle will let me know when the bottle conditioning (carbonation) is complete -- when it's no longer squishy, then I can pasteurize the rest to kill off the yeast and halt fermentation.
I just released pod_feeder_v2 1.0.6 which updates the required version of the python feedparser module for python 3.9 compatibility. If you're running pod_feeder_v2 from source please be sure to run pip3 install -U requirements.txt after updating. If you've installed it via pip this should be taken care of for you automatically.
The cranberry cider is ready for bottling, which means an airlock just freed up, so I'm on to my next project: tea wine. For those unfamiliar, it's basically fermented sweet tea. There's enough sugar that it should end up in the 10-13% range.
These will be a week old tomorrow. Plain on the left, cranberry on the right. I'm going to rack them tomorrow and give a taste to see where they're at.
My usual go-to beers all come in cans, but now that I'm getting into home brewing I need cheap pop-top bottles so I'm slumming it a bit. But hey, they come with free beer!
I'm watching The Queen's Gambit, and it makes me think of that joke:
Two men are playing a friendly game of chess, when one says to the other, "care to make things more interesting?" To which the other replies, "sure". So, they do something else instead.
This spring I created a 6'x4' woodchip bed specifically for growing wine cap mushrooms (Stropharia rugosoannulata). I was also setting up a Hügelkultur mound at the same time, so I threw a handful of mushroom spawn into it just for shits. Both beds were fairly prolific producers of wild mushrooms such as mica caps all throughout the summer and fall, but sadly no wine caps -- but I was just out by the Hügel pulling out some old broccoli plants to throw into the compost pile and saw this little guy poking up. I guess that means it wasn't a total dud. Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come next season. We'll see. 🤞