Started a AMA over on reddit.

Getting a lot of questions. It is pretty cool.

yup I used to manually masturbate turkeys for artificial insemination.

till one day a turkey came up to me and said “gobble, gobble”

I said “oh hell no, you are getting a hand job like the rest”

I keed I keed. Happy turkey day everybody.

look for the turkey fry vid to come. yeah I know it is a bit late, but it will work next year and for xmas.

I brewed beer professionaly for about 7 years. Four at Crane River and 3.5 at Misty’s steakhouse and Brewery.

I was an active homebrewer when I first started working for Crane River. I made friends with the brewer and eventually got to assist a bit in the brewery. It was awesome. Brewing a batch of beer on a scale of 9 barrels (279 gallons) on proequipment is pretty easy. It does involve some manual labor, it is a dusty, sticky, smelly, and hot environment, but there is lots of just sit back and let it do its thing time. I was going to college and often would get my study on while brewing. Towards the end I would bring in my laptop and play games or watch movies.

Grinding 300 – 400 pounds of grain started it off. It was amazingly dusty. I wore a respirator and swimming goggles. Brewers lung is not fun. Mix the grain with temp controlled water and let it sit for 2 hours. Then rinse the sugar off the grain and boil the wort. Another 90 minutes of kicking it. Cool and move the wort to the fermenter, which took about an hour as well. A brew day took 9 hours.

The pride I felt inside my glass cage sweating like crazy peering out and seeing folks enjoying a product I made was awesome. Spraying the glass with wter when kids came up to the glass. Inviting interested folk who looked into the brewery for a look around. All of it was fun. Cleaning beer tanks out is not fun. being a brewer is mostly just cleaning with a scrubby. The manway was a 20 x 16 inch hole I had to climb through with a spelunker lightm gloves, boots, and buckets of cleaner. The tanks were not tall enough to stand up in so I squatted and scrubbed. Rinsing it out while inside it was a bit tricky.

I was able to make my own hours which ruled. Sometimes brewing late into the evening and watching the sun come up. I was going to classes and working other jobs as well, so I had to squeeze in brewing time whenever I could. Prob only about 20 hours a week on average. And free beer was a major benefit.

I loved home brewing and then I turned it into a job. It kinda wore on me after a while. The love and passion for brewing slipped away. I spent over a year trying to get out of it. Lucky for me George took over for me and he kicks butt. I still love good beer, I love trying new beers, I love beer, just not making thousands of gallons of it.

Here at the state IT dept we have a 1 year contract open to assist with the desktop server support team.

Should have a puter type degree and like not wearing jeans.

Just thought I would let yall know.

Following family tradition in the reverse, my Dad is now a donut maker which I once was. Papa had lost his job when Quebecore closed. They broke NAFTA stuff and he will be reimbursed by them to equal his wage no matter where he got a job. He chose wal-mart. he was in the deli, which pretty much sucked and asked to be transfered to the donut area, he got it. They bake their donuts which come in frozen, should be cake (tee he he).

A blog about donuts.

So Monday night after my first day I go for a bike ride with friends and Fuggles, she did 10 miles. I enjoy a few brews, 3-4 over the course of the whole evening, hardly a buzz (over 5 hours). Yet Tues morning I feel hungover. I now know what it was. I had to mess with windows all fricking day at my new job. It just drained me working with the craptacular OS. I hate to be a snob, but it is just so frustrating dealing with something so inferior when you have to administer a network. Putty, winscp, all the rebooting, ugh……

I got a crappy workstation that had XP installed on it to use. I worked with the guys, got used to their domain setup, got my computer all in order, it sucked. First off I had to use windows on a crappy PC. It just sucked all the joy out of the whole new job thing. Yes working at the state IT dept I will be in windows often. But using it as my desktop just killed me. I can deal with windows in a VM as long as I am actually using linux as my desktop.

So I go home, download the newest beta ubuntu linux, feisty fawn, and load it up at work today. I get my XP virtual machine going but the PC I am working on only has 512 of ram and it is hurting. The guys I work with feel my pain and hook me up with an awesome machine (they suggested it, I did not bitch a bit). A pentium 4 dual core 3.2 ghz dual monitor 2GB of RAM badass. I went into work this eve for a few hours just to get it all kicking. The thing is rocking with beryl and my XP VM has a gig of ram for itself. I like new job Can’t wait to go in tomorrow.

Well it looks like today is the last day I will be working in the Capitol doing IT stuff for the Legislature. Well kinda. I am being contracted out tot he state IT department for six months which hopefully will end with me becoming part of their department.

Why am I sad? Well this has been a dream job. I was very lucky to get a job here and I have learned soooooo much. Plus I knew people who worked here for many years before I started, in fact that is how I got the job. So I will definitely miss my coworkers and the positive atmosphere.

I will be working in the Division of communications just an underground tunnel away from them though. And well we will be dealing with each other often. So I am not too far out of the loop. I would of been completely happy staying where I am, but when you get an opportunity, well you should not pass it up.

Well lets see. I did a bunch of crap there. Gonna save the cool one for the next post though.

- Expediter – Work the expo or basically the person who takes the food from the cooks and trays it up for the servers. booring and kinda stressful, but not too bad.

- Manager (kinda)- I would do some late shifts and some early ones when other “real” managers were not around.

- Bartender – Well mostly a daytime bartender. So I filled soda and maybe a few drinks. basically I was the front of the house. A glorified host and cashier for breaking bills and ringing up employee food. it was lame and booooooring. night time was different though. it could get busy and many folks liked to sit at the bar and eat / drink. Specially if the place was full and they could not get a table and of course the employee lounge was quite a money maker. Then there was football saturdays.

Oh man let me tell you a bit about those.

So during my time in the pizza biz, meeting my life partner, and realizing being a manager of min wage employees sucks, I got into home brewing big time. Theresa even drank a few of my homebrews while trying to win me over, but she was actually tricking me cuz she does not drink and spilled some on accident (yeah right ). I was interested in working at a brewery. Crane river hired me as a server.

Hmmmm…… I guess I can really lay into the place now that it is defunct, but I will not be too harsh. As I had mentioned about my Village Inn days, restaurant workers are drunks and druggies. The hippy like atmosphere there only made it worse. Kind of a unique place, really was like a true brewpub. Was actually a clone of Wynkoop brewpub in CO. Same equipment and menu, well really close.

After managing the pizza joint I switched to delivering pizza’s since that was one of the best jobs I have ever had. Figured I would earn some more tips by delivering flowers during the day for a very popular flower shop. Knowing the delivery biz I was hired immediately and get trained for 1/2 a day and I was off. Right away I figured I had made a big mistake. Flower delivery guys do not make tips, well hardly ever.