Winter Fun!

Greetings from Santa Fe! My snowman and I are happy to see you!


For reference, I know it's a crappy snowman. It was pretty lousy packing snow, so I did the best I could. Anyway, while I've been out here, I indulged in a bit of a culinary experiment with a Russian winter drink called sbiten. Following the recipe listed there, I assembled all the necessary ingredients. While there is an option to make a non-alcoholic version of it, that just seemed silly to me, so I actually got a decent bottle of wine to throw into it.


It calls for a bottle of wine, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, honey and blackberry jam. After putting the wine on to boil, I started getting the ginger and nutmeg ready, and I may have put in slightly more than the recipe required, but I figured subtlety could wait until my second batch.


After the wine was up to a good boil, I threw in all the ingredients, including a whole jar of blackberry jam, which may be a bit of overkill, but I was following the recipe. So, I let it simmer for a while, stirring occasionally.



And then it was time to serve it! At which point, several problems became apparent. One, I should have put the cloves in a tea-ball or some manner of spice-bag, as I kept picking them out of my teeth. Secondly, it was THICK. I mean, it was less a drink than it was a flavorful, alcoholic porridge. On the plus side, it tasted great. Sweet from the honey and jam, with all the appropriate kicks from the nutmeg, ginger and cloves. Almost a bit overwhelming, actually, so I may scale back next time. I will also definitely scale back on the jam, perhaps using half a jar next time, in addition to a larger portion of wine, as I wound up making approximately 5 mugs worth of it. Still, I killed my portion, as I did rather enjoy it.


In any case, happy New Years! Here's to more adventures in 2011, and more regular blogging as well!

Moo Cow Milk Stout

Several months ago, I noticed that my brewing crew, formally known as the Beat Attack Brew Shack, had not brewed anything in ages. Usually one of the other members would whip up a recipe and we'd all get together and brew it up, but since we'd run plumb out of ideas and enthusiasm, I opted to create a recipe of my own. Ever since I had Mackeson's Milk Stout, I'd always wanted to try my hand at a similar beer, as it's quite delicious. So I reviewed a number of recipes and cobbled together my own, as follows:

6.5 lb Two Row Pale Malt
1 lb of Crystal 20L Malt
0.25 lb Flaked Barley
0.75 lb Flaked Oat
1.5 lb Roasted Barley
1 lb Victory Malt
With hop additions of Cascade and Goldings hops at 30 minutes and 45 minutes into the boil, respectively. I also threw in 8 ounces of lactose during bottling, hence making it a milk stout.


It's turned out rather well. There's a bit of chocolate and coffee in the flavor, and while it's not super smooth, the lactose gives it a great deal of body. The hops aren't very pronounced, but I didn't want them to be. In any case, I'm certainly happy with how it turned out, and will definitely be brewing this again.

Fencing Recap and Tournament Report

So I have a lot of footage this week, as you can see (presuming you have the patience for 6 minutes of fencing without any sound):



What I'm taking away from these bouts is:
1) I'm constantly getting caught out when I lead with a massive advance. It's a huge signal to my opponent that I'm about to attack, and it brings me into a distance where it's easy to get hit and pretty difficult to parry. When I don't do it, I'm usually able to at least get in an exchange of parries and potentially a riposte, which brings me to my second point.
2) I'm not disengaging or using broken time near enough. I keep trying to get by my opponent's parries with speed rather than getting around them, which rarely works.
3) My false retreats always need to be followed up with lunges. There are several spots where my leg goes back, and I just fence from a weird lunge position without actually going forward, which really accomplishes nothing.
4) I should probably edit these videos down to some sort of theme, such as a specific action or problem I'm having, this is kind of a 6 minute mess of a video. Plus, I should set it to music, but the only appropriate song I can think of tends to make people laugh out loud after about 30 seconds.

In other news, this past weekend was San Diego's premier fencing tournament, UCSD's Bladerunner, in which I actually did not do half bad. I place 13th out of 48 overall, losing out by a touch to Ben Dorn, who went on to place 3rd. While I'm somewhat frustrated with myself for the loss, I'm mostly really enthused about how well I did overall, especially since this was the first tournament of the season for me, and the highest I've ever placed at this particular event. It's a good start!



This week, I'm hoping to do a better job of incorporating disengages into my game, and also to eliminate my half-retreat problem. Stay tuned!

Fencing Recap 11/4/2010

True to my word, I'm putting these videos together in an almost timely fashion! This is only a week old! In any case, there are two 15 touch bouts recorded here, one against Dave Drake and one against Mike Perry. I lost both, but it's pretty instructive.



Points about these bouts:
1) My front foot is slipping a lot when I lunge. This is mostly due to a lack of commitment to the lunge itself, I'm letting momentum take me rather than properly pushing off my back foot.
2) In both bouts, I'm reacting a lot more than I'm making them react. I have really bad counter-attacking habit that doesn't do me any good since it's not aggressive enough to make them miss or disrupt their timing. Basically, it only works if they're going to miss anyway, which isn't something I can ever count on.
3) My flicks aren't landing, mostly due to the distance. There's too much windup in the arm, so I'm way too close by the time I'm extending again. It needs to happen in front of my body the whole time so that my feet don't wind up too close to my opponent.
4) Towards the end of my bout with Perry, Tedd told me to stop angling my hand and body to the left in order to hit Mike, which really helped overall, I made a bit of a comeback at the end.

So that's what I'll be working on tonight. Let me know if there's anything I missed in the comments!

Nerd Collage

So a little while ago, I joined a little social network called "The Node" which is specifically set up for nerds like myself, and one of the initial 'nerdsourcing' tasks they suggested was to construct a nerd collage of all of one's favorite nerdy items. I was probably a rare example of putting in some sporting equipment, but hey, it's what I do.

So you can see some fencing gear, climbing harness, comics, Lord of the Rings, Dr. Who, Fallout, my beloved macbook, homebrew, and my deerstalker, just to show my Sherlock-love. All in all, it's about as good a physical representation of all of my interests as I can put together. Anyway, just posting something until I can get the next fencing video up. 'Til next time!

New Projects!

Hello interwebs! It's been a long while since I've blogged, and I've been working on some stuff in the meantime. And by 'working on stuff' I mean 'fencing and climbing a lot'. I've also been brewing, having recently come up with my first recipe. And most recently, I've started taking a metal working class in hope of learning how to actually weld! Affixing metal! To metal! With fire! It's really a blast.

This is an example of my current plasma cutting ability! Which is to say, it's not great, but it'll get better. It's supposed to say UCSD.
Recently, my fencing club has recently set up a camera system so we can replay our bouts and examine them. I took a couple and put them together. I lose both bouts, naturally, but they are somewhat instructive. You can see them below!


In any case, I hope there'll be more soon. And greetings chinese spammers! It's good to know that I've got readers still.