Gonna hit up the legitimate theatre tonight:
For the past four weeks, Dell’Arte teachers have guided the actors through the Melodramatic territory, a style normally associated with twirling mustaches and maidens tied to railway lines. Six, student-devised, 15-minute plays explore moral dilemmas, neurosis, obsession and the struggle against repressive forces.
Sounds like my kind of thing. I like watching people perform stuff they create, and the fact that it’s at bunch of 15-minute vignettes means that if any one is kinda awful — which with student work is virtually guaranteed, and as it should be — it will be over soon and the next one will be better. I think it’ll be nice.
In nerd news, comment spam has reared its ugly head. I’ll be tweaking things to try and change that so my apologies if that prevents you, my beloved readers, from yakking back at me.
And now, a grab-bag of thoughts with spring in the air.
For starters, here’s a pointless 20-second video of my man Mark’s “outdoor bike garage”:
We’ve also been experimenting with home-brewery — sustainable booze! — and these efforts are beginning to bear fruit. Mark and Zya’s first batch came out highly drinkable if not quite outstanding, and the second batch (ready to be opened tomorrow) looks even better. It had a robust color and a slightly-hoppy crisp flavor when we tasted it during the bottling process.
Mark is building up a good kit for making this a repeatable process. Batch number two introduced an innovative bottling mechanism, basically a food-grade five-gallon bucket with a spigot in the bottom. It’s a lot easier than siphoning directly from the carboy into the 22-oz bottles (detritus from my taste for big heady beers) we wash and sterilize.
The next logical step is to get a small keg and a CO2 system going, which will eliminate the need for bottling at all and render a drinkable beer much more quickly. As it is, we feed the yeast a final bit of malt/sugar before pouring and capping the 22s, relying on the small amount of in-bottle fermentation to give us carbonation. Some friends were by this week who have the CO2 tank and soda keg thing going on, and it’s pretty sweet to carry around your beer on-tap.
It’s been gorgeous the past few days, and the warming sun feels good in my blood. Things feel like they’re picking up, and I’m looking forward to some St. Paddy’s Day revelry tomorrow. Though I’m sure it’s not quite the same here as back in Nueva Jorka, I think I can make a day of it anyhow.
Next week I’ll be down in the Bay, where Chapter Three in the process of securing nice, lofty office space. We’ve got ‘Sheed coming in from Chi-town and are going to spend three days planning world domination, then nerd it out with the rest of the global crew in Sunnyvale.
