The Sounds Inside My Mind

I’ve made a long overdue update to my sidebar lists. Nissa and I have a baltic porter (named after the great jazz song) that will be ready to drink in a week…just in time for Nissa’s birthday. Sure, a strong, dark beer isn’t what you think of as the warm summer months roll in, but it’s a style I’ve wanted to brew for a while and a name I had to use. To get away from the dark malt beers, we are preparing to brew two seasonally appropriate beers in the next week. First up is a simple blonde ale. Second is a standard summertime saison that we will use a yeast we’re culturing from a bottle of De Blaugies/Hill Farmstead Le Vermontoise.

I’ve also updated my list of upcoming races. At the end of the month, I’m running the second Craft Brew Races 5k to be held in Portland. I won a bib in the lottery for the 40th Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC in October. As a training run for that race, I’ll head to Hampton, NH to take part in the Smuttynose Rockfest half marathon. Lastly, I am also running the Thunder Road marathon in Charlotte, NC in Novemeber. The last three races I’ve listed I will be running with my mom. She is also running the Mainly Marathons race in Sanford on August 24*. After finishing Thunder Road, she will have qualified for the Marathon Maniacs! Way to go Mom!

*Mainly Marathons is running a promotion right now where you can enter one of their races for free if you’ve never participated in one of their events! Check it out on their homepage.

Tröegs Rugged Trail Nut Brown Ale

B- / 3.35
look: 3 | smell: 3 | taste: 3.5 | feel: 3.5 | drink: 4

Poured from a cellar temperature bottle into a pint glass. There is no freshness date on the bottle, but I’ve had it for a number of months, so it may be past its prime. The beer is a very dark brown; not as dark as dark chocolate, but close to that. There was a modest head of tan bubbles that quickly settled to something that’s less than a skim of foam, just a few small bubbles and a little foam lacing, but I can see bare spots as well. Swirling the beer around gives a minimal amount of lacing. There’s a little sweet malt in the nose; maybe some raisin; and some warm, toasted grain. All of the aromas are very slight though. The beer has some sweet malt flavor up from to compliment the aroma. This gives way to a nutty, biting flavor. At first I thought it was an off taste; but after taking a few more sips, I like it. The flavor is a bit watery for my tastes, and I’m the first to say that I’m not a big fan of brown ales, but I like this one. This beer has a light body, but it is also complex. The watery flavor makes it feel light at first, but the robust, nuttiness in the finish gives the beer some punch as you swallow. Very little mouthcoating, just a hint of sweetness can be found if you go looking for it. This beer drinks very easy. I can’t think of any real objections, other than it’s not a challenging beer. The Rugged Trail will never command your full attention, but would be great to drink whilst engaged in other activities.

In other news: 500th post! Woo!

I’ve created a Twitter account that will be used exclusively for updates related to this blog.  You can follow it by visiting @SoundsInside.  I’ll let my follower’s know when a new post has been published to this site, as well as other interesting tidbits related to The Sounds Inside My Mind.  The most recent update from this account will always be displayed in the sidebar, underneath my main Twitter account’s recent tweets.

I spend more time on Twitter than I do posting to this blog.  Ever since I integrated my Twitter stream to this blog, there have been fewer and fewer blog posts and more and more collections of tweets showing up as blog posts.  I’ve decided to disable the tweets as blog posts feature; they will no longer show up in the blog feed.  My five most recent tweets will still be visible in the sidebar.  If you do want to keep tabs on my twitter thoughts, you can subscribe to them via RSS, but the best thing to do would be to sign up for a twitter account and follow me!

I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.7.1; I’ve also installed the latest versions of the Flickr badge and Twitter Tools.  Hopefully my tweets will begin to autopost here again.  If you see any irregularities, let me know!

One thing I’d like to with this blog this year is post a series of album reviews. I spend a lot of time listening to music, and enjoy talking about it. It’s about time I wrote some of this down and shared it with you. I’m not sure how often I’ll post album reviews, but I’d like to do at least one a week, if I can. The first review will be posted shortly.

All year I have been keeping track of how many beers I’ve drank and movies I’ve watched.  The final totals are 148 movies and 611 beers.  About one third of those drinks came as part of Novare Res’ Uprising challenge.

For 2009, I’ll be keeping track of movies and beers, as well as the books I read.  To view this list there is a Movie + a Beer link at the top of every page.

I finished Novare’s Uprising challenge tonight.  Eric gave me a recomendation for my final beer, which followed, it was quite excellent.  Overall, it was a rewarding and fun experience to fullfill the Uprising.  If you are a beer fan I recommend you take a shot at it.  It may be expensive, but it’s worth your while.

In other news, this is my 300th Post.

I was checking out my web stats to see what kinds of search terms bring people to my site.  Surprisingly, one was jim flanagan cats.  Even more surprising is that my site is the second result for this search term.  I’m also glad that someone stumbled upon my site by looking for an autograph of the Singing Nun.

In other news, Nissa and I are still looking for a house to buy.  We found one we liked that we put a low-ball offer on.  The people selling the house also received another offer the same which must have been higher than ours, for they decided to negotiate with the other prospective buyers.  We’ll be looking a three houses in South Portland later today, one of which looks very promising.  I hope we can find something soon.  I’d really like to get out of our apartment when the lease ends on May 31.

I’m going to start a mildly ambitious project this year: document every film I watch and every beer I drink.  I think I have fairly diverse tastes in both categories, and for a brief period in college, I kept a list of all the movies I watched, but this is my first attempt to catalog and analyze my viewing and drinking habits.  I’m hoping it will be insightful, but perhaps all we’ll discover is that I drink too much High Life and PBR.  Either way, I think it will be fun.  The list will be stored on a separate page, linked from the bar above.  I’ll update it as often as warranted. So far, we’re at 3 movies, 1.5 beers.