Beer Tasting

Beer is a two-syllable word. Or so the Australians would have us think.

This evening I attended a beer tasting benefit for the local humane society. The owner of a local liquor business and his brother, the owner of a local large hotel franchise, hosted it. Our host and beer educator was from Merchant Du Vin, the sole importer of many craft European beers sold in the U.S. Pictured below is the spread, which was split among the four of us at the table. Alas, we left a fair bit of it on the table - given enough time I might have been able to drink my 1/4 share, but the tables were set for 8, so it would have been quite the feat even to do that much. It didn't help that the wait staff kept bringing out food to go with the beer. My stomach groaned even as I gave it more excellent stuff.

Our host was exceedingly knowledgeable. Apparently all he and his colleagues do, when not selling their wares to local retailers, is go from country to country and sample the best stuff around. Tough gig. He held forth for over two hours about the different kinds of beers, anecdotes about their development, and why European beer is so much different than American.



The lineup for the evening was:
Ayinger Brau-Weisse, and outstanding wheat beer that would have been even better in hot weather. Brewer's page here, for those that speak German.

Samuel Smith's Organic Lager, India Pale Ale, and Imperial Stout. The IPA was refreshing - it didn't knock you over the head with the hops, and instead was just downright pleasant. As our host put it to us, "Guinness is on the light end of stouts. This is on the heavy end." That should put it in perspective - it was like pouring chocolate.

Zatec, a Czech "Brilliant Lager." It is better to call it a pilsner (a subset of lagers), but the EU forbids any beer not brewed in Pilsn from carrying the name "Pilsner."

Orval Trappist Ale. Apparently, trappist ales are a very specific class of beer. To officially be a trappist, it has to be brewed by monks, in the monastery, to cover the monastery's costs, and 65% of the profit must go to charity. For some trappist beers, they meet their operating and charity quota mid-year, and just go out of stock until the next. This one was unbelievably aromatic in taste and bouquet, floral, with a very persistent head.

Westmalle Trappist Dubbel - this was in a 750-mL bottle, like wine. At 8% alcohol and very smooth, it is meant to be sipped like wine. As it turns out, our table had most of a full bottle leftover, which I was allowed to cork and take with me.

Green's Endeavor Gluten Free Dubbel Ale. This was of the same style as the Westmalle, but brewed with rice instead of malt, and some other changes, so that it contains no gluten, and is thus accessible to drinkers suffering from celiac's disease.

Traquair Jacobite Ale. The Traquair House is, apparently, the oldest habitation in Scotland, and belongs to the Stuarts. When the Stuarts fell, they shuttered the house until they reclaimed the throne. That didn't go so well for them. In the 60's, thought, the patriarch reopened the house and turned it into a brewery. This thick dark Scotch Ale is aged 10 years in oak casks and is to ordinary beer what cream sherry is to chardonnay.

Lindemans Peche and Framboise Lambics. These two are becoming trendy these days. Very sweet, low in alcohol, low in fizz, and very smooth, they are able to take the place of champagne in various functions. The host described women requesting cases or kegs of this stuff for their bachelorette parties. The Peche tasted just like peaches, and the Framboise like very flavorful raspberries.

All in all, I'd say I downed only a bit more than two pints' worth. Still, it was an awful lot to take in. Good thing I took notes.

Snow!

Tonight, Rochester is experiencing its first real snow of the year. There's about a half an inch on the ground now, as we return from Jasper's evening romp. We'd been waiting eagerly to see how Jasper would respond, and as we'd hoped, he loves the snow! He ran around and around as usual, occasionally stopping to bury his nose in the chilly white stuff. He looked like he was auditioning for Santa Claus or Gandalf by the end of our walk. The scary inflatable snowmen down the block have deflated, so he can even stroll down the sidewalk unmolested. So, a step in the right direction towards Jasper the mountain dog. Maybe we'll even be out on skis soon!

We spent the evening at the local Radisson, which was hosting a beer tasting to benefit Paws and Claws, the humane society where I volunteer. I helped man the front table with shelter information and a couple of puppies looking for homes, and Alex bought a ticket and got to sample all the beers and goodies. There was a guy talking about each of the different brews, and Alex took many notes, so I'm sure a separate post is forthcoming. I did get a sniff of the raspberry one, and it smelled delicious!

The pediatrics inpatient service is going wonderfully. I really like the team that I'm working with, and we've seen some very interesting patients. The consultant supervising the team this week is fantastic—he is very encouraging and also gives great feedback about how to improve, and he spends at least 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, with us students every day answering questions and quizzing us about patients and important pediatrics concepts. I had a good overnight call on Tuesday, with about 5 hours of sleep out of the 34 spent at the hospital. I'll be on again overnight on Saturday, the bummer is that I don't really get a weekend, since I'll be there from about 7 AM Sat to noon or 1 on Sunday. I'm sure Alex will delay the Sunday waffles until I get home, though! Knowing that Puerto Rico is coming up at the end of this stretch makes all things bearable.

More from Alex soon, I think. We'll see if we can get some snow pictures of Jasper, maybe Sunday afternoon if it sticks.

Jasper on the Go

We had a beautiful sunny day today, and decided to take advantage of it by heading out for a long romp with Jasper. We went to Quarry Hill Park, and he got plenty of off-leash time when there weren't other dogs around. This gave us a chance to practice his commands, especially "come." He's getting better!

Here's Jasper in full bound, heading towards Alex's call. Look at those ears!


Resting for a moment:


Enjoying some scrambling (practicing for the mountains):


Jasper is so much fun, and endlessly entertaining. Now he's snoring away after his exciting afternoon, and I'm eating pumpkin pie and watching the UConn women beat Duke. All is well in our household!

Jasper's New Toy

When we were out and about running errands today, we stopped at Petco to pick up a couple of things for Jasper. He does not have many toys, because he doesn't play with them often. I think I've written before about his tennis-ball toy that he doesn't chomp hard enough to squeak. Besides that, he has a rope toy that he has gently gnawed the loose strandy ends off of, and he just finished totally shredding one of Alex's old T-shirts. We've contemplated getting him one of those toys that you put treats inside, and then when the dog chews and plays with it, the treats fall out. However, most of them are made of hard rubber, and we just don't think Jasper would chew hard enough to get the treats out. Today, though, we saw a toy that looks like a little football but with lots of holes in it, and it's made out of very soft rubber. So we bought it, brought it home, stuffed a few pieces of peanut-butter bone in there, and put it down next to Jasper. He has nudged it a couple of times and is currently contemplating it about 6 inches from his nose. We'll see how it goes.

Other excitement today: a realtor came to do a walk-through and give us some ideas of things to do before we put the house on the market waaaay in the future. Apparently I don't get my bathroom upstairs. Bummer. Also, we turn out to have way too many books and are supposed to make our bookshelves more "decorative" than functional before we start showing the place. How weird is that? She was very appreciative of Alex's beautiful work refinishing the floors, however.

And finally, we went and tagged a Christmas tree at the cut-your-own place on the outskirts of town. We're going to be away from mid-December until the 22nd, and then again starting on the 29th, but I really wanted a tree since we have so many wonderful ornaments and this will be our first actual Christmas spent here in Minnesota. Alex is indulging me, though we might come home from Italy to find all of the needles on the floor! It's quite against my family's tradition of procrastination to pick out a tree this early, but we figured it'd be easier to do the choosing now, rather than in a month when the lot has been picked clean. It should be easy for us to pick it up and put it up on the 23rd...accompanied by hot drinks and Handel's Messiah, which has become our decorating tradition. I'm hoping to pick up a wreath at the farmer's market this weekend, too.

Jasper is profoundly unenthusiastic about the decorations going up around the neighborhood: some folks down the street have big inflatable snowmen in the yard, and Jasper HATES them. It took me ten minutes to get him past them on our way back from our run yesterday. He kept leaping into the street to get away from them, and then I had to pick him up and put him back on the sidewalk. He's not that excited about the bright blue blinking snowflakes on one of the other houses, either. Poor guy.

Thanksgiving

This post was supposed to have some pictures of our Thanskgiving Day spread in it. But, alas, I managed to botch copying them onto my computer, and then further bolloxed it by deleting them off the camera. Now, the images are theoretically still there - the data is still on the flash card, but there are no longer any references to them. Undelete programs exist, even ones that specialize in recovering photos from cameras. For a pair of run-of-the-mill photos, though, it didn't seem worth the $20-40 and hassle to pay for such recovery software.

No matter, I'm moving on. You'll just have to take my word that it was a nice looking spread. Quite large, too, considering that it was just H, Jasper, and myself this year. A tofurkey, green bean casserole, stuffing, squash and wild rice medley, and two pies. Two pies for two people (and a dog) seems just about right.

We considered having some classmates over, or otherwise making it larger, but really ended up liking this smaller affair. No timetables - we just cook and eat when it suited us. Heck, we even ate on the couch! We popped in The Lord of the Rings (Extended Edition) as we started cutting veggies at 10, and finished it about 12 hours later.

It has taken a turn for the chilly here in Minnesooooota. It was in the teens as I strolled into work this morning - one of about 10 in my office of 50 that came in today. Being a bit of a quiet day, I worked on something out of the ordinary. We have a $100,000 hi-speed video camera, the same kind that are used at White Sands for missile research. I was using it for something far more mundane. I may post videos at some point. In the meantime, check out what other people have done with those cameras.

Triumphs in the Emergency Room

Working in the emergency room is great. I feel like the patients I see are really mine, since I do all of the initial workup, and that is very satisfying. The consultants have been excellent preceptors, and the residents very helpful and willing to teach as well.

Last night I had two particular triumphs. One of my patients was a teenager who had a one-sided sore throat and swelling. On examination, she had one enormous tonsil, which was actually pushing her uvula over. Now, if you've been to medical school, you are jumping up and down right now and yelling "peritonsillar abscess! peritonsillar abscess!" This is a classic finding, and I had read about it but never seen it, and it was SO satisfying to recognize what the problem was and to be able to tell the consultant so with some confidence. As I've written about before, third year is full of feeling dumb, and it was nice to actually diagnose something. (Other than viral upper respiratory infections. We do a lot of that in the emergency room.)

The other nice moment involved an infant with...drumroll please...a viral upper respiratory tract infection. That part was pretty obvious, but when I looked in her ears, I thought that one of her eardrums was a little redder than the other. Now, she was really squirmy, and 4 month olds have tiny little ear canals, and there was some wax in the way, so I was in no way SURE that this was what I saw. It's really tempting when I have an equivocal finding like this to not mention it, and just let the consultant draw her own conclusions from her own exam. However, I have also realized that the only way to get better at detecting physical exam findings is to mention them and then see if I'm right, so I did tell her. And it turned out that that ear DID look a bit redder than the other one.

So, good times in the emergency room. I have one more shift tonight, and then a four-day weekend. There will be plenty of studying during the weekend, but it will be a nice chance to gear up before starting the inpatient service on Monday. We have a very quiet weekend planned. I'm just looking forward to spending time with Alex—since I've been in the ED from 4PM -midnight, and he's at work from 7:30 to 5:30, we've only been catching each other for a few minutes a day when I come home and he's falling asleep. Jasper and I have been spending some quality time together in the mornings, but we've actually had really poor air quality here so no running the last couple of days. We did drive up to Minneapolis yesterday to hunt and gather a Tofurkey for Thanksgiving. Very odd that our co-op here in town didn't have them, but it gave me a chance to pick up more of Jasper's vegetarian kibble, too.

Jones Seminars and Energy

One of my favorite things back when I was at Dartmouth (particularly in my later, heavy-engineering years) was the Jones Seminars at the Thayer School. Friday afternoons, at the end of a long week (usually with a long weekend ahead, too), we'd gather in room 100 for coffee and cookies and a lecture. Yes, this is a geeky way of kicking back.

These were general interest lectures in science and technology given by distinguished guests or Dartmouth professors. Some of my more memorable ones were about the Columbia Accident investigation, bio-engineering a yeast to produce complex human hormones and proteins (now the focus of a successful Dartmouth spinoff), some interesting futures in robotics, the two-mile time machine, high-efficiency solar cells, and so on.

This fall, the subject of all the Jones Seminars are on energy, climate change and, most importantly, what can we do about it. Being a mostly-engineering audience, the focus of the interventions are things like cellulosic ethanol (another dartmouth spinoff) and carbon capture and sequestration. But, consistent with the Thayer School's mission, there were have also been speakers from non-profits and, just yesterday, from BP. There was a tie-in to an energy symposium put on the by the Thayer School as well.

Absolutely the best part about all this is that these lectures, which were always videotaped, are now available as video podcasts, too. I can remember a few years ago wanting to watch one of these lectures again, and having to wait four weeks for the videotape to be post-produced and available through the library (not on the shelves, even). Now, the post production is done in a day or two, and the video can be downloaded and watched by anyone, anywhere. They are available in large video format (640x480, approx 100 MB / lecture), small video format (QVGA, about 60 MB), or just straight audio. Unfortunately, they need to be transcoded (i.e., reformatted) to fit properly on my iPhone. The transcoding is kind of slow, so mostly I just watch on my computer.

Although these series are given to a mostly engineer audience, they are accessible to most folks. The focus this term on energy and what we can do about it is, I believe, particularly important. These are very informative and entertaining lectures given by very intelligent people, and I encourage all our readers to check them out.

Weekly Round-Up

I thoroughly enjoyed my week in the newborn nursery. We had four babies to take care of on my call night. I took all of them straight from the OB's hands and helped check them out. One of them was only 33 weeks old, and he needed some breathing help, which I got to do with a mask and some oxygen. Also spoke some very out-of-practice Spanish with the parents when the interpreter wasn't around!

As part of my rotation, I gave two presentations this week, and both went well. Friday morning, the consultant supervising the nursery team also watched me do a head-to-toe newborn exam, and he thought that I was doing a good job, so it seems like I'm acquiring the skills that I'm supposed to be on this rotation.

This coming week, I will have some shifts in the peds emergency room. I actually have Thursday through Sunday off, which is fantastic and way more than I expected! After that, my three weeks on the inpatient service start, and that will be much more intense hours-wise, with call every fourth night.

Jasper has begun spending more of the night upstairs in our room. He won't come near the bed, and he won't let us approach him up there, but when the alarm goes off in the morning, we can hear him chewing gently on his tennis ball toy. (This toy would squeak if he chomped on it hard enough, and we've tried to show him that, but he's never looked very enthusiastic about that noise, and I think if he ever made the toy squeak, the next thing we'd hear would be Jasper's head hitting the ceiling.) When one of us gets up out of bed, he leaps to his feet and runs downstairs, wagging his tail. This enthusiasm doesn't quite translate to getting out the back door efficiently...he's much better about that than he used to be, but we still have to put the leash on and coax him a bit.

He and I ran almost every day this week, since I was home around noon each day. Mostly he did well, though one very windy day freaked him out completely. He really is a lot like a pony sometimes, in terms of the things that spook him. He also has decided that he would really like to chase the geese at Silver Lake, who are all about as big as he is. "Heel" is an ongoing project. Though it definitely increases my pace when he's dragging me towards a gaggle!

Other than that, I've been able to do some more reading for pleasure. Last week was a nonfiction week, I finished up Once Upon A Quinceanera by Julia Alvarez and also God's Harvard. The Quinceanera book is about the Hispanic coming-of-age celebration, almost a mini-wedding, that is held for girls on their 15th or 16th birthdays. Julia Alvarez (no relation, teaches at Middlebury in Vermont) is one of my favorite writers. She's written several semi-autobiographical novels and a couple of wonderful books of poetry, and in this book she follows several girls through the leadup to their ceremonies. She explores the origin of the Quinceanera and spends a lot of time discussing whether these celebrations are good for the girls (a chance to collect everyone from the community who is invested in the girl's well-being) or bad (many of the girls end up pregnant in that next year, seeing their coming-of-age as permission to become sexually active, and also many families go deeply into debt to throw the parties).

The God's Harvard book was also very thought-provoking. It's about Patrick Henry College, which is a conservative Christian college in Virginia. Especially from my vantage point as a philosophy major, educated in courses where debate was required and no assumption was too basic to be questioned, it was really odd to read about an institution where certain viewpoints were simply not up for discussion. It's totally antithetical to my whole idea of higher education. Though, admittedly, Dartmouth's goals for its students are very different from Patrick Henry's.

Also, the creationist, not-believing-in-evolution thing drives me crazy. I'm a scientist, and part of being a scientist is accepting the best explanation of a phenomenon that we can discern from looking at the world around us. It's ruthless and often uncomfortable, but it's brought us delightful things like vaccines and antibiotics (and that's just in medicine, I'm sure Alex could come up with a bunch more physics/engineering examples). Besides, genetics is so intricate and awe-inspiring that it's a much cooler backstory than six days of finger-snapping.

Alex was telling me some interesting stuff about universities being hesitant to grant degrees to earth science PhD students who are six-day creationists, even if their theses deal with another topic. Now that's an interesting question about academic freedom...

Enough ranting for the evening! It snowed a little this morning, but not enough to stick. We're really hoping for a good skiing year, there are lots of great golf courses for cross-country. We're trying to figure out if skis would scare Jasper, or if he could come and romp around with us.