I'm back from another short trip to Los Angeles, probably my last for a while but unfortunately too soon to tell. This time it was just me -- my wife stayed home and handled work, tax fallout, cats, and everything else. I went to LA and handled taxes, our US mail, our US banking, various other paperwork; and I visited family.
It was all right, overall. Even though the LA weather was crummy, the Edmonton weather has been worse. I left early summer and returned to mid-spring. Snow everywhere, -2C. Supposedly there'll be another 20 cm of precipitation tonight.
The airline almost didn't want to land us in Edmonton. Cleverly, if Edmonton has bad weather, the policy is to divert to Spokane, Washington -- rather than to nearby Calgary. We circled in thick white cotton for about twenty minutes before we finally touched down -- and then we drove another ten minutes around the airport. Honestly I would have preferred it if we'd just flown to Calgary and driven the rest of the way.
Anyway, home again. I made up a batch of Improvisational Stout before we left for Prague -- something like eight weeks ago now -- and I've been working on drinking it since we got back. The half of the batch that I bottled into Grolsch-top bottles seems flat to me and also I feel like it has an off-flavor. So now I'm drinking the other half-batch which I bottled into 22-ouncers. It tastes better out of those, and there's a lot of head (a bit too much actually). But a 22-oz bottle neatly fills a half-liter mug like the ones I brought back from the Staropramen brewery. I should take some pictures.
Also on the plane I was reading a home-brewing book which points out that it is possible to carbonate flat bottled beer as long as the beer still contains live yeast. Since the off flavors may have just aged away in the Grolsch-tops (something I can check easily) I may be able to recover that half of the batch.
And in excellent news, our housemate is planning to move out before the end of the summer. We don't have a date yet, but it'll be nice to have the house to ourselves again. And this way we have several months to think about whether we want to take another housemate.