I’m still alive, and still around. Things are busy at work, where I’m juggling several projects, and at home, where it’s premiere season on the broadcast networks and finale season on cable, meaning there’s been lots of great stuff on like Burn Notice, Heroes, Eureka, and more. Still, I wanted to write about our amazing weekend.
Category Archives: cheese
Beer and Cheese!
Two great things go great together!
Yesterday, after a long day spent running back and forth across campus working on various projects, I got out from work just a little late and headed north to Milwaukee. I met up with tozier_wah and little_wolf near their place, then we carpooled in to downtown Milwaukee, taking the scenic route up I-794 along the lakefront. We had a few wrong turns along the way – did you know the Marquette Interchange is partially open now? Neither did I! We inadvertently drove through it twice. Finally we arrived at our destination, Milwaukee Public Market.
We were the for Mooo & Brew, a beer and cheese tasting to benefit the Hunger Task Force. Predictably, the place was a mob scene, but we had a lot of fun. We were joined at the last minute by jet_der_hund, and we had a great time critiquing the various cheese (yum!) and beers (mostly yum, though there were a few clunkers). My favorite was (of course) the Unibroue lineup, which featured a wheat beer (Blanche de Chambly), then the same beer flavored with apples (Éphémère Apple) and cranberries (Éphémère Cranberry). Best of all was the Don de Dieu triple wheat ale, which just knocked my socks off (easy to do, at 9% alcohol!).
After we had enjoyed all the beers and decided that it was probably really a good time to get some dinner, we wandered around the Market a bit and I introduced everyone to The Spice House and we hit a couple of other places. We visited the small wine shop there, which was doing great business selling the beers which were being tasted upstairs. I hadn’t intended to buy anything, but when they mentioned a free Unibroue glass with every Unibroue beer, I had to pick up a bottle of the Don de Dieu! The guys working the shop were very friendly and we had a lot of fun joking around with them. We asked for recommendations on places fro dinner and they steered us away from our original choice and recommended a couple of others instead.
So off we went into the rapidly-gentrifying Third Ward, admiring the art shops and oh-so-trendy bars. We stopped by Hinterlands Gastropub, but were scared off by the entrees that started at $30. We wound up taking the wine shop guys’ advice and settled on Water Buffalo. Dinner was delightful, with great conversation and very tasty food. I had a blast and I think everyone else did as well. And I learned all about IML! 🙂 Afterwards, we walked down to the Foundry location of Alterra, but alas they closed a half hour before we go there. So we walked back to our cars and said our good-nights.
What a great evening! My only regret is that I didn’t get home until 11, so I’m dragging a bit today. It was worth it, though! I look forward to getting up to Milwaukee more and exploring with friends.
Great Weekend Wrapup!
What a great weekend! Uptime and downtime – the best of all worlds.
On Friday I was feeling antsy and wanted to get out, so takaza and I met up with roho and genet for dinner at the always-fabulous Scott Dogs. My jumbo shrimp were indeed quite jumbo, and extremely delicious! It’s always such a pleasure to go there because Scotty and his aunt (whose name, shamefully, continues to escape me) always recognize us, make sure to ask how our food was, and really go out of their way to make sure the meal is a special one.
Saturday morning found us hard at work clearing out Dan’s office. He had emptied out the storage closet down there a month or so back and we kept meaning to get everything re-stowed, so now was the time to take care of it. Unfortunately my back was giving me some pain so after about 45 minutes I had to turn it over to him. In the meantime went upstairs and finished making a couple of loaves of a fantastic multigrain bread. The went into the oven just as people started showing up for Game Day. Our guests included aeto, Roho, Genet, posicat, nymphara and her boyfriend Nick, colliedoc, hypersnazz, woodychitwn, truegrave9, and Bob.
We played several games, including a nice round of poker, Cosmic Wimpout, Blokus (I blame rigelkitty – on the strength of his good comments about this game we picked it up. It’s a lot of fun!), Quelf (an aggressively zany and wacky board game – think Cranium, only trying way too hard), and Catchphrase (another good game we learned of from Rigel and xydexx). Pizza was ordered, beverages were consumed, and a good time was had by all. Thanks to everyone for coming! We’ll definitely have to do one of these again soon (and not schedule it again softball 🙂
On Sunday, we did…nothing. Well, we did laundry, but mostly we just did nothing. And it was good.
Coming up this week, I’m trying to interest tozier_wah and little_wolf in a beer and cheese tasting at Milwaukee Public Market on Thursday evening – anyone else interested?
Oh, and I finally got a LinkedIn profile. I’m not sure how useful it is or anything, but hey – feel free to add me to your network!