“Loss of a Sense of Well Being”

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Mark Zeiger

I should have known I was getting sick when I started feeling sad on Saturday. I chalked it up to being tired. We’d just come off the Independence day celebration, with staying up way later than usual for fireworks, then camping out overnight at friends. Those events blended into a long anticipated visit from friends on Friday. By Saturday it made sense that the excitement, activity, unusual hours, and the rest would take a toll. Sunday I still felt grumpy and sad. By that evening I developed a sore throat. The next morning I had to admit to full-blown flu, with sore throat, stuffy/runny nose, coughing, sneezing, head and body aches, and exhaustion. Most of all, that strange symptom we see in our medical books, “loss of a sense of well being.” Continue reading →

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Bottle Rocket

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Mark Zeiger

Our first batch of rhubarb soda tasted great, and had plenty of carbonation—too much carbonation, as it turned out.

We’re careful to use sturdy bottles in all our brewing, so I hadn’t worried much about explosions, even though the first bottle of soda needed to be opened very slowly. The second one required about 40 minutes of judicious “bleeding” to allow enough excess carbonation to escape that it didn’t take the whole bottle of liquid in a foamy rush. Even so, we took a bottle into town to share with friends on the 4th of July, and shared another one with friends here at home.

Unfortunately, I forgot that we had a third bottle of that batch hidden away in the root cellar.

broken bottle

The larger remains of my favorite bottle. The plastic stopper impacted with enough force to break it into several pieces, one of which remained lodged in the bottle’s mouth (Photo: Mark Zeiger).

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