7:32...ehhh could have been worse...
Laura and I just got back from a run. I did my typical timed one mile thing, just to see how much I have lost since the last time that I did it. Back in March I was running it almost every day, and pulling in some pretty respectable times for a 235 lb. ex-athlete... I was coming in around 5:45ish, so that was pretty decent. Today I clocked myself, without really pushing at all, at 7:32... Yes, it's considerably worse, but I figure that if I run it tomorrow, I'll get in around 6:45. Ehhh... at least it's something to keep my mind off the terrible pain that courses through my body during this joyous experience.
In honor of my feeble running skills, I figured that I would go on YouTube and find someone else that can run fairly well, or at least used to be able to, so without further delay, I present to you....Walter Payton:
Damn that man can run.
As of this week, I am officially teaching myself how to write and run reports using Cognos. One of the web pages that my company runs uses Cognos as a business intelligence reporting tool, and they need some additional reports run. I am going to eventually by writing up those reports, but in order to be able to do that, I am in the process of learning the software. Should be worthwhile. Thus far, it seems to be pretty straight forward, but I'm sure that once I get into things, it's going to get more and more complicated.
I haven’t' really been in much of a blogging mood recently, and there hasn't been a whole lot going on to warrant it anyway, so I suppose that works out fairly well.
This past weekend Erik and I brewed up a batch of porter and "small beer". Originally, our plan was to brew using the same recipe that we used during the first time that we brewed...ever. Erik had ordered all the stuff, and on Saturday morning we commenced brewing. All was going well until it was time to drain the grains that we had dumped into the lauter tun (it's a cooler with a filter at the bottom), and that's when it all went wrong. A long story short, the filter kept getting clogged with grain and various other flow problems, so Erik and I eventually went out to the dollar store, purchased three sieves and filtered water through the grain....2-3 lbs at a time. It was miserable. It added two hours to the time it took to brew. The batch was supposed to come out to be around 1.085 o.g. (density) and it only amounted to 1.056, so it was .02 off, which is around 2-3% less alcohol than we were supposed to have. Hopefully, we'll have a good batch of yeast that'll convert lots of the sugars and give us a solid 5% beer. In addition to the porter, we also took the grains, after giving them an initial washing, we did it again, and took those runnings and made that into a separate beer. That one is called a "small beer" and should only be around 2-3% alcohol in total. I have no idea how it's going to come out, but it'll be interesting if nothing else.
It's about time that I settle in for the night.