Selfie Monday, week 8, 2018: (Beer) Medaling

Before I talk about my selfie, I want to address the elephant in my room. My DayOne journal has been nagging me to see the posts I wrote on this day in the past. I don’t want to right now. My mom died four years ago today, and these days that loss is terribly raw for whatever reason. So, that’s not what I’m writing about today.

No, I’m writing about getting this 2018 Santa Rosa Beer Passport medal today at the California Welcome Center in Santa Rosa. Fern got one, too, and afterwards we played Queen’s “We Are The Champions” at least three times on the way home. Also, if I look… off… in that picture it’s because I’m finally in the full bear-hug of a cold that’s been squeezing me since Friday.

But let’s back up a few weeks. While Lisa and I were waiting in line for Pliny the Younger at Russian River Brewing Company (RRBC), I took a walk down through the mall, down through Railroad Square to the California Welcome Center next to the stop for the new SMART train to get three Santa Rosa Beer Passports. I honestly don’t remember where I read about this, but it was a few days before we lined up for Pliny. The gist of it is this: pick up your free passport at the beginning of February. Over the course of the month, you have to get stamps at 9 out of the 12 participating breweries – though there are three “free stamps” as two of the breweries (Seismic Brewing Company and Shady Oak Barrel House don’t yet have tasting rooms, and the aforementioned RRBC was doing their Pliny event for half the month (Lisa and I got that stamp that day anyway!)). So six breweries during February. No problem, I think.

But what was Fern’s reaction? “We can crank that out in a weekend.”

Wait, what?

Sunday morning we picked up cat food at Costco in Rohnert Park (lest the meows mutiny and smother us in our sleep!) before starting our day at Bear Republic’s new(ish) Robert’s Lake location in Rohnert Park. I don’t think I’ve written about this place yet, which is silly because Fern and I have been frequent visitors since they opened in early fall. I was ready to start small, to pace myself – literally, as they have a lovely 4% Session IPA called “Pace Car Racer.” But that’s when I realized we might have timed this incorrectly. It’s San Francisco Beer Week, and most of our Santa Rosa breweries are sending their A-game down do SF. For Bear Republic, that meant a double IPA called “Hop Republic,” weighing in at 9.4% and 105 IBUs.

Bear RepublicIt’s the first stop, I should get the Pace Car Racer. But counting myself as both a hop-head and beer aficionado, I couldn’t not get the Hop Republic. And, let me tell you, it was hopalicious. But by the time we parked and made our way through the Santa Rosa Mall to the new 2 Tread Brewing Company, I was feeling every percentage. And my cold was exerting its influence as well.

2 Tread Brewing Company opened just a couple months ago. They took their time building out the 2 Treadspace formerly occupied by a long-gone Fresh Choice. You’d never know it wasn’t a bespoke building. Bright and airy, the main room had plenty of room, and the roll-up doors facing the patio promise a wonderful summer space. As February was trying to establish itself in temperature at least, having given up on rain, the roll-up doors were firmly closed. They have three house-brewed beers on the menu and I went with their 2 Tread Brewing Experimental Hop IPA #2. If the name is a mouthful, the beer was delightfully less of one – a well-balanced IPA with appropriate hop and bitterness hitting mid-palette and falling away to pine on the finish. A really nice beer. Fern and I also split their “carnivore” pizza (sausage and peperoni) as well as their sweet potato tots with chipotle aioli. Everything was fantastic. Well, except for this sign and my choice of hat…

But, hell, if this marks me as being in my “late 30’s” I’ll take it!

The last time I was at Disneyland was during the Clinton Administration – the first term – but I remember we hit the park hard and fast, and then retreated to our hotel to recharge before returning the parade. We decided this strategy was prudent for our marathon, so we headed back to my house to recharge. By “recharge” I mean Fern chilled while I passed out in a cold-weary exhaustion for a three hour nap. With the sun down and Dayquil administered, we headed out to bag at least one more stamp and we set our sights on one of my favorite’s, Moonlight Brewing Company. We arrived only a half hour before their closing time, but we still got there. Fern went with her favorite Moonlight beer, Reality Czech. I went with their seasonal “Mounting Evidence” which uses flowers, herbs, and redwood tips instead of hops. As such, it had a more herbal quality to it but still managed to be crisp and delightful. Fern beat me in repeated rounds of Connect Four while we finished our pints and discussed out next move.

By and large Santa Rosa rolls up its streets at 8pm on a Sunday. Just about every other brewery on the list was closing, the exceptions being RRBC (which we didn’t need), and… Cooperage Brewing Company, practically around the block. Cooperage is similar to Moonlight in that they both reside in anonymous office parks. But if Moonlight is the attentive, good student with its carefully-crafted, miniscule-distribution, and blink-and-they’re-closed hours, Cooperage is, well, a shirt-off Bro who’s looking for a good time. But that really nice Bro who is friends with everyone and always says hi and asks how you’re doing when you pass. This analogy is getting weird…

CooperageOkay, Cooperage is open until midnight with plentiful seating, two TVs along with a giant projector, and a long list of beers on tap with names like “Curt Kobain Pale Ale” (Fern had that) and “Clear and Loathing DIPA” (yeah, that 8.4% one was mine – hey, with the hop-less “Mounting Evidence” at Moonlight, I had to make up my hop intake). Like Moonlight, they don’t have a kitchen, and if they had a food truck patron, they weren’t there at 8pm on Sunday. But patrons around us had take out from several different restaurants on nearby Piner Road. Next time – and there will be a next time – we’ll come with food.

But our Sunday was done. We’d bagged four stamps, and my cold had crushed my head.

Sonoma CiderMonday, Presidents Day, dawned bright and cold(ish – it’s California, after all). My cold had bloomed overnight into a sinus-crushing, nose-running mess. A hot, hot shower, followed by Dayquil made me feel mostly human as we drove down Westside Road. See, we’d planned to hit Henhouse Brewing Company, then Fogbelt Brewing Company. Unfortunately, it being Monday, Henhouse didn’t open until the afternoon. I really didn’t have until then. So we audibled to a location we had previously decided to skip: Sonoma Cider.

Sonoma Cider is on the outskirts of Healdsburg and is tucked in behind the Parish Café and the Elephant in the Room bar – you kind of have to know its there. They have a full menu, and it’s delicious. But you have to make it past the Parish Café’s beignets. Good luck on that. We did – we were on a mission – and decided to try a flight. You see, if you know Sonoma Cider from their popular farm-implement bottles (“The Hatchet” apple cider, or “The Pitchfork” pear cider), they have so much more on tap here. Even if the food wasn’t amazing (it is. It really is) the sheer number of options of cider on tap is worth the visit. I didn’t write down the farm-implements, but the “West Cider” (punily named after the small orchard on Westside road where all these apples came from) and Winter Banana (which is a type of apple!) were two of our favorites. We did find room to split a pint of the “Pitchfork” pear cider just to validate that their core ciders were solid (spoiler: oh yeah).

The Dayquil was starting to wear off as we rolled into Fogbelt Brewing Company. I’ve written about Fogbeltthem before, and they’re still a great place. Their SF Beer Week entry was a massive triple IPA, “The Godwood.” You know, if the Dayquil was failing, maybe replacing it with a shit-ton of hops would do the trick? It almost worked. Almost. I nursed that 10.3% monster while we played Uno. Forgive me for neglecting my tasting notes at this point, I was done. We got our stamps and we headed down the street to the California Welcome Center to claim our medals.

So, we did it! And then we came home and I slept for another 3-hour nap. And I’m ready to go to sleep again, because this cold sucks. But for Presidents day this weekend, despite my cold, Fern and I medaled!

 

Five Things This Week: week 7, 2018

Vinyl Me Please
The author, Caitlin White, gets so much right here and misses so much. As with every “best ___ in [state]” you’re going to necessarily miss things – that’s really the point of these things, to spark disagreement, engagement, conversation. And, yeah, I’m taking the bait (though I’ll try hard not to make this longer than the piece itself). Her perspective echoes the nascent crush I’ve had on SoCal for some time now (It’s been a while, SoCal, I need to come visit!), which gives me all the feels and combined with her rationale for Amoeba being in the heart of Hollywood… I get it. I truly do. But California is enormous. She gives props to Amoeba in SF and Berkeley, but it’s lip service from someone who never went to the Telegraph Avenue store and then gotten a slice at Blondie’s (RIP) – Ah, I’m doing what she did, co-mingling location with the store itself and with memories. Okay, well, I also always liked Rasputin better as a music store (Fat Slice, too, FWIW). But beyond that, what about the mom-and-pop record stores that are hanging on by the skin of their teeth? In Santa Rosa we have the (appropriately named) Last Record Shop which is magnificent and a real treasure of a record store. I’m sure you could probably point to your favorite record store not named “Amoeba”. Okay, getting off my soap box now. And the article is definitely worth a read.
Now that we’ve got that highly-charged political link out of the way, how about gun violence?!
Washington Post
Okay, let’s first agree that any school shootings are too many, full-stop. We may disagree on measures to stop them (which I’m not even going to talk about), but the reason I’m linking to this article speaks to a problem that is larger than school shootings (if that’s even possible) which is how we choose our facts. Reaching for the “18 school shootings in 2018” fact that has been echoing through social media since the most recent (I hate that I even have to put that qualifier on this) Florida shootings is easy, as it’s an incendiary statistic. But, as the article points out, it may not be accurate. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to cast aspersions on Everytown For Gun Safety or their rather transparent criteria. But if your goal is to reach people whose minds can be changed on this issue, including a middle-of-the-night suicide in front of a school that had been closed for six months seems disingenuous, even if it meets the letter of their criteria. Opposition to any gun control measures will hone in on this particular instance and use it to discredit the entire endeavor – it’s a well-honed tactic, and, mark my words, will be wielded if there is any real discussion about this.
New York Magazine
“When rescuers found Nathan Carman after seven days at sea, his mother had vanished without a trace. But his past was about to resurface.” Reads like a twisted novel… only this happened.

4Black Panther The Album Music From And Inspired By
Going to see Black Panther tonight and I’m SO excited! The soundtrack came out a week ago and is fantastic. Kendrick Lamar is featured on most tracks and has at least bit parts in the rest. Initially Lamar told director, Ryan Coogler, he’d definitely contribute a track or two, but then Coogler shrewdly showed Lamar an early cut of the album and Lamar instantly decided he’s all in. Lamar’s albums tend to be dense, powerful epics, but owing largely to the soundtrack format and his collaborators this soundtrack showcases Lamar at his most accessible. All that said, it’s still hip hop and rap, so if that’s not your forte then so be it. But if you are, it’s fantastic.

5
Happy Death Day

Late to the party on this one, Fern and I finally got around to heeding the suggestions we watch it. So much fun. The horror isn’t bad – there are a few jump scares, but it traffics on established horror movie tropes so you’re likely to see them coming.

Leslie The Dragon vs Craigslist

Story night this week falls on Valentine’s Day, so I figured I’d better put together a Valentine’s Day story. Yesterday I had a chance to tell this story at the Do Tell Story Swap in Santa Rosa last night. I’d never had a chance to tell/perform any of my stories before and it was so much fun. Of course being nervous I forgot a lot of details. So, here is the story in it’s full. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Label: Fiction

Girl DragonTo be fair, she’d tried everything she could think of before going online. She let her friends set her up with their friends (they just weren’t into her), she tried blind dates (ugh, disaster after unmitigated disaster — do you know what happens when an unsuspecting dolled up dragon meets an equally dapper yet unsuspecting Duke at an upscale bistro. I’ll tell you this, no one was killed, but you’d never guess a dragon in A-line shift dress could dodge the spears of half a dozen bodyguards so ably, and the duke realized polyester was a poor fabric choice once Leslie started breathing fire). She tried singles mixers, she even asked Taylor the leprechaun in IT out (turns out he was gay. who knew?).
Leslie the Dragon was at her wits end.
And it wasn’t like Craigslist was her first foray online either. She’d tried Match.com, eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, Zoosk… she was super excited about d-date.com, the all-dragon dating site? Turns out it’s full of Russian chat bots trying to sell you counterfeit prescription drugs.
Deterred but not defeated, she decided to pull out all the stops in an effort not to spend another Valentine’s day by herself in her cave watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend reruns. So, despite her better judgement, she found herself on Craigslist creating an account (PrplPpleEtr37) and composing a post in the Long Term Relationship room for “Women Seeking Men”. She started simply, with the title: “SPD [Single Purple Dragon] seeking a good man for Valentine’s Day!” Good start, she thought. Now for the post…
“Are you a fun-loving, adventurous man? Do you like dragons (who doesn’t?! 🙂 ) Are you looking for a fun Valentine’s date? Send me a message!” Short, sweet, simple, she thought, this is easier than I thought! She took a deep sulfurous breath and clicked “Submit”.
She didn’t have to wait long.
The first response came in just three minutes later. “HawtDude69” had drunkenly (she’d hoped he was drunk) scrawled out the reply, “Hey BB, I can slay that dragon. Let’s hook up! You want this!” She frowned and deleted the message, but the deluge had just started. Over the next few hours the responses poured in, most making HawtDude69’s message read like Shakespeare. Then she got her first unsolicited pic of male genitalia. Out of pure shock, she accidentally incinerated her monitor. She took that as a sign and decided she was done for the night.
She got a new monitor the next day, and proceeded to sort through the detritus that passed as responses — all 138 of them. One caught her eye, though. His handle was  “NeverNeedsALighter336”. Cute…. “Hey PrplPpleEtr37! You sound like a lot of fun! I’m 12’ 10” [tall, good…], athletic [positive...], like to laugh [ooh, nice!], and have fun [me too!]. Let’s get coffee or pillage a village soon! JK about the village!”
Leslie was over the moon. She wrote back, got his phone number and they agreed to meet the next day at a coffee shop near her work.
The next day her coworkers smiled at her renewed enthusiasm. Taylor admired her filed and painted claws and the leprechaun said her black skirt and boots were, in his words, “fierce”. Before she left work, she re-did her makeup in the bathroom, admired the new faux-emerald stud she wore in her nose horn. She felt, in the parlance of Craigslist, “hawt”.
She got to the coffeeshop early, ordered a skinny latte with a shot of brimstone and waited. And waited. And waited. Sometime after her fifth skinny latte she decided to text NeverNeedsALighter. “New phone, who dis?” came back. She left claw marks in the table.
She removed her first post and tried another, simpler post: “SPD looking for a real guy.”
Same cavalcade of sex solicitations and male genitalia. Oh, and look at that, a post from “NeverNeedsALighter493” new number, same schtick. There were a few decent, genuine-sounding emails that she responded to, but none wrote back. What gives?!
Valentine’s Day drew ever nearer, and her third, fourth, fifth posts garnered the same responses. She set up two more meetings and had two more no-shows— one she swore she saw the guy peek his sout around the corner and then disappear. She started casting a wider net, posting in “Strictly Platonic,” “Misc Romance”, and even “Casual Encounters”. She wasn’t looking for a casual encounter, mind you, but she just wanted a real person! Her posts had degraded, too — “SPD looking for anything. Come on!”
Same responses, but this time even more male genitalia.
Leslie had had it with Craigslist. Unfortunately, now it was Valentine’s Day and despite her posts, her cute outfits and being stood up, here she was. As she cued up the first episode of the first season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, resigned to start the series again from the beginning, she changed her mind. She opened up her laptop, brought up Craigslist, and started a new post — this time, though, it was in “Rants and Raves”.
Out of curiousity, she’d perused the room before and found it to be the domain of the lunatic paranoid, the right-wing conspiracist, and the furiously jaded. She turned her head, let out a hot, angry jet of flame, and decided she fit that last category.
Right out of the gate, she fumed, “Any male dragons on this site are a disgrace!” From there she let loose an assault of colorful invective that made her earlier jet of real fire seem like a cool breeze. When she finished, she didn’t click “submit” as much as she hammered it with a fist.
Responses came back fast and furious. Sure, there was the ubiquitous male genitalia (seriously, she thought, who the hell sends these?!) but there were also emails from women expressing “You go girl!” And “Set it on fire, my scaly sister!” For the first time since getting stood up by NeverNeedsALighter336, she showed her teeth in a genuine smile.
And then another email came in. The email was “KnightNDay43” and it matched Leslie’s rant for sheer anger.
“You think being a female dragon is bad? Try being a [explative removed] knight! For every purported damsel email (who never show, BTW) there’s countless bots and angry women with axes to grind — literally, they usually come out with axes. Who needs this [explative]?”
A knight? She pursed her mouth like she had bitten into a fire extinguisher. She moved for the delete button, but her claw hovered over the key… Slowly, she moved her talon over to “Reply.” As she started her reply, she told herself it wasn’t out of anything other than shared hatred for Craigslist users. It absolutely wasn’t about him — for gods’ sake, he was aknight! She was a dragon. “You’re right, KnightNDay43, it sucks all around for dragons and knights alike!” She rifled around her meager liquor cabinet and poured herself a shot of Fireball whiskey, and typed, “Alone on Valentine’s Day. Screw it! This shot’s to you, KnightNDay43!” And she hit send, then slugged back the cinnamon whiskey, which ignited halfway down her throat and literally burned.
He emailed back a picture of a shot glass of amber alcohol held poised in a chain mail gloved hand.
She opened a bottle of mead, poured herself a generous glass and wrote back, “What the hell is it with people and dragons, and everything?! Seriously?!”
He responded that he didn’t know but agreed, “People and mythical beasts suck. Present company excluded.”
That made her smile — in a, you know, jaded, angry, now slightly buzzed way. She responded, “Same.” And they kept emailing.
She didn’t remember how far after midnight they emailed. She didn’t remember which one asked for the other’s phone number, nor how or why they hatched a plan to commiserate over coffee. The next day, though, she did not wear a fierce skirt and boots, opting instead for her preferred Doc Martins and comfy jeans. She didn’t do her makeup before she left work — she didn’t even do her makeup before work. And her claws were chipped and she didn’t give an F.
But when she got to the coffee shop, he sat there early at a middle table, his helm occupying the seat next to him. She folded her wings against her body, pushed open the door and started inside. KnightNDay43 looked up, saw her, and smiled a smile that lit the room and melted her brimstone heart.This, she thought, is a good start.