When I got up and jumped into the shower yesterday I noticed a bit of a problem. The shower wasn't hot. It wasn't freezing cold either, thankfully, but it was obvious that the hot water wasn't working and it was slowly going cold. This is not optimal. Once I got out of the shower I futzed around and looked at the switchbox in the cupboard. I couldn't see anything interesting.

When I'd turned the power back on yesterday (had to turn it off to unwire the oven) I'd remembered I'd heard what I thought was a rather largish "wooomph" noise. But I hadn't been sure if it was real or just imagined, because about 5 things all turn back on at once and beep/click etc.

Once I got home I fossicked around in the fuse box again, not really sure what I was doing. Just checking to make sure that...

A horrible Sunday morning this morning. Sarah's in the kitchen cooking bacon & eggs on bagels. Now just to be fair, I was cooking it but then she took over.

Our new oven arrived yesterday, 2 days earlier than it was supposed to. Which is fine with us, having it here on the weekend made it a little project to put together. Not that it really needed that much putting together, we just had to attach the legs to it so it's not a little midget oven. It's looking good now, we've got it a gas bottle all ready for the gas fitter to arrive on Tuesday and connect it all up for us.

Yesterday we also bought some stain for the deck and got started staining it! Have a look, it's getting there. Of course this morning it's raining, so I can't do the rest. And in case...

Looked at the deck last night after it'd had all day to dry in the sun and it looked really good. It's dried fairly well and it looks nice and clean, ready for a coat or two of deck stain. The only issue now is to pick the right stain and to make sure that it doesn't piss with rain this weekend. We can only influence one of those things, of course.

Went out into the spare room attached to the shed last night to hang the washing and uh-oh. Smells like beer. That's never a good sign, especially because there was 4 crates of homebrew in there. Looks like there must have been one very weak bottle in the batch I bottled on the weekend, because it'd burst. I did a bit of reading and usually if the explode they explode into lots of little pieces. This was just...

Bottled another batch of Tim's World Famous ginger beer on Sunday morning. And Saturday I bottled Number 7, a (I hope) tasty Indian Pale Ale that I made a couple of weeks ago. I realised that I fluffed up the versioning of the beers the other day, because the lager is still lagering. So now the bottle cap doesn't reflect which brew it was! This is not a huge problem, just a silly one. I still know which is which.

I spent a chunk of the afternoon on the back deck, scrubbing it with a broom and cleaning all the moss, dirt and other bits of crap out from between the planks. Finally after a couple of hours it's not looking too bad, though I'll be interested to see how it looks at the end of today (if it doesn't rain). Next weekend I'll get out there with some deck...

Saturday morning we did a bit of shopping downtown, after the best ever breakfast up in Eden Terrace. We'd walked past a cafe there a couple of weekends ago on the way to the brew shop so we decided we'd stop in there for breakfast and see how good it was. It was super tasty, my mince-on-toast didn't have any peas (to be fair I did ask before hand) and Sarah's breakfast looked really tasty too.

I got the wheat beer out of the Garage yesterday and fumbled around for a little while before I realised it was going to be a lot harder than normal to bottle. Usually I bottle out of my big plastic bucket, but because the Wheat Beer was resting in one of the smaller secondary fermentators I decided to bottle from it. The problem is that none of the pipes, tubing that I have fit...

I got up early this morning to cook bacon and eggs on a bacon for Peter C and of course my lovely wife. And me too, I was also hungry. But not Tui, she doesn't eat human food. Anyway that was all good, then I headed off to work. They've upset my greatly by changing the bus that I take, no longer does the trusty 006 little midget bus exist but instead I have to take the Outer Link bus. I though this would piss me right off but actually it didn't, it was nice and empty and had a lot of seats. Bonus that.

On the bus I was doing as I usually do, reading the websites I like on my phone and checking Twitter. I like Twitter, but only because it's mostly full of idiots and I like to annoy them. Anyway I was reading and I saw...

BOTTLE LABEL: 6
First all malt boil batch!

Measured out 17g of Pacific Gem (Alpha 15%) Hops

bought 6L water to the boil.
Added 2 x 500g Copper Tun Light Unhopped Spraymalt
Added 1 x 1.5Kg Black Rock Light Malt Extract

Waited until boiling fully, added 17g of Pacific Gem Hops.

Boiled for 45 minutes. Then added Cascade Hops, 15g at 5.8% for 15 minutes.

Took off the boil and chilled as quickly as possible. Strained everything into the primary fermenter. Cooled to about 30c. Sloshed back and forth 5 times.

Pitched yeast, wort at 18c - Filled up to 21 L.

Start Gravity: 1.045

Final Gravity: 1.012
Bottled 3/9/2011
Note: Burnt a little bit of the powered malt.