Tickets to New York

October is here already. The past few weeks have flown by. I can’t believe that my last post was Labor Day weekend. That seems so far behind already. I was talking to Jeannie the other day and she described her time as moving slowly on a daily basis and before you know it a month has gone by. That feels about right.

Gavin’s fall break has come and is almost over already. Holly took the kids over to Oahu this past weekend to drop off Gavin with granny. That left me home alone for 3 days. Not only did this give me alone time, it gave me the opportunity to do things that needed to get done. This list included, fixing the car window, fixing the car speaker, filling the car steering fluids, investigating the broken A/C, working on some illustrations, cleaning the house, riding the motorcycle, catching up on a few tv shows, making more beer, and relaxing. It was nice to have time alone, but I sure did miss my peoples. I’m glad to have Holly and Leif back. Tomorrow, I head off to Oahu to retrieve Gavin. Then I will have them all back.

I’ve been in contact with the east coast quite a bit lately. My sister recently purchased a new iMac and my grandmother recently purchased a new Dell something-or-other. I’ve been able to video chat with my sister and mother along with my nieces and nephews. It’s been really nice. Hopefully my grandmother will get her webcam operational and I’ll be able to chat her up too. All the recent contact with them recently had added to the feeling of urgency to go visit the east coast. So after months of saying I want to go visit, I’ve finally booked 4 tickets to NY. I will finally get to hug my family and close friends once again.

So I mentioned making more beer this past weekend. I’ve brewed up a batch of IPA from an Australian beer issue of a brewing magazine. This batch should be bottled and ready to drink right around the time that my cherry ale becomes ready to drink. So Halloween ought to be awesome. I’ll have  10 gallons of fresh home-brewed beer. That said, I don’t know now, how I will get some to my mother-in-law. I’ve been packing a few bottles into my suitcase whenever I fly over to Oahu. Unfortunately, all the airlines now, including Hawaiian Airlines, have started charging for any checked luggage. This adds at a minimum of $10 to the also-increasing airfare. This is quite frustrating and is making it harder to justify flying to Oahu for weekends as well as flying beer over. And with shipping via USPS being illegal, I’m not sure how much more beer Mary will be getting. As a trial thing, I’ve decided to mail some beer to the east coast via UPS. It is against their policy to ship beer, but not illegal. It cost me a bit due to the larger than needed box that I stuffed with other items to fill, but the box received it’s destination in one piece. That makes it totally worth it. So who was the lucky recipient? That would be Jeannie. I couldn’t think of a more worthy person to receive the first shipment of beer. Jeannie is awesome.