A Bundle of Myrrh

Here I am applying the glass etch. These are 6.5 gallon carboys. I also did all my 5 gallon carboys.

The finished product. It looks simple, but doing 13 carboys was no small feat. I hope to brew this coming week. I decided I need to dilute the hard water here with distilled water. That should improve the quality of my beers.
Happy brewing (or drinking if you don’t brew)!

Lily and I go to story hour at the library here in town sometimes. Unfortunately this time, she slept through most of the stories and the Valentine cookie decorating, but she did wake up to get in the picture with the big kids so she’d make it into the paper. Look how she sat up all by herself!
By the way, we haven’t changed our name from “Hale” to “Halek” in case you were wondering. I guess the reporter was attempting to give us a little “anonymity”. I don’t think it worked.

So long pickup, hello Pilot! We got a “new to us” car this week we’re very excited about. I’ll let Phil tell you all about it. You might want to kick your shoes off and grab a cup of coffee for this.

After selling the pickup (romantically, on valentine’s day) we planned to wait and get a vehicle with more seats. We found a deal sooner than we anticipated. It was quite adventurous to withdraw a big wad of $100’s from the main bank. One banker came over to me and gave me his card, possibly thinking I was wealthy. I didn’t break the bad news to him. My teller had a sign informing customers that she also spoke Arabic. I bet you didn’t know Nebraska was that cosmopolitan.

We drove to lincoln (the largest city named after Abraham), to inspect it. It is a 2004 Crossover SUV. That means it has a mini-van type frame, but an SUV appearance. It seats 8 without being too long. The back bench seat is meant for children really. It has 4 wheel drive that kicks in when accelerating or when the front wheels slip. This enables it to get decent gas mileage (low 20’s MPG on the highway). It has some nice luxuries, like automatic climate, a built-in garage remote, and handy rear benches which fold down flat (both split 60/40) .

UPDATE: It can fit three car seats across in the 2nd row, all with anchors. Child seats with tethers can be used three across in the back row. Of course that is assuming the car seats are not of above average width. All 8 seats have 3 point harness seat belts.

Anyway, we are happy with our purchase, and after having a lot of preventive maintance done this weekend, we hope it will last us a while. Aubri thinks I wrote way tooooo much, but I think I didn’t write enough. Signing off… Phil, Goodbye and Good Lookie.