After disc golf, we headed to the 1st annual (I assume) Gypsy Picnic Trailer Food Festival. I had high hopes for this festival. Trailer food is a hot trend right now in Austin. You can view a map with a lot of the trailers on it here.

Unfortunately, reality turned out to be complete and utter chaos. 🙁 Word of mouth and advertising worked much better than was anticipated. I have to imagine that there were over 20K people here. Parking was a nightmare. Jon and I parked over at Whole Foods and we walked over the bridge and down to Disch field. Once we got there, the place was already packed. Lines were incredibly long! We each split up into separate lines and waited for food. The line I was in was over an hour long. And that was just to pay for the food. I had to wait another twenty minutes for the food to cook! Also, with so many people using phones here, the phone was unusable. I could not call or text anyone. Sigh. I even got sunburned waiting outside so long…

I even saw a film crew here using a Canon DSLR as a video camera. I wonder where that video aired…

A friend of mine is getting into brewing beer at home. And I wanted to see just what was involved in the process. Luckily, he was willing to invite me over to watch (and help — but mostly watch).

The first interesting thing was that he used an Igloo ice chest as a container to steep the grain in. He also used a very fine nylon mesh fabric to line the bottom. This was supposed to allow the wort to drain off easily (kinda like a reusable tea bag). Although we still had some small problems with the mass of the grain blocking the drain outlet.

Once the grains (mash-tun) steeped for 60 minutes, we drained off the liquid (wort) into a container.

We then poured the wort into a rather large aluminum stock pot and boiled the wort for 60 minutes. This is where the hops are added. And, depending on when they are added, that determines what function they serve. At the beginning of the boil, the hops are bittering hops. For the last 15 minutes, we added flavoring hops. And for the last 5 minutes, we finished off with aroma hops.

We then had to cool off the hops down from boiling to a temperature where the yeast can ferment the sugars into alcohol. This had to be done rather quickly. Which is difficult since water is a great heat-sink. So we used two sets of large copper tubing twisted into a radiator. One copper tube sits in a large ice chest filled with ice and water. The other tube sits in the stock pot. Water is then circulated from the outside garden hose to the first tube, through to the second tube, and then draining out to the yellow bucket. The bucket is just to capture some of the water runoff to be used for cleaning.

After the wort is cooled down to 70 degrees, it is then siphoned off into a large glass fermentation chamber. At the top of it will be placed an air lock which will allow the excess carbon-dioxide to vent off.

It was a pretty easy process. Perhaps someday I will get into it.

This plant is jumping for joy!

This was a rather quick snap. Especially since the cat was in the process of getting up and moving on…

And another quick snap. This time the automatic focus points were centered on the arm rather than the face.

I don’t normally walk this way, so I was happy coming across these reflections across the shadow. It worked well on the multi-colored granite tile backdrop. Although I feel that I should spend more time on the post-processing of this photo. The picture turned out too flat.

I went to South Florida again to visit the family, the beach, and some Cuban restaurants. This time I tried out the Prius as a rental car. It was okay car to drive.

While I stayed at my Aunt Jill’s house, I was able to visit with my other Aunt, Beth. Here I am with both of my Aunties.

I also saw some of my friends who still live here: Sean Conner and Bunny.

And another Sean. Williams, that is. It was good to see them again. If only briefly…

We went to the Sundy House in Delray Beach for brunch. I’ve never been there before and it was nice. The location is pretty. There is an indoor garden, well more of a tropical forest. We also had fun taking pictures. I wish I had more spontaneous pictures like these… The first is my mom and I and the second is my cousin Heather and her mother, Jill.

Here is a video of the Lake Worth beach (here).

And a video of the Boynton Beach Inlet.