What I did Over Winter Break: Tacoma beer and bike edition

What did your colleagues do with their winter break this year? Look for blog posts over the next few weeks from the Communications team about their winter breaks. Care to share your winter break story? Let me know; we'd love to hear what you did!

As a homebody/eccentric shut-in, my winter break was spent alone in my apartment, not leaving except to gather needed supplies (eggnog). If spoken to during my rare forays into the outside world I would mumble "chrerry mistmas" or "hah bumbug" to confuse the person or dog and then make a clever escape. There were a couple of instances where I purposefully left my neighborhood, which I can only ascribe to temporary insanity brought on by eggnog overdose, and I will now describe those uninteresting episodes from an uneventful break.

Before moving to Tacoma, I lived in Portland, Oregon, for three years, and winter break was kind of a callback to those halcyon days. Portland is known as the rose city and also for having a ton of bridges, but I avoided both of those things (deadly bridge allergy, crippling rose addiction) and focused on the parts of Portland that I remember most fondly: beer, bicycling, and not really understanding how either of those things work but liking them anyway. With that in mind, please feel free to stop reading now.

Beer: So at one point in the distant past my friend and I drove down to Vancouver and bought 500 pounds of malted barley, which we took a small portion of and put into that crazy device pictured on the left, along with a bunch of water. I'm no scientist, but from what I can gather an invisible wizard turned propane into fire, making the water boil and thus causing sugar or something to somehow fall out of the barley. After some further voodoo involving hops and more hot water, we poured the stuff into that big glass jug in the middle picture. A couple of weeks, more black magic, some yeast, and beer was finally born. We poured the newborn liquid into that bunch of smaller glass jugs on the right. Sometime soon, we'll get to drink it and realize how extremely bad we are at making beer.

Not a Star Wars prop.

At this point, it's just really boring soup.

One of these bottles contains a genie.

Bicycling: Over break I also rode my dangerously rickety bicycle around town to get exercise and avoid an eggnog-related heart attack. While gallivanting about, I must have crashed a number of times and squished my phone, because it took these pictures. Since they are all accidents of technology, I cannot be held responsible for their utter lack of composition, framing, or any of the other words that mean "good picture" to a photographer. On that note, enjoy. Or, y'know, don't. Up to you, really.

space needle	mt. vesuvius
taj mahal	I think they filmed part of the Wire here