At Nancy's recommendation, Jon and I watched the first 4 episodes of the 1st season of 24. Pretty darn good, so far. It's an interesting gimmick: 24 hours - each hour is an episode and things are in 'real time'. And the best thing is Jon watched it with me and he's interested in watching the rest. Yay! I couldn't get him interested in Angel at all. You know, the older Kiefer Sutherland gets, the more he looks like his old man.

The other day I proved to myself once and for all that my cat is stone deaf. We did take her to the vet; he looked her over and said he couldn't find anything wrong with her ears. Last Tuesday I was vacuuming the house and I saw her asleep on a box. So I turned the vacuum cleaner off; rolled it up right next to her, then turned it on. If you own a cat you know that you would have to then use a putty knife and a claw hammer to scrape/pry kitty off the ceiling, but she didn't even budge. With the cleaner running, I woke her up by scritching her behind the ears; she stretched, yawned, and then went back to sleep. Yep, deaf as a post. Kinda envy her in a way.

The beer is burping merrily away. Once I transfer it to the secondary fermenter I'll have a small taste to make sure nothing funny decided to breed in there. The secondary is merely getting the new beer off the bed of dead yeast which will start breaking down and adding funny flavors to the beer. Am I afraid of poisoning myself? Nah. No self-respecting pathogen would grow in that crap.

The secondary fermentation simply gives the more hardy yeast time to flocculate - wait, that's a cool word:

flocculate
SYLLABICATION: floc·cu·late
VERB: Inflected forms: floc·cu·lat·ed, floc·cu·lat·ing, floc·cu·lates

TRANSITIVE VERB: 1. To cause (soil) to form lumps or masses.
2. To cause (clouds) to form fluffy masses.
INTRANSITIVE VERB: To form lumpy or fluffy masses.
NOUN: Something that has formed lumpy or fluffy masses.

*Heh*. Any way, I will transfer the beer into its secondary fermenter, which will be its permanent home (until I drink it) which is an old metal Pepsi 5 gallon keg. I'll seal it, and burp it every 2 or 3 days to relieve the CO2 pressure for about 10 days. Then I'll hook it up to my CO2 tank and carbonate it. Mmmm. Because I'm doing the secondary fermentation in the keg, that first glass of beer will be about 90% flocculated (heh) yeast. Mmmmm! It's a great source of (if I recall correctly) vitamin B-12, which coincidentally is good for hangovers.

Oh, yeah. My other vocabulary word for the day:
bonhomie
SYLLABICATION: bon·ho·mie
NOUN: A pleasant and affable disposition; geniality.
ETYMOLOGY: French, from bonhomme, good-natured man : bon, good (from Latin bonus).
OTHER FORMS: bonho·mous (bn-ms) —ADJECTIVE