Old Time Activities

found that my back tire was flat so had to take it to Maglia Rosa down the street.

Crown Heights

Two Saints in Crown Heights is a cool bar

shops like this look like Korea

New Life Tabernacle Inc.
fat piece of cat that steven basically inherited.

after this Crown Heights adventure Jen and I ate at Brucie in our neighborhood.  The Linguini in clam sauce was really really really small and Jen was so mad it prompted her to sign up for Yelp and write a long bad review.

Since I moved back to America I have been using a pre paid AT&T plan and so I finally got a real phone plan, Verizon family plan with bob.  An experience I didn't really need to have but I now have an iphone6 (up from iphone 4) that I pay $23 a month for 24 months for.  A thrilling caption and I'm sure you're glad you read it.  Now you'll see a few iphone 6 photos thrown in here sometimes, much better camera than the iphone 4 but still no where near as good as my canon 6D.

across the street from congress bar someone has a huuuge screen.

lines on my forhead from 3D glasses because they don't fit asian faces.  I don't have a high nose bridge so I have to push the glasses so far onto my face that my eyelashes hit the lenses and eyelash oil gets all over them and then it gets all blurry.  Besides the fact that 3D glasses tint everything 10% or more black and other problems I have with 3D this eye lash problem takes the cake.  I say it all the time, F 3D!!!!  Also we saw "The Martian".  I found the humor and casting to be super inappropriate and it took away from the film so much that I say F the martian too.  

Old time activity #1 is we finally made Makgeolli, aka Korean rice wine, although technically it's not rice wine.  

the ingredients are simple, cooked rice, water, yeast, and nuruk (korean starter enzyme that has yeast, fungi and other stuff in it)

you're supposed to wash the rice a ton, one recipe says wash it 30 times.  After a little while I said to myself why do i have to do this so many times and then i made bob look online to see how vigorously other people wash their rice and it looked like most people just swirl their hand around in there where as I was kind of rubbing it in my hands.  I did it about 15 times very zealously.  Super washed rice has this amazing look to it.

gotta let it dry before you cook it for some reason.  Also doesn't make sense but must be for a good reason, and since this is a super old time activity we let it dry.  How old timey you might be asking? (i'm sure you're not asking) well the first record of it was during the rule of King Dongmyeong so anytime from 37 BC until his reign was over.
what's going on with soju these days?  it used to be 22% and now its down to 18.....

we made the whole thing into a makgeolli making party, virginia and chris came and no one really likes makgeolli that much cuz it really doesn't taste that good.  What makes it go down easier is the cultural aspect of it, especially if you're in Korea drinking it.  Anyway that's fine, I'll drink it you guys.  (also same deal with soju)
made some little Chawanmushis (Japanese though) because they are cuter looking than a big bowl of korean style steamed egg.

after cooking a few batches of rice in a rice cooker (which i won't do next time i'll do it in a pot like they suggest) it's time to add the nuruk made paste like by mixing it with some water.

into the sterilized fermentation vessels which we dunked in boiling water.  I was concerned about if this was going to be sterilizing enough because what we didn't isn't sterilizing technically I don't think.  It's easy for it all to get ruined by bacteria they say.  They is also a lot of people that all have different recipes.  We had to pick and choose from these recipes to come up with our Franken recipe.  If you know bob imagine him facing this task with Jason Raish as his task master.

we filled them up to much and in the morning we saw a bunch of what might have been precious alcohol had overflowed.  They warned about this and we thought we calculated for this but we are dumb@sses.  The yeast were playing around and it was bubbling so we knew they were doing their thing.

I've had these Klipsch promedia 4.1 speakers since the year 2000 and finally the subwoofer started buzzing whilst watching "Earth to Echo" (a movie for tweens that we decided to watch on a lark because we couldn't be bothered to spend 30 min trying to all agree on something) of all things.  The foam around the subwoofer speakers completely disintegrated so i had to by replacement foam.

Fort Tryon park above harlem in the washington heights and inwood neighborhoods.  They had a Medieval festival there so lots of weirdos and nerds.  Steven loves medieval stuff and I don't know what category he's in but he didn't like how other nerds were polluting his medieval times with their out of time period or out of theme nerd crap.  There were quite a few people and groups who used this festival to just cosplay or wear any weird thing they wanted.

two mates waiting around the entrance for their other mates so they can really get it kickin' off.  Steven wasn't happy with this photo and I said why, because it give you a bad name? and he said yea.  I have to agree, it does make him look bad by association.


are hula hoops medieval?  this festival had a generous peppering of hippie fare in it.

is aromatherapy medieval?



giant turkey legs, $10

brah seriously can you just help me out here and cover this shift for me?  I'm up here with Maggie and my kid and we're just really trying to make it happen this year.


Steven owns something similar to this, a lap dulcimer or something weird like that.  cool man

probably just heating up this iron piece and pounding on it all day because no one is going to stay around long enough to see a whole sword get made

Steven called these swords bullsh!t and later pointed out the real guys.  cool man

crappy photo but fort tryon park runs along the hudson river so it's pretty cool

the living chess game.  all scripted, basically the WWE with a medieval script

I wish bob was there so I could have beaten him.  There were plenty of play swords and armor being sold.

finally went to the Cloisters




cloisters were nice, i'm sure they are a lot nicer when there aren't so many weirdos from the next door medieval festival swarming the place.






across the street from the locksmith wine and burger bar.


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