…. Uncle Ben Osorio! Congratulations! You’ve won a half batch of your choice of beer, and once complete Ryan will bottle and ship (or bring) over.
For all those participants interested, here are some stats about the contest:
Nicely done, everyone.
Wow, it’s been a LONG time since we’ve blogged. We’ve just about given up blogging for Twitter (see @ryanmaple and @christimaple for our feeds) but every so often, something comes around that you just can’t summarize in 140 characters.
It’s that time of year again, folks: #bigshave2012!
I’ve been growing the beard since July and, quite honestly, it’s beginning to annoy me. Couple that with the fact that it’s been an unseasonably warm winter, and the urge to shave it — and move on — has overtaken the urge to see how long I can grow it. I haven’t done a big shave contest in a while (you can see the last one in 2009 here), and I haven’t brewed in a few weeks, so I thought I’d have one this year. You can see my current beard (photo was taken the morning of Sunday, January 15th) in the photo to the left — click on it to get a high-res version.
So, without further adieu, here are the contest details!
Right before I shave or on January 21st, whichever comes first, Christi will pluck (with relish!) ten (10) random hairs, solely at her discretion, from my face. These hairs will be set aside for judging. She will measure all ten of them, in millimeters, then calculate the average length. This average length is what you all will be guessing.
Each person is entitled to one (1) guess. This guess may be provided in whatever measurement you want, but it will be converted into millimeters for the purposes of judging.
The prize is 2.5 gallons — half a batch — of #homebrew and, of course, bragging rights. I’ll brew whatever the winner wants, within reason (must be an ale, and something I can brew with my equipment), and will bottle and ship it to them at my expense.
Your guess must be submitted, via email, to bigshave@mapletrees.com, by 9am on Saturday, January 21st. Christi is the judge, and her judgement is final. She will resolve all conflicts and questions.
Ben Thomas (@ibackupyourshit) is the defending champion, and he can attest to the quality of the homebrew. The 2009 contest was a success, but let’s make this year’s even better! Spread this contest around to anybody you know who likes beer, or facial hair. The more the merrier!
Leave questions and notes in the comments below. Please do NOT put any guesses there — you don’t want to help out anybody else, do you?
Lastly, I may shave before January 21st (maybe today, maybe tomorrow, we’ll see) but that doesn’t change the terms of this contest. Good luck, everybody!
Happy New Year Everybody!
As most of you know, @christimaple and I were in Paris for Christmas this year… this trip was a present to Christi for her 30th birthday. Heavily edited digital photos of the trip may be found on my Picasa page... I’m eager to know what y’all think, so don’t be shy and leave a comment!
Had an awesome time at the pool yesterday to celebrate Benny’s graduation from High School, Michelle’s Confirmation (albeit a little bit belated), and Michael’s graduation from Middle School. Congrats to all!
I didn’t bring my camera and used this party as an opportunity to shoot and edit everything on my iPhone 4. Here is the movie I cut up, again, entirely on my iPhone using the iMovie app. The A4 processor made this exercise a total breeze, taking just under 20 minutes. It’s quite incredible that the technology is here to do this entirely on your phone, potentially while the event is still going on.
Anywho it’s a bit big (1280×720), and entirely HD, so it may take a while to download. If you want a copy just right-click on the link above and use “Save as…” to save a copy to your local system. The raw pictures are also up in my Picasa gallery.
I’ve also posted it to YouTube and MobileMe but, quite honestly, they both look like crap compared to the high-res version above.
Enjoy!
Is this really the first post on our site of the new year? It’s March…already!
Did we mention that we went to San Diego and San Francisco last year? It was a great vacation and we had lots of fun. We started our trip in San Diego, in town to celebrate Dennis and Lisa’s wedding. The wedding was beautiful taking place on a paddle boat in the Santa Barbara Cove in Mission Bay. It was a beautiful, emotional wedding and a fun, festive reception. We spent a few days in San Diego with Jason & Jess and Rob & Becky, taking in the sights, then went to San Francisco for a few extra days. Ryan took advantage of being on the west coast to explore local breweries (we called this his beer-cation) and together with Rob & Becky we saw Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Haight/Ashbury, Fisherman’s Wharf and other sites. It’s a beautiful city and we experienced beautiful, sunny weather. One day, Ryan and I took a two-hour Segway tour in San Fran that took us all over the city. It was a blast and we recommend to anyone, in any city that offers tours, to experience the fun!
Since then, we’ve celebrated the holidays, I’ve lost my job, Ryan received an interim promotion at his, we spent time with friends for a long weekend in the Poconos (and then helped demolish the kitchen up there), I took a trip to Charlotte for my cousin’s baby shower and most recently we celebrated Ryan’s birthday. Our third wedding anniversary is coming up so we’ll be celebrating again at the end of the month.
Ryan’s still brewing and I’m sure he’ll write a big post about his accomplishments, including his 1st place win at a recent competition for his Oatmeal Stout. It received that recognition within the “Sweet, Oatmeal and Foreign Extra Stout” category and then was entered into the “Best in Show” category, where he placed 5th! I’m so proud of him, because this was the second biggest competition on the East Coast with over 800 entries!
Enjoy your St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, be safe and happy, and check back here soon for more updates!
So here I sit brewing an English Mild for our annual Poconos trip in January 2010 and I say to myself “hey, I haven’t blogged in a while!” Christi is inside, warm, doing her own thing so I thought I’d throw a quick post up — while I’m still somewhat sober, as I’m on my fourth beer by 11:00am (this is a Defiant Christmas Ale, the other were my homebrewed Oatmeal Stout.
The pictures are up in my Picasa gallery. I didn’t get as many as I usually do because, stupid me, I forgot to bring our camera Christmas Eve (when most of the action happens, as that’s when the kids open up their gifts).
I’d promise to blog more but, as I’ve made that empty promise before, I’ll just go back to brewing. Cheers!
Here is a quick movie I whipped up from the movies we took on Fathers Day last Sunday, at Kristen and Jon’s:
My first post to YouTube, enjoy!
Happy Monday everybody! Christi and I had a great weekend. On Saturday we picked our new 2009 Jetta SE. The lease on our Acura TSX is up in April so it was time to get some new wheels. So far we love it: it’s not an Acura, of course, but it rides really nice and is very comfortable. Our salesperson, Pascal Lemaire, was absolutely wonderful and we highly recommend him to any of you looking to buy a Volkswagon. We had a small snag with the finance guy (it was his first day) which caused us to have to wait 3 hours longer than we expected, but that was no big deal.
On Sunday night we celebrated our upcoming anniversary by having dinner at a French restaurant, The Chef’s Table in Franklin Lakes, NJ. It’s only our second anniversary but this is a tradition of ours, celebrating it at French restaurant to commemorate our incredible honeymoon in Paris. Last year we ate at Latour in Ridgewood and thoroughly enjoyed it, so that was the bar that The Chef’s Table had to stand up to.
It’s BYOB — which, IMHO, is a must — so we picked up a bottle of Chateau La Tour De Mons Margaux, 2005. We have had this wine a few times and it’s one of our favorite Red Bordeaux’s. The ambiance was certainly more comfortable than Latour: it was much more personal and well-lit, as opposed to the dimly-lit ambiance of Latour. The service was perfect and the food was out of this world.
Christi started with a standard, French onion soup and I started with a Louisiana crab cake. This was the best crab cake I have ever had: it was a good 4 inches around, there was no filling, it was 100% crab, and it was only slighly grilled on the outside. I can’t stand crab cakes which have that burnt flavor. It was served in a very tasty sauce and was the perfect beginning to the meal.
Christi had a duck dish as in entree and I had twin medallions of veal with swiss and ham. Not the most exciting dish in the world but it was bursting with flavor: the cheese had a nice pronounced flavor to it, which I like, and each medallion was fried which gave it a nice depth.
For desert Christi got an apple tart and I got another standard: creme brulee which was also phenomenal. The sugar layer was hard but not too hard, thick but not too thick, and delicious. The creme layer was also perfect and you could see little specks of vanilla at the bottom of the dish. The perfect ending to a nearly perfect meal.
So how does it stack up to Latour? It’s most certainly comparable, and both Christi and I liked it a little bit more. The food and service is just as good, but The Chef’s Table gets the edge in terms of ambiance. It’s just more our style.
Sorry for rambling 
. Enjoy the rest of your week everybody!
Happy New Year everybody! Sorry I’ve been so quiet as of late, and how about Christi beating me to the punch for the first post of 2009? She blogged while I was taking a nap on the couch, during the first quarter of the Eagles/Vikings game, after drinking a pint of my cider. This is only the third full pint I’ve had and, at this rate, that keg is going to last a long long time.
Anywho, lots to catch up on. NYE was a blast, as Christi said, having fondue with Jason, Jess, and John. Hanging with John is always a trip and a good time so it was really great having him up. He managed to help me free up some bottles, thankfully, since he took to my homebrew like a fish to water
New Years day was ultra-lazy. Christi made an awesome coffee cake for breakfast then, after watching the NHL Winter Classic, we played a bit of Rock Band 2, as seen in the picture to the right. Jess was on lead guitar, I was on bass, Jason was on drums, and John sang a few songs. I somehow managed to get through “Painkiller” by Metallica on bass/hard, which was a miracle, and a good time was had by all. Playing Rock Band by yourself is fun but it’s always way more fun with other people (*cough* *cough* hear that Christi? *cough* *cough*).
Jess is also really good at guitar: she must have had lots of practice over the last few months 
. She’s trying to make the jump to playing on hard, so everybody wish her luck! Next time we’ll all play is out in the Poconos in a few weeks.
Friday was another lazy day inside the house. We took down our tree, worked on our 2009 want/goals list, and hung a picture shelf over our television. The shelf is a bit high but should look better when we get a bigger TV in a few years (Christi, feel free to ignore that previous sentence *jedi mind trick*).
Saturday was a busy tech support day. I taught Kristen and Jon how to use their shiny new MacBook Pro, and set up a wireless network at Tiff and Jeff’s house. I also tentatively scheduled a tech support session with my Mom, to teach her how to use her new notebook and iPod Touch.
Sunday we watched the Ravens destroy the Dolphins (no Miami fans, Pennington is not your savior and yes, that was the real Chad who came to play) and the Vikings lose to the Eagles. With the Vikings losing, I dropped to -4 games with only 7 games left to pick in the season. Things are looking grim but I’m not giving up yet!
Nothing big happening this week, but it’s our first full week back at work in a while so things are bound to get interesting. I’m brewing my first partial-mash brew on Saturday or Sunday, an Oatmeal Stout, along with bottling/kegging the 10g of Irish Red, assuming it’s done… but you’ll hear more about that when the weekend comes for sure.
Have a happy and healthy 2009 everybody!
Well, 2008 is over. I don’t know anyone who is sad to see it behind us, for the problems with the economy, the political administration, and other personal issues. I’m glad to see it finished because I feel that 2009 is going to be an exciting year with lots of changes.
But it’s not starting out as I’d hope! We had Jason, Jess, their dog Sonny and friend John up at our place to celebrate New Years Eve. It was lots of fun, lots of laughs and a great time. Our fondue dinner and chocolate fondue dessert was a success – something none of them have tried before. We celebrated the countdown over a glass of champagne – and then I crashed for a restless night’s sleep due to what I only thought was a head cold that I had since Monday.
J&J left the next night and Ryan and I had the rest of the weekend to ourselves. Saturday was the first day in a long four-day weekend that we actually had things to do. We left our house early that morning for a day of Tech Support with Ryan’s sisters. I didn’t do much – it really was all Ryan – but it left us so drained. I was still really sick (and getting worse as the days went on) so by early evening we were on our way home, both so tired and ready for early bed. But a problem at Ryan’s office left him having to go in for just over an hour and we didn’t get the early night sleep we wanted.
Today, Sunday, has been pretty restful. I was able to get to the doctor who gave me antibiotic for my sinus infection. Let’s hope after a week the medicine does what it’s supposed to do – I need to get better! We just finished watching the Baltimore Ravens destroy the Miami Dolphins (yippee!) and are now watching the Phila Eagles/Minn Vikings game. We’ll see how things go for these teams!
