#Game of Thrones – what a disappointment

Disappointed evening last night, but not because of the TV show Game and Thrones. Sometimes things just don’t work out. We had planned to watch the last episodes of #Game and Thrones last night. We looked forward to having another exiting evening of TV watching. Well...it didn’t happen. At 8:30 p.m., just as we decided to start watching TV, we had a power failure. Apparently, there was a pole fire and they had to replace a transformer. 993 homes in our area were without power. Our house was one of them. The power didn’t come on until shortly after 11 p.m. There were over a thousand pissed off people last night, my wife and me included. In our younger days we would have made it a romantic evening with all the trimmings, but as it stands now we spent the evening reading a book using a headlamp for light. If anyone is interested, I read ‘More than Fire’ by Philip José Farmer, the 6th book in his World of Tiers series. Science Fiction, of course.The book was not as hot as my temper. My wife tried to calm me down by saying, "You wanted to read a book for a long time already, anyway. Here is your chance." She was happy with the book she read on her eBook-reader.

So now we are planning to watch Game of Thrones tonight. Hopefully it works out. On the menu of TV watching for tonight had been the last 2 episodes of #‘The Blacklist’. Last night was the season finale. Of course, I couldn’t tape it for lack of power, but I downloaded it from the internet. I also downloaded the third episode of #24. We haven’t watched the first 2 yet. Another TV evening in the planning stage. Another show I downloaded was #‘Continuum’. It’s a time travel show and we like it. Lucky we can get these shows through the internet, otherwise I would have been even more upset.

The weather outside is still miserable, so I’m going to bottle another batch of my beer. I managed to bottle one batch yesterday. It is a lot of work. If one counts the hours washing and sterilizing bottles it almost isn’t worth it, but I’m a pensioner. My time is worth nothing. I get paid either way...work or not work, it doesn’t matter. The kit cost me $35.00 for the kit plus the cost of the priming sugar, and I get 66 x 341ml bottles from it, which means one dozen cost me about $6.50. Not bad considering the cheapest beer I can buy costs me $19.30 in the liqueur store. And the price is going up again. Perhaps it already has. (Government greed). There are cheaper beer kits to be had, but I like this one; it is called ‘Festa Brew’ and makes very good beer. I buy 23 litres of must and you don’t add water. All you do is add the yeast, let it ferment and age a bit in a secondary carboy (2 to 3 weeks is fine) and then bottle it with priming sugar. It is drinkable after about one month but gets better as it ages. I have kept home made beer for 5 years and it never went bad. You can’t do that with commercially produced beer; it lasts only a year if you’re lucky.

Note: Everything is going up in price except our pensions. I just checked a flyer from Brewer's Direct, that's where I buy my beer and wine kits. They have a sale on Festa Brew beer kits: $41.99 . They even put a limit of 4 on it. (Another trick to make you think you're getting a super deal). Last time I paid $35.00. It used to cost around $25.00 on sale. It seems as the government controlled liqueur prices go up so do the prices of kits. I may have to look around for a different store or different kits. Maybe I should grow my own hops. Or maybe I should start drinking more water. But that isn't cheap either. We just paid $2500.00 for our well pump.

Well, I'd better get started with my bottling. Time doesn't stand still.