Yard Sale: Day 2

My yard sale is over.  Yee haw!

We finished the sale a short time before the rain came.  We planned to go until 4 pm but when a few scattered rain drops fell after 3:30 pm we started to pack up.  It didn't start raining in earnest until 7 pm.

Rain is good as the grass had dried up before the sale.  Add in the stress of people walking and cars driving on my front lawn and my lawn needed attention after the sale was over.

I expected more people on Saturday than Friday but that wasn't the case.  I don't know why.  Maybe it was because it was the second day.  Maybe it was because of the weather.  We woke Saturday morning to an overcast sky and cold temperatures.  The temperature was 42 degrees when we went outside to set up around 8:30 am.  The warmest the day got was 66 degrees.  The sun tried to break through the clouds at times in the afternoon.  Tammy sat with a blanket all day and had hot chocolate several times to warm up.  August in Montana.  Where's global warming when you need it?

I sold plenty of stuff but I also had plenty of stuff left.  I was able to sell a number of bulky oddly shaped stuff which was good as it was a pain to store them.

Some odd stuff I sold:

• my Australian hat with wooden pegs hanging from strings all around the hat to keep the flies away from one's face,

• an old trunk I planned to toss on the burn pile but put out anyway for the sale.  Tammy put a "make offer" sticker on the trunk and one guy offered $5 for the trunk.   Sold!

• My life-sized cutout poster of Marilyn Monroe that I had from my apartment in Rochester, MN,

• most of my dad's old RV stuff from when he sold RVS in the early 70s,

• several large ugly hanging lamps from the house.  A neighbor lady brought the ugly green lamp for her son who loves the "70s" look,

• miscellaneous oars I had found along the river over the years.   The woman who bought them said her kids float the rivers and constantly are losing oars,

• the two boxes of wine bottles I had saved over the years for when I would learn to make my own wine.  I'm sure I'll save enough bottles by the time I'll ever learn to make wine.

One guy clued Tammy in the first day of the sale about all the copper and brass plumbing fittings that I had for sale.  He told Tammy I'd get more money selling them at a recycling place than at the yard sale.

One family said they would buy the bundle of insulation and would be back once they visited the bank to get cash.  I offered to take a check but they said they had to come back with a pickup anyway so they would bring cash then.  They never came back.

That's it for the year.  I do have more buildings and rooms to go through and I am sure I'll have enough stuff for a sale next year.

Liver, wine, hat

'So.. how does liver sound?'

"Sure!"

Sunday night I went over to my friend Rod's house for supper and to help him bottle wine. Rod and his wife had recently gotten a half a beef from her relatives and they needed room in their freezer. Hence the liver for supper.

Also attending the meal were Ed (from trivia night) and Alan. The meal and company were very good. Afterwards we went downstairs and bottled two batches of wine Rod was making: Apple and Apple/Rhubarb.

After we were done Rod gave me a bottle of each wine along with a bottle of Pomegranate/Rhubarb wine he had made earlier and was pretty proud of.

When it came time to leave I could not find my cap. My coat, gloves, and ear muffs were all where I left them but my hat was gone. After much searching Rod found my hat. Or what was left of my hat. Rod's dog, Buddy, had gotten my hat and destroyed it. It was my nice Missoula Livestock Auction hat. Oh well.

As I had walked the mile to Rod's house I needed a hat for my walk home in the cold. Rod gave me another one of his hats as a replacement for my destroyed hat.

We had wine with our supper and later tasted the wine we were bottling. The wine Rod was bottling tested to be 10% and 11% alcohol. The next morning I had a little bit of a hangover.

3 batches of wine

Saturday I went over to Rod's house to help him bottle the three batches of wine he had made. Rod hadn't planned on having all three batches ready at the same time, but that is how it worked out.

Rod made blueberry, cherry, and banana wines.

Rod has an old antique glass hydrometer, and he showed me how he uses it to measure the amount of sugar in the wine.

The blueberry and banana wines were at 10% alcohol while the cherry wine was at 13%. No wonder the cherry wine tastes the best of the three!

Then we siphoned the wine from a carboy into a bucket. This was to reduce the chance of siphoning any sediment at the bottom of the carboy into the bottles.

In the following photo the wine in the bucket is the banana wine. The third photo shows a couple of wines still in their carboys along with boxes of empty wine bottles that need to be prepared for filling.



The farmer is disinfecting the wine bottles with a solution. Then Rod fills each bottle after which the farmer places the cork in each bottle.



We bottled about 30 bottles each for the blueberry and cherry wines and 28 bottles of banana wine. Pictured here are the banana and blueberry wines.



Then Rod wanted to quickly make some wine labels. He hadn't counted on my coming up with offbeat ideas for labels. Naturally I had some ideas and suggestions and hours - many hours - later we came up with three wine labels. Rod had a headache by the time we were done, though part of the reason might have been all the wine we had sampled.

The first wine label was mainly my idea, which accounts for it being the most irreverent and goof-ball of the three labels. Since this was for the banana wine I suggested the label feature a monkey. After a long search we settled on this as the monkey image.

Once we had the image the name "Hunky Monkey" popped into my head. It does look like the monkey is posing. Rod handled the text's font and coloring.

I haven't drunken enough of the banana wine yet to know, so it may be an exaggeration to add the tag line "It'll Grow Hair on Your Chest". Besides that is more of a tag line for a whiskey and not a nice wine like Rod made.


We did the cherry wine label next. I started with a connection to George Washington and the cherry tree. We couldn't find an image of this. We couldn't even find a decent image of George Washington.

We did find a few good images of cherry trees in blossom with the Washington Monument in the background, but Rod felt the connection to the wine was too much of a stretch. Beside we had noticed an artistic rendering of two cherries that was good. Rod prefers to have drawings of the fruit on his wine labels. I admit Rod's label does look classier.

I wanted to give the wine a name - more of a name that just 'Cherry Wine' - and still was stuck on Washington and that led to 'president' and 'presidential'. "Presidential Cherry Wine" doesn't sound good so we ran 'presidential' through Babelfish and most translations weren't that interesting.

Then I came up with the idea of translating 'presidential' into Japanese because of the Japanese connection to the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. That is how we got the Japanese word on the label.

Poor Rod, he wanted a simple classy label and now he has to explain the label to everyone to whom he gives a bottle of the wine. "And why is there Japanese on the label?"


Lastly we designed the blueberry wine label. Again I went down a crazy tangent as I tried to tie 'blueberry' to Fats Domino through his song "Blueberry Hill". Rod humored me initially.

We couldn't find a really decent image of Fats Domino that would work on a wine label. We did think about using a black & white image of Fats dancing with his arms up in the air but the pixel size was too small and it was too irreverent for a classy wine.

Rod looked for images and drawing of blueberries and we decided on this image as it was more than just of blueberries and would be distinctive from the cherry label.

Now for the wine's name. With this as an image I struggled. I was still thinking about Fats Domino and Blueberry Hill and that did not work with this image. This image looks closer to a traditional wine label and evokes a location. The problem is that many wines have names related to the location of their vineyards. We didn't have a vineyard. We wanted a name that meant something to us and not merely a cute sounding name.

We struggled to choose a North Dakota name that would work with the picture. Nothing came to mind since mountains are rare to non-existent in North Dakota. I started thinking of a Montana name. I suggested "MacDonald Creek" after Glacier's Lake MacDonald as the image reminds me of where MacDonald Creek enters the lake. But Rod, never having visited Glacier Park, kept thinking of hamburgers when placing the MacDonald name on the label. We scrapped the name.

Blue. Blue. Blue. Something related to blue. Then it hit me: Cobalt Lake. My first trip with my hiking group was to Cobalt Lake in Glacier park. While there weren't any blueberries there, we did see a number of other berries: thimbleberries, elderberries, and huckleberries. Cobalt Lake it is.

Poor Rod, he makes the wines and I name them something totally unrelated to him. I chose the color of the words which explains why the color has nothing whatsoever to do with blue or purple. Rod chose the text's font and background pattern and color, which is the classier part of the label.

So "Hunky Monkey" was mainly my idea, " Cherry Wine" is Rod's idea, and "Cobalt Lake" is a combination of our ideas.

Now... to enjoy the wines!

First Aniversary

One year ago today I started this blog. Wow, a year has passed. I have written 355 posts over the past year. That is almost one each day. Lots of words and pictures. We'll see if I can keep it up and not run out of things to write about this next year.

Lately I haven't had much to write about as I haven't been doing much other than watching lots of movies and riding my brother's bicycle. I've seen more movies than I can remember, and what I remember are blurring together.

I have seen a number of Jean Harlow movies from the 1930s and have come to be impressed by her movies. I had her pegged as a glamor girl and sex symbol and not an actress, but have come to find she is pretty good, and pretty funny.

The romantic comedies from the 1930s are far better than most of today's romantic comedies. Maybe that is due to the passage of time and style of comedy; maybe it is because the 1930s women seem to be strong, witty, and equal to strong leading men in their own way, while many of today's romantic comedy women seem to be self centered and neurotic and their leading men are wimpy and not the leading ladies equals.

I also mentioned bicycling. After 10 days the middle of January of not riding (due to the time it took to rid the virus from my brother's computer and the cold snowy weather) I have gotten back on the bicycle the past week. I need some physical activity to counter the time watching movies and reading. I rode 111 miles this past week - not back for the third week of January in North Dakota! But then the weather here has been nice as it has been sunny and cloudless most of the time and relatively warm with high temperatures in the 20s F each day.

Tonight I visited my friend Rod for supper and to help him bottle his raspberry wine. Between football games Rod's wife, Barb, made a delicious supper. Barb is a big football fan while Rod and I don't care to waste time watching football. Rod made bread for our meal. Also very good. As I am a more adventurous eater than his family, Rod made a Thai peanut sauce for the two of us to go with the chicken his wife had cooked. Again, very good.

With the meal Rod served wine from a local Minot winery, the Pointe of View Winery. This winery was North Dakota's first winery. (There are more wineries in North Dakota now). According to the wine's label, North Dakota was the last U.S. state to have a winery.

Rod served two wines from the winery, a mead (honey wine) and a Cherry wine. Both were good, though sweet and with a slight syrupy feel to the liquid, especially the mead. These are not wines one overindulges on.

Then it was on to filling the bottles with the Raspberry wine Rod had made. After we taste tested the wine, Rod readied the wine while I rinsed the bottles with a sulfate solution to act (I believe) as a stabilizer and preservative. Then after Rod filled each bottle I corked them. We filled over 25 bottles of wine.

For helping I got several bottles of the wine along with a bottle of apple wine Rod had made earlier this Fall.

Rod has three more batches of wine brewing: cherry, blueberry, and banana. When Rod takes up a hobby he goes all out.

After we finished the wine making Rod showed me recent photos he had taken. Another of his recent hobbies has been bird watching and taking photos of the birds. With his camera's telephoto lens he has gotten quite a number of interesting bird photos. I never realized the variety of birds here in this area.

Frost had started to form on the pickup's windows by the time I drove home. The frost was starbusts and not solid so I didn't have to search for my brother's ice scrapper to clear the window before driving. Besides the distance was short. Still I had to be careful as I found the overhead street lights would light up the frost as I passed underneath them.

Beet wine

About time I got around to posting about this... I have made wine. Yes, beet wine!

This is my first time making wine; but now is the time to try my hand at making it. I always wanted to do this. My neighbors and I back in Montana have talked about making chokecherry wine, but never found the time to do so. My good NoDak friend, Rod, learned how to make wine this fall. He got the idea after visiting a winery during the 2005 edition of the CANDISC bicycle ride around N. Dakota. He has made successful batches of apple, plum, and chokecherry wines, among others.

Well, what do I have to make wine from? I hardly had any of my apples left. I didn't pick any chokecherries this year. My garden beets did really well this year and I ended up with more beets than even I cared to eat. Lo and behold I found a few recipes online on how to make beet wine. Well, why not?

You may remember my earlier post about my schleping lots of garden stuff on the train from MT to ND? Beets! Lots of beets. Now you know why I brought them with me!

Rod, and most recipes, said the fermentation process during wine making takes 6 to 8 weeks. Therefore the first thing I did after getting here was to cut up and cook the beets and then start the fermenting process. Rod and I did this in his kitchen before Christmas. Being guys we were a little messy - and beet juice is messy - so the kitchen got a little 'red'. Rod's wife, when she saw the kitchen, bit her tongue. Rod and I applied some elbow grease and cleaned up all of our mess once we were done, and I think (hope) all was forgiven.

The cooked beets were placed in Rod's 6 gallon pail, along with 9 pounds of sugar and enough water to fill the pail to the 5 gallon level. Campden tablets and a few other chemicals were also added. Then I took it all home. The pail of beets had a strong aroma!

24 hours later it was time to start the fermenting process. I started the yeast and then added it to the beet mixture. The next morning, re-reading the notes, I read that one should pour the yeast on top of the beet mixture. Do not stir and mix the yeast into the beets. Oopps. Maybe that is why the yeast mixture seemed lackluster.

Rod gave me another batch of yeast which I carefully poured on top of the beet mixture. This time the yeast took off. Now in addition to the smell of beets (yum?) the fermenting process was starting to give off an alcoholic smell. Hmm.. must be working!

After about a week it was time to remove the cooked beets from the mixture. By now there wasn't much left to be extracted from the beets themselves. Still I squeezed and squeezed and squeeeezed... the mesh bag of beets to get all the beet juice I could. A little more beet flavor can't hurt, can it? By the time I finished the squeezing, my hands were red, red, red! It took a long time and a lot of scrubbing to get back signs of my normal color.

Then Rod and I transferred the mixture from the 6 gallon pail into one of his carboys. Carboys look like one of those jugs of water on top of the old style water coolers. In fact these jugs can be used as carboys. I think that is where Rod got his carboys. (That's also the reason for the duct tape!)

Now to wait. This is where the 6 to 8 weeks comes in. I watched the bubbles rise through the liquid to the top of the bottle. Quickly rising. Many, many bubbles. All streaming upwards along the carboy's slope to its neck, which was sealed by an airlock. The airlock releases air from the bottle and does not not let it get inside. The next day the water in the airlock now had a pinkish/reddish hue.

My beets fermented really fast! After 7 to 10 days the hydrometer check showed the yeast had already converted all the sugar to alcohol. So much for weeks and weeks of fermentation! Now was the time to stop the fermentation process. By now I already had my first cataract surgery and had blurry vision. So I took everything back to Rod's house to have him help me with these steps. I also returned his two boxes of empty wine bottles - now clean and label free.

After adding potassium sorbate to kill the yeast, we let the beet mixture sit 24 hours to fully stabilize. Then Rod re-racked the mixture into another carboy before he added the clearing (fining) agents that encourage any pulp to fall to the bottom of the carboy. I left the mixture at Rod's house for him to do this for me. I was about to have my second cataract operation in a few days.

While I was at Rod's house I helped him bottle one of the two wines he was in the process of making: strawberry/kiwi. Rod had bought a nice corker that easily and quickly put corks into the wine bottles we filled, and the two of us made short work of bottling his wine.

Now to wait again. After about 10 days, on a weekend, we got together again to check my wine. After moving the mixture from one carboy to another we found plenty of sediment left behind. We sampled the beet wine. Strong and with an earthy aftertaste. Well, I did see some sediment move though the siphoning tube along with the liquid. Rod commented that this siphoning took longer than usual for him as the liquid mixture was thicker than his previous wines. Hmmmm... I had time before returning to Montana so we added another round of fining agents and let the mixture sit another week for more settling.

This time the earthy aftertaste wasn't as noticeable. Success! And I was pleased with the wine's color. The color you can see in the photos below.

Rod has experimented during his wine making on sometimes adding sugar water to sweeten the wine a little before bottling it. He had done this with his strawberry/kiwi wine before we bottled it. I am not sure which way my bottled beet wine will go: will it stay the same, sweeten, or become more acidic? Since my wine was near my tolerance for acidity in a wine, and the wine had a good body to tolerate sweetening, I decided we should add some sugar water to sweeten it a little. That way, if the bottled wine does turn more acidic over time, it will still be drinkable.

More sugar water sweetened the wine up some. I didn't have much room to work with now. Any more sugar water and the mixture could quickly become too sweet. And in case the wine sweetened with age, I didn't want it to get too sweet. I'd say "and fruity" but these are beets we are talking about after all, not fruit.

While the earthy aftertaste was now gone (or masked), the wine is after all made from beets. Think and you shall notice. Shhh!! My beet wine has body and still does taste of beets even through all that alcohol. But it's wine.

Enough tinkering. Enough sampling. Time to bottle! Besides Rod was also working on a batch of concord grape wine and peach(?) wine. Between sampling all our experiments with these wines, and the cheese and crackers, it was time to bottle my wine before our stomachs and taste buds gave out, or the effects of the wine made us too careless. Oopps... a little spilled on the carpet. Where is Rod's carpet cleaner machine? Got to clean it before his wife finds out! Beside being very noticeable, beet red is not a good carpet color!

We bottled 29 bottles. Actually closer to 26 bottles as 6 bottles were half sized bottles. Those bottles are for friends who want to try my wine. A little is probably all they could handle. I gave Rod 6 full bottles in exchange for all his help. I offered more but that was all he wanted. Based on its strong flavor, he felt it would take me years to drink all my wine. Possibly...

Then Rod and I got to work on designing a label for my wine. We came up with what I think is a nice label, and one representative for me. Tall Pines Winery presents "bietola rossa". We used babblefish to find a neat sounding name for my wine. "Bietola rossa" is Italian for red beet. Appropriate, eh?

At the local Gourmet Chef store I bought a re-sealer to use on opened wine bottles. I figured with my wine I wouldn't drink the whole bottle at one time! Turns out I was right!

I have had a few bottles of my wine since we bottled them all. I was pleasantly surprised that after a few weeks, and chilled in a refrigerator, the wine tastes better than when it was originally bottled. It's aging well? It also helps to drink the wine with a meal, and not sipping and re-sipping it warm before bottling it. Still, it takes me several meals to drink one bottle. Partly because of the strong flavor, and partly because after a glass and a half I can feel the alcohol's effect on me. And I don't presently have a pretty girlfriend to, ahem, enjoy the wine's effects with when I get silly.

Here's to my wine improving with age! And to me making more wine this year! (Anybody got any empty wine bottles they don't need?)



Flashlight behind the bottle

Against light

In sunlight

Look at the color of the wine.