Big beers are in the house

Who'd have thought that just down the road a bit there is a good stash of high gravity beers. On Friday, at the recommendation of another Huntsville beer snob, I made the trek over state lines to Fayetteville, TN. The Liquor Locker looked like your average liquor store at first. It looked like a waste of my drive, then I rounded the corner to the back room. Hello gorgeous. I don't think I have seen a better collection of big/bold beers in one location. North Coast, Sierra Nevada, Chimay, Stone Brewing, etc. I don't know how this little shop gets distribution of these micro-brewery specials, but I am glad to have found them.

I walked out with a case in hand and about $70 out of the wallet. There goes the beer budget for the month, atleast most of it. Here is the goodie list:
4pk - Flying Dog Brewery, Double Dog Pale Ale (11.5%, 85IBU's)
4pk - North Coast Brewing, Old Rasputin Sout (9%, 75IBU's)
4pk - Nort Coast Brewing, Old Stock Ale (12.5%, 36IBU's)
6pk x 2 - Sierra Nevada, Bigfoot 2009 Barley Wine (9.6%, 90IBU's)


It was a good year for all these beers. Maybe they taste better because I am deprived of them here, but I don't think that is the case. It was weird to walk out without a Stone brew in the box, but the stone brew was all overpriced (about $10 for a 22oz). So for the past few days I have happily been sipping the good stuff and remembering the good'ol days. Looking forward to monthly beer runs across the state line.

Not a whole lot else going on. Weekend was unproductive. We had to scramble all day Saturday to get everything done and Mom to the airport. Austin had his second birthday party, a sleepover with the boys. We awoke Sunday morning with snow coming down, so playing in the snow and lounging around was all that was on order.

The desktop computer is giving hints that the main hard drive is on it's last legs (noise,random crashes, slow startup, hanging on apps). So I ran around and found a drive last night. Buying hard drives at retail is not nearly as good of a deal as I can find online. 250gb drives sell for $80-90 in the stores. I ended up getting a 1tb. I stayed up until about 2am backing up and transferring everything off of the 250gb storage drives onto the new 1tb. Next step will be ripping out the 80g system disc and putting one of the 250gb in it's place. I always say that windows works best with an annual re-install. It has been about 14mo, so I guess I was due anyhow. It just never seems to happen at a convenient time. Oh well. I am kicking around the idea of installing the 250gb drives in a redundant raid array (sorry, Ed is probably the only person reading who got that).

That's all for now.