The Brunello situation has been averted

Friday I was out of work by lunch time, and had a quiet afternoon reading to finish Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It's wonderful! One never quite knows what to expect with him. This is almost entirely told in a flashback by a 7 year old, and it's completely compelling. The story doesn't sound plausible at all, until he gets started, then you're right in there with the characters. The next book is Is That a Fish in your Ear, Translation and the meaning of everything, by David Bellos.

We are in the middle of summer here, and I'm loving it. We had DD here this morning to look at our back yard. She did the interior design for our house. We are at a total loss of what to do in the back yard, and we're hoping she will give us some ideas. Of course, she's up to her eyeballs dealing with people flooded out and trying to do something with their homes. There's one sad situation where she is trying to convince the homeowners that it's cheaper and better to knock the place down and build over. Except they don't want to. The foundation is compromised, the design makes it hard to strip stuff out so it can all be properly sanitized and rebuild, and they think it's an easy fix. Clearly they don't know what was in the water. It will be a while before she gets back to us, and nothing will happen this year.

Afterward I went for a lovely run down into Fish Creek in the 25C heat. I know the loop is about 7 to 8 K, depending on exactly where I start and stop. Runmeter thought I'd done 9 K, but it admitted it didn't have a good GPS lock for a while. Take a look at the map for the large red dot.

There I was running along, thinking that girl on the bike looks awfully familiar, then I realized it was Katie! She stopped and I ran back so we could chat a few minutes. Haven't seen her in a while. She had done a swim already, and ridden Road to Nepal TWICE, and was still fresh as a daisy, looking to ride more. She is awesome. While I'm standing there chatting my phone tells me I'm up to 3 K, but I already knew the distance wasn't right. Still, I'm amused by what it thought I was doing, standing completely still. According to this I was playing in traffic.

The rest of the run was nice and easy, except dodging around part of the path that isn't there any more. This is looking back, in the photo, the alternative path is off to the right. Duh. If you look carefully you can just see where the path ends on the other side of the washout. The river moved about 30 m maybe to take out quite a good sized chunk of path. This is after the huge floods in Fish Creek a few years ago, when they piled up a lot of rip rap to help stabilize the bank. I guess that only goes so far.

The great Brunello situation has been brewing for a while. It's one of my all time favourite wines, and my existing stock was getting down below a dozen bottles. In our house, this almost qualifies as a crisis. The Brunello kit has been ready to bottle for a little while, but I haven't been able to get to it. At last! It is very nice, though a touch sharp, just out of the carboy. I drank several glasses while BBQing rack of lamp, and a mix of sweet potatoe and ordinary potatoes.

One thing with summer in Calgary is you get interesting cloud formations. No rain here out of either of these, but I liked how they looked.

Lastly, I've been having some of the novel brew in my head over the last week, and I'm finally starting to capture some of the ideas. I'm hoping to do a deep dive into it tomorrow. One of the characters has spoken up, asking for something that is very interesting. Writers, have you ever had this happen? Do you agree and write it in, or go where you wanted to go?