Sigur Rós -Boston, 19 September 2008

The show was freaking TIGHT! Seriously....and our seats were 2nd row center, as you can pretty much tell from the photo above. This shot was taken, as usual, with my phone and sucks. I'm pretty sure this was from the opening song, svefn-g-englar (or, alternately, "unpronouncable song #1").

Damien & Liz came with, but had seats way in the back; the Bones & I were basically on the stage with the band. Observe:

and the venue is my favorite place in town to see a show, outdoors under a giant tent on the waterfront....plus, it was a cool evening so everyone had out their big wool sweaters, Icelandic-style.
I'm thinking about re-naming this blog "Cool stuff I've done but am only able to present in crappy cellphone camera images."
This shot was from one of the last songs, Gobbledigook, which was clearly off the Gobbledihook. (Please slap me in the face for that joke, now). The show may have started slow and mellow but ended on a totally energetic and manic note, and not a person remained seated by this point. Freakin' great.

Edit: here's the setlist-
svefn g englar
glósóli
ný batterí
fljótavik
við spilum endalaust
hoppípolla
með blóðnasir
svo hljótt
heysátan
viðrar vel til loftárása
inní mér syngur vitleysingur
sæglópur
hafssól
gobbledigook
illgresi
popplagið
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So today I'm dedicating some serious time to sitting around & doing nothing except maybe hanging out with the badass pumpkin I got yesterday at the farm. Should be good times.

-Wrence

Coo-coo for Cacao

Today I ditched work.

This morning after coffee I roasted the cacao beans in the oven. I started them off around 400 and slowly lowered the temp to about 300 for a total of 20-25 minutes roasting time. The house smelled glorious. If you are trying it yourself, what you want to hear is the popping sound of the water evaporating from the beans. Afterward, we removed the husks, which was quite easy to do just by hand. Separating them out was a little trickier, but no big deal. Then, they were easily crushed with the back of a spoon and dumped right into the black beer, which is now 2 weeks old.

One snag in this whole plan came about when I went to buy the cherries. I was wondering a few weeks ago when the cherry "season" officially ends, so I went out to whole foods and was happy to see that there were cherries in abundance there. For some inexplicable reason, I DIDN'T BUY ANY, somehow confident that they'd still be there for me when I eventually needed them. Turns out, the end of cherry "season" was approximately now.

SO, after futile trips Wednesday night to 2 or 3 different Whole Foods stores, and also the Harvest Coop, and even after Vanessa drove me around to Shaw's and Stop & Shop, I finally gave up and started re-thinking the whole plan. But it was quite evident that I needed to press on with the original idea. I thought about getting dried cherries and re-hydrating them in some brandy or something, but the ingredient lists for same always included some kind of vegetable oil, presumably to keep them from sticking together in one gross congealed cherry orgy. As we all know, lipids do not play nice with beer, so that idea was written off. I ended up finding jarred sour cherries, not a pie mix, mind you, just pitted cherries in a sugar water brine, with the only other ingredient being food-grade citric acid, which I am fine with. So I chopped the shit out of them and added I think about 1.5 pounds. Oh, also a vanilla bean got in there as well. Here is a video of the first blurp from the airlock after I sealed the fermenter back up.




(Yea, I was rocking Dark Side while all this went down -Cheers, Richard Wright). Normally at that point in the day, I would have been at work, just finishing my coffee and reluctantly getting around to checking my voice mails. This was a much better use of my time, I think.
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In about 30 minutes Diesel & Liz are expected; tonight we are seeing Sigur Ros at the Bank of America Pavilion (or whatever the shit they call it these days) which is probably my favorite venue in town to see a show. Should be tight. I've never seen this band though I've been a fan for a long time. Also, it should be noted that while I'm not POSITIVE, I think The Bones and I have totally kick-awesome seats. More to come on that later

Peace
-Wrence