The Holt Blog

This is a neat movie I just watched akin to the movie I love called “Money as Debt”.

I’ve been reading about homebrewing for a couple weeks now. My friends Jeff, Nick, and Andy are way more experienced than me and have all produced delicious beer or cider on their own. I’ve benefited personally.

So I decided to try out hard cider on my own. I like beer, but cider seemed more local, natural, and historic to me. In the early days of our country, hops and barley weren’t easy to get but apples grew all over the place, meaning cider was the drink of choice.

Brewing seems to be something you can do casually or spend years scientifically perfecting. For cider, the recipes range from “leave a jug of apple juice alone for a few months” to complex and experimental. Some variables include:

- The kind of cider you use (makes a huge difference)
- The use of chemicals like pectic acid, Campden tablets, yeast nutrient, etc.
- Supplementing with sugars, honey, fruit, etc.
- Length of time of fermentation
- The type of yeast (also a big factor)
- Adding sweeteners after the fermenting process
- Method of stopping fermentation – cold crashing, racking, pasteurization, or a combination?
- Bottling with sugar to add extra carbonization

There’s others too, it’s quite a science even just for cider. Since it’s my first time, I read a lot and decided to go semi-pro. I used four separate gallons of cider so if I messed up one it wouldn’t mess up my whole batch. I used Nottingham Ale yeast, some pectic acid, and pre-treated with one Campden tablet per gallon. My friend Nick brought me all of that from the store plus some rubber stoppers and valve thingys, some sanitizer, and a hydrometer.

Much of this stuff is above my head yet, but the beauty of brewing seems to be that even an absolute amateur can end up with a delicious result if you follow a recipe. Maybe I’ll experiment if this batch comes out great.

Some materials needed

Campden tablets preparing cider for yeast pitch

Now I wait a week or two for fermentation to finish!

Jill and I just watched The Amish: A People of Preservation. There are no large explosions or well-known actors, but we liked it a lot.

Some of the things we were very attracted to because we’ve been thinking a lot lately about community living. The Amish seem to have a lot of the qualities we admire in people or are actively striving to assimilate, such as:

1) They place the community above themselves. They work together and have fun doing it. They try to avoid everything that leads to selfishness and pride. It’s like what communism is supposed to be like!

2) The Amish are simple and don’t need computers, TV, internet, cell phones, cars, radios, or even electricity to have fun. This is done intentionally to avoid becoming too worldly. Despite this, most of them interact with the world a lot, use phones, public transportation, and other machines. They just choose to avoid being wrapped up in them at home.

3) They worship God in their homes/barns and don’t have special, expensive church buildings. Neat.

4) They really, really care about each other. If a barn burns down, the community will have one up – the next day. They are really nice, loving people who would drop everything if a neighbor needs something.

5) They try to live out principles from the Bible. Sure, other Christians may find fault with some of their interpretations and methods. But they live out their convictions generation after generation. Do we?

Their lifestyle reminds me of this verse:

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands…” -1 Thessalonians 4:11

Try this experiment: Calculate how much you actually spend per minute using your current cell plan for one month. You may be astonished at the result! People routinely spend much more than they think.

Let’s say your cell phone plan is $60 per month and you spend 300 minutes talking. Right there, that’s 20 cents a minute! If you go over your allotted minutes, you get hit hard. AND most people are in a contractual relationship with their carrier, meaning you pledge to pay for the service for one or two years!

Being cheap and wary of large company monopolies and contracts, I set out to find a different way. The pay-as-you-go plan I found a few months ago is through STI Mobile. It’s eight cents a minute, which has been working out well for us. There’s usually adequate coverage because they piggyback on the Sprint network. The only downside is horrible customer service.

We also eliminated our land line years ago and never looked back. Why pay for a land line AND cell phones? It just confuses your friends who aren’t sure what number to call when.

Today, I set up an entirely new system using my awesome iMac as a phone. I can call (and receive calls) anywhere in the US for free! I used this article as a guide.

I’ll be testing this system out for a week or so to make sure it works well, and then getting rid of my cell phone. Simplicity is a good thing! One cell phone at eight cents a minute and a free land line is all the complexity we need.

Perhaps best of all, my new number is 617-440-HOLT. How awesome is that? Yeah, I’ll have to change my number, but it’s worth it.

I have learned that some women actually *like* taking care of babies. I had no idea. When we find one who says something like, “Anytime you need someone to watch Alice…” we put their names on a list. So far, we’ve found a lot and taken advantage of many of them! I’m not sure if they’re all just extremely helpful or just like babies a lot, maybe it’s a mix of both.

Because of these people, Jill and I have had a few dates together, which is really great because we like to spend time together. I’m able to be less jealous of Jill’s massive amounts of time with Alice when she can also spend time with me. So thanks all you babysitting peoples!

This invoice was really funny. It was just a typo though, I really didn’t get charged $3,000 for an oil change!

These two animated GIF’s just make me laugh and laugh. I got them from a site called senorgif.com.