Vacation Day X: Brooding, Brewing, & Planning for a Better Escape Next Summer

I quit counting the days off that I've used since this past Tuesday. There has been nothing eventful since then, except for sobering issues that I had to address on Wednesday evening, all of which were work related. Other less than favourable circumstances have me restricted to being a homebody. So, I settled with converting the kitchen into a laboratory, to start brewing some beer, and then I continued to monkey around with other wildly experimental ways of cooking and food prep that just run shy of me using liquid nitrogen and explosives.

The brewing project is going well so far. The yeast culture is alive, activated, and doing what it loves to do best: making alcohol. I love hearing the initial rhythmic released bursts of CO₂  escaping from the fermenter's airlock, as it matches the same cadence and frequency of a person's heartbeat at rest . . . a tell-tale sign that this life form is being well-nurtured and content. Yeah sure, I suppose that sounds a little flaky . . . but I'd rather share this little blurb with an embellishment of romanticism than describing it all with the more accurate scientific explanation of what is really going on through this process: the synchronous expulsion of gas that is an expended metabolic by-product of digestion from micro-organisms. In other words . . . a pulsating release of the collected billions of tiny yeast farts.

I had to force myself to settle down, and let my ankles and knees recover from the shock of using my toe shoes (Hobbit boots) for running again. These things are a delight to run in, but they play havoc to the leg muscles when doing any extended period of walking in them. I became so seduced by how wonderfully I was performing with them on my run that I overshot my training range by a hell of a long way, and I'm paying for it now.

My review of last entry led me to search through travel sites for getting ideas for cheap packages for next summer. I figured that I'd extend my running to hitting a race or two out of province, or even out of country. I'd be doing neither races further south of here, nor any around the great lakes region in summer*: I don't handle heat and humidity very well as it is now. I figured that I could do a marathon in Quebec, or the Maritimes, or someplace in Northern Europe which would be suit me better: maybe somewhere between the latitudes of Reykjavik and Zurich. I have more research, and whittling down of options, to do.

*- Maybe in mid or late autumn.