Aside from a day spent pulling my remaining hair out to get an impossible amount of work done in a mere eight hours, my birthday was very nice. Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes! My wife made me a nice London Broil for dinner, and she and Alexis got me some very thoughtful gifts.
One of the highlights was the imported beer that the ladies brought me to have with my dinner. These were not beers I would have tried on my own, most probably, but they were definitely a pleasant surprise. Both were from Germany, and I’d not had German beer for some time … very good ones are hard to come by where I live.
The first was from Tucher, a “Dunkles Hefe Weizen”, which basically means it’s a dark wheat beer. I knew I was in for a treat the moment I poured this one from the bottle. It was dark, but not too dark, and had a pleasant aroma — sweet and not too yeasty, almost like apples. The taste was smooth, rich, and wonderful, and more or less completely unlike any beer I’ve ever tasted. I definitely want some more of this.
The second beer was also a hefe weizen, but a lighter one from Paulaner. It had all the qualities of the Tucher but was not as dark, and the nice aroma wasn’t as pronounced. The flavor basically followed the color, this one was a bit light and tasted that way. Pleasant, but not as impressive as the Tucher. It’s probably easier to find, though, so when I’ve got a taste for German wheat beer and can’t find the Tucher, this will likely be my choice.
I did a little hunting about on the web this morning and discovered that Tucher also makes a light version of the hefe weizen, called “Helles Hefe Weizen”, but I can’t tell if Paulaner makes a dark one. In any case, I have now discovered a taste for wheat beer, something I’d never really experienced before, and I now have a whole new category of beers to explore, thanks to my wife. Thanks, honey!
The National Geographic channel had a piece about Three Mile Island last night, called “Minutes to Meltdown”. I don’t think it was newly produced, but this was the first time I’d watched it. (The 25th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident is coming up, March 28, so I guess we should expect more of this type of documentaries in the near future … they’ll probably be running the hell out of “The China Syndrome” too.) The piece featured lots of commentary by Mike Gray, whose book “The Warning” is probably the most authoritative and complete work on the accident ever written. It puts my humble web site (http://kd4dcy.net/tmi) to shame. I was pleased to see that the facts and events surrounding the accident were very faithfully reported, and that the technical details were fairly accurate, this is more unusual than one might think given the complexity of the accident and its causes.
My wife groans every time I watch a show about Three Mile Island, but it’s become a great interest of mine over the years, beginning in the mid 1980s when I worked on a related project. I think it’s a very important piece of American (and world) history. Not only is it an indictment of a nuclear industry (and a regulatory agency) that had become dangerously complacent, but it’s also a success story. When one compares Three Mile Island to Chernobyl, it becomes clear just how well the safety systems at TMI worked! Not one person was injured as a result of the TMI accident. Meanwhile, a huge swath of the Ukraine will be uninhabitable for thousands of years, and hundreds are dead as a result of Chernobyl’s fiery demise.
I am getting geocaching withdrawal … maybe just outdoors withdrawal in general. I haven’t found a cache yet THIS YEAR … shameful. I want to go camping this weekend … do some geocaching … get outside. With my luck, it will piss down rain both days, but I can dream, can’t I? 🙂