A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
So, what did I do on my summer vacation?
Well, let’s see.
Quite a lot of local beer was consumed, and some local wine. Occasionally, non-local beers and wines were administered, mostly when I was elsewhere. In addition, gin came back into my life after a long estrangement, which began during the Reagan Administration. Back then, I couldn’t seem to restrict myself to one or two drinks of liquor in a day, with disturbing results. Now, a long, tall, cool gin and tonic at the end of a summer’s day strikes me as highly civilized, and I can enjoy it in moderation.
So far.
In the face of a summer-long onslaught of great (and caloric) food, I’ve managed to hold the weight/waist line at “still too heavy, although at least not gaining.” C’mon, there are many more harmful habits that living on bacon and tomato sandwiches, watermelon and fresh salad greens. Thankfully, it’s been a couple months since I last consumed the 800-lb gorilla – or as I call it, “fried chicken,” with all the Southern fixings. Evert day, it’s a struggle. Some days, I lose.
The grass at home has needed to be mowed – quite a lot. In years to come, when 95-degree-plus temperatures from April through November are back to being the norm, I’ll look back on the summer of 2013 as being somewhat normal, absent the predictable droughts and pestilence. There has been enough rain, and on most of the hotter days we’ve had, it still has remained cool in the shade. There was a mild spring. Will there be a pleasant, crisp autumn? If so, make room for those Oktoberfest beers. In the absence of Schweinehaxe, bratwurst will do.
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For the first time in ages, there was an opportunity to briefly escape the looney American governmental experiment and decamp to foreign soil, in this instance England for a visit with my wife’s kinfolk. That’s the good news. The bad news is that our arrival triggered a heat wave on British soil, and it was cooler in landlocked Nawbony than ocean-side Plymouth, but it’s all good.
The real ales in Devon and Cornwall were cellar temperature, and the London eels were tender. One of the Queen’s male subjects won Wimbledon, and we didn’t experience a single delay at Heathrow. Chicago’s O’ Hare International is another story entirely. I couldn’t even have a beer during the wait, because our gate was adjacent to the Goose Island bar, and I don’t go for Trojan Horse Craft.
The usual company fieldtrip to Wisconsin in August afforded an opportunity to sample genuine craft beer, and to frolic about the countryside in a blue state, where the air is always fresher and the fascism – while as yet extant – is at least measured in smaller, less offensive increments. The Great Taste of the Midwest remains one of the best ever beer festivals, and Ha Long Bay’s three-way Asian cuisine (Vietnamese, Lao and Thai) continues to please.
Alas, there wasn’t the chance while in Madison to attend a Mallards baseball game, and as luck would have it, the vintage baseball game held in New Albany (the only New Albany Bicentennial event of remote interest to me) was on the same Saturday as the Great Taste festival. Furthermore, despite my best efforts, we never made it once to Huntingburg for the Dubois County Bombers, and I’ve been avoiding the Louisville Bats owing to the team’s viciously Luddite proclivities when it comes to the absence of craft beer consciousness.
But just before departing for Wisconsin, I had the pleasure to accompany my dear old friend Barry Sears and our high school radio teacher, the freshly retired Lee Kelly, on the drive to Cincinnati to watch my Oakland A’s lose to the Reds. It was like 1990 all over again, or in the case of our radio days, 1978. If an A’s loss turns out to be the only ball game I see in person all summer, then it was the best possible one to attend. After all, reconnecting is priceless, and a ballpark is the ideal venue for it.
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Indeed, time has been an issue with me. There hasn’t been enough of it for reading, or listening to new music. There have been too few minutes in the day for bicycling in the consistent fashion I prefer, although walking’s been constant. The always hectic beer and brewing events season has been especially crazed, primarily owing to the twelve Friday evenings spent pouring beers for the city’s Bicentennial Park concerts. We had great fun working those, and the music was excellent throughout the schedule.
Of course, this brings me to the summertime activity that has taken up the most of my time in 2013, by far: Searching high and low for adults in Floyd County government, otherwise known as PourGate, and alternately referred to as the health department’s intrusion on my serenity.
The hot weather hasn’t passed, but the traditional notion of summertime is that it generally comes to a conclusion when schools are back in session, state fairs are done, and football begins. Between now and the beginning of October, festival season roars into its final throes of cacophonous overkill, culminating in New Albany with the civic albatross we all love to hate, Harvest Homecoming. When NABC’s concurrent Fringe Fest is finished and the booths are cleared, the calendar gets easier as the air chills.
After a bit of rest in winter quarters, we’ll do it all over again in 2014, and so it goes.
Now if Dr. Tom would just go ahead, apologize, and cut that check for 700K, it would make it far easier to plan for the summer of 2014. But seeing as he’s spent two months trying to pry permit precedent from my cold, unyielding hands, I suppose I’ll have to spend that much time or more wresting the defamation penalty from his. Maybe the health department should commence a Kickstart for when the bills come due.
It’s going to make my year when the nanny bureaucrats lose, although which year it will be, I’ve no way of knowing.
Enjoy the rest of your summer.
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