Thirsty Thursday - Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA

Located in Delaware, the Dogfish Head Brewery is an excellent craft brew maker that came to my attention upon moving to Dover in mid-2005.  The first time I had their 90 Minute IPA, it was paired with a delicious cheeseburger at the Dogfish Head Brewpub located in Rehoboth Beach, DE.

Since the brew has a 9% ABV rating, you can only find it bottled in 4-packs.  This is the kind of beverage you pour into a glass and enjoy over the course of an hour.  It's remarkably flavorful and merits truly savoring each sip.  I drink this beer the same way I approach a nice scotch.

Photographs of the bottle enjoyed this evening are illustrated below.

Sweet Elixir

Sweet Elixir
Originally uploaded by Juston Western

Finishing off the day with my favorite beer from Delaware...gotta love the Dogfish Head.

Delaware

Delaware
Originally uploaded by Juston Western

Art in our kitchen that Ashley received as a gift from her coworkers when we left the state almost 2 years ago.

Hard Rock Candy On A Stick

Hard Rock Candy On A Stick
Originally uploaded by Juston Western

Reminded me of the kind I used to get in the Smoky Mountains as a child.

Koala In Candy Kitchen On Rehoboth Boardwalk

Koala In Candy Kitchen On Rehoboth Boardwalk
Originally uploaded by Juston Western

This koala didn't seem to mind the sub-zero wind chill temperatures.

Coaster At Dogfish Head Brew Pub

Coaster At Dogfish Head Brew Pub
Originally uploaded by Juston Western

Delicious brews & food.

A Jazzy Evening Out In Dover

About 3 weeks ago, my favorite jazz artist, John Axson Ellis, was in Philadelphia for a performance. Unfortunately, this coincided with our Air Show weekend, so Ashley & I weren't able to get up to Philly for the show. Last night, however, we were able to get our jazz fix locally, as the Air Force Reserve Full Spectrum jazz band did a free performance here in Dover at the Schwartz Center downtown.

We decided to make a date night out the occasion, going first to Smither's for cocktails and appetizers. I had also received an invitation to a cocktail hour on the third floor of the Schwartz Center prior to the show, so we checked that out, too, before taking our seats.

The show lasted about an hour and a half. While the vast majority of the songs were jazz numbers, the band did throw in a smattering of patriotic tunes and oldies tracks to keep the interest of those in the audience who weren't jazz aficionados. I especially enjoyed the contributions of one particular saxophonist, who really had a New Orleans' flair about him.

After the show was complete, we walked down Loockerman to The Dirty Beggar. I'd heard good things about the establishment, with it having a reputation as one of the more upscale bars in Dover. Ashley got a great Mojito, while I opted for a Maker's Mark on the rocks. When we were done, we stopped in to Angelo's Pizza Restaurant just before closing time and grabbed a couple of pepperoni rolls to go.

Overall, a really fun Friday night outing reminiscent of our excursions in the French Quarter back in college. Nothing like some good music and good beverages to keep the heart young.

- JW

Nintendo's 21st Anniversary Celebration

Last Wednesday, October 18, 2006, was the 21st anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System's release in America. With the NES representing such a large portion of my childhood entertainment, I couldn't let the event pass uncelebrated...especially with the little console finally old enough to drink!

Ashley & I put together a Nintendo-themed party for the occasion, complete with emulator action of ROMS from all the old classics I used to own and 5 hours of hand-picked video game music remixes I found online last summer. We ordered several pizzas from Dominoes (just like back in the '80s!), and Ashley whipped up two Mario adult beverages: Mario's Dream & Princess' Pink Martini.

While we had Mario Kart Double Dash & Mario Dance Dance Revolution hooked up in the basement, the run away successes of the evening were the original Bases Loaded and Tecmo Bowl running on my laptop upstairs. Despite the poor graphics, some games are just classics. And of course, Super Mario Bros seemed to have sentimental value for everyone who picked up a controller.

We asked attendees to dress in video game or '80s themed attire. The clear-cut winner of the night was Amber, who dressed as Mario for the occasion, complete with white gloves and mustache. Be sure to look for her in the photos.

So happy 21st, NES. You'll always hold a special place in my heart and those of most of the children from the 1980s!

Now for the digital memories. Check out the photoset on Flickr and two clips now up on YouTube.

- JW

Fordham Brewery's Oktoberfest 2006

This weekend we checked out the local brewery which was holding its first annual Oktoberfest celebration. The price was $20 for two meals and 3 drink tickets, so we got there shortly after kickoff to get the most bang for our buck.

Overall a really fun afternoon. The weather was beautiful, clocking in around 45 degrees with sunny, blue skies. They had a horseshoe pit setup, so we parked our folding chairs nearby and played several rounds of horseshoes while drinking beer and listening to the local bands.

The festival wasn't nearly as big as the Oktoberfest we went to in Newark, DE, last year, but the closer proximity more than made up for the smaller scale. We also went on a brewery tour while we were there. The whole operation is run by two full time employees and then a small contingent of volunteers who lend their services for free beer and pizza.

Concerning the types of beer they had on tap for the event, it was a selection of 4 different brews. There was a light Lager, the Oktoberfest seasonal, a red-colored Tavern brew, and an ultra dark Oyster blend. My favorite was the Oktoberfest, which had the most balanced flavor of the four brews.

As usual, I took many photos and a selection of video clips. You can check out the 72 photos on Flickr, and 6 videos on YouTube.

- JW

Dover AFB's Air Show 2006

As fate would have it, I lucked out this weekend and only had to work Saturday morning for the Air Show. This let me catch some college football on Saturday afternoon (stupid Arkansas), and then be a spectator for the Sunday portion of the Air Show.

With this my first time attending an Air Show, I really went in with few expectations. I'd seen the movie Tarnished Angels (based on William Faulkner's novel Pylon), but that was about the extent of my exposure to aerial acrobatics. The event was actually pretty entertaining and definitely a departure from our typical weekend fare.

I'd say the highlights were:

- Seeing an F-18 cause a Prandtl-Glauert condensation cloud by nearing the sound barrier
- Going inside the cargo bay of a C-17
- Watching the Aeroshell Team leave the crowd of nearly 50,000 in a cloud of smoke
- Witnessing the Thunderbirds' performance...made me think of the Team America theme song

As promised, I've put the photos and video clips from the event online. You can check out the 85 photos on Flickr or watch the 11 videos on YouTube.

- JW

Photos from Wilmington Blue Rocks Game

Just a quick post to make note of the photos I took at the Wilmington Blue Rocks game last Thursday night. Mr. Celery made many an appearance as the Blue Rocks went on to a 6 - 0 victory. Check out the photo set on Flickr here:

http://flickr.com/photos/justonwestern/sets/72157594253453115/

Lt Western on an Antenna Site Survey

Condor.jpg
Originally uploaded by Juston Western.

Hello from 75 feet above Dover AFB in a Condor bucket truck crane.

Looking Forward To The Weekend

With the end of the (military) fiscal year approaching, things have been crazy around the office this week due to my "additional duty" as the Billing Official for the Comm Resource Advisor. I enjoyed my accounting classes in college, but having 5 Excel spreadsheets open (each with about 8 - 12 tabs) and a desk full of financial printouts and multiple calculators has lost any appeal it may have had.

On the bright side, though, it's been a big week for software, with Google Desktop 2, Google Talk, & TiVo Desktop 2.2 all launching. I've had a little time to play around with all 3, but I'm really looking forward to testing them out this weekend.

I think I'm also ready to break down and buy a few more hard drives. At my current rate of downloading at least 1GB of music a week (with the Essential Mix, John Digweed's Kiss 100 shows, Hernan Cattaneo's Metrodance shows, and other live mixes from Mercury Nation & djmixes2k), my 700GB of storage is zapped. I'm looking to buy 1 or 2 320GB hard drives from Newegg.com, & another spindle of 100 DVD+R's.

One more day of work this week looms on the horizon, and it's expected to be just as busy as the previous four days, so it's time to get some rest.

Oh The Unintended Irony

On Thursday I got a thank you note via base mail from the Wing Commander thanking me for my work on the Dover Wing Mission Video. If you'll remember, it was debuted last Monday at the annual MILCON briefing, and I was somewhat amused that the soundtrack to the video (all electronica) was going to be listened to by Senator Biden, who was co-sponsor of the RAVE Act (see my previous post for all the details). Well, upon reading that note, I couldn't help but audibly chuckle after seeing his word choice. Read the scan of the note above to see what I mean. :-)

Wing Mission Video at MILCON & Getting a Coin

The briefing at the Sheraton for MILCON went well on Monday. I got to the hotel at about 5:45AM to work with Milt on setting up the laptop and making sure that Col Cox’s slides and my video were working smoothly. As planned, each worked perfectly. After the presentation of the Wing Mission Video, there was a rather boisterous round of applause, so it’s good to see my creative work flies with the public at large.

Ironically, Senator Biden had to follow the Wing Mission Video. The most peculiar part, however, is that he was actually tapping his foot to the music during the Underworld tracks. Could Mr. RAVE Act himself potentially be a closet Underworld fan? The more likely answer is that he had a few too many cups of coffee that morning and would’ve been keeping beat with a washing machine had it been in the room.

It was interesting hearing Sen. Biden, Sen. Carper, & Congressman Castle speak. One thing I will say about Delawarians: they are just as passionate about their state as Texans. Admittedly, most politicians have love for their state, but these guys eat, drink, & sleep Delaware. I was also told at the briefing that Sen. Biden is considering running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. I don’t think I’d vote for the guy, but it’ll be neat to say I ate breakfast about 10 feet away from him when he was “only a Senator”.

This morning on my way to work, I got a call from Maj West letting me know that my presence had been requested at the Wing Standup Meeting scheduled for 8:00AM. At first I thought they wanted me there to take inputs and feedback on the video from all the group & squadron commanders (which would have been less than pleasant trying to consolidate 25 opinions into a revised product). Quite the opposite was the case, however. Col Cox asked that I come so that he could recognize me in front of the base leaders and give me a Commanders Coin.

So that was a welcome, albeit unexpected, reward for working on this project so much over the past 3 weeks. Truth be told, the project was tedious, but entertaining and educational, too. I had the opportunity to learn a new software tool, and I’ll probably end up creating a few slideshow videos for my website because of this experience.

For those of you who may not have seen it, you can view the Dover AFB Wing Mission Video at this location. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to install Google Video Player on your computer to view it.

"Mildly 'Sticking It To The Man' " OR "Monday's Fun With Sen. Biden (Mr. RAVE Act)"

First to bring you up to speed...

I got tasked about two weeks ago with creating a "Wing Mission Video" for Dover AFB. Apparently our new Wing Commander was stationed at Charleston AFB before coming here, and they kept one of these videos on file to show to VIP's, newcomers to base, & state/local leaders at briefings.

Since we don't have any real "video" footage from Dover, and they weren't willing to buy me a video camera to run around with for a few weeks (boooo!), I told them that I could do a “glorified PowerPoint presentation”, using Windows Movie Maker and including photos from base spliced together (with pans & zooms) along with some stock video clips of C-5's and Night Vision Goggle stuff.

They said that was what they had in mind anyway, so I went to work gathering photos. At the first meeting I asked if there were any musical requests, but I was just told to make it tasteful (i.e. no gangsta rap or death metal). Other than that, the Wing Commander told me I could essentially use whatever songs I wanted.

Well, after foraging through my music collection (who knew I had so many electronica MP3's?!) I settled on a 6 minute medley of clips from the following songs:

Underworld - Dark & Long
Leftfield - Song of Life
Orbital - Lush
Underworld - Pearl's Girl
Sasha - Xpander
Underworld - Two Months Off
Underworld - Cowgirl

Aside from the fact I'm apparently on a huge Underworld kick this week, it's obviously not your typical background music for military-related events/slideshows/videos/whatever. But I showed our Wing Commander a draft of the video earlier this week, and the only suggestions he had were for photo tweaks & additions. He said the music was fine with him, and rather "upbeat".

At the end of the meeting, he told me that the first official showing of the video would be at a meeting next week downtown in Dover, where all the state & local big shots will be in attendance...to include, that's right, Mr. RAVE Act himself, Senator Joseph Biden. For those of you who may have forgotten, check out this link from EMDEF.

Now I'm not disillusioned: I know the RAVE Act was not legislation proposed out of Sen. Biden's disdain for electronica. But I'm going out a limb here, and I'd say maybe, just maybe, that we're not going to find any Ministry of Sound albums in his car CD changer. And by the witty name of his now-defunct bill, I'd say that in his mind, drug use & raves are inextricably linked.

So maybe it's just a passive-aggressive streak in me, but I'll take some amount of pleasure in pushing the play button in Windows Media Player on Monday morning and treating the most honorable senator from Delaware to 5 minutes and 52 seconds of "RAVE music" set to military photos. :-)

Saturday Night at the Drive-In Movie

Image_11.jpg
Originally uploaded by Juston Western.

Hello from the drive-in movies in Felton, DE! A little slice of Americana.

We Bought Our First New Car

So just a week after having Ashley's Montero nearly die on us in Philadelphia, we sold it to a used car dealership here in Dover yesterday, and this morning drove up to Chadds Ford, PA where we bought Ashley a 2005 Aquarius Blue Beetle Convertible.

This purchase was really a long time coming. Ashley started looking at buying one of these back in the summer of 2003, and I even bought her the plush flower for the dash-mounted vase along with a Beetle Convertible keychain almost two years ago.

Thankfully USAA made the whole buying process painless, and we didn't even have to hear a sales pitch: all the paperwork and financing was taken care of before we even got to the dealership.

It rained nearly the whole drive back to Dover, so Ashley couldn't put the top down. But after we ate lunch and went grocery shopping, we decided to drive south to Rehoboth Beach to see if the sun was out. As luck would have it, the sun was out and we got to drive along the boardwalk with the top down and the music bumping.

We thought we'd be ambitious and head back to Dover with the top down. About halfway home the bottom fell out, and we had to pull onto the side of the road to get the top back up. The interior got a little wet, but I was able to dry all of it up with my shirt.

I can already tell that we're going to have a lot of fun with this car. Ashley absolutely adores it, and I know I'll get plenty of enjoyment out of going for joy rides on the weekend in it. As with most of my posts, I'll end this one with a link to some photos we took of the occasion. Here's a look back at the day of the first Western automobile purchase:

http://www.justonwestern.com/Photos/NewBeetle/

4th of July Wrap-Up, London Terrorism, & NYC This Weekend

I finally got around to labeling my Braves vs. Phillies photos from last Saturday. The game was a lot of fun, albeit rather short (only about 2.5 hours). Still gave us plenty of time to have a couple of hot dogs and Yuenglings, though. :-) You can check out the photos at:
http://www.justonwestern.com/Photos/BravesPhillies/

As I was eating breakfast this morning at around 6:00AM, I got an IM from my friend Clemente telling me he was alright. I didn't understand, and then he told me to turn on the TV. He was visiting his sister in London this week, and the explosion that rocked the bus this morning was only a few blocks away from where he was staying. It really made the whole thing hit close to home for me. Then at work this morning I was scheduled to get a "gas mask fit test". So there I was at the Bioenvironmental building, watching this footage of the terrorist attack on CNN through my gas mask. It was kind of surreal. I called my friend Brian (who had studied abroad at the London School of Economics in 2003), too, to make sure he had touched base with all his friends. Thankfully, he said that none of his friends were in the area at the time.

On a lighter note, Ashley's sister, cousin, & former room mate are flying into town tomorrow. We're going to pick them up in Philly tomorrow night, then we're all heading up to NYC on Saturday morning. We're taking AMTRAK out of Philly, so the London attacks kind of made this trip a little more tense for all of us. None of us have ever taken a passenger train, but I guess now is as good of time as any since security will be so increased. We'll be staying the night on Saturday about a block away from the United Nations, and we'll be taking a cruise around Manhattan during the day. Hopefully the weather will hold up, and I'll be able to snap lots of good pics. On Saturday night, we're also having dinner at the Bull & Bear Bar in the legendary Waldorf Astoria hotel. I'm REALLY looking forward to this, as Frank Sinatra actually recorded an album in that very bar. It's supposed to be one of the top 3 classic bars in the world. Sounds like my kind of place! I'll try to have pics up by the middle of next week.

Another 4 Day Weekend

Thanks to AMC, I'm getting my second 4 day weekend in a month's time for the 4th of July holiday. Ashley & I are hitting up the Braves vs. Phillies game in Philadelphia on Saturday with Capt Brummitt and his wife, so I'm looking forward to that. Aside from the trip to Philly, my goal this weekend is to make a lot of progress on JustonWestern.com. I've created about 45 photo galleries to date, and I'd say I still have roughly that many to go before the Photo section is complete. But that's only one of about 20 sections I hope to launch, so there is still much work to be done.

Then next weekend, we're headed back to New York City, this time with Ashley's sister, cousin, and college roomate. We'll be taking the train into Penn Station on Saturday morning, playing around midtown in the afternoon, then having dinner at the Bull & Bear Bar at the Waldorf Astoria that evening. We're staying at the Beekman Towers by the United Nations on Saturday night, and then on Sunday we'll spend most of the day in the SoHo area before heading back to Dover that night. Look for photos from all of these trips soon!