teh whisky

We had our whisky club "meeting" tonight. My dad hosted at his place. Tonight's theme was pairings. Bring a whisky and something that pairs well with it.

Sheep Dip blended malt with shepherd's pie
Dalmore 15y with venison and beef meatballs in a Merlot and juniper sauce
Benromach Hermitage Cask with raspberry truffles
Benromach Chateaux Cissac Cask with S'mores
Laphroaig Select and Dewar's 12y in a cocktail with honey ginger syrup, called Penicillin
Ardbeg 2009 Supernova with smoked beef brisket

I must say that all of those foods (or drinks) paired very will with their whiskeys. Mine was the Laphroaig and cocktail. We always do food pairings, so I got a little outside the box with a cocktail. There were cigars and pipes there as well, but (fortunately) nobody had those as their pairings. I recruited Austin to help me with the cocktail, because he's the mixologist.

Last year when we did this, my dad and Jack stayed up, drinking by the fire until almost 10:00 the next morning. I think my dad was disappointed everybody left by 1:00, so he couldn't demonstrate this feat again. I left at 1:00 with my designated driver. I think only one person stayed the night (Collin had set up his tent, though two more stayed the night last year).

So here I am, 2:00, at the computer. I don't like going to bed drunk.

light bulbs

I've been transitioning the house away from incandescent bulbs. As the old ones burned out, they've been replaced with CFL's.

Two rooms in the basement have 75 watt can lights in the ceiling. Twelve in each room. That's a lot of electricity. Shortly after we moved in here, they started burning out. I replaced about half of them with CFL's, figuring that when more burned out, I'd replace them with the incandescent ones I'd taken out. And then when those burned out, I'd replace them with CFL. But none have burned out since.

Our bathroom has a bank of eight bulbs. They're the large-diameter globes, and crystal clear, not frosted, so I could never replace them with CFL. I finally found LED replacements. They look pretty good. They cost $13 a piece, but they dropped from 40 watts to 4.5, and the box says they're supposed to last longer than 22 years (almost ten times longer?). It will be interesting to see how long they actually last.

I had previously bought three of them for the other bathroom. I decided to move them to a light in the family room, and put the leftover incandescents in there. I dropped one of each bulb. The LED broke, so there went thirteen dollars. Now I need to pick up one more so the three will match, but I had to order these from online, so...