Mead Day!

It is a bit of a meadstravaganza around my apartment these days:

By now you must sense that I love any reason to celebrate food and drink. In fact, I was just talking with some neighbors this weekend about our need to celebrate International Crepe Day. The group agreed that it's too many months away, as is Nutella Day, though felicitously the two are a mere three days apart, so we agreed we needed to make some practice batches between now and then. For research.

While sipping on a little snifter of mead after dinner tonight, I realized that many of you might not know there is a National Mead Day. It was on August 5th this year, and I was fortunate to have my mead making mentor, Tysen (yes, I have a mead mentor!), and my boyfriend  Matt, (yes, I have a boyfriend!) over to celebrate. After a lovely brunch, we got to tasting five different varieties.

I'll be writing a full post on the mead making process and results -- Tysen will be editing the excerpts from our planning, brewing, and tasting sessions, and posting the finished podcast in coming months on his site -- but as I decompress from my amazing summer travels and dive back into teaching, I didn't want to miss the chance to share this most important day that you should mark on your calendar so you don't miss Mead Day next year: it's the first Saturday in August. You have almost a whole year to learn about and learn to love mead before then! Those who are around may be invited to taste the by then 18-month-aged varieties pictured here:

Which will you prefer, I wonder? The classic? The quince-infused? The tangerine and thyme variety? What I can say is that there will be no more of this smooth, barrel aged one, hand carried all the way from western Poland:

Take comfort, though, DC-area mead lovers (or those who are mead-curious): you can reference Tysen's awesome website to learn how easy it is to make your own mead. Or you can pick up some of Charm City's latest limited-release meads at many a local grocery. I have a can each of raspberry coconut and orange lavender in the fridge now. For research, you know. Cheers!

This means war!!

It's not news to me that DC has a rat problem. It's also been known for some time that Ollie has been sharing a storage closet with rats. But until recently, the rodents kept to their corner, and we kept to ours.

Apparently these rodents have gotten a little big for their britches: the other day when I went to take Ollie for a ride I noticed some distinctive chew marks on her right handlebar. I brought my bike helmet inside. (Rat poop on my head? No thank you!) Then a few days later, some chomp evidence on her left handlebar. Then today, a brazenly large chunk was missing. Eating rubber? Really?? Apparently the mild winter meant that rat populations across the city have grown considerably larger than usual, and they're getting aggressive. I hate rats, yet I've generally maintained my distance. Love and let live, you know. But now?

NOBODY chews on my Ollie and gets away with it! This means war!! That exterminator better get here asap or I'm heading in there with the rat poison myself....