Hows my little MMXIV?

Two Thousand Fourteen, what a year. What an excellent year. So many exciting things happened! We traveled quite a bit, Minnesota several times, Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Canada and New York, a few jaunts to Indianapolis. Not only fun travels but I dodged a bullet and didn't have to attend a single day of my scheduled jury duty. We stained our front deck and it looks much nicer and the newly painted base around the house made it look so sharp! The back deck stairs are finally done and after we stain them the pergola project from 2013 can finally be considered a wrap. Lets not forget the most exciting bit of news, Laura got knocked up!

Here are some highlights of my year:

Best: 

Movie (in theater):

Guardians of the Galaxy - It was surprisingly funny with lots of action and wasn't cheesy.

TV Show:

I guess the Hulu show, The Misfits wins. We watched season one but found out that our favorite character wasn't coming back, so there was just no reason to watch more, it wasn't that good.

Concert:

Phantogram at the Virginia Theatre. The lights, music, and atmosphere were all stellar.

Album:

Phantogram - Voices

Song:

I just don't know this year so here are some favorites:
Beats Antique - Jumpin, Broken Bells - After the disco, Duck Sauce - Barbara Streisand, The Dirty Heads - My Sweet Summer, KONGOS - I want to know, Gaga & Tony Bennet - Bang Bang, Railroad Earth - Monkey, Phantogram - Howling at the Moon
Thats a solidly eclectic list.

Game:

I actually gamed this year! I got sucked into Titanfall early on and have been having a blast. It's the first time I've played a FPS since Doom 3 I think.

Book: 

Antonio Mendez & Matt Baglio - Argo. This was a fascinating story.

Gadget:

Xbox One, that's a gadget right? I've spent so much time having fun with it this year.

Getaway: 

Puerto Rico was phenomenal, I would recommend it to anyone.  

Garden Growth:

Our onions did great for the first time ever this year.

Construction:

The pergola stairs were not that fun to do but they turned out great!

Intoxicating Beverage Tour:

I really enjoyed the Vikre Distillery in Duluth.

Food Ferment: 

2014's Kimchi was really really good.

Alcoholic Ferment: 

Doppelwiezen V.3 was very good.
Whats in the carboy: Natural Wine Experiment, Peach Wine, A bunch of Mead, Strawberry Wine, and a Pumpkin Wheat.

Athletic Endeavor: 

Indianapolis Monumental Half Marathon

Events of Note: 

Random:

My epic motorcycle tale. It never made it into a blog because it just kept getting worse and stretched out for so much of the summer. I'll sum it up:
Leaky clutch, bike couldn't change gears
Rented trailer, brought it to nearest place that would fix it. 1 hour away.
Shop was closed.
Left bike, mailed key
Key was ripped out of envelope and was lost.
Was my only key
Many weeks passed in attempt to get one made
Found out key wasn't able to be made
New core installed
Rode bike home and front brake caliper wasn't reattached, no accident thank god.
Got new bolts mailed quickly and reattached caliper
Rode bike as much as possible for the rest of the fall.

Obsession:

I think Titanfall wins this year

Newsworthy:

That F***ing Plane (it really is tragic, but the endless coverage was awful)

News I'm oblivious to: 

Apparently something noteworthy happened in Missouri this year.

Travels:

Indianapolis, Dayton, Vieques, San Juan, Twin Cities, Duluth, Washburn, Niagara-on-the-lake, Watkins Glen, Allegheny National Park.

More events of note:

Bockfest 2014 was fantastic

I've accepted that the hair on my head is parting ways with it's former locale.
Total gallons fermented this year: 46.5
I own one square foot of a private island called Hawaii 2.

Resolution:

This year's resolution was to touch the floor with my palms. I almost made it but due to my back injury where I couldn't bend over I had a major setback and didn't achieve this. So I'm going to reinstate that goal but also to improve my flexibility overall. I'm going to also get that handstand down too.

Last year I ended my year in review with "2014 I think I can handle what you've got. Bring it on, I dare you." Well I've got a kid brewing in Laura's belly now. I can handle that. I managed to plan and carry out a surprise vacation, I handled that. There were a bunch of things, this year that I just felt great about. This year was just great there were a lot of really fun things that we did.

I'm excited to find what 2015 brings me. 

Hows my little reader in 2014?

I'm doing my reading list for the year differently, I've come to accept that I'm not good at writing a book summary (and don't want to try at it), so I'm not going to try. Plus I use this mostly to keep track of what books I've read.

Veronica Roth - Insurgent
We listend to the second book in the Divergent series on our NY adventure. This book seemed to fit well into the series. I honestly didn't like it that much. Not to say I disliked it, it just wasn't really great. I did like the bomb that they dropped at the end and now I'm curious about the final book in the trilogy.

Veronica Roth - Divergent
I really enjoyed this book, I liked the mystery and intrigue surrounding a future where Chicago is empty save for this transplanted colony of people. I've heard some people draw some parallels to The Hunger Games, they're wrong. There is a strong female lead, and it's staged in a different future that's where the similarities end.

Antonio Mendez & Matt Baglio - Argo
Argo was great, The movie was great and did the book great justice (with some extra Hollywood thrills) but the book...It made the story real and believable. Affleck played Antonio Mendez the real CIA agent who wrote the book and carried out this mission. If you liked the movie and you like mystery/history books you'll like this one.

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse V
I started this on the plane coming home from PR thinking I would finish since it's so short, except I fell asleep, so I didn't. Anyway...someone in college told me to reread this book and more Vonnegut saying, 'I think you'd like it'. Sure enough, I did. I'm looking forward to reading more.

George RR Martin - A Feast for Crows
Book 4 from A Song of Ice and Fire threw me for a loop, no Danerys, Jon Snow, or Tyrion? Far too much Cersei. But finally Sansa doesn't suck (so much). This book was half of a giant bridge to book 6, I just have to read book 5 to get the other half, I'm expecting it to be MUCH better.

I spent most of 2014 working through JJ Abrams and Douglas Dorst's experience 'S' I have really enjoyed it but I shut down early on and didn't read it or anything for months after I invested some more time into it I really enjoyed it. I'm not done as of this writing yet.

Hows my little November in December update?

I'm on track to have the least productive blogging year in my history of maintaining this space. It's not due to a lack of content either! Oh well. November has been a fun and busy month! Check it out:

I started the month off by running the Indianapolis Monumental Half Marathon. It's amazing what a person is capable of achieving if they actually stick to a dedicated plan. This year I did almost all of my workouts up until the last three weeks when two different minor/major injuries stacked onto a vacation. All of that didn't matter on race day though, I made a good plan in the morning and started the race feeling great. It wasn't until about 5 minutes after finishing that everything caught up to me. I set a new Personal best, with a time of 1:49:14, my best before was 1:52:35 back in April of '12. It was an unusually cold day and I ended up wearing almost everything I brought, I had planned for chilly weather not freezing weather. I keep thinking I'm going to retire the plaid tights but I just can't bring myself to do it.

The next weekend my mom came for a visit and we headed over to Indy to do some crib shopping. We found one! Plus it was actually delivered yesterday and we set it up. It's very exciting. After a long day of shopping we met our cousins for some dinner and laughs. The next weekend we did some extra shopping after we dropped Mom off at the airport. We stopped by pottery barn kids and I couldn't believe how blah the color scheme of their stuff is! It was like walking into a gallery of pastels, there was nothing to get excited about and Laura and I agreed their room mock-ups seemed almost somber. Anyway, sorry about the kid rant, but this stuff is supposed to be fun and bright (in my eyes).

The following weekend was supposed to be a bit more relaxed because we had been on the go for the past three/four weekends but since we found a crib we decided we needed to paint baby's room before it arrived. We found a nice shade of middle grey and are actually really happy with the color. The idea is the bright colors of baby things are going to be a nice contrast with the walls. So far so good!

Jinx helped.

I do all the edge work because I'm good at it *toot toot*

Grandma Jacobson...er Laura did all the rolling, we make a good team.

 Laura and I had a Thanksgiving with just to two of us this year. Laura's Mom had the good idea of asking if we wanted to get things done with the long weekend rather than entertain. We did. So we made a pretty easy dinner of beer butt grilled chicken delicious bean casserole and a wonderful pumpkin silk pie from pumpkins we bought at The Great Pumpkin Patch in Arcola.

Over the long weekend I finally remedied our treacherous back steps. This is the best before picture I could find taken in April 2013:

I had to cut out half of the steps to place that corner post for the pergola, I thought I was being clever by only removing half the stairs. Little did I know I only planted a seed of procrastination. "I'll get to it eventually...at least we can get up them!" After Laura came down with a serious case of pregnancy I decided I needed to get these stairs finished before winter. I didn't want her or anyone with baby accidentally falling into the pit of de-stair ; ).

As all of my Loyal followers know, I hate and suck at math. Geometry is like the ugliest practical math to me and these stairs mostly look like a bunch of right angles. Look again, my brain got such a workout with this my hair actually grew an extra inch over the weekend. I'm very happy with how they turned out, the steps are more sturdy than what we had ever before and there is so much room now! Next spring we'll get around to staining them along with the rest of the back porch. Also hopefully the clematis over there will find its way onto the balusters.

Laura took a stab at gnocchi over the weekend with really tasty results. It's actually easier than expected so I think we'll make it again. Due to our abundance of pumpkin we used that over potatoes this time around.

Flour, pumpkin, parmesan

Yum!

So, life's been busy, fun and rewarding, but busy.