YCGL - Day 13 - Friday, April 12, 2024 - Carrying On Carrying On (200th Blog since February 2022)

 I woke up at 8:30 on my own.  I still had unfinished business in Shiner, in fact, the whole reason I went there, the brewery tour.  Now, my stomach was still pretty rocky, so I tried to keep things simple.  I had a small bowl of cereal and headed over.  I got there at 10:00 because the ladies at the gift shop had told me the tours started at 10:30.  Actually, the tour desk opened at 10:30 and the first tour was at 11:00.  

( This is a long aside, but it will come up several times in the next weeks.  While my allergies have abated over the years, one of the things I tested positive for was grass.  In fact, my first allergy attack occurred a few weeks before my 50th birthday when I was sitting in a field of grass installing an experimental septic system.  I went from fine to eyes watering, sinuses dripping, coughing and wheezing in about 30 minutes.  I also tested positive for dust and mold.  I taught in a soil mechanics lab, imagine that.  Two prescription pills a day, three shots every other week for years.  Things got better.  I went to Zyrtec and Allegra and two shots, then Zyrtec and one shot, until finally, at 68, I stopped altogether.  Except, I still react to some grasses and insect bites.  And the worst grass seems to be St. Augustine, the common lawn grass in the south.  If I walk in St. Augustine, my legs will start to itch and will itch for days.  Luckily, I don't react the same with Kentucky Bluegrass, the common lawn grass in the colder climates.  Now, it could also be insect bites, like mosquitos and gnats.  Those bites will swell and itch for days as well.  All this is to say, I try to stay off of grass as much as possible, especially when I'm home.)

Since I had an hour to kill before my tour started and my stomach was a little green, I went back to the truck, set my alarm and read and dozed.  When I got back, there were 12 of us in our tour.  

Kosmos Spoetzl, who bought the small existing        A ram's head made with 2069 bottles of Bock Beer,

brewery in 1915 and ran it through 1950.  His           representing a bottle for every resident in Shiner, 

daughter ran it for the next 15 years.                          Bock means ram in German and is on many bottles

                                                                                    and cans.              

     I put my bottle cap over Laramie.

So, here I am, surrounded by all this beer, with four chits for beers in my pocket, and my stomach is telling me that would be a really bad idea, so I had a BBQ sandwich and iced tea (which actually tasted good and settled ok), went back to the campground, hooked up and headed to Montgomery.  

I got to the campground, backed the trailer into my site and relaxed for a little bit before going over to Pete and Carol's.  Carol heated up some Chicken Cordon Blue, mashed potatoes and salad and we watched the latest edition of Dune.  It was interesting, but I'm just not a fan of science fiction.  

But there was something that struck a bell with me.  Searching for "spice" and living in  "stech", I'm wondering if there was a very early computer game of Dune in the 80s that I played with Erik.  Or maybe with Wilbur on his Commodore 64.  I'll have to check with Erik.  (He said "yes, we had a CD version in the 90s".)  (That's interesting because we didn't allow Erik to have a PlayStation or any kind of Game Station, or any device that was just for playing games.  When we got games for him, it had to be on a computer so that he would learn computer skills while playing.  It served him well and he was writing his own computer code when he was 12.  In fact, he taught me the basics of HTML when he was 14, which I used throughout the rest of my teaching career.  And his friends had all the game stuff that he could play when he was at their houses.)