Tag: Bristol Brewing

Weeds and grass roots

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
The front yard
The House Back East™ gets a front-yard makeover.

The rain has abated for the moment and the home-improvement projects have resumed with a vengeance.

The deluge reminded us of just how badly the garage roof leaks — it had become less of a garage and more of a free car wash — and so the roof got replaced yesterday.

The back yard
The back yard looked like a scene from “Platoon” before Herself and I spent an afternoon defoliating it by hand.

Also ongoing is landscaping at The House Back East™, which had developed a bumper crop of noxious weeds during our extended monsoon season. The front yard has gotten a colorful layer of mulch, and the much larger back yard is awaiting similar treatment.

You want a reminder of how feeble you have become in your dotage, spend an afternoon doing squats while pulling a metric shit-ton of weeds. The next morning, assess the plummeting property value of your crumbling temple of the soul. Comparables from the immediate vicinity probably won’t help much, if your wife is seven years younger than you, lifts weights and does yoga.

Speaking of things getting fixed up, a group of local investors has transformed the old Ivywild School, shuttered due to declining enrollment, into a mixed-use development that houses Bristol Brewing, Old School Bakery, the Meat Locker deli and any number of other worthwhile operations.

“This is a celebration that says, hey, if people work together, this is what can happen,” partner Mike Bristol told The Gazette. “We can do this again. Not me personally, but as a community. We can do other things like this.”

Yes, please. And thank you.

When the rain comes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Rain today, finally. Maybe the dust on the trails will finally turn back into sand. Asking for actual mud would be too much.

The Broadmoor
Stately old pile, ain’t it?

Last night Herself and I enjoyed cocktails and snacks at The Broadmoor, courtesy of an old college pal whose line of work dollars up on the hoof a little faster than does free-lance rumormongering. Our shared and violently colorful past was disinterred for inspection, tales of relatives, pets and exploding toilets were exchanged, and the whereabouts, whys and wherefores of absent friends came up for extended and critical examination. Hilarity ensued and the four of us agreed that we see each other far too seldom. Good times.

The Broadmoor is a Forbes Five-Star resort, so naturally it draws Republicans in the way that a gutpile does buzzards, and I felt as comfortable as John Edwards at a NOW rally as various Suits ambled past, occasionally glancing at me as though I were encamped on the pine-board stoop of a 9-by-40 single-wide with my bib-alls around my ankles, a copy of Maxim in one hand and a 40 of Olde English in the other, irrigating my tooth while a half-dozen three-legged pit bulls chased chickens, social workers and red-headed stepchildren through an overflowing leach field.

Happily, a couple drams of Bristol Brewing Company’s Compass IPA removed all apprehension and I even managed to shake hands with one of the sonsabitches when my bro’ engaged him in polite conversation (though I cleansed the hand vigorously in an unflushed toilet afterward).

It was something of a late night for us, and today we barely managed to get breakfast, chores and a two-hour ride done and dusted before the rains came. Rain? I don’t mind. Shine? The world looks fine.