I'm going off the vitamins for a while. All the beer I had over the weekend might be at odds with the vitamins, might make the liver work harder. I want to be good to my body so: no more vitamins.

Well, there's a rumor on the street that glucosamine and alcohol don't mix. I'm not sure this rumor has any more validity to it than the rumor that glucosamine actually helps your joints, so I'm dumping on the glucosamine for a while. The beer tastes too good!

Okay, it doesn't all taste that good. Went to the Stone Brewery Sourfest with family and friends yesterday and before I got there I perused the PDF of all the breweries and beers that were going to be served and I was shocked (shocked!) that there was not a one that I had ever sampled or tasted before! So how were the sour beers? They were sour. Some more sourful than others.

I think there is a reason that the style of "sour" beer is not sweeping the nation, and you can guess what that reason is. I tasted ten of them, and they all tasted pretty much like a batch gone, well, sour. It makes one wonder if "sour" is just a category that poorly-made beer falls into out of a failure to attain certain desirable, beerish heights. They weren't terrible, they were just SOUR, like they lacked one or two necessary ingredients. Like a cinnamon-raisin bagel without the raisins and low on cinnamon, and in the end just mostly bagel-like.

As well, I snuck away -giving in to overwhelming temptation- on Saturday to sample the beers at the Oceanside Ale Works, which were nice. Well, there was one called "Dirty Blonde" that actually tasted like racehorse bathwater, and had very little of the blonde flavor advertised, and far far more of the dirty. Seriously: to say this was the worst beer ever conceived, brewed, and sampled by man is an insult to unshowered, libidinous blondes (and racehorses) everywhere. I actually dumped mine in the men's room sink, returning it to its source. I'm a fan of the OAW, so this was a major disappointment. The brewer was there, and we almost leapt over the tasting bar and grabbed him by his frothy beard and smacked him around, "Hey! What're you trying to push on us?! You oughta be ashamed of yourself!" But we contained ourselves and found it in our hearts to forgive, as the other ales were fine. But... I'm still shuddering at the sickening flavor of that putrid, unquaffable gutter runoff roiling on my tongue. Blechhhh...

All the beer drinking was necessary because of all the dance recitals with the Little Ditchman, I must say. She did all right, for a 3-year-old. She didn't fall off the stage, which is an automatic 7 points, and she knew all the words to the song and had a couple moves down, so it looked good. The final performance on Sunday was scheduled dead in the middle of naptime, so it was tough on the little ones. At the curtain call for the final bow, the screaming and hollering of the applause and the blinding bright lights had the Little Ditchman (and others) with her hands covering her ears and her eyes welling up with tears, standing there onstage with a quivering lip (I know the feeling.) Her teacher picked her up and tried to console her, and it was a bit heartbreaking to watch helplessly from the fifth row. I felt I was going to cry too, after seeing so many recitals and performances. What can I say? I'm a guy, and I just don't get the dancing. It's been said that if The Dance could be explained with words, then they wouldn't have to dance it out, so I guess I'll never know.

I, and every Dad there, applauded furiously all the same.


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