I worked 12 hours today, which makes it slightly galling to be stuck in on a Friday night — but on the other hand I did get off at 8 without calling anyone first, and I expect that this next week will have its fair share of excitement. At the Door yesterday I prophesied that I'd be sick of everyone just in time for Brooke's annual Potlatch (or as I like to think of it: The Friendship Olympics) on Saturday. In remote Mankato, where there is no escape from the fun.

My Fourth of July was pretty tame: I had Shelley, Nick, Jenna and Barry over for beer, brats, and some bocce ball, but to the untrained observer I doubt our interaction was distinguishable from your everyday grilling.

(Minor disappointment of the summer: the guy I usually get my brats from has been consistently out of the really good stuff. We made do on the Fourth with my latest batch of venison brats, but I'd be grilling way more if I had a good supply of fantastic bratwurst like I did last year.)

Since then I've been working through happy hour all week, and I'm too thrifty to organize an outing at some other time, so I feel like I haven't done much of anything. On Wednesday I finally opened up a bottle from my first batch of beer, which I'm calling Dangerweizen.

First because it's a Dunkelweizen recipe I adapted from a German dark beer recipe called Danger Knows No Favorites, and second because I miscalculated the sugar when I bottled it, and I was worried for a few days that my basement beer cellar would be celebrating the Fourth of July early.

It's not great but it's decent-to-good and that's more than enough for me. Part of the reason I brewed a weizen in the first place was so that, if it turned out bad, I could just turn it into delicious colaweizen.

Excited to try it with some other people: there are multiple parties tomorrow after my mandatory overtime. (Which can get exhausting — but the money is good. I'm just trying not to get burnt out like last time my team was overcapacity like this.) For now I'm off to bed; I've had enough of staring at screens today.