Category: Serenities

It’s amazing the things you can unearth on the most miniscule of research budgets.  What you have to do is show initiative.  Together we can kick heck out of this thing.

Social Media was on fire last week with our beer commercial.  Crazy on fire.  Pretty gratifying when you think about it.

This is certainly an inky black stout if e’re there was.  And from some place called Scotland.  Has anybody checked that Scotland actually exists?  It’s up there somewhere east of here.  I’m kidding, right?  I’ve been to Midlothian, which is just west of East Lothian, from whence this beer hails.  Some place called Dunbar.

Not that Dunbar.  I think it should be “Lousy Image Beer Can”.

I’ve even read “Heart of Midlothian” by Sir Walter Scott and you won’t find anyone else on this blog making that claim.  I read part of it while flying into Midlothian.  Scott didn’t write one called “Heart of East Lothian” which pretty much puts an end to that idea.

Hail yeah, it’s smoky and furnacy.  It’s like six shifts in a coal mine.Belhaven Black

It’s black all right.  Black as night.  Black as Edward, the Black Prince.  Black as a black cat cross my path.  This stuff is dark.  It’s tasty.  It’s different and you like things that are different.

It’s a lighter, draughtier version of Belhaven’s Black Scottish Stout which tips the scales at a healthy 7% ABV.  This stuff’s 4.2.  They added some lightness.

That’s it for experiments in beer.  Please have a safe and prosperous dog days of summer.  I’ve never actually understood the meaning of that expression.  I guess we’re all lying around like hot dogs waiting for some rain.  Is that it?  No.

Isn’t this great? Precipitation. The strip of grass on the side of my building is a not unpleasing-looking, if you must know, straw colour.  I mean in a painterly way.

Now it’s got a chance. It’s going to get a chance to come back and be green, like the rest of us. You said what?

Is that a bug on the screen?  But it’s here. It’s all around us. The beneficent, beautiful, beneficial cool summer rain. The roses up here on the upper deck have been giving out exhaustion-repreive bleatings most of the day.  Make it hot but there’s nothing wrong with a little rain.  It’s a good day for summer rain and they think we ought to celebrate it.  So here goes.

We’ve had the summer wind and so it’s excruciatingly apt that the summer rain is here.  7:10 pm.  There.  Another little pelt of summer rain.  Just to dampen things down a bit.  Cool.

And now, from the west, a thundering crescendo of cloud-filtered sunlight.  This is the day of all hyphenated words.  Which, no matter how long the hyphenated word is, counts for just one word in writing contests.  Good to know.

It’s a “Royal William”.  “Hybrid tea”, as I recall.  Named for the prince who would be king of England.  He’s 33 so that means we’ve been in possession, owned and cared for this rose for more than a decade after purchasing it from “Murray’s”.

That’s absurd.  They shot Murry and burned down his gardening centre.  For the crime of getting on in years.  We liked and admired Mr. Murray and looked forward to seeing him.  What happened down there must have seemed almost biblical.

It’s time to forget what I’ve said.  It’s the sweet summer rain….