the GRAPE JELLY family blog: Fall-a-la-la-la

Fall is finally here! For like 20 days and then it'll be winter. Oh, Austin. And we've been busy drinking in cooler temps, Halloween, trips to weddings, and a trip to Denver for a rockin' Rocky Mount baby shower. It'll be easier to just show you the pics -- you'll figure it out.

But, speaking of drinking it in, sampling the various Oktoberfest beers that come out is a fun fall pastime. I ended up jotting down a top 10 list of them because I just like to make lists.

10) New Belgium - sure I love their stuff, and the Colorado brews are always fun (see more later in the Denver trip). But this one was too hopped up for me.

9) St. Arnold - a Houston beer. Probably just knowing it's from Houston affected my rating downward. I had it on draft and it was perfectly fine but kind of weak. I like my Oktoberfest to be a nice marriage of drinkability and complexity. This was pretty drinkable but not so complex.

8) Magic Hat - our friends in Burlington, VT produce many a fine beer. I even had a beet beer when I visited their brewery a couple years back. But their Oktobee wore you down halfway through the bottle. Kind of the opposite of the St. Arnold.

7) Shiner - sure, sure -- the famous Texas beer. It was fine, but nothing to write home about.

6) Spaten - Our first real German beer on the list and it was solid but always seemed to fizzle out about 10/12 of the way through the bottle for me. A green bottle no less too. Not a fan of green bottles.

5) Real Ale (bottle & draft) - the bottle was not that good, but the draft version made up for it. Definitely bold, but maybe too much so for me.

4) Boulevard (Bob's 47) - this is the section where I just get picky. I really enjoyed this and had it before in KC. Basically it's the "worst" of the 4 that I really liked.

3) Paulaner - Our truly German winner. I think it was lots better than Spaten in my unofficial, unscientific selection of 2 whole German beers.

2) Leinenkugel - This was tough, but I had to put it second. I had this one early in the fall and never again. Perhaps if I had it later, I might push it to number 1. It's the perfect blend of what I want in an Oktobee.

1) Sam Adams - I know. Lame. Everyone loves Sam Adams and they're always "THE" microbrew you go to. They saved microbrewing in America, right? It was just a littler more perfecter than the Leine...

Anyway, enough about that. Just go out and support Wisconsin and buy a Leine. So, the first thing to report is that Grace had her first Halloween. Kelly got her a ladybug outfit in the mail and since Grace kept "overachieving" the sizes on her clothes, she went big. A bit too big it turns out. So, while we could have put her in it (and did for a photo shoot)...

... we ended up on Halloween going with one of Jasper's (yes, the dog) old outfits -- a bee costume. Grace has long loved when we "buzz" when we play with her touchy-feely book that has a bee on the front. So it was at least kind of tied to her interests since she can't really tell us what she wanted to "bee" (pun!) for Halloween. We had a bunch of friends with babies over and got all kinds of great chaos photos in our 1200+-sqft house.

We also got out for a night for a wedding in early November while Grace slept at home with the grandparents. It was fun. The ceremony featured a small orchestra playing music but not what you're thinking for a typical wedding. They did Journey and all kinds of fun music. It was a festive wedding like that. Good times. And good food! Mmmmm. Here's some of those pics and other random ones from around town.

Caroline & Skip tie the knot!

With Nana & Pops at the pumpkin wagon

Eating her bath toy in the bath

Grace is...not a vegetarian. As you can tell, she gets happy when given meat

Just last weekend we flew up to Denver (Grace rocked both direct flights and did a fair amount of sleeping for us). We left just 4 days after Daylight Savings and then headed one more hour back into Mountain time. Oh boy. Suddenly she wakes up 2 hours earlier?! She already gets up too early for this lazy ass. We're screwed right? But actually she did great. Mainly because we kept her up late at the raucous shower where, I might add, I won the sippy cup tournament. You might recall that from our own shower. I guess I learned a thing or two back then. The beer we had was just one of many fine Colorado brews that are NOT available here in Austin. So if you have the means to pick up some Odells in your neck of the woods, I highly recommend it.