Nothing Again this Weekend, Now with Even Less

Last weekend I wrote about how I planned to do nothing." Nothing" wasn't nothing-nothing, though, as we had plans to see two sets of friends. And by mid-morning Saturday we'd planned to see a third. As a pretty-much-nothing weekend it was relaxing. This weekend I'm doing nothing again... and this time it's even less! 🤣 I hung out with one friend Friday evening at a local taproom, and that's it for formal plans this weekend.

Why not more friends? Aren't friends cool? Yeah, but last weekend even hanging with friends in controlled circumstances did give us a Covid scare. 😨 Thankfully our tests have been negative.

New Lens for my Camera. NOT a Brick!

I've started replacing some of the gear that was stolen from our car in Hawaii. The main thing I lost was a midrange zoom lens for my camera. It was expensive, a loss of over $1,000 all by itself. It's expensive because it's quality gear. Quality comes at a price. ...And that price was not just dollars but also size and weight. That lens was a brick!

I ordered a new lens online Wednesday. It arrived yesterday afternoon.



This is not a "brick" lens. I chose a lens that's smaller and lighter— and also much less expensive. Our insurance policy explicitly allows us to claim the depreciated value on items that were stolen then replace them with cheaper items, or even nothing at all, and keep the difference.

The point wasn't to pocket the money, though. The point was the smaller size and weight.



The new lens (above) is compact. I can practically close my fingers around it. Compare that to The Brick....



By the numbers, The Brick weighed in at 721 grams, or over 1.5 pounds. My new lens weighs just 141 g., a hair under 5 ounces (0.31 pounds). It'll definitely be nice to be spared of the weight and bulk when I'm out hiking— which is where I take most of my pictures.

What about image quality, though? That's a bit of an unknown. I mean, clearly it's lower quality. The new lens is 1/4 the price of the old lens, new. And I bought used, so I paid 1/6 the price! But that doesn't mean it's 1/4 (or 1/6) the quality. In photography, as in many domains, high end equipment costs way more than consumer grade stuff, often for only small gains or gains that are limited to special conditions. In the research I did online before buying I found that this cheap lens punches above its weight— and price. I'll try a few pictures around the house and the garden this weekend to see how well it works.

Beer Tasting, Round 8: Summer Shandy

It's time already for Round 8 in my Beer Tasting 2022 project. This round is a short one because there's only 1 beer.

"One beer?" you might ask. "What's the point of one beer?"

The answer is that I'm writing these as I buy & try beers, and I'm not drinking beer that fast. When I buy two six-packs at the store they last for two weeks or so. I've been stacking up leftovers from previous tasting rounds. This is an aspect of my drinking problem— I don't drink booze as fast as I want to buy it! (I admitted 5 years ago that this is really a shopping problem, not a drinking problem.) So on last weekend's shopping trip I bought only one new beer, Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy.

Leinenkugel's is a brewery you may not have heard of if you live outside of Wisconsin, where it was founded in 1867. I encountered it for the first time because of Southwest Airlines, of all things, several years ago. They offered Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy seasonally as one of their in-flight beers. With the other (few) choices on the menu being Bud and Miller, I tried the Shandy.

It's been a few years since I've seen Leinenkugel's offered on Southwest, so when I saw it carried in my local Total Wine stores recently I put it on my list to try at home, at 38 feet above sea level, rather than at 38,000 feet.

A shandy is a style of beer similar to the German radler. In Germany a radler is generally 50/50 beer and lemonade or beer and a citrus-flavored soda. My sister learned this accidentally on a trip to Germany many years ago when restaurants offered her "lemonade" and she only found out days later she'd been drinking beer. In Germany, at least, radlers are lower alcohol; often around 2 - 2.5%. ABV. Leinenkugel's is different from the Euro style with 4.2% alcohol content.

So what is Leinenkugel's Summery Shandy? Or Leinie, as I affectionately call it? It's a summer wheat beer (weis beer in many Euro countries) with a healthy dash lemon juice in it. Though it has a clear taste of lemon, you wouldn't mistake it for a lemonade. It's clearly beer.

Summer Shandy is one of those "good at the right time" beers. I find the lemon flavor overpowering when I drink it solo. Perhaps it'd be great to drink sitting on the patio on a warm summer day... but we've had cool weather the past several weeks so I haven't been able to test that idea. The situation where this beer is good, suprisingly good, is with spicy-sweet-savory food. I had it with BBQ Buffalo wings one night this week, and it was amazing. Another night I made paneer tikka masala (an Indian dish), and it was good with that, too.

Overall, Summer Shandy isn't a beer I'm going to buy regularly. ...Except on Southwest Airlines, because almost anything is better than Bud and Miller. At home I'll buy it when the right opportunity rolls around, such as when I'm planning to barbecue chicken or expecting to sit outside enjoying hot weather.