The Steamtug Blog

I had been giving it a good lashing over the warm summer months, but when I came home from the “Great Australian Beer Festival” held here for the first time in Geelong talking double speed that making no sense, I got a bit of a talking to from me Ma. Who convinced me to take a month off drinking and participate in the much touted “Free February” and give up alcohol for a month.

So it all went well I think… Firstly there was cards. Now how can you play cards without a beer? Surely I would have an unfair advantage eh? It was at Curly’s place out at Lara, just out of town. Because I live right in the middle of Geelong, I can usually con someone to pick me up on the way through, despite which direction we have to go, and never have to worry about driving home. But this time, I was the designated driver! I picked up Grumps and Foot, and sipped non-alcoholic ginger beer all night, studying my cards with a clear head, but still lost all my money! (Damn!) But they were all happy for me to drive them home.

A whole week went by until I started to dream about beer. This long hot summer was taking it’s toll. With record rainfall in the North of the country, here the parched earth has received just 2 lots of 10mm since November. Things are so dry and I watch my garden shrivell up before my eyes. And after mowing the lawn on a hot day, and seeing the cracks in the ground made me realise the importance of hydration. I weakened. Surely just 1 beer would not hurt? I had the beer lines drained from my keg and filled with cleaning solution to avoid temptation, so had to drink a stubby from the bottle. Then another, just to be sure.

Oh, well. Back to the plan… Firsty Febree! 3 more days without a beer. Going well so far! Until we had a BBQ. Now how can you cook a barbie without a glass in hand. The cleaning fluid in the beer lines needed draining anyway, so I flushed them out, tapped a keg and had a beer. Now it’s not that I needed one, just that the onions needed it! I always caramlise my onions by pouring on a little beer. It’s my secret recipe, so it was from this need that I just had to pour a glass and have a few sips on the way.

Well that’s pretty much how the month went. Almost no alcohol at all. I’m such a good boy, I think I will go and celebrate now that “Massive March” is here. Can’t wait until “Alcohoic August” !!!

Beer Festival

Hey the beer festival was great. There were many vendors there selling small glasses of their beers to try, and quite cheaply. I saw my mate Scott from Red Duck breweries there. He was pouring beer from these great 750ml swing top bottles. Now nobody but me could be excited by a beer bottle, but I commented on how nice they were. And he said he had a whole box of them he didn’t want anymore, coz he wasn’t going to use that style of bottle anymore. He told me to come round and pick them up! So the next day I made the trip to Ballarat to his brewery, picked up the bottles, a few samples of his experiments, and called in to Sovereign Hill while I was there. (Member of Sovereign Hill, so get in free!)

There were some great bands playing, and the hot day added to our thirst. I needed to buy another 20 beer tickets! (You need 2 for a glass, so don’t get excited….) But by far, the funniest thing there, was this 8 foot tall scottsman walking around the crowd. He had these big leg looking boots that made him so tall. With genuine scottish accent, and could play the bagpipes, but the big hit with the crowd was his dog. (Probably his girlfriend dressed up). The dog was bounding up to people in the crowd, while his master called him to behave. It was so funny, and when he lay on the ground, there was these huge bollocks hanging between his legs. Funny As!

The dog came bounding up to Goofa, who being such a dill, stuck his arse out for the dog to sniff, which he did. The crowd laughed a bit, and he turned and looked at us, as if to say “How funny am I” but he didn’t notice the dog had turned behind him, cocked his leg and was pissing on our Jeffery. The cro

wd was going histerical with laughter, and poor old Goofa thought they were laughing at him! Oh… it was hallarious!

Air Show

Mitch and I attended the air show, sharing some good father/son time together. Most impressive was the F-22 Raptor from the US air force. The only thing that spoilt it, was the yankee drawl and drivel over the microphone, because they brought their own commentator to tell us how good Uncle Sam and their great air force is. It’s still a machine to wreak havoc, destruction and death to anybody that doesn’t subscribe to how the US wants to do things.

But there were many other interesting things to see. Mitch works on the air flight control desk at Moorabin airport, so knew every second person there. We were getting hungry, and as we walked down the tarmac, we found a kiosk but they only sold ice cream. So we walked on and found another ju

st like it, and another, and another! Damn, doesn’t anybody do a pie ‘n sauce round here? Eventually we found an area with some food stalls, but the cue was 100 metres long! If only I could get them all to go and buy an ice cream….

We went onboard one of those huge cargo planes from the Australian airforce. And the lady inside told me it can carry 80 tons inside! It was huge!!!