The Buffalo Red started out as a Sazerac, but has come a long enough way from its roots that I don’t feel bad claiming it as my own. It still retains the wash with anise-based liquor, and the Peychaud’s bitters, but we replace rye with bourbon, and bring both maple bitters and Muscovado simple-syrup to the party. The resulting drink is warming, earthy, and not-too-sweet. Urban Moonshine makes the maple bitters, and you can easily buy them on Amazon.com if they’re not available at your local quality liquor store.

To make Muscovado simple syrup, just buy Muscovado brown sugar (easily found at local mega-marts or organic groceries) and then heat it with an equal portion of water until it dissolves. Cool the resulting liquid and store in the fridge.

Here’s the recipe:

The Buffalo Red

• 2.5 oz Buffalo Trace Bourbon (other bourbons will, of course, work too.)
• .33 oz Muscovado Simple Syrup
• 1 tsp Pernod
• 6-10 drops maple bitters
• 1 heavy dash Peychaud’s bitters

Pour Pernod into an empty rocks glass and swirl to coat. Discard excess Pernod. Fill rocks glass with a few large, solid ice cubes. Add all ingredients to the rocks glass and stir several times to combine. Flame an orange peel over the glass, and drop it in. The resulting drink should be a beautiful reddish-brown, like Autumn leaves. Sit back in a comfy chair, take a sip, and relax.

Oh, and just for the record: no one from Buffalo Trace paid me in cash or free samples to write this recipe or even asked me to promote their bourbon. I’m an honest fan of the product, and it’s my go-to bourbon for day-to-day mixing.

This isn’t the case. The crowd we saw last night was extremely diverse. There were people of every skin color, gender and age group represented. Art-school kids with gauged ears and punky outfits chanted happily next to elderly gentlemen in tweed jackets. There were musicians, artists, people handing out educational materials on a variety of subjects, photographers both professional and amateur … and there were a lot of people who, like my wife and I, were merely curious about the movement and wanted to learn more.

What we saw at the park was inspiring. People in their fifties and sixties (and older) were mingling happily with teens and twenty-something college students, who stood alongside thirty and forty-something parents and professionals like Charlotte and I. Most of the people there didn’t need to “get a job” (the most common insult hurled at these groups) because we already have jobs. I didn’t see a lot of lazy, go-nowhere pot-heads who had merely moved from the couch in their parents’ basement to a tent in the local park. What I saw instead was a group of regular people who are unhappy with the way our current system of government is working, and would like to effect change. The overall belief is that this can no longer be accomplished merely by voting, and that more significant action must be taken.

Are there a lot of mixed messages coming from the protests? Sure. It’s a given that when you have more than a thousand people standing in a park holding signs and chanting, some of them are going to be “off message.” There will be someone there whose biggest concern is stopping the fur trade. There will be someone else who is convinced that the legalization of marijuana will solve the world’s ills. There will even be a few people who are only there to “troll” the protest by holding up goofy, ridiculous or insulting signs. The media delights in presenting these types as the face of the movement, but it’s an inaccurate portrayal. The vast majority of the people there do in fact have a pretty good idea of why it is that they’re there and what they hope to accomplish.

We can break down the concerns of the majority of protesters easily with three simple statements:

1. The “American Dream” is failing, and it is no longer possible simply by finding a job and working hard to enjoy a comfortable life and a secure retirement. Corporate loyalty to, appreciation of, and concern for employees is at a low not seen since the early 20th century: a time when hundreds of thousands lived in poverty and were worked to the bone simply to eke out a meager existence.

2. Our government and politicians no longer represent the will of the people in any real way. Both parties are owned by corporations and special interests, and both parties have been complicit in the gradual erosion of worker rights, the widening of the gap between rich and poor, and the continued establishment of laws which benefit corporations at the expense of the populace.

3. It is completely unacceptable that corporations and the ultra-rich enjoy massive tax breaks, subsidies, and other benefits that allow them to pay far less than they should (or in some cases, nothing at all) while the average person in this country struggles to pay the bills. It is unacceptable for a company to receive tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in bailouts/stimuli/subsidies, declare record profits, give its high-level employees massive bonuses, and then announce vast layoffs of its lower-level employees.

The United States has fallen into a sort of “Capitalism Uber Alles” trap whereupon the pursuit of the dollar is seen as the most glorious activity that mankind can undertake. Being rich, or getting rich, is the most important thing one can aspire to. And if one is rich, then one has every right to exploit any available method of retaining as much money as possible. Corporations, particularly those which are publicly held, are judged almost exclusively by their share price. If the price goes up, they are doing the right thing, even if the “right thing” is massive layoffs, cutbacks on employee benefits and a complete disregard for the environmental impact of their business. It is also not enough anymore merely to be profitable, or even to maintain steady growth. Record profits and huge stock increases have become the expected.

The goal of the protests is to draw attention to these issues. There are millions of Americans struggling to make a living right now who have a general sense that life has treated them unfairly, but lack any method of making themselves heard or impacting the policies that have dictated their fortunes. They cannot even be sure that the local representatives they have voted for are acting with their best interests in mind. The hope is that these protests will act as a snowball rolling downhill, growing ever larger as more and more people see that, yes, there are others out there who feel the same. There are others out there who sympathize with them, and care about them, and want to enact change that will help them.

Charlotte and I have worked very hard to reach our present point, where we are largely free of debt and enjoy a higher quality of life than many of the people in this country. We pay our taxes on time every year, and we are conscious of the community around us and the ways in which we can impact it, both positive and negative. We do not believe it is too much to ask from corporations and the ultra-rich that they do the same thing. We do not believe that it is too much to demand of politicians – men and women elected by the people, who are supposed to serve the people – that they make the necessary changes to the laws of this country to ensure that those things happen.

We went to the march to see if our beliefs were being adequately represented. We’ll be going back because we found that they were. This country does not belong to Bank of America, or to Exxon Mobil, or to Apple. It belongs to you, and to me, and to our neighbors and friends, and even to that jerk who lives down the street and plays his stereo too loud, late at night. It belongs to the people, and the people are standing up and demanding that notice be taken of them.

This is not a call for communism or even socialism. It’s merely an acknowledgment of the massive inequalities present in our country, and that a time has come for change. We’re not demanding heads for the guillotine, and we’re not asking for handouts. We’re asking our government and our corporations to do the right thing, to keep America strong and to keep its people happy, healthy, and gainfully employed. This is a good thing, and it’s something that any American — even the super-rich — should be able to appreciate and support.

I encourage you to go down to your local protest (you probably have one), and check it out. You may find that it’s not for you, but you may also find that it’s not nearly as full of crazy anarchists and droning lie-abouts as you’ve been led to believe.

As a reward to myself for finishing Blood Hunt, I finally got around to buying and playing Fallout New Vegas. I forced myself to wait because I knew it wasn’t going to be a six-hour first-person shooter, or even a 25-hour game like Mass Effect 2. No, I knew I was going to drop 70-plus hours into the game. That’s how I am with RPGs, especially open-world RPGs like Bethesda’s become known for.

I haven’t in fact “finished” or “beat” the game because I’ve only seem one sequence of innumerable possible endings, but there are certain stories I’ll never see (siding with Caesar for example), and certain other ones that I’m saving for an inevitable replay sometime down the road, so for the most part I feel finished, and won’t be going back to it for a while. With about 79 hours put into the game, and every single location on the world map visited (including exploring all the caves and buildings, not just getting close to them so that the map marker highlights), I think I’m at least qualified to write my review.

So here’s what’s weird: I’m not sure whether to complain about the game’s highly derivative aspects first, or laud the things it does far better than Fallout 3 first. There are plenty of both, and although I clearly enjoyed the title it’s a bit hard for me to give it a “great” because of all the ways it could have improved on Fallout 3 but didn’t. On the other hand, it succeeds so spectacularly on certain levels that … you know what? Let’s just start with what it got right.

(note: I’m not going to explain the plot here. I hate reviews that do that, not because of spoilers but because it’s a waste of space and time. You can find out the plot from the millions of previews on the web.)

The Good

Fallout: New Vegas had a few people working on it – most notably Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone, who were major contributors to the original two Fallout games. While I felt Fallout 3 did a fine job of nailing the “feel” of the Fallout universe and presenting a compelling story, I think New Vegas does a superior job of following in the footsteps of the originals. The overall storyline is more convoluted with no “right” route or goal clearly highlighted. There’s a “good vs. evil” sideline, but only if you believe the NCR is good, and there is plenty of compelling evidence placed within the game to show that they are not.

There also way more marked side quests (a lack of which bothered me in Fallout 3). Many of the characters are directly related to people you met or worked with in Fallout and Fallout 2, including at least one possible companion. You also get to learn more about some of the well-established pre-war companies like RobCo. In general, it all adds up to feeling just a bit more like Fallout than Fallout 3 did, which works for me as a huge fan of the first two games (Fallout remains on my ten best games of all time list).

The concept of managing your reputation with various factions has been reintroduced, and might actually be stronger than in any of the three previous titles (I don’t really factor in the non-RPG spin-off games when thinking about the history of the franchise — just the RPGs). While there are still some extremely obvious karma choices, there are many interactions which are intertwined, and helping one faction can hinder your reputation with others. It’s actually quite possible to gain “mixed” karma ratings where people are mildly bewildered with your actions. I tend to play a heavily light-side character, and I still had a couple of factions (and not necessarily the evil ones) who were a little sketchy in their opinion of me. The “bad guys” – Ceasar’s Legion – hated my guts, of course.

Another thing that New Vegas does better than Fallout 3 is packing more punch into a tighter area. The game map for New Vegas seems slightly smaller than Fallout 3′s Washington DC metro area (especially when you account for the large amount of inaccessible mountain area), but there are fewer “filler” locations and a total lack of “oh my god where the hell am I?” subway stations (thank you, Obsidian). With the noteable exception of a few parts of New Vegas, everything is open to the outside world. When you do find a filler-esque location (such as a cavern, or a mine), many of them are tied into side quests and have a reason for existing. Those that don’t are kept mercifully short. There are very few multi-map cavern/bunker crawls, unlike in Fallout 3 where often a cave system would often have three or even four separate areas. While this gaves Fallout 3 a bit more breadth than New Vegas, it didn’t really add much depth, and it added a ton of repetition to the game. In fact, the last three Bethesda RPGS — Oblivon, Fallout 3 and New Vegas — have gotten progressively better about this. I’m hoping the trend continues in the upcoming Skyrim.

New Vegas also gives you optional companions who have a whole lot more depth than the companions in Fallout 3 did. They’ve got lengthy back-stories, each companion has an entire quest-line that allows you to choose between different upgrades to their abilities and change their endings, and they have a lot more to say about the places you visit and the movement of the plot-line. The revamped companion interface wheel is also a million, billion times nicer to use than navigating through dialog trees, and I applaud whomever designed it.

The crafting system has also been greatly expanded for people who love turning raw ingredients into usable stuff. As someone who ignores crafting as much as possible in every RPG he’s ever played, I … ignored it as much as possible. But it was there, and I’m sure I could’ve saved a whole lot of money on ammo and other goods if I’d used it. Also, if you’re insane enough to play the game in hardcore mode, where it tracks your sleep, thirst, and hunger, then you will absolutely need a high survival skill, and all the crafting abilities it bequeaths. Otherwise the crows of the Mojave will be picking your bones clean in short order.

Strong voice acting has always been a hallmark of the Fallout series, and this is still the case with New Vegas. Many of the major characters (and a few minor ones) are played by Hollywood actors, and the rest are fleshed out by talented and experienced voice actors who do a good job of giving life to the supporting dialog.

The Less-Good

I’ve heard mention that many people felt New Vegas seemed like “a glorified mod” and I understand why. A massive amount of art assets are recycled from Fallout 3, from bunkers to burned-out sheds. Even in character creation, I don’t think so much as a single new haircut or beard style was added, which was more of a bummer than it seems because it means all of the characters you meet in the world look identical to residents of post-apocalyptic Washington DC, despite the fact that Nevada is frankly much further ahead in the “restoring the world to order” department than the Northeast is. A lot of new content was made for the game, most noticeably in the various casinos and other areas around the New Vegas strip, but it’s sometimes hard to differentiate the two games.

Another frustration, for me, was that the game makes an extreme effort to prevent you from overpowering your character. Perks have been reduced to once every two levels, so you only get 15 total instead of Fallout 3′s twenty (on the plus side, you do level 30 times, so you can still max several skills if you have a high intelligence). For those of us who want to play a game where our character eventually evolves into a super-powered cyber-genius whose skill in combat is matched only by his stealth and silver tongue (and who think Perks are the single greatest thing about Fallout), it’s frustrating not to get as many of them. Of course, the original game only gave you one every three levels, so I guess every two is still better.

If you do the side quests as they come along, you’ll hit the level cap long before you have visited every point on the map. I did; in fact, I hadn’t even entered New Vegas proper until somewhere around level 26 or 27. When I hit the cap, continuing to do quests just felt pointless to me, so I downloaded a mod that set it to 50 instead of 30. Problem solved. I beat the game at level 38. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have wasted two early perks on the “10% extra experience points” set.

I also preferred Fallout 3′s somewhat more open approach to enemy strength. In New Vegas, there is a definite path the game tries to lead you on (roughly: south along the western border, then east along the southern border, then up towards Vegas). Trying to deviate from this route lands you rapidly in areas stocked with brutally powerful deathclaws, and gigantic wasps that hit like a mortar shell. In many cases it seems you may be able to sneak by on the borders but — SURPRISE! — invisible walls abound in the Mojave desert. There are areas of incline that you absolutely should be able to scale, but can’t, and in some cases you can even hit invisible walls on flat planes. This is a game design tactic that needs to die a quick, merciful death, and I was sorry to see it show up in this title.

The casinos in the game are kind of a let-down. They’re fancy and fun to wander, but many of the areas are remarkably empty — amusingly, one will often hear background noise indicating a huge crowd despite there being only two dealers and one other gambler in the room with you. I understand this is probably due to performance limitations, especially on the consoles, but it was still a bit of a letdown to walk into Gomorrah for the first time and find a gigantic and mostly empty room full of tables. Oh, also, the “choice” between blackjack, roulette and slots at the casinos isn’t really much of a choice. Blackjack’s the only game where the odds don’t overwhelmingly favor the house (and let’s be honest – they still get a sizable edge). A version of poker would’ve been nice, though I understand that would’ve involved a lot of AI coding. Craps would’ve been pretty great too, just because it usually takes at least a little longer to burn through 200 bucks.

In Summary

In the end, New Vegas ends up being a lot like Fallout 2: it uses essentially the same engine, recycles a LOT of art assets, but is a somewhat more complicated game than its predecessor. Also there’s more gambling and whores than in the first game.

While New Vegas is by no means perfect, it’s an impressive title with an intricate story, characters you grow to have feelings about, and an unbelievable amount of stuff to do. I think Obsidian did a great job in a fairly limited time of creating an interesting and enjoyable game world that’s populated with outstanding characters, and fits very well into Fallout canon. I don’t know where the series is going from here, and whether the task of planning it out will be given to Bethesda’s core team or to Obsidian, but either way I’ll be happy, because both have proved that the franchise is in good hands.

—

Note 1: New Vegas is currently available on Steam or at various retail outlets for around twenty bucks. If you haven’t played it yet, it’s a steal at that price.

Note 2: With rare exceptions, I don’t do DLC. By all indications the New Vegas DLC is very good, so this game might be an exception once all the stuff is out and packaged together into one purchase. Maybe on the next play-through!

Nearly twice as long as The Blood That Bonds, Blood Hunt picks up several months after the first book left off, and finds Two back in New York City, searching for vampires so that she can rejoin their ranks. The book contains more characters, more locations, and more points of view than TBTB did, while also delving deeper into  characters’ personalities, motivations, and desires. It also explains a lot more about the four primary vampire races, and about the political structure of the vampire world.

Of course, along with all of this there’s a lot of darkness, violence, sex, drugs and booze, topped off with healthy quantities of sweet, sweet profanity. This is, after all, a II AM Book!

Blood Hunt costs $2.99 for the eBook and is currently available for Kindle (US/UK/DE), Nook, iPad/iPhone/iPod and other major eReaders (via Smashwords). It will soon be available at the Sony, Kobo and Diesel eBook stores, but if you’re impatient, the Smashwords  EPUB version will work with both Sony and Kobo readers.

Blood Hunt was simultaneously released in print. You can order a copy from CreateSpace or, if you want, you can order a signed copy direct from me. The print copy is $11.99 either way, and I will ship signed copies to anywhere in the world (just choose the appropriate shipping option).

For full information, please visit the new Blood Hunt website – http://iiamtrilogy.com/bloodhunt

The Passage by Justin Cronin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” is a complex novel that at, over the course of its reading, left me at times enthralled and at other times enraged. I think that’s a good thing, but if you ask me tomorrow, I may have changed my mind again.

What I can say about the book is that it’s a sweeping sci-fi/fantasy epic that fits very nicely into a long and proud tradition of novels in which their author gleefully destroys most of humanity and then sets about telling us what happens in the aftermath. I’ve seen it compared to Stephen King’s The Stand, and the comparisons are warranted. There is a long and utterly engrossing set-up to the end of the world, which eventually happens with remarkable speed. King spent more time dealing with the actual apocalypse part of his post-apocalyptic world than Cronin does, but considering the heft of the book as it is, it’s perhaps for the best that Cronin literally skips over the 90 years or so between “when the bad stuff happens” and when the story picks back up.

The similarities continue throughout. There’s a group of traveling friends, and not one but two old, black ladies who like to talk about God. There’s a pregnancy and a divorce of sorts. There’s a bad guy who is drawing others to him. There’s a big showdown at the end and a pronounced denoument. Throught the book, people die. Most of them die badly. There’s a lot of The Stand in here, yes. But to call the book a copy or even highly derivative would be an outright lie. It stands as its own work, one with is intriguing and exciting, pulse-pounding at times, sad or uplifting at others. There are characters to hate and love, although I never found myself hating and loving them quite so much as I have with some other books.

As a fellow author of “vampire books” (though my vampires are apples to Cronin’s oranges), I love what he’s done with the myth. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book, give or take, are nearly flawless. Cronin paints a portrait of a near-future United States that is hyper realistic, bound up in protocol inspired by fear over continued terrorist attacks, with states mistrusting each other and the federal government operating in many clandestine ways to get what it wants. You can SEE this world, you can feel it, because it’s not so improbable. You become caught up in the story and the characters immediately, and you spend much of the time waiting for The Virals (as they become known) to break lose. You know it’s coming and that it’s going to be bad. Cronin doesn’t disappoint here.

To say that the story shifts gears at this point is an understatement. It’s something more akin to parking the car, getting out, and switching to an entirely different vehicle. Yes, it still takes place in the same world, with the same problems and even a few of the same characters, but in the 90-year shift the story also moves more out of the realm of Science Fiction and into that of Fantasy. I don’t have an inherent problem with this, but I did find the shift jarring. I also found the sudden introduction of more than a dozen new characters a bit overwhelming at first, though in the end you figure out who’s who, and you are properly outraged at the times you’re supposed to be, when the heroes are being held up by people who don’t understand that, damn it, they’re the heroes and they’re right.

The problems I had with the book, the things that threw me out of reading mode and made me frustrated, all happened in the second half and were mostly small issues. For one thing, Cronin is guilty of the extremely modern belief that all human beings immediately lose whoever they were before, at the moment they hear they are having a baby (or in extreme cases, at the moment of the baby’s birth), and instead become dedicated only to the existence of that child. For another, I’m tired of old women who love God. I don’t find any comfort in the idea of predestination or “God’s Will” and I don’t find characters who do to be particularly sympathetic.

I also had extreme issue with one decision a primary character makes, late in the novel, not even so much because I didn’t like the decision, but because it’s given barely an ounce of explanation and is a pretty clear setup for a later event. It felt like the character was only doing it because the story needed her to. If you’re going to have the cavalry show up, you need a reason for why it wasn’t there in the first place, and this reason seemed flimsy. The character in question supposedly has her reasons, but they’re never given (or barely so), so the decision she makes seems amazingly arbitrary.

There are a few other moments like this — Cronin kills off a character whose name might as well have been “Obvious Choice” at one point — but I may be stressing the negative too strongly. In the end, the important thing was that whenever I put the book down, I always wanted to pick it up again, and preferably soon. This is the first in a trilogy, and I’m looking forward to the second and third books. They’ll probably frustrate me too, but I bet they’ll be a lot of fun to read while they’re doing it.

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This one deals with straight-up cocktails, and could also have been titled “Up Drinks”, but the idea remains the same: these are drinks served as-is, without any ice (though they are shaken or stirred on it). These are the drinks that most people think of when someone says “cocktail” or … ugh … “Martini” (they’re not Martinis. If you love Martinis like I love Martinis, you will stop calling them Martinis).

I provide some history and four delicious drink recipes. Sound interesting? Take a look!

The fine folks at Primer did a killer job with the photos, as they always do. One of the great pleasures of writing for them is the knowledge that I’ll get to see my drinks (and many drinks that I love but can’t take credit for) looking fantastic. Go check it out!

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a remarkable writer Cormac McCarthy is. This is the second of his books that I’ve read, and while it was more difficult to follow than The Road, it was also a significantly better book (and I really liked The Road!). An unflinching look at the American and Mexcian old west in the pre-Civil-War era, Blood Meridian follows the exploits of a young man who finds himself embroiled in the exploits of the Glanton Gang, a real-life group of scalp-hunters turned outlaws. McCarthy describes scenes of brutal violence and quiet solitude with the same slow, deliberate, biblical prose, and it’s up to the reader to make judgements upon the people who he describes. There are bad guys aplenty in the book, but no real good guys, and I appreciated that fact. There are few good guys in real life, and there were even fewer to be found in the desperate places on the edge of the country (and beyond it).

The lack of quotes and general eschewing of punctuation didn’t really bother me, but I did have some trouble with the extreme run-on sentences, frequently joined together with “and” over and over … sometimes by the time I got to the end, I had to go back to the beginning to remember where the sentence started. Still, the book was fascinating and deeply engrossing. McCarthy is a master.

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I don’t know about the rest of you, but where I lived it was a long, cold winter followed by a very dreary spring. We saw a lot of the kind of weather that makes a cocktail fan long for mulled wine, spiced rum, cider drinks, and anything else that can bring a little warmth to the party. Now, at long last, we’re starting to see some nice days! It’s a welcome change, and it’s a good time to break out the list of summer drinks: refreshing cocktails that are made to be sipped while sitting on the back porch and watching fireflies dance through the air.

This article features two of my own drinks, and two classics worth investigating. As usual, the Primer folks have done a fantastic job photographing the cocktails. Check it out!

Our Friends

One of the main reasons we chose to move to Indianapolis is because my friend and business partner, Gabe, and his wife Brett lived out here. We’ve enjoyed being able to see them far more often than we could before, and it’ll be a bummer to lose that. We’ve also made a couple other good friends since moving out here, Charlotte’s former boss Amy and her husband Jeevan, and we’ll definitely miss seeing those guys as well! It seems to be my destiny to have good friends that I never get to see as often as I’d like, scattered across the entire United States (and, more and more, across the globe). Someday I’m just going to have to make enough money to afford my own private jet.

Hubbard & Craven’s Coffee

I go for a morning coffee and pastry at Hubbard & Craven’s in Broad Ripple basically every single day that I’m in town, and have been doing so for close to two years. I also have spent a lot of time there hanging out and writing. I’ve gotten to know several of the baristas by name, and even brought them some beer I brewed with their Bali Blue Moon coffee! I don’t know them quiiite well enough to call them friends, but I’ve enjoyed chatting with them all. When you work from home all the time, it can get pretty lonely, and having a place to go and be social for a bit is really nice. Also, I like supporting local coffee shops, and enjoyed the overall atmosphere of the Broad Ripple location. I’ll miss it!

Scholar’s Inn Bakery Pastries

On the subject of my morning pastry, nine times out of ten that pastry comes from Scholar’s Inn, a bakery based in Bloomington, IN that makes the most ridiculously delicious scones I have ever had. Hubbard & Cravens purchases many of their fine goods from Scholar’s Inn and bakes them on the premises, and sometimes if you get there early enough, the scones are still warm in the middle. My all-time favorite is their cranberry scone, which seems to always be moist and fluffy (not typically what you associate with scones!), but the Chocolate Chip and Almond-Apricot varieties are delicious as well. It will be with a heavy heart that I begin searching for a replacement pastry shop in Providence.

The Ball & Biscuit Cocktail Bar

Anyone who reads this blog even occasionally knows that I’m a big fan of artisan cocktails. There are several places in Indy serving high-quality hand-crafted cocktails, but none of them is more dedicated to the concept than The Ball & Biscuit. Charlotte and I have been down there many times to enjoy a Sazerac, or an Aviation, or one of their own creations (or two, or three!). The bar has a great look, with lots of exposed brick and filament light bulbs, and the small plates and cheese selection they have there rock. It’s one of Indy’s best places to go for sophisticated libations, and I’ll miss it when I’m gone!

Great Fermentations Brew Shop

I haven’t been to Great Fermentations in a few months, as I’ve been focusing on drinking all of the beer I brewed, rather than brewing more (that way I don’t have to move it!), but it’s an awesome shop filled with courteous and knowledgeable people who really love them some beer. I’ve learned a ton about the process in the past year, and have gotten almost all of my equipment and ingredients from Great Fermentations. I’m hoping I can find a place in Providence that will have the same selection and quality!

The Availability of New Belgium and Three Floyds Beer

Oh, sweet sweet Robert the Bruce … not the guy from Braveheart, though I suppose he was nice enough; I’m talking about the Scottish Wee Heavy from 3 Floyds Brewery, a Chicago-based brewery that doesn’t yet distribute to the east coast. Robert the Bruce is one of my top five beers, and I’m going to sorely miss it. New Belgium, based in Colorado, also makes several brews that I enjoy often, including their 1554 Black Ale, Fat Tire amber, and Ranger IPA. They don’t distribute to the east coast yet either. Oh, the weeping!

Inexpensive Housing with a Basement

One of Indy’s primary appeals was that it was cheap, and it proved to be so, considering we got more space than our Brooklyn apartment for less than half the cost! The thing I hadn’t factored on being such a huge deal, though, was the basement. We don’t even use it that much (it’s about 3/4 empty) and it’s still awesome just because of the storage possibilities and the fact that it gets the cat boxes out of our day-to-day activities. I’m not looking forward to going back to having cat litter on our bathroom floor.

Summer Fireflies

Firefly, On -- by James Jordan

During summer evenings, Indy has the largest fireflies I’ve ever seen, and there’s no lack of them! It’s pretty awesome to come walking back home from an evening out at one of Broad Ripple’s restaurants or bars, and have our way lit by zillions of tiny blinking lights floating through the air. I don’t expect Providence’s more urban streets (at least, where we’ll be living) to provide the same, and that’s a shame, because it’s a little, semi-magical experience that I really enjoy.