Fremont Oktoberfest

This weekend was Fremont Oktoberfest, a three-day beer festival two blocks from my apartment.  It's sort of like lawnparties for three days, but with Northwest craft beers instead of Beast and you have to pay for it, and it rains.  And it's not at Princeton.  OK, so it really has nothing in common with lawnparties except that you're drinking beer outside in the middle of the afternoon.  For some reason, about half of the beers were IPAs.  Now, don't get me wrong, I like hops as much as the next guy, but at a certain point enough is enough.  By the end of the weekend, I was desperately searching for the least hoppy beers available.  It is possible to make good beer where the dominant flavor is not hops, and I was able to find plenty.

I got my first taste of the infamous Seattle rainy season.  On Friday, when I biked to work, it was sort of raining - it was overcast, you could sort of make out droplets in the air, and the air felt wet.  I didn't get wet in the time I was out, but the ground seemed to be getting wet, so I think that counts.  Even if that doesn't count, Saturday we got hit with real rain.  Not New York rain; I was outside all day, and although I regretted wearing a light fleece instead of a waterproof jacket, I survived.  Nothing gets called off in Seattle due to rain; Oktoberfest was packed, and the BMX bikers jumping over kegs continued.

Before hitting the beer garden today, I ran my first 5K race in just over 5 years, the Fremont Brew-ha-ha.  Despite only training for two weeks and consuming a copious amount of beer yesterday, I was happy with my performance - I finished in 20:57, beating my unambitious goal of 22 minutes, and finishing 44th out of 815 runners.  Seeing my place shocked me, to say the least - I realized that the competitive pool at a weekend 5K road race is quite different than my high school cross country races.  I definitely miss the camaraderie of having a team to hang out with before and after the race; perhaps I'll have to start my own.

In other news, I got a new Windows Mobile Phone, the Samsung Blackjack II from AT&T.  So far my experience with Windows Mobile has been less than fantastic - it seems almost impossible to upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1, which is apparently much better, although the upgrade wipes out all of your data (it is theoretically possible to back it up and restore it) so I'm trying to do that before I put too much on it.  Unfortunately I don't get a company discount on an iPhone...