First Thoughts

This blog was originally set up to document my adventures in home-brewing, however after only 3 posts, I never really kept up with it. I also felt that limiting this to solely home-brew did not fully encompass the myriad of projects in which I find myself constantly immersed. 

Having purchased a house from my father, my fiance and I spent the next several months painting, redoing hardwood floors, ripping up carpet and gutting a moldy basement. We were finally able to move in, but have lots of additional projects planned, including building the basement back out, building a deck, planting gardens, etc.

I often peruse Pinterest and come up with all sort of grand ideas of water features, garden walkways, a cottage style greenhouse and cedar decking. However, my bank account after all the initial work is pointing me in the direction of a garden hose and sprinkler, dirt paths, and a few shrubs. Additionally, I should probably first concentrate on putting up a fence to prevent our neighbors black lab from bullying us out of our yard. He has a tendency to charge us everytime he is allowed out, flying across the yard at top speed growling and baring teeth. I have no idea who this canine thinks he is, but he will not be ruling MY yard much longer.

But I digress. This blog will serve to share all of my gardening tips and woes, home-brewing successes and failures, house projects, recipes, crafts, and whatever else I get myself into. Hopefully I will be able to share some good tips on something you are interested in, or at the very least, provide you with an entertaining story from time to time.

So why the name Crosshatch? For those of you who are not familiar with drawing or quilting, Cross-hatching is the practice of overlapping parallel sets of lines in drawing to indicate lights and darks, or shading. (Hatching is one set of parallel lines, cross-hatching is one set going in one direction, with another overlapped set going in a different, often perpendicular, direction.) These parallel lines basically form grids. Anyway, to me, brewing, gardening, music, etc., are all the parallel lines that cross and recross to form the gridwork of who I am and/or what I do. A great patchwork of hobbies, interests and knowledge that help to form the framework of the soul.

....or more likely, I'm just a middle-age guy with a touch of A.D.D. who likes to have about 15 different things going on to keep my attention....Hey look! A squirrel!