Kjel.org awoke Saturday to the promise of snow. Luckily, it was a secret promise: I neglected to tell the Jr VP about the possibility because I know that all the weathermen in this town live to crush the snowy dreams of little boys, so their bogus forecast caused no tears when the snow didn’t come as advertised.

I for one wasn’t too sad. I was going to get downtown for the Holiday Ale Fest even if I had to chain up all four wheels on the Suby. Thankfully, I did not have to chain up the Suby.

The Fest was crowded this year. Normally we show up at 11:00 and are some of the first people in. This year there was a 100 person line at 11:00; I need to stop talking it up during the rest of the year. The Edumacator and I were lucky to be inside the gates by 11:07. Once in the tent everything was awesome as usual. The first beer of the morning is always the toughest, but they get progressively smoother after that. All of us in fact proceeded to get pretty smooth.

The Chief Photographer making a rare appearance:

A few other distinguished gentlemen joined us in the wetting of our whistles:

Dam right we’re Beavers! And drunk!

We somehow then found ourselves at Rock Bottom in the bar upstairs. They let us in why?

Is there anything better than watching football after a long morning of drinking, while having appetizer sampler plates periodically sent to your table? Unlikely. Rock Bottom beer doesn’t do much for me but by God the lads down there know their way around a deep fryer. Bravo! Oh, and congrats to the Beavs too.

The HQ survived the weekend windstorm relatively unscathed and the roof seems to be holding. A certain gutter on our house is super clogged because the CFO is too lazy to clean it, so we now have what I like to think of as a “cascading water feature” onto the back deck but otherwise I think we’ll make it. I will anyway; the CFO is hurting due to the loss of her favorite never-visited tree:

Storm Snaps World’s Tallest Sitka Spruce
SEASIDE, Ore. — The world’s tallest Sitka spruce near Seaside survived 700 years of storms and a threat from chain saws, but snapped in half during Sunday’s powerful winds. The 204-foot tree was badly damaged in 2006 during a powerful storm and officials had considered cutting it down. “Its such a landmark. You drive by and you stop. You take a picture with your kids and you keep going. It’s a sad day. Kind of lost a piece of Oregon coast history,” said one local resident. Some visitors stopped by the tree on Sunday to take pieces of it as keepsakes.

One of the CFO’s favorite things to do was hassle me about stopping at the Sitka roadside attraction every time we drove to the coast, seeing how many different ways I could deny her the pleasure of looking at a big tree, always hoping against hope that this might be the time where I breakdown and Kjel.org actually stops. Sorry CFO. That big tree (and your attempts at dragging me to see it) will have to live on in your memory. And your dreams. Now I wonder if there is an Air Museum we could go to around here somewhere?