Home brewing adventure
After I bought my brewing supplies, it was a few days before I made it to my local supermarket to pick up five gallons of 'soft' cider. I have never been more excited about a trip to Cub Foods.
On the day before Christmas Eve, I carefully sanitized all my stuff and poured the apple juice in to my fermentation bucket. I kept the plastic jugs to use for bottling the hard cider when it's done. I stirred some yeast nutrient in with the juice, put the lid on the bucket, and whacked a "smack pack" of yeast. Next morning, the plastic package was swollen with hungry and activated yeast molecules. I opened the bucket and tossed in the yeast. Then I sealed it up again and we left home to celebrate Christmas in four locations over the course of two days.
When we returned home, there was no discernible activity in the airlock; in other words, it didn't look like fermentation was happening. Had my yeasts fallen asleep while we were away? We bought a fancy new room heater to warm my brewing area up to the recommended minimum temperature, and the yeast woke up again. As of yesterday, it was happily fermenting in the juice. After a month or so in primary, it should be all done turning into hard cider, and it'll just take some time to clarify and mellow out before it's ready to drink.
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Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel 
Tom Sloper shows an example of two "blank" cards 
With the second half of the chrysanthemums on display here, I have completed every suit in the hanafuda deck! But that doesn't mean I'm done... not quite yet.
It is fitting that my final suit should be for the current month (September). These two cards portray a chrysanthemum junk (left) and on the right, the final "animal" card, which is 
When I was in Japan with 
Here it is! By popular demand, more or less. This is the second card done up with my trademarked realistic-style maple leaves, which I will be using for the complete suit. I think it combines the best aspects of both designs from 
Some of you might be interested to learn about how I make these cards? If you were wondering about the process, then read on, for all will be explained. If you just want to see the finished cards, you can scroll down to the bottom of the post. Everybody wins!
Once I have a satisfying sketch outline, I ink the image. I have done my first ink on the card on the left. On the right card, I've gone over my lines a second time to make them bold and correct any minor mistakes.
Here are both cards in their boxes. I draw each image at a larger size than the final card, so they overlap with the edges when I first drop them in. You can see them here before cropping.
Coloring is the final step. I use the border red in at least one card for every suit. If it's appropriate, I also try to apply colors that I have already used in previous suits. Apart from that, I use whatever color strikes my fancy. On these cards, I picked a yellow from before and a brand-new pink for the blossoms.
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Whoa, what? That doesn't look like lightning, you may think, and you'd be correct! This is possibly the weirdest card in hanafuda. Besides its overall craziness, it also doesn't include any common elements from the other willow cards. It looks like the hanafuda artists dropped some acid before designing this one, and it's a distinctive card in every modern deck I looked at.
Here's the animal card for the willow/rain suit. Readers who know me very well may have seen this swallow somewhere before, since I have two of them tattooed on my chest! I got to cheat and use it again in my hanafuda deck, although it's not really cheating since I did the original bird design myself.
The subject of the "rain man" willow card is 
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Behold the mighty phoenix, or, depending on which hanafuda page you read, possibly a chicken? Actually, it's not supposed to be either. A definitive source identifies this animal as the 
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I didn't know what a wisteria looks like, but at least I had heard of it before. Paulowia? Yes, it's a real thing! Apparently it is a type of tree, and the flowers look a little something like the cards on your left, which are the two 'junks' from the suit.
A blank red ribbon and a cuckoo are the subjects of today's cards.
