Hair of the Dog

Maple protects the Snow Cap.

I can’t imagine what will change when we have a baby.

We’ve had a puppy now for several weeks, and life hasn’t been the same since the day we brought her home. It hasn’t changed in the way I imagine it will when we bring a tiny human being, borne of our hopefully fortunate genetic splash, home from the hospital. Nor has it really, truly changed, truth be told.

But it’s been very difficult to get to our favorite pub or catch the last twenty minutes of a happy hour since Maple has joined the family. The wife, you see, is a responsible pet owner, and wants to be home with the puppy as much as possible. To train her to soil the puppy pad instead of destroy it; to hold her bladder instead of unleash it; to learn commands instead of blissfully ignore them. My wife is the good parent.

I am the bad parent.

I don’t want to give up the post-workday pub beer. (Or the hours during which I might write something, read something, send a long-overdue email, engage in some extremely humble and mercifully brief sort of social activity, or listen to a record, honestly.) But I’m in the wrong here, folks. If my personal spare time is more important than raising a puppy, a new member of our family, what does that say about my prospects as a father to an actual child? Would I, one future day, rather enjoy an IPA at Beveridge Place Pub than swipe waste from the lower cheeks of the sponge of a person that Rena and I enthusiastically joined to create?

Well, no, dumbass. That’s why man invented the glass bottle.

Pyramid‘s Snow Cap is out already, if you can believe that. Found a lone six-pack at QFC yesterday. Don’t let the latest brash incarnation of the brand’s label turn you off; the brew within is a textbook (if not exceptional) example of a “winter warmer”: dark, well-balanced between malt syrup and hop bite, and pleasantly tongue-depressing in its 7% ABV weight.

The micro-macro brewery celebrates its latest Snow Cap release with a Seattle Alehouse parking lot party this Saturday at 7 p.m. I’ll miss it, of course. (Puppy training stops for no man.) But if any of the six bottles I giddily cradled across the threshold of our home yesterday remain unopened, I’ll party from afar.

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