Okay, I dragged my tired, abused body off of the couch to siphon the new cherry cider over to the secondary. The siphoning doesn't take long, but before I can do that I have to mix up a boatload (er, bucketload) of sanitizer, clean my tools, clean the destination carboy, and continuously float and wipe all the cat hair off of everything... that has been in the closet all this time. Man. Cat hair. Fluffy, fluffy cats. And after, once I've siphoned cider all over the floor, there is MORE cleaning.
Anyway, I thiefed (thieved?) a sample out while it was siphoning, to check the gravity. Dang it, someone glued the hydrometer to the bottom of its tube again. Thief. Thief. Thief, float! Aha!
Unreadable, and WAY off the charts again (well below 1.000). The cider is really opaque this time and I can't see through it to the scale.
As I wander around exclaiming to Marla how opaque and bizarre this batch is, the secondary overflows. Oops!
I dribble some of the thieved cider into my shiny new vinometer (which needs a protective case, I fear for its safety) and read... 12%. Wowza! Oh, no, I read that backwards, that's probably 8%. Did it again and it emptied ENTIRELY. That's not right. Did it a third time to get 6%. Also, the particulates in the cider are probably messing up the reading.
I'll have to do some math and get a sanity check.
The final test -- a drink of it. Yes! It's alcoholic and reasonably sweet! Just like I wanted.
Hopefully, it will settle and do nice things in the secondary, and then off to the bottles.
Between now and then I need to formulate my carbonation strategy.