Secondary fermentation - easy, right?

The thing that has become most obvious to me after my first experience with home brewing is that EVERYTHING TAKES LONGER THAN YOU THINK, even if you think to think about every damn thing involved. If you haven't brewed before, trust me, you haven't - especially in an all grain process. I'll be posting pictures and a write up of my first brew day later, but I wanted to talk a little about moving my beer to secondary last night.

Mark and Bill are the guys who have the space and equipment, so my first batch has been fermenting in their basement for about 5 days now, and the primary fermentation appeared to be over. I told Mark that it couldn't take more than a half hour, all I had to do was clean the 5 gallon carboy and siphon off the beer from the primary fermenter. You know what takes a long time? Cleaning carboys. Why does brewing have to involve so much damn WATER? Every time I think about brewing in my apartment I start imagining methods to get some kind of rubber flooring I can put down in there....

So basically I cleaned and sanitized the 5 gallon carboy, cleaned the autosiphon Mark had used to transfer beer to the bottling bucket, tried to sanitize that, and cleaned and sanitized an airlock. Took it down to the basement and siphoned the beer off to the carboy. Then I tossed in the pellet hops for dry hopping and about 3/5 of the oak cubes. I was a bit worried that I hadn't waited long enough for the primary to finish - the bubbling was no longer active, but the krausen was suspended and had not settled back into the beer. Maybe that's a good thing? I dunno, we'll see. Secondary fermentation is debated heavily on forums and such, so hopefully I didn't make things worse instead of better.

Updates to come!