Recently in the new me Category

my personality, like frank's black, is my gift, and my curse.

i am not satisfied with "it basically works" or "good enough". i crave perfection. it is why i enjoy video games like "demons souls", and my all-time favorite, "planescape: torment". both games are the D&D video game equivalent of "groundhog day": you die, and die, and die again until you get things just perfect, then you win.

knowing about my quest for perfection, I gave away Silvia, my espresso machine, a while ago. silvia offered endless opportunity for the quest to perfection. i could play with her all day long and occasionally get the perfect cup of coffee -- the legendary God Shot. but as my hobbies multiplied, i found that i didn't want to spend all day chasing a shot. i wanted to have the shot and get on with things. that just wasn't happening with silvia, and also, espresso makes an unbelievable mess in the kitchen.

but i missed having espresso. so i decided that in 2012 i'd get a new machine. i did my research last year: what was the state of the art? it turned out, to my surprise, that the most excellent machine for me was the same machine I was lusting after in 2006 and 2007: the Quick Mill Andreja Premium. In 2011 my espresso knowledge was woefully out of date, but I did a smart thing: I remembered that I knew everything there was to know back in 2007, and if Andreja was my choice then, and there wasn't anything new on the market, then Andreja was the machine for me. So I ordered it. It arrived yesterday.

I went out and bought some beans at my local coffee shop, because I was woefully underprepared -- I did not have fresh espresso beans ready. That turned out to be a good thing: I wasted a half pound of commercial beans getting my grinder "dialed in" -- that is, adjusted so that it produced the proper size coffee grounds for my purposes. And then, just when I got the grind to the point where Andreja produced the proper 2oz shot in about 25 seconds, I tasted the coffee.

Man, did it suck. Bleh!

Fortunately, last night, I roasted a half pound of Sweet Maria's Moka Kadir blend, to about a Full City+, a little light for espresso, maybe. Certainly, way too fresh for espresso. Coffee, after roasting, gives off CO2 for a couple of days. If you put really fresh coffee into an espresso machine, it tends to gush out uncontrollably as the gas release is accelerated by the brew process. But I was desperate for a decent shot out of my shiney new toy. So I went for it.

The first two shots choked the poor dear. I had ground the beans too fine, and no water was able to get through. Still, Andreja handled it like a champ, and didn't complain. I apologized and adjusted my grind. This was the sort of thing I hated about espresso: always adjusting, never tasting.

Then I pulled the third shot. Third time's the charm. Holy cow.

I did almost everything wrong that third time: my grind was still too fine, my tamp wasn't level (I have a single spout portafilter handle, and the spout is off-center, making it very difficult to get a level tamp. fortunately, my new tamp stand will be here soon :D), likely the machine wasn't at the optimal temperature.

None of that mattered. Good beans + reasonable approximation of good technique + Andreja = awesome shot. Perhaps not a God Shot, but so close to a Silvia god shot, with so many screwups, that my mind was blown. I'm still shocked at how great that shot was, with so many errors on my part.

I think I'm on to something here. I wanted effortlessness, and I've got it. It still makes an unbelievable mess (in the very literal sense of the word, unbelievable) and exposes all sorts of problems in my kitchen layout and lighting. But with very little effort, my coffee knowledge is rewarded with amazing espresso, and not endless tweaking frustration (this is, of course, making the big assumption that my next shot will be as good as the one I'm blabbing about now!)

For your viewing pleasure, meet Andreja:

andreja and her support crew have taken over part of the kitchen. hops hasn't complained yet, and once she starts steaming milk, and eventually, i bet, making americanos, she'll be happy for the coffee bar.

i wanted shiney. andreja is shiney. good thing i had a shirt on when i took this picture

andreja is ridiculously large. i thought silvia was large, andreja is way bigger. forget about under-cabinet. t-mobile G2 for scale.

had a pretty good climbing night last night. first climb of the year (and of the last 3 weeks, more or less) was a successful 5.11a. for contrast, i'd guesstimate that my first climb of 2011 was a 5.10b (3 levels lower). so i've progressed, that's cool.

then, sadly, i flubbed most of my subsequent climbs. still, i climbed an (admittedly easy) 11a cold. that's a good start.

at the end of the night the climbing buddies wanted to stay later. i told them not to bother arguing, i am inconvincible. in fact, i told them, i was wearing my cloak of inconvincibility, +2.

so don't even bother. you'd need at least a vorpal whine +3 to best my saving throw.

i started this life out with really good hearing, and i've protected it jealously all my life. my parents always told me to turn down my headphones, and i did, and even today, though i listen very frequently to headphones, apparently i do it at much lower levels than most people.

i've been to two concerts this year (okay, one was more like a blues club), which is actually a record for me (and will likely be exceeded next year), and both times i wore earplugs. not only did i feel like i lost nothing, in both cases the un-plugged version was so terribly overdriven that all i could hear was interference. only with the plugs in could i hear the actual melodies.

so i'm happy and lucky that i've been given good hearing and the wisdom to protect it so that i can enjoy it to the fullest.

i'm generally trying to avoid routines, but they're really easy to fall into, particularly when it means connecting with people and enjoying good food. now we have a sunday routine. it goes a little like this, and it went very nicely yesterday:

a hefty bike ride (or preferably a hike, but that wasn't in the stars yesterday since it's easier for three people to bike independently than for two people to hike slowly with a third...)
a quick shower amidst shouts of "i'm starving! hurry up!"
the inevitable wait while various parties do various things completely unrelated to getting to lunch
going to town for brunch
being told that the wait is thirty minutes, wondering aloud once again why we didn't make a reservation
looking at that one case at the antique shop that isn't quite what we need but closer than anything else we've seen
finally getting our seat at the counter
talking with chef jeremy
drinking an el perro locco [sic]
enjoying chicken and waffles, epic breakfast sandwich, or greasy burger
grocery shopping
driving home to Jah's Music
going for a very nice 5:00 walk through the neighborhood, checking out the flowers, the sun, and the music
lazy dinner at home with a great movie and a tasty beverage

that was my sunday last week, this week, and jah willing, it'll be my next sunday too (with the possible exception of a nice dinner out, but who knows?)

like all things, it must change. chef jeremy is leaving town, and the new guy doesn't have jeremy's charisma (or perhaps he does but it was hidden under the nervousness of his first day on the job). but hakuna matata, change is good, and we'll settle into a new routine as needed, to keep things enjoyable. that's what sundays are for.

i finally broke through a weight loss plateau, and not only did i break through, i lost 3 lbs in a week instead of the usual 1.

so my new weight loss plan is simple: a bag of doritos every sunday until i'm 185 again.

due to recent events in my life, not least the reading of a most exceptional book, i've stopped saying "god bless you" when people sneeze. however, people still say it to me, and after 30 years of cultural reinforcement of the acknowledgement of sneezing, i feel a painful and awkward void when my companions sneeze and i greet their bodily function with only silence.

hops suggested i say "gezeundtheit" but I really don't like germans, so that's out. "salud" has the misfortune of making sense and not being funny. so i've gone with the absurdist benediction of "that's what she said!" this irritated a sneezing hops on the drive home yesterday, and by this morning i'd forgotten all about it, until i sneezed while i was preparing breakfast, and heard a shout from hops office upstairs: "THATS WHAT SHE SAID"

i haven't laughed so hard in the morning in quite a long time (TWSS).

for reasons of creative freedom, my (initial) trip report will be here, and not on the blog.

i'm entering stuff day by day now, but who knows what the final product will look like? i won't be sending many updates about it, you'll just have to reload the page every once in a while to see what's changed.

where i really want to think about "this time tomorrow". almost.

but this time three weeks from now, i should finally have a worthy blog post for y'all.

it's Frobuary 3, YOMHC 0x6e!

this one was an expensive salon cut. i go back and forth on this one. it cost quite a lot, and i can't ever see myself spending this much on a cut when i need one every 3-4 weeks. and at first glance, it looks like just any old haircut.

but after a bit, i seem to think it's way more versatile than "a regular cut" and can look good quite a number of different ways. coincidence? genius? i may never know.

It's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x6f!

I was near a barber with a spare hour and a desperate need for a haircut, so i took a gamble... and lost. this may just be the worst haircut i've ever had, whether paid for or not.

i'm trying to grow it out a bit so i didn't go for the buzz, which probably this guy could have pulled off, but certainly he failed to deliver whatever it was he was trying to do. ah well, in two more weeks i'll be back to shaggy.