LBRD?

I think RT and I established a new tradition for Father's Day yesterday. I'm just not sure what it was.

There are two contenders.

Around noon, I went out and bought four new litter boxes for our three cats. No matter how good one is about keeping litter boxes clean, there comes a time when you just gotta start fresh. It's pretty much an annual thing, and it has always helped me remember things like that if I can make the association with another significant occurrence. Father's Day might just become Litter Box Replacement Day.

The other candidate is a bit more in keeping with the spirit of the occasion. I bought RT a whole lot of the first cherries of the season and fed him steak and lobster for dinner.

It's probably a good thing that Beanie, Buddy, and Blue don't get to vote on this one.

 

posted by taming at 04:10 | link | comments (2)|
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It's Not All Hockey in Alberta

The Stanley Cup will be decided tonight, but one of the better sporting events in Alberta is just gearing up. Yes, it is promise time.

Despite having the lowest tax rate in the country, the politicos vying for premier Ralph Klein's job are competing to see who amongst them can come up with the tax reduction scheme that appeals to the voters the most. So far we have heard from a candidate who thinks that people under 30 should have their tax rate cut in half, and from another guy who thinks that the province should not grab the education funds we pay though our property taxes.

I'm sure this is just the beginning.

In the meantime, Albertans are busy patting themselves on the back as the rest of Canada celebrates Tax Freedom Day, an event that occurred here on June 6, and won't really happen in Quebec until June 27.   In the US, tax freedom day fell on April 26, though I imagine, if the US government were to begin paying for health care, the two governments might get by with one celebratory cake.

From Can-West News Services

OTTAWA - Canadians start working for themselves rather than the government on Monday, June 19, five days earlier than last year, according to the Fraser Institute's annual Tax Freedom Day calculations released Friday.

June 19 is the earliest tax freedom day since 2001. The latest tax freedom day was June 25 in 2000.

The annual calculation is meant to provide Canadians with a measure of their total tax burden, including income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, fuel taxes and a host of other levies, the report said.

According to the report, Canadians are working until June 18 to earn enough to pay the total tax bill imposed on them by all levels of government.

"Although this year marks a reversal of the recent upward trend in taxation, Tax Freedom Day falls over a month and a half later than it did 45 years ago," Niels Veldhuis, senior research economist at the right-wing think tank, said in a news release. "In 1961, the earliest year for which the calculation has been made, Canada's Tax Freedom Day was May 3."

 

posted by taming at 03:38 | link | comments |
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Happy Birthday, Paul

I just tossed out a piece of chocolate cake. To be specific, it was double chocolate cake with chocolate icing, and was reported to be very good, indeed.

Now, I'm pretty sure that folks have been disposing of very good cake for eons, but it is a reasonably new phenomenon in the House of Taming. Almost three years ago, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and swore off chocolatey and floury delights. My diabetes is under great control now, and as a bonus, I'm at "normal" weight for pretty much the first time since three (or was it four) minutes in the ninth grade. I could probably have the occasional slice of chocolate cake, but it just doesn't call to me these days.

It's not that my oral fixation has disappeared, it has just been recast as one that revolves around really good coffee, and really good (and usually stinky) cheese. Both appear to be self-limiting, in terms of my consumption, though it is rare for cheese to survive for more than a day in our house. Fortunately, we don't live next door to a grocery store, and the kind of cheese I like comes in very small packages.

Last night, RT went up after dinner to get some ice cream (another food that fails to call to me). I suggested that he have it with that last piece of cake, but he passed on it—a sure sign that the time had come to consign it to the trash.

I remember when, as a kid, my family would have some sort of really rich dessert in the house and the adults would eat little tiny bits of it, exclaiming that it was "too sweet" or "too rich".  Back then, I didn't understand how such a thing could be possible.

I do now. I guess when you start your life as a Beatlemaniac and are still around to see media reports about Paul McCartney's 64th birthday, that kind of thing is not just possible, but inevitable.

 

posted by taming at 05:28 | link | comments (1)|
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Coffee Update

It's too early to put the coffee on, but yesterday morning, I loved my very good Horse Harar Lot 19, roasted to what I would call Full City/Full City Plus, and rested for 4 days. I am trying different roasts all along the time line, from 1 day of rest through seven. I'm looking forward to seeing what Day 5 will bring.

For this, urmmm, cycle, I stopped the roast with 45 seconds left of the 11 minute profile. Because Horse roasts unevenly, I ended up with about 5% of the beans that looked dark enough that I expected them to have oil on them, but they didn't, 90% nice evenly roasted darkish, but not dark, beans, and about 5% noticeably lighter ones. In my 130 gram batch, I tossed out about a half dozen beans that never really roasted much at all. This is noticeably different from what I saw during the last "cycle" when I stopped the roast 30 seconds earlier.

On the Sweet Maria's Home Roasting Email List, there was a fair amount of criticism of the iRoast-2, the machine I use, related to the 350 degree pre-programmed start. I bought this machine because it was affordable and the venting system made it practical for indoor roasting. Roasting outdoors just can't happen here about six months a year.

I've had 30+ years of buying appliances that aren't exactly top of the line, and learning to work around their limitations. This roaster seems to be much the same. I know that I am seeing a definite relationship between changes of the variables that are under my control and the end results. For now, that is enough for me to feel good about the machine.

If we win the lottery, I'll get one of those neato sample roasters and have an appropriate exhaust system installed in the house. But until that happens, I'm betting that by learning as I go, I can nudge some very fine coffee out of the iRoast-2 and my KMB pot.

I'm really enjoying the home roasting list. It's very active, and unlike the other on-line communities I am active in, most of the posters are men. Coffee roasting seems to attract guys who, in these days, we think of as geeks, but are probably more like the men who, in previous generations, had a big time workbench in the basement or garage and spent most of their free time working on one project after another. Whenever my friends gives me "the look" when I talk about coffee, I send them to The Coffee Geek forums so they can see what true coffee obsession looks like.

In any case, I've got 10 more pounds of green coffee on the way. RT (AKA The Sweet Guy) encouraged me to order a particular bean, that had scored waaaay up there in the Panama Cup of Excellence competition. Sweet Maria's had bought a bunch of the same coffee, before it won big, and good guys that they are, didn't raise the price after the CoE auction. So even though we already had 25 pounds of green beans in the house, I ordered five pounds of Panama Carmen Estate 1800+ Meters and, because even I can get over caffeinated, five pounds of a solid Nicaraguan decaf.

From the Sweet Maria's site:

Carmen Estate is a small farm located high on the hillside above the large, well known Finca La Florentina. In fact, La Florentina used to buy the coffee cherry from all the surrounding farms to augment their own, but this was done for more than increasing the volume. The fact is, La Florentina is down in the flat valley and Carmen Estate roughtly another 500-600 meters higher up. Carmen is on a very steep hillside with southern exposure, and due to the high altitude, the coffee has greater density, better acidity, a more piquant cup. So in a way, Florentina was getting some better cup quality with Carmen in the mix. But the farm was passed down to the new generation of the Franceschi family, namely Carlos Franceschi Aguilar (Carmen was his grandmother) ... and he realized that they had a better coffee on their family farm then something to blend with lower-grown coffees. He built an independant mill for the Estate down in the valley using the latest equipment, and began a program to care for the trees using new techniques. This farm uses the de-muscilage process where the muscilage is stripped off the parchment layer using friction, rather than traditional fermentation. I was very impressed with the high altitude and excellent practices of Carlos and Finca Carmen. This coffee won the #3 spot in the Best of Panama competition in 2003, 2004 and #2 in 2005, and #3 in 2006! The entire farm is very high altitude; it starts at 1450, an altitude many farms don't even reach, meters and goes up from there! We have a special arrangement to buy this coffee each year from the 1800+ meter altitude on the farm, a very small amount of coffee. Altitude matters, with coffee, and you can taste the difference here. Altitude allows coffee to ripen slower, creates greater bean density, and results in higher concentrations of bright, snappy, acidity in the cup. I also notice stronger aromatic attributes compared to the lower altitude coffee from the same Estate. The cup has sweet and toasty aromas at City roast, with clean fruited aromatic components; peach, apple. The wet aroma is crystal clear and bright, with grain and nut hints at this light roast stage. These become more distinct in the cup flavors: lightly malted barley, a sweet nuttiness, and (while the body is light) a very buttery mouthfeel. The finish is piquant, clean, and leaves a sharp, distinct aftertaste. This is a very crisp cup at City to City+, the roasts where the "origin flavors" are most distinct. If that is too snappy, too acidic for you, you can get great sharp pungency with a "toned down" acidity from an FC+ roast.

 

posted by taming at 01:45 | link | comments |
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Every Problem Has a Solution

I was listening to the car radio whilst making an emergency yogurt culture run this morning when once again, I was struck by the wonders of living here. Tamingtown is big enough to have grocery stores that actually sell yogurt culture (definitely not a given in Central Alberta), but small enough so that the DJ doing the morning drive show can sound honestly enthusiastic about a call in contest that has, as it's grand prize, dinner out at A&W.

Take that, Toronto.

I got home, started my yogurt, and then sat back and marveled at the wondrous configuration of our home phones. Yup, the problem I wrote about yesterday actually had a solution. I won't go into any great detail other than to say that our 3 bedroom house with a finished basement now has 10 phones  We may not own living room furniture, but we have a phone set-up worthy of a mansion, or at least a Tamingtown show home.

I got all of the planning, and a good part of the implementation, done while RT was at work. I saved the part that involved crawling under our desks for him. That might seem odd, given that he is 6'2" and weighs 215 pounds, and I am 4'11" and tip the scale at 108, but trust me, he got the better end of the deal. While he was dealing with the tangle of wires, I got to hunt down the stink that had suddenly started to emanate from the area around our dishwasher.

I don't know how a person who can make yogurt, roast coffee, and reliably turn out quasi-gourmet meals failed to learn that it is a good idea to scrape smoked trout detritus off of the plates before loading them into the dishwasher, but I gotta tell you, dishwasher drainage systems are not made to accommodate much more than bread crumbs and the occasional leftover spoonful of mashed potato.

In any case, the kitchen no longer smells of anything but roasting coffee, and all is right with the world.

 

posted by taming at 07:39 | link | comments (1)|
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