The Joy

I've done absolutely nothing blog worthy for over a week now. I've roasted some lovely coffee, made a few good meals, and interacted with friends and family, but I figure, if it feels this boring to me, well...

 I toyed with writing about why I am not rushing out to buy Vista. Ho Hum.

I even thought about whingeing about my sudden inability to tolerate dairy products, including my beloved cheese, but it somehow seems better to mourn my loss more privately.

I have a couple of friends who are considering blogging. And although I have spoken to one of them about it, and was supportive, right now there is this inner voice screaming, "Don't do it. Don't do it. It will just hang out there in space and haunt you."

In truth, it is easy enough to babble on, even in dry (and uninteresting) periods like this, at least it is if the act of writing gives one joy regardless of the topic, the importance, or whether anyone actually reads it. The trick seems to be sitting down and doing it, whilst having faith that in the doing will come the joy, even in dry periods.

I guess if I felt any compulsion to be honest here, and I really don't, I'd have plenty to write about now. I'm struggling physically, worried about some people I love, concerned about something having to do with RT's career. Lots of blog fodder, if I chose to see it that way.

Sometimes though, life is too important to blog about, the process of blogging too trivializing for the truth of one's life.

I will update to Vista after the release of service pack one.

 

posted by taming at 10:12 | link | comments (3)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: homelife, blogging

One of Life's Little Dramas

It's a heat wave! Another few days like this and all our snow will be gone, at least for a little while. If the weather guys are right, I'll be able to roast coffee without boots, gloves, and a down jacket on Thursday.

I went out in a sweater this afternoon to do some errands and I got to watch a little drama unfold at Safeway. I was in the pharmacy, looking for my fix (that would be nicotine gum), when I saw the pharmacist come out from behind of the counter and confront a young woman about shoplifting. I've never given much thought to effective shoplifting technique, but it seems to me that stuffing something under your jacket five feet away from the raised platform with three or four employees looking on would not be the way to go.

Initially, she said that she didn't have anything under her jacket. As the pharmacist moved it a bit to look, she said that she forgot she had something she bought at Wally World there. When that didn't fly, she switched to some story about putting it there to keep her hands free as she did some further shopping. Eventually, she just looked defeated and quietly followed the pharmacist upstairs to the office.

On my way home, I wondered how it would all work out for her. I have no idea if the store will press charges, though I suspect they will. I guess a good outcome would be that the whole process makes enough of an impact in her life that she turns things around, and makes the kind of changes she needs to in order to avoid getting in this kind of trouble.

The other possibility is that this is just a little blip in a life that will be filled with more serious run ins with the legal system.

They say that in most cases, people who shoplift aren't taking something they really need, but can't afford to buy. In this particular instance, the woman was stealing a box of some sort of laxative. Chances are, she wasn't planning on fencing it or selling it on Ebay. Even if she really did need it, it's a sad theft, isn't it?

I hope it isn't just another chapter in a sad life.

 

posted by taming at 16:09 | link | comments |
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: homelife

You Shouldn't Have To Be An Electrical Engineer to Roast Coffee (a rant)

For the last day or two, an interesting topic has been under discussion on the Sweet Maria's home coffee roasting mailing list. It seems that a number of people who recently got iRoast 2 roasters find themselves struggling to get the great coffee they were hoping for when they bought the machines,

I really like my IR2. It's my go-to roaster when it is just too cold to roast outdoors. Its smaller capacity makes it ideal for testing a new green bean, perhaps at several different roast levels, before roasting a big batch with my bread machine/heat gun combination.

Many people new to roasting, after reading about the IR2 decide that it seems like the perfect roasting appliance for them. A certain percentage of folks begin using it with the expectation that they will be able to develop highly nuanced custom roast profiles. I know the custom profile feature was important to me when I was in the market for my first roaster.

Unfortunately, some of the people who buy the IR2 are finding that their particular machines are running so hot, that rather than being able to design custom profiles, they simply can't get a good roast out of the little buggers at all. Now, we roasters, even roasting noobs, are a strange bunch. Instead of saying, "Whoops, I got a defective machine," and returning it for one that delivers what Hearthstone, the manufacturer, promised, the people saddled with the bad ones have succumbed to that inner drive almost all homeroasters seem to have to fiddle around or modify them.

The iRoast is nothing more than a kitchen appliance developed to make homeroasting of relatively small amounts of coffee easy for just about anyone. It should work as advertised out of the box.

That means that you should be able to get a decent roast using one of the preset profiles without any fiddling around. Customizing profiles so that you roast beans that are denser a bit differently than beans that are less dense, or beans grown at lower altitudes differently than beans that are grown higher up, can't happen if your IR2 is turning perfectly good green beans to charcoal in six minutes flat.

I'm trying to imagine this compulsion to make silk purses out of sows ears being applied to other small kitchen appliances. Can you picture mailing lists and bulletin boards devoted to discussions of how to adjust/fix/modify brand new toasters with a propensity to burn bread every single time they are used?  How about adding on a $150 variac to a stand mixer to fine tune the electrical output of the outlet it is plugged into?

Stop the madness.

 

posted by taming at 23:46 | link | comments (3)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: coffee, roasting, iroast

Just Another Day in Tamingville

Sometimes I feel like Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies. Not the post-move Granny, but the living in a shack version. Our house is far from shack-like, but when my day involves roasting coffee in my garage and  smoking fish out on the patio, well, Granny would be right at home.

Today's fish smoking exercise is actually a dry run, just two nice sized salmon fillets, that have been sitting in a concoction of kosher salt, Splenda (both brown and white), dill, pepper, and garlic for the past 24 hours. The real test will come when my neighbour Andy comes back from ice fishing.

See, it's not just me. My neighbours also live in Granny World.

This is what RT found in the fridge when he got home from work yesterday. The salmon fillets are in the lower pan, covered with the seasonings and wrapped in plastic. The cans are there to weigh down the fillets so they release their juices.

The fellow that developed the recipe I'm using recommended using two six packs of beer, but (horrors) we had no beer. The Puritan Meatballs in Gravy comes from our doomsday food stash, where they are part of the "canned protein you can eat without cooking" category.

And whilst we have no beer, the glaze for this fish involves copious amounts of Jack Daniels. That we always have.

So, if you happen to be driving through Tamingville later today, and you smell fish smoking and coffee being roasted, park the truck and come out back. It's -15, so I won't be sitting out there in the rocker.

Just yoo-hoo at the door, and walk right in.

 

posted by taming at 06:13 | link | comments (4)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: smoking, alberta, homelife

Drivel On

I've been sick. Not in any gonna die sorta way, but sick enough to have basically checked out of the human race for the past few days. It doesn't help that it is cold, grey, and just plain depressing outside, I suppose.

It also doesn't help that RT has been working his tail off and that he's not around to perk me up. I keep telling him that it's part of his job, but he just mumbles something about "end of year". Apparently it is an accountant thing.

All of this translates into my having spent too much time in bed during the day and too much time geeking out in front of the computer at night doing entirely useless things (note the drop cap that begins this current blog-drivel). When I recite this litany of woes to the friends who have called me up, the ones who live out of town tell me it sounds like the flu. The ones who live close by tell me it is a combination of the January blahs and Chinook winds.

Unfortunately, neither diagnosis has fixed the problem.

I finally forced myself to look in the mirror this afternoon, and after I recovered from that, I got in the shower, got dressed, and went grocery shopping. Cooking is an amazing cure for most things that ail me, and since all I had in the house was four eggs and sixteen cans of tuna packed in water (don't ask), clearly something had to be done.

I don't know that spending $200 at the grocery store has any curative value, but having a delightful conversation with the cheese lady seems to have perked me right up. In fact, it perked me up so well, that here it is, 2:05 AM, and I am sitting at the computer telling you all about it.

Somehow, I don't think this is a step in the right direction.

 

posted by taming at 02:18 | link | comments (4)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: tech, homelife

Home   Blog   Roasting/Brewing   Resources/Links   About   Site Map 

Copyright © 2007 4cats2much

Web Counter