Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

October 27 2006

Dither, Dither, Dither

Two weeks from today, I'll be going on a road trip. I'm flying to Toronto, where I will attend a good friend's wedding, and spend time with some other women I have come to know and love, first over the Internet, and then last year, in person. I'm also going to meet a few new people, including one person I'm pretty sure doesn't like me, and another who I feel a lot of closeness to, even though we have never met. I'm hoping the one who doesn't like me on line, will find me a little less annoying in person.

RT will miss the wedding, but he'll fly in a few days later. He will rent a car, and we will drive through parts North in Ontario to visit folks, and then head back to Toronto before going across the border to visit my son, who has recently moved to Detroit.

It will be our first US Thanksgiving together since 2000, and rumour has it that my son and his roommate are planning on keeping me confined to the kitchen. I think he was joking when he said they were contemplating buying a freezer so I could cook enough to last them until my next visit, but mebbe not. RT is entirely satisfied with the notion that I will spend the five days we have there cooking, as it is his first trip to Detroit, and he is looking forward to doing a whole lot of car related activities with my son and his roommate, both of whom are car guys.

With the trip in mind, I am busy checking things off of my to-do list. A surprising number of these things are coffee related.

A few of these friends have become coffee connoisseurs, and one or two of them have had my homeroast. I'll be bringing beans for them, drinking my own brew when I am there, and roasting greens at least once, to further infect my friends with the good coffee bug.

And whilst some of my friends have great coffee making paraphernalia, not all of them do, so I need to bring a pot and a grinder along with me. And my heat gun. Fortunately, the bread maker part of the roasting apparatus is available in the kitchens of various friends.

I am, by the way, aware that there is a good chance no one I am going to visit really gives a damn about roasting coffee themselves, and that I am being indulged as this lovable, but slightly ditzy, friend.

Getting ready for the trip would have been much easier if FireFox had not decided to release its new browser this week, and easier still if this wasn't happening on the heels of my having gotten a new computer.

A new browser release means that I have an excuse to rethink how I organize my on-line life. I'm trying a new (to me) RSS reader, adapting to the included spell checker (which doesn't have a Canadian dictionary yet), figuring out what to do about extensions that no longer work, and trying new ones.

At the moment, this version of the browser seems far more unstable, and is regularly freezing up. I have a feeling it is related to one or more of the extensions that are supposed to work well with it, but don't. I'm just not sure which one it is yet, so I am experimenting.

I better figure it out quickly, or I will get on the plane with my coffee stuff and nothing else. Packing is just not my thing.