The Coffee Malfunction

Once upon a time, I did not like coffee. Then came the day when I did like coffee. The reasons are unimportant, for this post at any rate.

Before I liked coffee, I would enjoy the occasional mocha, because, that way, I could go to the cafe with my wife, something she very much enjoyed. It was usually a once a week thing, a Sunday morning treat.

But after I liked coffee...! After I liked coffee, the cafe started to become a "thing." Two days a week. Sometimes three or four days a week. Clearly, this was not a habit we could sustain.
So I did what anyone would do: I bought an espresso machine for my wife.

Yes, it was for my wife.
My wife had a strong desire for good morning coffee, something better than the instant coffee we had, so the espresso machine was so that I could make coffee, good coffee, for her every morning.
That was almost five years ago.

Of course, the best possible time for the machine to break is during a pandemic, right? And the best time during the pandemic for that to happen is when I'm sick with the pandemic disease. So that's what happened. I was making coffee -- because one must still have coffee when one is sick, unless one is unconscious -- and the machine made a popping sound and water started coming out of it from every place it could except the place it was supposed to come out.
Well, shit.

Fortunately, we did have some instant coffee on hand so coffee still happened. If you can call it coffee.

Look, I don't get a caffeine hit so, for me, it's all about the flavor, and instant just didn't... Well, it wasn't the same is all I can say. Replacing the espresso machine became a priority.

What we discovered is that espresso machines had gone up in price considerably. The machine that had so recently departed from us cost us only $150. It was a good machine, even if mostly manual, and I had come to love it. I made great coffee with it. But there was nothing comparable currently on the market. In trying to decide what kind of replacement to get and how much we should spend, we decided to figure out how much the dead machine had saved us: $30,000+!

Yeah, that was mind-blowing.

We decided that $500 wasn't too bad for a replacement.

So we have a new espresso machine.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the coffee it makes, but it's virtually automatic. I have to put beans and water in it, but I don't have to grind anything anymore, and clean up is incredibly easy.
And, well, even if I don't like the coffee as much as what the old machine made, it's still so much better than anything that we would get at a cafe. Yeah, we really never go to cafes anymore, because the coffee I make at home is so much better. It still is.
I suppose I can't ask for much more than that.

Mendocino and the Didjeridoo: Part Two

Fortunately, Mendocino (the town, just to be clear) has a decent coffee shop. It may be the only real redeeming quality about the place. Other than a few scattered houses, the rest of Mendocino is made up of B&Bs and little touristy shops full of junk. We seriously didn't go into even on shop while we were there unless you count the cafe. Okay, we did go to the chocolate shop but only to get some treats to bring back for our kids. After trying the one thing they had out as a sample, I decided we didn't need any chocolate from there.

But back to the coffee...

The coffee at the Didjeridoo was piss poor. It brings to mind the idea of watering down alcohol to decrease your costs and make your customers buy more at the same time. It was weak-ass shit, like trying to wipe your butt with wet toilet paper. Vaguely brown water. And, amazingly, it was even worse the second morning! That was like drinking warm, watered-down cream. There was no other actual discernible flavor. As my wife said, providing adequate coffee should be the least you are able to do. It's really not difficult and, if you can't manage that, it says a lot about your establishment.
Not in a good way.

So we were very glad to be able to walk over and get real coffee after breakfast before heading out to do our fun things for the day. Hanging around in Mendocino wasn't a part of the "fun things" for any of the days.

You know what? Mendocino is a fucking loud little town. It's less than 1000 people, not counting tourists (and who knows how many of those there are at any given time), and they seem to not ever sleep; at least, judging by how many times I got woken up each night, they don't. And I don't mean just noises from inside the B&B -- though there were plenty of those, too -- I mean noises from out in the town: loud traffic (though it's far enough away from the highway that you can't hear the highway traffic) in the middle of the night, distant crashes and clangs, people being outside at 4:00am making lots of noise. It was the kind of stuff you'd expect to hear in a city, not in what is supposed to be an idyllic seaside village. I'm on vacation; let me get some fucking sleep! If I want to be woken up at 4:00am, I can stay home with the fucking cat.

All of which was made worse by the owner of the Dreamtime (sorry, I'm not going to type out that stupid misspelling anymore) being incredibly noisy every morning when he came in to start doing whatever it is that he does at the buttcrack of dawn, like dragging trashcans around outside. I'm sorry but, if you have people staying in your house, be courteous and don't crash around waking them up before the sun is even up. If I want to be awake at 5:30 in the morning, I can do that home. I'm away from home so that I don't have to get up that early. Probably all the noise he was making was associated with the shitty coffee.

Also, turn off the fucking porch light at night. If not that, give us some curtains for the room so that we can shut out the light.

See, our room was at the front of the house with a big window looking out into the yard. With no curtains. This was problematic in so many ways. For one thing, the bed was against the window and set up so that the head of the bed was at the window. The porch light was just between the front door and our window, so the light shone in right in my face. Did I mention the lack of curtains? Oh, yeah, I did!

Of course, the real problem with the lack of any curtains is that it makes the room feel very... exposed. Especially with the bed against the window. We did have a big butterfly bush growing up under the window which blocked some of the view into the room. In the evening, between that and the reflection of the fucking porch light off the glass, you couldn't see into the room from the street or the yard or anything. I know; I checked. However, anyone on the porch or at the door, if they glanced over to the right, had a clear view of the our bed and anything happening in it.
What did I say about providing some fucking curtains?

Our room also came with a jetted, two-person tub. Except the jets didn't work. When I was on the phone making the reservation, the woman told me the jets didn't work and made it sound like a recent problem that they just hadn't been able to fix yet. As she said, they hadn't been able to get anyone out to the town to fix them because Mendocino is so out of the way. I shrugged that off at the time because we don't care about jets anyway. Later, though, we discovered that none of the jets in any of the tubs in the whole place work and that it's been that way for years. And years. I think reviews going back more than a decade mentioned the broken jets in the tubs.

Here's the thing, Fort Bragg is, like, 10 times bigger than Mendocino, and it's only about 15 minutes away. I feel fairly certain that there's someone in Fort Bragg who both has the skills and the desire to do the work. If not Fort Bragg, certainly Ukiah, which, also, isn't that far away. The real issue here is that the owner doesn't want to put any effort into the upkeep of the place.

For instance:
The tub is in a separate room than the bathroom. The bathroom has the toilet, the shower, and the sink. You come out of that room into the main room and around to the room with the tub. To cover all three of the places where you would normally keep a bar of soap, we got one tiny disc of soap that was about the size of a silver dollar. "Annoying" does not properly convey the emotion for this situation. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the owner does not have just one bar of soap in his house that he has to move to wherever he needs it at any given time.

Also, not that we used it, there was a TV in the room. The TV was on a stand against the wall facing the open space between the end of the bed and the far wall. There was no way, really, to arrange the TV (an old tube model, not a flat screen) so that you could see it from the bed; even if you could have, it was a small screen, so you would have needed to be able to put the bulky TV right in the bed with you. There were no chairs in the room...
Do you see the problem here? If one had wanted to watch the TV, one would have been obliged to either sit on the floor to watch it or to watch it standing up. Probably people don't much use the TVs there, but, come one, I'm not five; I don't want to lay down on the floor to watch television anymore.

I mentioned this was a bed&breakfast, right? I'm being facetious; I know I did. There was no dining area...
I'm going to let that sink in for you until next time...

Pumpkin Spice Latte (a recipe post)

Hello, blog readers. I am Sarah, Andrew's wife. We are doing a special Creepy Days thing here where we post things that are fall-themed / Halloween-themed. I offered to Andrew that I would help out with recipes, because I am the recipe person in our relationship. [This is true. I do most of the cooking, but my inclination, often, is to just wing it. Sarah researches and provides recipes to keep me more on track.] So here is your first recipe for Creepy Days: Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte!

First, what is a pumpkin spice latte? Historically, it's a flavored espresso drink invented by Starbucks and first sold in 2003. [Link]  It has a pretty rabid fan following, and also inspires non-fans to become snarky about "the PSL" (as those in the know dub it, apparently). I don't really know why people become snarky about it, because 1. it's a coffee drink that no one is forcing anyone else to drink, 2. "pumpkin spice" is a delicious melange of flavors generally, 3. the PSL feels autumnal, right? are these people who are snarking actually FALL-haters, and wouldn't that mean they are anti-American?? 4. the eggnog latte seems to slip under everyone's radar and not come in for any abuse at all, despite being a legitimately gross concept, [She says this in a house in which all of her children love eggnog and, though none of them have discovered having it as coffee, they will probably love that, too.] and 5. who even has enough energy to waste on getting cranky about an espresso drink, unless they are in a circumstance where the barista just spit in it? Oh you're not in that circumstance? Then maybe stop being snarky about freakin' coffee!

Whew! OK. I myself do not care for the PSL as it is formulated by Starbucks; however, I am not going to snark at people who like it that way. More power to them in their chosen method of enjoying the seasonal spirit of autumn. For my own preferences, I want a PSL that is more pumpkin-y and less sweet. A lot less sweet, both because I don't like things that are overly sweet and also because I want to avoid consuming a lot of sugar. If you like the idea of the PSL but you would prefer not to have to visit your dentist and cardiologist after each one you consume, then this recipe may be right up your alley.

Now, this recipe is more of a formula than a recipe per se. I recommend that you adjust the formula components to suit your own desire; this could take experimentation. Delicious experimentation. [We do a lot of that.] I consider that a feature rather than a bug as regards this recipe. So does Andrew.

Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL) Formula

Pumpkin flavor. Once upon a time, the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte did not contain any actual pumpkin, rather it was artificially flavored. In 2015, in response to consumer pressure about the drink not containing "real" pumpkin, it was reformulated to contain some quantity of pumpkin; Starbucks doesn't indicate how much. To me, this is not a knock against the drink itself (because, I mean, come on--any of Starbucks' sweetened drinks are really just dessert in liquid form, and extracts are often used in desserts to supplement flavor), though to some people it might matter. Rather, I say this in order to make you aware that you have two basic options as regards flavoring your own personal PSL:

• Pumpkin flavor. Pros: Can be purchased here from my favorite baking-supply company, King Arthur Flour; using a very small amount will apparently give you a big flavor; won't add any texture to your drink as real pumpkin does. Cons: Waiting for your flavor to reach you in the mail; isn't "real pumpkin."

• Real pumpkin. Pros: It's real pumpkin!; it's easy to find in the stores this time of year; adds some Vitamin A and other nutrients to your coffee drink. Cons: It will add texture to your drink, depending on how much you add in; some people don't like the "raw" taste of it (you can cook it before using it in your drink if that is an issue). [We go for texture. Just sayin'.]

Milk base. Totally up to you what to use here. If you like your lattes made with milk, do that; if you prefer almond milk or coconut milk or something else, that is also fine. Just maybe no goat's milk, that doesn't seem like such a great idea.

Coffee. Do you have an espresso machine? Use a shot of espresso! [If you don't have an espresso machine, you should totally get one. It's well worth it and will provide you a reason to redecorate.] Do you keep instant coffee in your cupboard? It's OK to use that too! (We have both, because we love espresso but sometimes we're lazy and/or I need the instant for baking with.) Or are you a kid or someone else who hates the taste of coffee? NO COFFEE FOR YOU!

Sweetness. Andrew and I are sugar-avoiders, so I use sucralose to sweeten our homemade PSLs; a little less for him, a little more for me. You can use sugar or honey or stevia or maple syrup (that sounds interesting!) or agave or whatever you want. I recommend starting with less and going to more because, as my mom always said, "You can put more in, but you can't take it out." (Good advice for cooking AND pretty good advice for managing your retirement account, too.)

Spices. If you have "pumpkin pie spice" in your cupboard already, you may as well use that. If not--e.g., if you are a crazy baker like me [She is the baker; I just do the cooking.] and have a collection of 30+ spices and herbs that are getting regularly used (ok, except for the ghost chile curry powder that Andrew bought on a whim, that stuff is never going to get used up because no one in our household, mysteriously, wants to have their tongue burned off) [Not true! I use it when I make things that require curry powder! It's just that I didn't buy it until the end of our run on Indian food experimentation so haven't had a lot of opportunities to use it since then.]...anyway, if you have the individual spices you can just use those, and if you have the individual spices then you also probably know that you want to be using some combination of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and/or allspice. Or, if you enjoy masala chai (AKA "chai tea" to Americans), a bit of cardamom will add that flavor. Or try turmeric and black pepper if you're feeling adventurous and want to add an extra dash of warm color and heat to your PSL (black pepper boosts the beneficial effects of turmeric).

Vanilla extract. Why a flavor other than pumpkin and spice and coffee? Vanilla is a great balancer and rounder of other flavors.

Salt. Salt is an enhancer of other flavors. It also moderates the bitterness of coffee.

Whipped cream. Totally optional, unless you are our daughter, in which case whipped cream is literally the most important part of this drink or, indeed, of any dessert. In fact, if we were to allow her to put whipped cream on her breakfast cereal, she would probably be really eager to do that; but please, no one put that idea into her head, because we are already exhausted from saying "NO, YOU MAY NOT PUT WHIPPED CREAM ON YOUR WHIPPED CREAM, THAT IS ENOUGH WHIPPED CREAM."

Pumpkin Spice Latte - 2 servings

4 oz canned pumpkin

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp ginger

1/4 to 1/2 tsp blend of other spices such as cloves, nutmeg, mace, allspice, cardamom, black pepper, turmeric

2 cups milk

2 to 3 tbsp sugar or substitute

2 tbsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp salt

1 to 2 shots espresso

In a small saucepan, heat up the pumpkin, along with your chosen blend of spices.

Add in milk, sugar, vanilla, and salt. Stir to combine, then heat up. If you're using instant coffee instead of espresso, this is the time to add it in to your mixture, so that it dissolves. If you want your drink frothy, you can use a hand-held blender to do that when the milk is warmed up.

Pull espresso shots and pour into your favorite mugs. Top with the latte mixture, and whipped cream if that's your thing.

Then, enjoy your fall-themed hot beverage!

When a Snowman Drinks Coffee (pictures I like)

Changing Life (Change: part 3)

Weight:
Some number of years ago (no, I don't remember when, but I'm sure my wife could tell you), my wife and I dropped sugar from our diets. This was a significant change, especially for me. I grew up drinking soda and, when I say that, I mean I grew up drinking only soda. From a very young age, actually. I moved from apple juice to Coca~Cola, and soda was pretty much the only thing I drank for the next 30-odd years. Cutting sugar meant cutting the soda, which was one of the hugest changes I've made in my life. Ever.

The immediate result of that change was that I lost weight. A lot of weight. About 100 pounds in less than a year. At the time, I dropped to under 200 pounds for the first time since I was in high school. I kept all of it off for a while but, over time... well, you have to really stay focused, I suppose. At any rate, at my physical last year (during January or February), it finally hit me that I had let myself creep back up to about 245.

Well, that was enough of that.

So I started exercising again, something I'd let slide for a couple of years. [Seriously, why does exercising have to take up so much time?] And I started monitoring my portion sizes. When you don't eat sugar, it can make you feel justified with eating more. Well, me, anyway.

The short of all of that is that I am, now, under 200 pounds again, for only the second time since high school.

Coffee:
I think I have probably come off as a coffee drinker on here for years. I mean, with posts like this, I totally sound like a coffee drinker, right? But I was only barely a coffee drinker as I would only drink coffee if it was in chocolate. It took my wife a while to work me up even to that, because I grew up sans coffee. See above with the soda thing.

Basically, we could go to the cafe together because I could get a mocha, but my wife insisted that that wasn't the same thing. I... really didn't understand.

What we couldn't do, though, was sit around having coffee together when we went out for breakfast. My wife would have coffee, but I would just have water. (And, then, go to the cafe after for a mocha. heh) Again, I didn't get the big deal, but she assured me it wasn't the same as us sitting and having coffee together.

Well, she was right.

Long story short, I finally agreed to to try having coffee (just plain, old coffee) with my wife when we were out for breakfast one Sunday morning. No, I don't drink it black, but, I did buy her an espresso machine, something she has always wanted but didn't feel like it was worth it if she was going to be the only one using it. Now, we have coffee together every morning.

Beer:
As with coffee, I also grew up not drinking alcohol. Of any kind. My wife spent some number of years converting me to drinking wine (it was a slow process), but I still stayed away from beer. No, not on any kind of principle or anything; mostly, I just didn't like the way it smells. And not that my wife wants or likes to go hang out in bars but, every once in a while, she likes the option of going to share a beer in a bar. Except you can't do that when one of the people won't help share it. But, you know, I've been open to trying and tasting things over the years but, really, nothing ever really did it for me. Well, there was this one time years ago we got some blackberry beer at a local brewery, and I liked that, but they never had it again, and you can't buy it at the store or anything.

All of that changed this year. We were at an open mic night (probably the one where we first saw Parcivillian), and my wife got a beer... with the understanding that I was going to taste it. She got something called a Bitch Creek (because she liked the name). Well, we both loved it. Yeah, it was the first beer I ever really just liked. Or liked at all, but I liked it from the first taste. What we've discovered is that I like dark beers, especially stouts, which Bitch Creek was. That was not ever a thing we'd ever tried before. As it turns out, my wife tends toward darker beers, too, so that has really worked out, although she does have a broader palette than I do when it comes to beers and ales.

At any rate, we can now share a beer over dinner or grab a beer to share when we're out or whatever, so that has been a whole new thing for us, too, sort of like with the coffee.

Also, I have a new appreciation of the fact that some of the best breweries in the country are right here where I live.

A Startling Chain of Events

I bought my wife an espresso machine for her birthday. That seems like such a simple thing, but that's how it all started. Doesn't that sound ominous? It all started with the espresso machine...

So, anyway, I bought my wife an espresso machine. I thought it was just a simple thing. Not that an espresso machine is a simple thing, but it's a thing she's always wanted. Sort of. Actually, the thing she's always wanted is more complicated than that and has more to do with the actual coffee than the machine, but that will be for another post. For simplicity, we'll just say that she's wanted an espresso machine for a long time, and we finally got to the appropriate time for that to happen. So I bought her one.

She didn't know where we were going to put it... Oh, yes, I told her about it ahead of time, because I wanted to make sure I got something she would like and that would do the things she wanted it to do, so we looked for it together. Lots of research. She likes research, though. Anyway, she didn't know where we were going to put it, so I spent the day it arrived rearranging and clearing counter space so that it would have a place to be.

This is the place that I made for it to go. Sort of. There was actually a bread machine in the corner there that the espresso machine initially sat next to. As you can see, neither thing is there now. Now, it's just a big naked spot. Of course, we haven't really had much counter space in our tiny kitchen, so the big naked spot has been good. But how did the naked spot happen?

This is where it gets... interesting. Yeah, let's say "interesting." See, once we had the espresso machine and it was set up and everything was working fine, my wife informed me of two things:
1. We were going to be painting one of our walls.
2. We had to buy a thing to put the espresso machine on.

To the left is the color of the rest of the room and the color the "blue" wall used to be (the color of the "blue" wall is actually Mexecali Turquoise); to the right is the new color of the accent wall. The red thing is the thing that goes under the espresso machine. Here, you can see it better:

And here's the whole thing:

The wire mesh is part of, well, I'll call it an art project, because that's what it is, an art project for art, which is mostly non-existent at this point. We're not all the way finished.

So the espresso machine led to
1. Painting a wall, which involved testing colors and all of that jazz.
2. Buying a thing from IKEA, where I had never been before. Neither had my wife. There will be a post on that trip.
3. Building the thing that came from IKEA which, again, was more complicated than you would think, because we modified it.
4. Several trips to Home Depot, both for the modifications to the thing and for the materials for the art project.
5. There will also be a lamp project in order to replace the ugly reading lamp you see there on the end of the thing.
6. And who knows what else...

All because I gave my wife an espresso machine.

But, well, you know, if you give a mouse a cookie...

Oh, and hey! The coffee is great! It's totally a thing now. Every morning. Yeah, I'll explain some other time.

"...one of -those- weekends."

Softball update as we approach the end of the season:
They did lose the game I thought they'd lose (which makes us 9-4, at the moment), but the coach of the other team (the undefeated team, I should add) said we were their toughest competition all season (both times we played them).

And here's a new one I heard at Saturday's game (spoken by the opposing coach to one of his batters as she was getting struck out):
"I can't come and swing it for you."

So, yeah, Saturday started bright and early with a softball game. Prior to the softball game was gassing the car and retrieving coffee. After the softball game was the end-of-season party even though the season isn't quite over yet. Evidently, you can't actually have the end-of-season party after the season ends because no one will show up, because, you know, the season is over. [Let me clarify, this was the end-of-season party for just my daughter's team (yes, there's a reason I'm clarifying).]

Then it was rush home and get the final cleaning in on the house before my daughter's 10th birthday slumber party. [Are you seeing a theme here, yet?] It was a small one this year, because we inadvertently planned the party for the same night as a school fundraiser which involved going to an A's game. [See, not being a baseball fan, I had completely dismissed the fundraiser in my mind so didn't realize we were planning my daughter's party for the same time slot.] She lost several of her friends to the game, so, on the one hand, I felt  bad for my daughter (and for her friends that were upset that they were going to miss the party), but, on the other hand, it was kind of "yeah! we'll only have nine girls!" (instead of 15). Still, nine girls make a lot of noise. [Seriously, the girls never stop talking and I can't hear any one of them over the constant chatter, and there's always at least one of  them trying to talk to me. Parties for my son (the younger one) are never like that.]

And one of them climbed a tree and got "stuck" and, then, went home because I didn't cause a drama over the situation. Basically, I told her she could stay in the tree or I could go get her parents (she actually lives next door, so that was an option (and also why she could just go home)), but she didn't like those options, so she came down (I watched her climb back out of the tree) and, upon arriving back at our house, announced that she had decided she would go home to sleep, which was fine with me. And, while I was dealing with TreeGirl, two of the other girls chased my cat down the street. When I say street, I mean, they chased the cat down the middle of the street to almost a block away. This was after I had told one of the two, specifically, to leave the cat alone, because he wouldn't come to her anyway. And he didn't, so they chased him. Then I had to go fetch him back which was also a bit of a chase, because he was freaked out by all the girls to begin with and, then, by being chased by two of them.

And the night just got better and better as they achieved a kind of synthetic agreement to not sleep. They've never done this before. At previous sleepovers my daughter has had, by the end of the movie, most of them have been asleep. That happens when you start the movie around 10:00 p.m. But not this time. No, at the end of the movie, they were all still awake. So I had to put in another movie. I do plan ahead, though, so I already had one set out. However, I wasn't able to make it through the second movie. The girls had mostly calmed down (after another incident of going off and doing what she was told not to do by the girl that had been told not to go after the cat), and my eyes were melting out of my skull, so I went to bed. I want to say that was around 1:30 a.m., but I'm not really sure.

And I say I went to bed, because I never really went to sleep. There was talking and some amount of moving around and such once I went off to go to bed, which elevated when I heard The Goonies being over. I just waited it out hoping they'd go to sleep, and, eventually, I nodded off sometime after 3:00 a.m., which I know because I got up to go to the bathroom just prior to the nodding and checked the time while I was up. It was short lived. At around 4:00 a.m., I was awakened by one of the girls doing her best Lionel Richie impression, by which I mean that she was dancing on the ceiling. Or something. Maybe galloping through the house on her ghost steed. I'm not sure if she was alone in the cavorting that was going on or if she was the only one brave enough to respond to my shout down the hall that no one was supposed to be up:
"But I'm not sleepy!"
"I don't care. Be in your spot."
"Someone took my spot!"
"I don't care! Find a place to be!"
"But I can't find my blanket!"
"Go to sleep!"
And she did. I know because, 20 minutes later, the cat started scratching on the door that he needed to go out. I've learned that scratching on the door means, "I have to go potty!" Also, he was probably just trying to get away from the girls and only came out at that moment because he figured it was the first time all night that it was safe for him to do so. "Finally! They're all asleep! I can escape!"

But here's the thing with that. The cat has recently switched his eating schedule to eating in the morning before he goes outside from eating in the evening when he comes in. And, normally, I wouldn't let him out so early (so wouldn't be up feeding him so early), but I felt bad for him, because the girls just would not leave him alone when he had been trying to go to sleep after the whole being chased down the block incident. Every time he laid down, someone would put her hands on him, and he'd have to move. It was like a compulsion with them; it didn't matter that I kept saying "leave the cat alone." I mean, he would have been happy to lay down next to one or two of them (which he tried to do) if they would have just quit trying to pet him.

So, anyway, the cat wanted out, and I figured I should feed him, first, so I got up, turned on the lights in the kitchen (basically 10 feet away from where all the girls were sleeping), and banged around to feed the cat. The girls were completely zonked out and didn't stir at all, including the one that had just said to me, "But I'm not sleepy!" After the cat ate, I walked over all of the girls, as did the cat, so that I could let him out. I halfway expected never to see him again. I'm not sure I would have ever come back if I had been the cat. I'd have been all, "Meesa outta here!"

The funny thing with that is that when the girls did get up, about half of them tried to claim that they had never been asleep, including Miss "But I'm Not Sleepy!" One of them tried to claim that she had only been pretending to sleep, but none of them remembered me being in the kitchen or turning on the lights or letting the cat out. heh

I gave up on sleep at that point. Or I tried to. It was only an hour or so before I was supposed to get up and start working on breakfast, and, by the time I was finished with the cat, I was awake. Or so I thought. At any rate, I sat down at my computer to work, but I couldn't focus enough to do that, so I mostly just stared at the screen until I decided I'd go do some more work in the garage because that required standing and some movement. I managed that until sometime after 6, when I thought I'd try to get in a 20 minute nap before the alarm went off at 7, my new time for starting on breakfast since all the girls were still asleep. So I laid back down in bed and had just dozed off... when my daughter's alarm clock went off. 6:30 a.m. I sighed and got back up. [Oh, and there was some stuff with the dog in there after the stuff with the cat, and it was the dog that kept me from going back to sleep after the cat went out (because she had to go see if the cat had left any food, and wouldn't stop bothering me until I took her to see that it was gone).]

Then there was the morning drama, which I won't really go into except to say that it's hard to cook when you have to round up a gaggle of girls and yell at them for the misbehavior. It got the day off to a great start, let me tell you.

Eventually, though, all of the girls did leave, including my daughter, because she had to go to her end-of-season league party. Which, again, had to happen before the season actually ended. The boys had gone off to other places so as not to be home during the sleepover (a wise decision), and they weren't home, yet, so I thought, finally!, I could get some sleep, but that pretty much wasn't to be, because the dog decided to spend the afternoon barking at stuff.

There's more stuff to include, but that stuff will come in other posts, because, really, this one is long enough, and I haven't even gotten to the BIG thing, yet, which is that in between all of this I finished getting all of the last things accomplished for Charter Shorts, Too, and that is now available!

This is the collection of short stories from my creative writing class for this year, and there is some really good stuff in there. Some I was surprised by. There are more students represented this year, since I had some many more, so that's nice. Still, I wish I had more stories from them for it. Maybe, next year, with the changes I'm hoping to get for the program, the book will be longer and won't need anything from me to fill it out. Still, there is only one from me this, year, so that's good. I hope some of you will pick it up and support these kids and the work they're doing.

Double Fail

Do you ever have those moments where you realize you've forgotten something or mislaid something or, I don't know, lost a child? I know someone that did that, lost his child at Disneyland because he forgot she was with him and just walked off and left her. There's that moment of panic that sets in when you realize that you forgot. It's a horrible moment.

Until today (Sunday, July 29, 2012), the worst experience I've had with this was forgetting about my creative class one day last school year. It's not that I forgot the class itself, I just forgot what day it was. I was busy writing, what can I say? I was being very cognizant of what time I needed to leave to pick up my kids from school, but, about half way through class, I suddenly realized "oh crap! it's Thursday I'm supposed to be teaching class!" That was a moment of panic.

Mostly, I don't have those, though. I've never forgotten to pick my kids up from school or anything like that. When I used to wear glasses, I would have those moments where I'd wonder where my glasses were while I was wearing them (no, I didn't switch to contacts... it's a long story (okay, not that long, but I'm not talking about that, right now)), but, really, I'm pretty good with remembering things or, at least, knowing that I'm not remembering and asking. I've never even forgotten birthdays, or, um... anniversaries.

Well, until now, that is.

I realized this morning... well, I was reminded this morning (remember, this is Sunday morning) that it's my wife's step-twins' birthday is today. That's not a big deal. The problem was that as I was being caused to remember their birthday, I had the sudden realization that their birthday is after my wedding anniversary. It's after our anniversary, and my wife and I hadn't done anything for it. Or even mentioned it. Or talked about anything about it all month. My immediate response to realizing that I'd missed our anniversary was an interior "oh, crap!"

Because, see, my wife hadn't mentioned it. She also didn't seem mad. I didn't know what to do. I mean, had she also forgotten, or, as I thought was more likely, had she remembered but not said anything because I hadn't said or done anything. Was it a test? This was bad! What the heck do you do in that kind of situation?

I briefly considered just not saying anything. I mean, you know, if she had forgotten then everything was cool. But, no, because if it was a test of some sort, the longer I went, the worse things would get. And if she had forgotten but remembered and I still hadn't said anything... I had to bite the bullet. That's all there was to it.

We go out for coffee on Sunday mornings. It's the only time we have without the kids all week, and that's what we do together. We drove over to the coffee shop to get our Aztec mochas (you can read more about the whole Aztec thing here), and, as we got out of the car, I said, "I realized this morning that I've forgotten something," to which my wife responded, "What did you forget?"

That wasn't a very good response for me. So much for fishing for information, right? So I start trying to explain to her about remembering what I'd forgotten without actually telling her what the thing was while I tried to figure out if she knew, and she just kept saying to me, "What did you forget?" until I finally said, "I realized that we missed our anniversary." My wife kind of stopped, like she got stuck for a moment, and then said, "What?" I could see her figuring out days in her head until she finally asked the date and then she kind of didn't believe that we'd missed it and tried to tell me that I was wrong, but I reminded her that it was the twins' birthday, which is after our anniversary, and, then, she couldn't remember the date of our anniversary to figure out when we were supposed to have celebrated it.

So I got points:
1. Because I remembered first!
2. Because I knew when it was supposed to have been!

And, then, she said, "What does that say about us?"

Which is a good question.

And I didn't really have a good answer except that I finally answered that it says we have very busy kids, which we do, and it's so difficult keeping up with all of their stuff that we can't remember our own stuff. Which is actually true. But, still...

We forgot our anniversary. Both of us.

However, I went out Sunday afternoon and bought some good food and cooked her a great anniversary dinner for Sunday night, and that was nice. Even if we did have to share it with 2/3 of our children.

My wife's final response was, "Well, at least it wasn't our 15th or 20th that we forgot, right?" And that's true, except that we still have the opportunity to forget those. I'm trying to figure out ways to drill this into my head, now, so that I can remember not to forget next year!

I still say boarding school is the answer...

Note:
Don't forget to pick up your FREE copy of chapter one of Shadow Spinner: "Part One: The Tunnel" for your Kindle or Kindle app! "Part Two: The Kitchen Table" will be coming soon!
When you pick it up, please click the "like" button. After you read it, a short review and rating would be awesome! Thanks in advance!

No Sugar Added (part 2): The Coffee Solution

I have a terrible confession to make. I'm barely a writer. I know  this is true because I don't like coffee. I also don't like the only acceptable substitute: tea. That's not to say that I don't occasionally partake of these substances. I even, occasionally, want a cup of tea, but I don't really drink these on a regular basis or from any habitual desire to do so. That  means I don't sit down at the computer in the morning with my cup of liquefied caffeine to get to work. It also means that I don't drag my laptop (which is, at the moment, a glorified paper weight, but that's another story) to the cafe to enjoy some foreign ambiance while I sip a beverage and work.

In fact, just the other day, my wife and I were at our favorite local cafe, and I noticed a number of women sitting with their laptops and mostly empty cups just writing away. I'll explain the whole cafe thing in a moment. I commented that I just didn't get that whole thing with the cafe and the laptops; my wife looked at me like I was crazy. I don't ever see men doing that, though, so, maybe, that's more of a female thing than a male thing. At any rate, my caffeine choice has always been soda... but, of course, I gave that up. No sugar equals no soda, because 0 calorie sodas are nasty and, actually, just as bad for you, or worse, than the ones with sugar.

When I first came to California, my experience with coffee extended only to its smell. I love the smell of coffee brewing. Growing up on  the farm, I used to wake up to that smell. Okay, well, that's almost true.  My grandparents had a farm in East Texas, and I spent a lot of time there as a kid. A lot. My grandmother was a morning person, and the first thing she did every morning was set the coffee to brewing. No one else drank it. Not my grandfather. Not my mother. Not my father. I loved waking up to that smell. But I never developed a desire for the actual substance.

When I moved out to CA, there were two things my wife wanted to get me into: alcohol (that sounds bad, but no one wants to drink alone, or so I've heard) and coffee. No, I'd never had a drop of alcohol before I moved out here, and I've still never been drunk. Or even tipsy, much to my wife's dismay. She has set a goal for herself of getting my tipsy, but, so far, she hasn't managed it. Okay, there was this one time while I was still in Louisiana that I got tipsy, but it wasn't exactly alcohol related and is a story for another time.

Coffee, though, was a big issue. Even though I was willing to go sit around in cafes with her while she had coffee, she didn't like it that I wasn't having anything, so it wasn't a satisfying experience for her. After years of training, she worked me up to mochas. Starbucks mochas with only one shot of espresso (instead of the normal 2) and a lot of sugar. Not that I had extra sugar added, I didn't, but their drinks commonly have more sugar than a can of soda. In fact, Starbucks is, possibly, the most sugar saturated place I know of that isn't an actual dessert shop.

Then...? Then, we cut (processed) sugar from our diets.

As you might imagine, this caused considerable problems with  the whole cafe thing. Although we didn't know it at first. Initially, when we dropped sugar, my wife also dropped caffeine in an effort to get her whole diet stabilized. The caffeine wasn't an issue for me since I'd quit drinking soda, which hardly counts as having caffeine, anyway. It was months and months before we hit a coffee shop again. Starbucks. A latte for my wife (no sugar in those), a mocha for me, because I (still) can't do lattes.

Oh. My. Gosh. I cannot describe for you the amount of sweet in that mocha. It was... horrendous. I wasn't able to make it through a third of it. That's the thing, though; when I was having sugar all the time, Starbucks seemed perfectly normal to me, just like it seems perfectly normal to virtually everyone else in the USA. But after going off of sugar for months, all I could taste was the sugar. And it was just too much.

Just to throw this in, the average sugar consumption per year of someone living in the USA is currently over 125 pounds. That's up 4-5 times what it was just a few decades ago. You know in those old TV shows when the dad catches his son smoking and he makes him smoke a whole pack all at once to show him how horrible it is? I feel like we should sort of do that with sugar. Give people their yearly allotment and tell them to eat up. All of it. Right now. I could go on to talk about how sugar consumption is linked to all sorts of health problems, including cancer and especially breast cancer, but, instead, I will just link this article for you: Is Sugar Toxic? Just to warn you: it's long, and it's kind of scary.

All of this lead to figuring out how to make mochas at home that didn't include sugar. I do have a morning drink, now: hot chocolate. Peppermint hot chocolate. Occasionally, I'll throw some coffee in to make it a mocha instead, but that's never more than once or twice a week (when I accidentally pour too much peppermint in and need something to cut the taste). Oh, and let me just be clear, here; I'm not talking about little hot cocoa packets. Those have sugar. This is something I make from baking cocoa sweetened with honey. I'll get back to that in a moment. The recipe, that is.

And as another aside, I just want to say that honey is, like, a miracle food. Some of it. There's actually a type of honey from Australia that can, literally, be rubbed on open wounds to promote healing. Very quick healing. Like Wolverine regeneration type of healing. Okay, so that's probably stretching it a bit, but still... It's too bad we're killing off all of the bees that make this amazing stuff. (And, no, I'm not going to argue the validity of honey vs sugar. Maybe some other time. Trust me, they're not the same. Rub some sugar on an open wound and see if does more than just sting.)

We did, also, find a cafe we can (kind of) frequent. They have what's called an Aztec mocha. It's spicy! Although not really spicy enough for me. More than adequate for your average consumer, though. People blame that on me growing up in Louisiana, the love of the spicy, although I can't see it. We didn't do spicy food when I was a kid. At any rate, it's not too sweet, and we can manage one a week together. On Sunday mornings. That's pretty close to the extent of processed sugar we get. Don't get me started on the kids, though. Especially my daughter. The girl is a hummingbird. Not that we provide her the sugar... Let me just say that for a school that's fairly "hippie," there is a constant stream of sugary goods in that place. Not to mention the relatives at holidays. And after years, yes, years, of going on about "no sugar," they persist in doing things like giving our kids Easter baskets full of enough sugar to last them months. >sigh< [My mom doesn't even live here, and she's constantly mailing my kids hoards of candy (which they never see, because it goes straight into the trash).] At least one of them did better this year, though, by providing a brown paper bunny in their baskets instead of the actual chocolate bunny.

The sugar thing is a constant struggle. It inundates our society. We can't go out to eat and really enjoy it, because everything is too sweet. Even the salad. Yes, salads! It's a good thing I'm a good cook, because the awesome part of that is that we have problems finding anywhere to eat that makes food as good as what I make, so it makes it easier to not eat out since we know we're just going to be disappointed. That doesn't mean my wife doesn't have to remind me of that when I don't feel like cooking, though.


I mentioned in  part one of this the disbelief with which people respond to the idea of cutting sugar from their diets. The most common phrase is "I could never do that." I imagine that that would be the same phrase that people would use about cutting out most of the destructive habits we have as a society. Like dropping to owning only one car. "I could never do that." Or actually using cell phones for emergencies only. "I could never do that." Getting rid of cable/satellite television. "I could never do that."

We only have two cars, right now, because my mother-in-law died last fall and left us her Prius. Prior to that, we spent 7 or 8 years with just one vehicle. We even spent a couple of months with no vehicle after our van blew up (yes, blew up), last summer. We haven't had cell phones in more than 5 years. We've never had cable television in the 14 years my wife and I have been together.

Yes, you might just say that we are rather contrary people, but we prefer to do things our own way. I was lucky to find someone that's contrary in the same ways I am, although that contrariness does cause us to butt heads more frequently than I'm sure we like. More than I like, at any rate.

Of course, this is not without its negative consequences in the writing field. But that's probably a whole different post...

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Because I know some of you are interested, or, at least, one of you, I will now go about explaining how to make hot chocolate without sugar along with how to make the spicy mocha. Disclaimer: I really like dark chocolate, much darker than my wife likes. She says my hot chocolate is too bitter, so be aware before you try this at home. However, my kids, who love the sweet, prefer my hot chocolate to hers.

The most important part of the hot chocolate is the cocoa. I've tested a variety of brands, and, unfortunately, the best is not available in stores. That I know of. As far as I know you have to order it. I prefer King Arthur's Double-Dutch Dark Cocoa as my base (my wife uses King Arthur's Black Cocoa). Here's the real trick, though, you can't use just one type of cocoa. Not if you want the superior hot chocolate. My wife and I both use Ghirardelli's Unsweetened Cocoa as our second. If you need a fall back, the Ghirardelli's works well with Nestle's. Forget Hershey, though. Seriously.

Now that you've worked out your cocoa blend, I'll hit you with the next obstacle: my wife and I have an electronic kitchen scale that we use for things like this, because it's easier to keep your proportions the same with the scale than by measuring by volume. And you can do it right in your drinking vessel, if you have a scale that tares. So...

You need to start with 1 ounce of cocoa. I use a ratio of about .7/.3 (Double-Dutch/Ghirardelli)

The honey... my wife no longer uses honey in hers; she's switched to sucralose. However, when she did use honey, she used 1.2 ounces. I tend to only use .8 ounces (unless I'm not paying attention and squirt too much in). [If you want to make it a peppermint hot chocolate, this when you add in the peppermint extract - .05 ounces. If you hit .1, it tends to make it too strong.]

Okay, this is very important. Add in about 1.65 ounces of milk. We use non-fat, but that's really up to you, I guess. Whatever you do, do not go over 2 ounces of milk. You need to mix the cocoa and milk into a paste, a smooth paste, and, if you put too much milk in, you'll get little blobs of floating cocoa that won't mix. These explode in the heating stage and will cause your yummy beverage to boil over in the microwave. Okay, after creating your cocoa paste, add more milk in to bring your total milk up to 12 ounces. Stir your paste into your milk and heat for 2 minutes your radiation device.

That's your basic hot chocolate (or peppermint hot chocolate). Well, my basic hot chocolate. Instant coffee can, of course, be added, at this point, if you want a mocha instead.

Now... let's step back a moment... the directions change just a little bit if you want a spicy mocha. And trust me, you want a spicy mocha, not a spicy hot chocolate.

After you've added your cocoa to your mug but before you add the honey, you have to add the spiciness. This is a little complicated. In my opinion, you need three types of pepper and cinnamon. The best type of cinnamon to use is Vietnamese cinnamon, which can also be found at Safeway under the name of Saigon cinnamon. Regular cinnamon works, too, it's just not quite as good. Here's how I do it:
Cinnamon - .05 ounces
Cayenne pepper - a gentle sprinkling, enough to see it spread over the cinnamon
Chipotle chili pepper - twice as much as you used of the cayenne or thereabouts
Ancho chili pepper - this is kind of your base pepper. You need to add enough to bring your total weight (starting with the cinnamon) up to .1 ounce and then add a little extra. Not enough to bring it up to .15, though, although it's not a disaster if you do.
Tare your scale and pick back up with the honey.

No, I don't know why it makes a difference which order you do the honey, all I can tell you is that it does make a difference. The spicy stuff doesn't mix in as well when you put the honey in first.

So there you have it! I hope all of that isn't too complicated. If you try it out, any of it, you'll have to let me know!

Sunday Coffee and Books

Every Sunday morning, after the kids have left for church with their grandparents (why we're not going to church is a very long story and one I won't get into any time soon), my wife and I go out for Aztec mochas. Yes, Aztec mochas. Specifically. Yes, it's important. Generally speaking, we make our own mochas at home. But not very often spicy ones. At home, I do peppermint, and my wife does straight up chocolate. The mochas we make at home are better than what you can get from Starbucks or any of the local coffee shops we've visited, so we don't often waste our money on buying inferior products. However, although we do occasionally make spicy mochas at home, and good ones, we can't quite get them to match the Aztecs from Flying Goat (don't you love the name?), so, once a week, we splurge and go out for our coffee.

None of that is actually important except that it helps set the scene. Sometimes, after we get our coffee, we stroll through downtown, which is what we did today. And, in strolling through downtown, we decided to step into an Antique store that we've never been into before. Actually, we haven't been into any of the stores downtown; we always just window shop. However, today, my wife said, "You know, I wouldn't mine going in here sometime." And I said, "Well, let's do it." And she said, "I didn't necessarily mean right now." So I said, "But we're here right now, so  let's go in." So we did.
[That's probably not exactly how that conversation happened, but that's the gist of it.]

I have a problem with antique stores that I was reminded of this morning -- the frequent inclusion of things which are not antiques. It's like the over use of the word "classic" for things that it doesn't apply to. People seem to think that if it's slightly old at all or if it is something that's considered collectible, then it should be in an antique store. So there was a section with comic books, none of the ones I flipped through were more than 10 years old, there were toys that were from my lifetime, and lots and lots of stuff that I'm pretty sure was brand new but made to look like it was an antique. And then there was a whole section of books...

First, let me just say, that this was by no means a section of "antique" books. The sign said "Rare and Used," but what it really meant was "Used." Yes, some of the books were quite old, but I'm fairly certain that there wasn't anything in the store that could have been classified as "rare." However, if you can get past that, the  book section was the best of what a book store should be. It was also the worst.

It was the kind of book store that makes you feel like a kid lost in a book store or library before you know how they work. You don't know that there's any kind of organization, so everything is a discovery. This place had no real organization. Or no standard kind of organization. I'm sure that the guy that was working there had some way that he organized it, and he could probably take you right to anything you wanted, but, for us, there was no discernible organization to the books. Although some of it certainly had to do with size. All the Harry Potter books were up on top of the bookshelves. See, not antiques.

But there were plenty of old books. Old Tom Swift books and Bobbsey Twin books. Rudyard Kipling. Old editions of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew on the shelf next to virtually brand new editions. And other less familiar works like The Lord of Misrule, which is a great title but only a mediocre poem. And The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, another great title and one that no one, today, could get away with. I haven't read much O'Neill despite an English degree with an emphasis on Literature. Which meant, I suppose, a lot of Shakespeare, because I've read most of Shakespeare. And, speaking of Shakespeare, so old editions of Shakespeare works: The Tragedies of Shakespeare, The Histories of Shakespeare, and The Comedies of Shakespeare.

Every time you turned a corner or went to a new shelf, it was like, "Wow! Look at this!" Of course, if you wanted to look for anything specific on your own, you were out of luck. So, yeah... It was fun to browse through those old books. Great smell. Old, brown pages. Something "new" around every bend. But, you know, nothing really worth buying. I mean, if you are actually a collector of old books, there was nothing of value there, so there was no point. And if were looking for something to read, mostly, you'd want to get something that wasn't at risk of falling apart in your hands, so, also, no point, despite the inclusion of a few newer books, it's not the kind of place you actually want to go if your looking for something. However, it was a great stroll while having the Sunday morning coffee...