On that coffee

On February 6, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews4 Comments

I had a cup of Importin’ Joe’s Habesha coffee this morning, one of the two types I ordered, and as I was drinking it it occurred to me that I really don’t have any vocabulary for writing anything even approaching a review of a liquid. There is a little blurb on the front of the bag about what “tasting notes” to expect, and I’ll be honest: I picked up on the toffee, I guess, but other than that? It was coffee. It was good coffee, mind you, but I’m not a hundred percent sure how to go into detail about what the differences between “good coffee” and “bad coffee” are, other than that I’ve had Starbucks a couple of times and I understand what people mean when they say that Starbucks coffee tastes burnt. I have finally successfully conditioned myself to be able to drink my coffee black over the course of the last year, and so I didn’t put any additional sugar or creamer or anything like that into it. I’m not opposed to that or anything, but I figure since I can drink coffee black now I may as well drink my first few cups of this unadulterated so that I can learn what it tastes like. And yeah: it’s good stuff; I just wish I could be more elaborate than that.

What’s the best coffee you ever had? And can you tell me what made it the best coffee you ever had?

On coffee and customer service

On February 5, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

You know this already, if you’ve been around for a while: I moved to Chicago in 1998 after graduating from college, and lived there until getting engaged and moving back home to South Bend in 2007. I loved living in Chicago, and one of the things I miss most about it even after all these years is the food. Chicago’s one of the biggest cities in the country, and (especially once you got used to getting around) you could find anything there, and most of them delivered. Thai food at 3 AM? No problem.

South Bend is not like that. Most of South Bend’s restaurants, for better or worse, are regional or national chains. We’ve got some gems sprinkled here and there (Nedderman’s Steak Place, some good teppanyaki, and a really good hole-in-the-wall Venezuelan bistro) but in general if you’re looking for quality cuisine outside of what you would expect to find in a mid-size Midwestern city you’re going to be disappointed.

I found out yesterday that we’ve recently acquired an Ethiopian coffee business. How did I find out? They brought a bunch of free coffee to work, and the secretary emailed everybody that there was free Ethiopian coffee so come get some free Ethiopian coffee, and I wasn’t at work to go get it, so the email just sort of sat there and teased me. Interesting fact: they don’t appear to have a retail footprint, but they’ve got the website, and if you’re local they bring you your coffee. If you aren’t, they’ll still ship for you.

I ordered some coffee yesterday evening at around 6:15 PM. At 6:38 I got an apologetic text message that due to the blizzard taking place outside my coffee would not be delivered that evening. So their usual standards are pizza-delivery speeds, which I feel like isn’t completely necessary for coffee. I replied to make it clear that they could take as long as they needed to; I don’t need someone sliding off the road into a ditch so I can have novel caffeine the next morning.

At any rate, I did get my coffee today, and had a weird moment with the delivery guy when we both realized the other one looked kind of familiar, but it was dark and bloody cold outside and also COVID and neither of us were masked up (side note: “masked” can autocorrect to “naked” if you aren’t careful with your typing, which would have altered the meaning of that sentence somewhat) so we did not stand outside and chatter at each other long enough to figure out where we might have known each other from. Have I consumed coffee yet? No, which might make this post premature, but I figured the whole apologetic about not bringing me coffee during a blizzard thing probably warranted its own post. Plus, dear God, I know better than to have coffee at 8:15 at night, and that’s, like, Folger’s and shit. I assume this is probably going to be a little stronger.

I’ll report back tomorrow, of course.

My Saturday so far

On August 25, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading

Be awakened by the boy at 7:10 AM, who informs us that he has finally lost his first tooth! The bad news: it fell out while he was asleep and is nowhere to be found, and we are forced to reluctantly conclude that he swallowed the goddamn thing in his sleep. We are hoping he didn’t aspirate it.
While drinking my cup of coffee, read P. Djéli Clark’s The Black God’s Drum s from cover to cover.
Eat a piece of leftover birthday cake.
Tweet a bit.
Read Walter Moseley’s A Red Death from cover to cover.
Eat lunch
Shower
Go to the bookstore and buy even more books
Write a blog post
Begin reading Ismail Kadare’s The Traitor’s Niche.

So far, so good.

It’s 9:00 AM

On September 1, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking3 Comments

I’ve eaten an avocado and done some staring.

Now there is coffee.

Good morning so far.

It’s 4:10 PM…

On August 11, 2016August 11, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading6 Comments

…and I’m making a pot of coffee. I managed to land another two-day weekend, my second of the past eight weeks, only I didn’t know that I was getting it until showing up to OtherJob yesterday to pick up my paycheck and noticing I wasn’t on the schedule.

I am emphatically not complaining. So far today my activities have included finishing a book I was reading and taking a long nap and not bothering to shower until 2:30, so I’m working hard.

*stares into space for literally twenty-three minutes*

*gets up and gets coffee, drinks half a cup*

So. Yeah.

Let’s talk about that book for a minute, actually, although this isn’t going to rise to the level of a review: Nemesis Games, the fifth book in James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series, and the book that is, I think, finally going to get me started on buying the series in hardcover once volume 6 comes out in December. In some ways, Nemesis is a sloppy mess of a book; I don’t know if it’s because I was trying to read it as an author or what, but it’s clear for the majority of the book that a) there’s a lot of deliberate moving around of chess pieces so that the right characters can be in the (improbably) right places for the action of the book to move forward, and b) this isn’t a book itself so much as a setup for the next book or, more likely, the next couple of books. I feel like you can see the architecture on this one in a way you can’t with most books and you haven’t been able to in the previous four Expanse novels.

That probably sounds like a complaint, so let me follow it up by saying that Nemesis Games surprised me in a way that I haven’t been surprised since reading A Game of Thrones for the first time, and that it’s virtually impossible to talk about the book in any detail without spoiling how Corey wipes the status quo almost completely clean and throws every corner of his(*) universe into turmoil by the end of the book, only to then turn around and introduce a whole new problem in the final chapter of the book. It’s a hell of an ambitious thing, Nemesis Games is, and even if the story wasn’t as compelling as it was I’d respect the hell out of it for what it managed to do. My wife read it before I did, and she’s been chewing her nails for weeks waiting for me to get around to it since she wanted to talk about it and refused to tell me anything before I’d finished the book. That’s compelling, guys. Like I said, the book’s kind of a mess as a standalone artifact, but maybe as book 5 of what is probably a series with no planned end it doesn’t need to be. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s starting with Book 5, right?

…you should probably read these books, is what I’m saying. There’s a season of TV floating around out there that you should get into, too, as it’s quality stuff, even if the TV version of Amos is fighting with the Amos in my head in a way I don’t like. My Amos is better and he needs to win.

(*) James S.A. Corey is actually two people, but saying “their” in this context feels weird. They’re both dudes, so “he” it is.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Insane Idiosyncrasies Edition

On May 29, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Stories3 Comments

coffee2

If we were having coffee, I’d be in a better mood than I am right now, because I’m not drinking coffee. (Note that it is probably best to interpret this post less as whining and more as look what an idiot I am. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.)

Our coffee maker took a shit a couple of weeks ago, developing a leak toward the base somewhere that necessitated its immediate replacement. The new hotness was a more expensive & more technologically complicated edition. It had a timer on it! My wife was super happy, as you could set everything up before bed and have hot coffee already brewed when you get out of the shower in the morning.

Sounds great, right? It also has an auto shutoff, meaning that there’s no more early-afternoon trips that feature one of us saying Did you shut the coffee maker off? because it automatically shuts itself off after some predetermined amount of time. And for whatever reason I haven’t taken the time to figure out how the timer works and how it can be adjusted, which means that there have been several times since we got the new coffee maker where I’ve wanted coffee and not had any, because for some reason the idea of reheated coffee creeps me out. Once that shit gets cold, it’s permanently undrinkable.

Note that I drink iced coffee every now and again. If it’s cold on purpose, that’s fine. If it’s cold because it got cold, it cannot be made hot again.

Yes. I know.

That doesn’t make any sense at all. I am aware of the problem and I have top people working on it.

I just wandered into the kitchen– yes, I know, it’s a quarter to twelve, shut up— ready for a hot cup of coffee only to be greeted with what was best lukewarm liquid that wouldn’t have been hot at all once I added milk to it. Turning the pot back on or putting the cup in the microwave is existentially impossible, and making a new pot seems wasteful. So no coffee for me this morning, again, because I’m too damn dumb/lazy to figure out how to extend that auto shutoff feature by another hour or two or, better, just disable it altogether.

I am not very bright, is what I’m saying here. On the plus side, I discovered cold pizza in the fridge that I didn’t know was there, so the morning isn’t a complete loss.

How’re you?

#WeekendCoffeeShare: VD edition

On February 14, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories3 Comments

Let’s be honest: if we were having coffee, we would absolutely be talking about politics in one way or another, but I’m not super interested right now at 10:00 in the AM on a Sunday in talking about politics. I’ve entered the Two Weeks of No Romance period of the year, guys; my wife’s birthday was yesterday, today is Valentine’s day, and this being Leap Year we actually get an anniversary on Feb. 29th this year. We’ve been married 8 years, but this is our 2nd anniversary.

What do we do to celebrate these august (heh) events? Well, nothing, really. My wife and I both agreed that Fat Tony’s death was the best birthday present the universe could possibly have arranged for her, we’re dropping the boy off with his grandparents and going to see Deadpool today, and as for our anniversary … hell, we’ll come up with something. What did I get her? Nothing. We aren’t gift people. (For the record, she didn’t get me anything for my last birthday either, and we didn’t exchange gifts at Christmas.) What will we be getting each other for our anniversary? Chances are nothing, although we’ll certainly go somewhere and do something fun together.

Valentine’s Day? Bah. Neither of us care.

I married correctly, is what I’m saying here.

This was an odd week. I got nothing done on either of the two fiction projects I’m working on during the week, a combination of exhaustion, depression, and what was probably a very mild flu completely taking me off my game from Monday through Thursday. I had my son at home with me all day on Friday and somehow between Friday and yesterday managed to get something like four thousand words done on the new Benevolence Archives novella I’m working on. Sunlight is still a little stalled, but I ought to be able to get back to that this week and I still have high hopes (ha!) of being able to get it done before C2E2.

Note that at one point I wanted it available at C2E2. So that tells you how good I am at keeping on schedule for novel projects, if you weren’t already aware of it. For what it’s worth I love the hell out of the BA story that’s responsible for my recent distraction.

The Walking Dead is back tonight, and I have the boy again tomorrow (he gets a four-day Winter Break weekend) and so somehow I have to manage to avoid spoilers for 24 hours. This will be harder than usual, I think. I’m glad the show’s back, although I think The Expanse may have supplanted it as my current favorite TV show.

(Are you watching The Expanse, fellow coffee-drinker? Or, rather, did you, since the first season’s over? I strongly suggest that you get on that right now.)

So, yeah. That’s where I’m at. How’re you?

#Weekendcoffeeshare: Blood Pressure edition

On January 17, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories4 Comments

If we were having coffee, I’d for damn sure be having tea or juice this time. I had a day earlier this week where I was so tired and half-dead that I made a pot of coffee at 11 AM– a full two hours after I’m usually done with coffee for the day– and drank the entire thing myself. You may recall a recent coffee chat we had where I showed you my new Walking Dead mug. One of the things I’ve done a lot of this weekend is home improvement tasks; I hung a new mirror in the bathroom yesterday and we went to my parents’ today and tore out the old toilet and installed a new one. My wife and I were greeted with those two monstrosities above. The coffee cup on the right is a reasonable person’s coffee cup. I can fit two full Walking Dead cups into each of those ridiculous bastards. They aren’t for coffee. That’s, like, a pot each. They have to be for, like, soup or something.

I wouldn’t have a whole lot to talk about, actually; a not-infrequent theme of these posts and the natural consequence of writing about my nonsense life every single day on the blog anyway. I somehow still have not sold an ebook in January, and that issue might come up, because it’s starting to get to me. I did sell one book in print, and I picked up a really nice review of Searching for Malumba today (check the previous post) but I have sold a total of three ebooks on Amazon in the last month, a drought of nearly-unprecedented nature. Please, for the love of God, if you ever read ebooks and have $5 to spare, check something out. My confidence is starting to take a hit here. 🙂

Let’s see. Writing on Sunlight has gone well, although I’ve officially reached the part in the outline where it just goes ??? DRAMA ACTION SCARY STUFF MYSTERY ??? MAYBE A HAMSTER ??? and part of me feels like I’m closer to the end than I really want to be. I wrote 1100 words of something today, unrelated to anything else I’ve done, that popped into my head whole and complete while I was taking a shower and came with such intensity that I rushed through shaving my head so that I didn’t lose anything and ended up cutting the shit out of my scalp.

You would have noticed the Band-Aid already, and so that part might actually come up first. But seriously: I wrote 1100 words of fiction during the time it took my wife to take a shower. If you know anything about my process, you know how ridiculously, insanely fast that is. I don’t know what this thing is yet; I mean, it’s a short story, but I sort of feel like it’s a proof-of-concept for something bigger. You’ll probably hear more about it later.

Maybe I’ll get called for a job interview this week. That would be nice.

How’re you?