On that coffee

Luther M. Siler4 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?

This post is basically just a whole bunch of Tweets strung together

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

luckycharms02…got home from work, fell asleep on the recliner (well, mostly) while they boy watched Dumbo, reflected on how catchy racism is (the phrase “be done seen ’bout evrythang” is gonna be running through my head for a bit) and then had cereal for dinner.

Because fuckit, cereal for dinner, dammit.  Lucky Charms, specifically.

Fact: WordPress replaces “fuckit” with “faucet” if you aren’t paying attention, which… is not the same thing.

Secondary fact: The little marshmallows in Lucky Charms and various other cereals are called “Marbits,” and if you are savvy, you can get them in giant bags all by themselves.  I have not done such a thing, but my wife has given bags of marbits (WordPress correction: marabouts) as Christmas gifts.

Related to the post below: you may have noticed that the rape/sexual assault complaints about Bill Cosby have been all over the news lately.  Ponder the fact that the actual women coming forward never really led to much, but a relatively unknown male comic jokes about the assaults and now it’s national news.

Thanksgiving is next week.  I am not sure how this is possible.

My son, who as we established a couple of days ago is three, got a report card from his preschool.  It is thoroughly standards-based and something like nine or ten pages long.  It doesn’t have actual grades on it but if it did I think he’d be on honor roll.  I can live with that.

We are supposed to get somewhere between four and eight inches of snow tonight, but I am not lucky enough for it to result in school closings.

The federal monitoring visit today went… interestingly.  I may talk more about it later but it doesn’t fit into the theme of this post very well.

In case you ever thought I was smart

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

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I’d like to point out that Chuck Wendig is a Real Author and this is therefore somewhat more humiliating than it ought to be.  I have literally been complaining about “ducking” since I got an iPhone and this is the first time it’s been pointed out to me that ducking actually is a goddamn verb.

I is a writar!

My Google-fu and vocabulary have failed me

Luther M. Siler7 Comments

The bit that’s flipped up there, so that the pilot can climb inside the jet.  What’s that called?

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I swear to God I’ve just spent several minutes looking for the answer with no luck.  Closest I can get is “windshield,” but I feel like that shouldn’t apply to the back part of the damn thing and plus windshield doesn’t repurpose to part of a spacecraft all that well, since there’s no goddamn wind.  Vacuumshield?  Dumb.

Words are stupid.

(Sidenote: Ha!  There was a period of time early in the life of the blog where for some reason WordPress wanted to add “aviation” as a tag to every single post I wrote no matter what.  I get to use it for real!)

In which I need another German word

Luther M. Siler

Something that means “when the thing that you are absolutely sure did not happen is the only thing that could possibly have happened.”

Made eggs again this morning, using those cast-iron skillets that supposedly are impossible to fry eggs in. My preferred method for eating fried eggs is to butter two pieces of toast and put one egg directly on top of each, crack the yolks (I like ’em runny) and then eat the whole mess with a fork, using the toast to sop up the remainder of the yolk. This means that I need to have the bread ready to go before the eggs are cooked because otherwise the eggs overcook or I have to move ’em twice, and that rarely works out well.

For some reason this morning I grabbed the wrong size plate. I realized this after I’d buttered my toast but before I put the eggs on top of it, so I grabbed a bigger plate, transferred the eggs from the skillets onto the toast, put the skillets back down on the burners I’d used (note: glass, electric cooktop) and then, barehanded, carried my fried-eggs-n-toast and my glass of tea into the dining room to eat. I set the plate on the table and then, again, barehanded, turned the plate toward me, thus insuring that I’d touched both sides of the plate.

At no point during this process did I ever scream in pain.

While I was eating I noticed that some of the yolk seemed to be scorching onto the plate. “That’s weird,” I thought. “That’s not how yolk works.”

I finished my breakfast and picked up my plate to go put it in the sink.

And pulled the goddamn tablecloth– which is cheap vinyl– halfway off the table.

Somehow, in the all-of-two-minutes it took me to eat two fried eggs on toast and drink a glass of tea, on a plate that I not only carried with my bare hands but turned— that detail is important; it means I touched the plate all the way around– I had managed to melt the plate into the tablecloth.

Which is impossible. I didn’t put the plate on the burners. The damn skillets were on the burners, and the plate was in my other hand. I slid the eggs off the skillets directly onto the toast both times. I couldn’t have set that plate on a hot burner while I buttered the toast because I buttered the toast on a different plate. I have very clear memories of how this went down, and even went into the kitchen and reenacted it before going to tell my wife, who was getting our son ready for daycare, that I’d managed to not only fuck up my own breakfast but destroyed a plate and a tablecloth in the process.

The only way this could possibly have happened is if I somehow set the plate down onto the burners long enough to have gotten scorching hot, immediately completely forgot that I had done that, and then managed to not notice it while I carried the plate with my bare hands into another room that is a good twenty feet away from the stove and then– again– touched both sides of the plate while turning it around. I didn’t do that and yet that’s the only thing I could possibly have done. There’s no way the heat percolated down from the fried egg onto the plate; the egg would have been a cinder. I doubt that’s even physically possible. It not only melted through the top layer of vinyl and screwed up the cloth layer underneath, there’s a visible scorch mark (not black-burned, but it looks like it’s been ironed, maybe?) on the pad that was underneath the tablecloth.

That requires a lot of heat, right?

What the hell, universe?

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Also fun: noticing, after the breakfast fiasco, that the dishes were completely out of control, and then realizing that I was doing the dishes while my wife left for work. She didn’t quite pat me on the ass on her way out the door but I could tell she was thinking about it.

I have a couple more posts in mind; they may come later today or I may just write them and preschedule the next couple of days. We’ll see.

FASCINATING SCIENCE! UPDATE:  At the behest of a Facebook friend who is clearly trying to kill me, I reset the burner to the heat level I was using for the eggs, gave it a couple of minutes to warm up, then put the same plate partially on the burner for ten seconds. After that, I went into the dining room, put it on the table, and I’ll be damned if the sonofabitch didn’t melt straight through the tablecloth again.  Furthermore, it was perfectly cool about a centimeter away from the hot part.

Furthermore-furthermore, the plate is gonna be salvageable.  I’m gonna have to do some serious scrubbing and scraping to get the vinyl off, but it’ll do.  VICTORY!

tl;dr: this is a story about how I almost burned my hand and broke a plate and dropped my eggs on the floor, but instead got really lucky and only destroyed a tablecloth.