You know I struggle when I try to discern what’s regeneration time and what’s straight-up procrastination. Each. Time. I had thought that, after thirty-some years of paying attention, I would be better at this discernment by now. At least so that I could rest in my resting-! Sigh.
Two school-papers remain to be written. There has been little motion on that front for… what?… a week. They prey on my mind whether I’m addressing them directly or not.
As I woke the first time this morning, I not only pulled insights together from the conference I went to Monday & Tuesday (streamed, not in-person, praise God!) but rolled baptism and the Lord’s Supper agreeably around. So: today appears ripe.
In parallel, I’ve been missing this blog. Missing as in not-hitting, mostly. I find myself lamenting my blog-daily-responsibility-drive, which withered away after Robert died. You guys are great, but your stats don’t lie—you read in batches, the way I do. I can’t even weasel out of my conscience by saying I was using up my day’s words elsewhere-!
Whoops. Let me go get my bowl of coffee.
***
Bowl: like the French, for café au lait. When I was doing the half-plate project, I held myself to one per day, but I’ve been creeping back towards two here at term’s end. Facilitating that is a gizmo I picked up via Amazon while I was in Pittsburgh… the issue of O Magazine I was reading while traveling mentioned a collapsible “pour over” cone. How nifty, I thought. I could certainly use that. And look: there’s one in wire, rather than silicone (which must be washed-washed, not just rinsed off).
***
When I was a little girl—we lived in Alexandria, VA, so I was six or seven—my dad, a coffee-drinker, got a grinder and some Melitta tools. My mom always drank (drinks) loose-leaf tea, so I have known how to make a cup of tea since before I was permitted to cook. (It’s not hard.) For whatever reason, I don’t remember anything about my dad’s coffee habit from Before Grinder—no, wait, there was a stovetop percolator maybe, because I remember being proud of the miniature one Just Like It in my little kitchen—
but coffee ground into a powder, placed in a filter+cone, with boiling water poured over, is what I know of coffee. The “racing red” Krups 4-cup coffee-maker that Andy got me one collegiate Christmas was the first automatic coffee thingy I interacted with.
Imagine, then, my bemusement during the past few years as the fussier coffee shops began touting “pour over” as the most virtuous way to brew coffee. For a long while I had no idea what they were referring to—I tend to make my coffee at home because I’m cheap, lazy, and picky. Having hung out with home-espresso people in my thirties, I assumed it was yet another complex set of hardware with exacting temperature measurements. (Techies, they be techie pretty much everywhere.) Then I wandered into a space where I was invited (!): would you like a pour-over coffee? <shrug> Sure.
You mean all this fuss is because you’re making coffee like my dad did? (Does still, when there’s a lot of us?)
Shaking. My. Head.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely cuppa. I can’t tell the difference between my one-off cups and the brew in the thermal carafe that My Sweetie and I start our day with, though.
Oh well. Their buzz is my win: the collapsible single-cup cone fits in my pantry much better than my dad’s does in his. <wink>