pantagruel

coffee, by Christoph Niemann

Christoph Niemann's lovely blog about coffee made me laugh this morning. An excerpt:

"In New York, I was always envious of people who could walk into a coffee place and the guy behind the counter would know them so well he would just start fixing their order, without any exchange of words."

Read the rest here.

I'm proud to say that I'm one of those people. I walk into the cafeteria of my office building, and the manager gets my coffee ready, at 6:02 a.m. I walk into the Peet's near my office, and they start making my order without my having to say a word. This morning, the cafeteria manager mentioned he was trying to get Peet's coffee in, to use instead of the swill he's currently stuck with. I'm all for this, but I wonder how diluted he'll have to make the Peet's to accommodate the taste of most of the building, who seem to prefer water with brown grit in it, instead of coffee.

art, coffee

Caffeine carnage

This is the current collection of recyclable cups, under my desk; about two weeks' worth. Most of the cups are stacked in multiples to save space. It's more than a little scary how much caffeine I drink.

Yes, it's been that sort of month.

Branches

So when I said I was raiding Christmas tree scraps -- I wasn't kidding. For reference, that's the pile of branches in the back of the Mini, and with a bundle of firewood. Go big or go home, I like to say. I might get more tomorow night, too.

It's not quite cutting mistletoe with a sickle at dawn while standing on one leg, but hey, I'm a modern pagan. And, there's no mistletoe growing within 25 miles of me -- yes, I've looked. But if you're local and you know of any, hip me to it, yes?

the breakfast triangle

Talking with amandarin this morning, I landed upon one of the great dilemmas of the modern day: the Breakfast Triangle.

You might be familiar with the service triangle, the truism that you can only have two of the three qualities in a service provider: good, fast, or cheap. You cannot have all three. Will absolutely not happen, ever. If you think you have all three, it's only a matter of time before one of those qualities disappears. It was an illusion.

Even as fantastic a designer as I am, I can't manage to give my clients all three qualities. I do a lot of pro bono work for worthy causes, which is both cheap and good. But I am not fast, when I'm doing something for free, and I warn the clients about that. Glacial is a suitable adjective. For free, it gets done when it gets done. For free, it can go stand in line behind all my other paying work. For free, it may well languish for months or years if there's no firm deadline. My habit of moving at two speeds (Glacial/On Fire) does not help much here. You'd think it would be so easy to also just get the free thing done quickly. Surely, it can't be that much more difficult to just do the free thing sooner, right? But in what seems like the very instant a deadline is set for a project I'm doing for free, bugs, typos, and other errors inexplicably begin breeding like cockroaches. They just do. I suspect the hand of Titivillus.

So, the Breakfast Triangle.

You cannot find breakfast food that is all three of the following:

• good for you
• easy to make/acquire/consume in an undercaffeinated state
• tastes good

Absolutely cannot be done. Some example foods:

Bacon -- tastes good, not good for you, not easy. Hot grease burns.
Coffee -- tastes good, not easy at all.
Yogurt -- tastes good, good for you, totally not easy. Those lids are made of evil.
Cold cereal -- tastes vile, not easy.

The problem with breakfast food is that it's so treacherous. I mean, there you are, trying to decide what to eat, when you've had no caffeine. Even making caffeine is hard when you haven't had any and are an addict. Now, some of you who don't suffer from severe caffeine addiction might be wondering what the problem with 'easy' is. I invite those of you in this category to come spend 15 minutes with me on any given morning before I've had at least 16oz of coffee. My dexterity, normally quite good, plummets as if my hands were replaced with action figure claws. My intellect likewise tanks.

So in that state, how can you reasonably be expected to choose foods that actually taste good together AND are easily made? You can't. Which is why I avoid breakfast entirely, and thus, the Breakfast Triangle. Maybe twice a year, I attempt breakfast before coffee, and regret it every single time.

Now, of course, for more coffee.

Technorati Tags: food, forgetting to eat

Caffeina

All hail Caffeina!

Yes, I really do love caffeine enough to have a statue of an Office God named after it. Especially coffee.

potentially hazardous food

I bet you had no idea that tofu could be lit on fire.

But oh yes, it can.

Also, when putting plums into one's bag, one should check to make sure they're not so ripe that they will explode at the slightest amount of pressure.

The last 9 hours has been filled with potentially hazardous food. I'm dubious about my coffee.

Technorati Tags: food

Hail Julia

by request, my impromptu piss-take on the Hail Mary prayer. Only about Julia Child, instead; penance for having to throw out wasted food from my fridge.

Hail Julia,
Full of ganache,
The Chef is with thee.
Blessed are thou among women
and blessed is the food
from thy kitchen, aw yeah.

Technorati Tags: food, hail julia

good espresso takes tarnish off

As I was being handed my espresso at Peet's, a penny dropped into it. I waited until I got outside to fish it out, and discovered the tarnish was completely gone. The penny is now pristine. Now that's good coffee!

coffee = beer

you know, one could treat the office coffee just like beer.

get yourself started with the good stuff you acquire on your own, then maintain the feeling using the communal swill.