Coffee, It's a Helluva Drug

Salt & Pepper Diner Essential Song of the Day for 3/1

Great artist. Great song. Great back story. Enjoy it 21x in a row.

one benefit to working from home

….. is having the chance to improve on making milk art (getting to hang out with your dog is pretty sweet, too). Because I know you’re all out there yelling “MOAR COFFEE PICS!!!!”, here’s today’s effort. Not great, but decent for a small glass with a quad shot.

Made with Wonderstate Coffee‘s Driftless blend and 2% milk.

coffee! donuts! coffee and donuts!!!

It should be pretty obvious that I love good coffee. I also love donuts. I’m certainly not the only one to feel this way, and definitely not the only one to love them together. Sweets balancing out a great cup of coffee is always a treat, and for whatever reason the soft and chewy mix of yeasty dough and a million tons of sugar makes for the best complement.

I thought about this when I found myself standing in a block-long line the other morning for 45 minutes in 35⁰ F weather. I was there to buy donuts.

*we’ll come back to this image in a few minutes*

new toy

So I splurged on something totally unnecessary, because it looks great and is high-level nerd tech. I treated myself to the Acaia Lunar scale, which I featured in 2018 as part of my original holiday gift guide. It’s still one of the most well-regarded coffee scales available. And as expected, it’s gorgeous.

this is what passes for being social these days

Most days lately I continue the long slog toward becoming a living caricature of an old man by watching the birds who gather at our recently installed backyard feeder. We get a lot of regulars, from cardinals to blue jays to woodpeckers to mourning doves to starlings. I can watch for hours. I’ve been surprised by how much comfort and enjoyment I get from it.

*one of these is a woodpecker and the other is an abject fiction sold to us as unwitting children by the cartoon industrial complex*

If this makes me an old fart then so be it.

*the author (left) and an unidentified friend enjoy an evening of theater in this undated photo*

gifts

This week’s mail brought coffee from roasters I’ve never tried, and the first try with each was a success.

First up was an unexpected present from a friend.

I had heard recently of a new coffee company in New Jersey, LeGrand Coffee House. Not just for the coffee, I was naturally drawn by Eric LeGrand’s inspirational story. It was meaningful to receive it from my friend, a proud native of the Garden State.

just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it

Let me start with a little reminiscence. When I was a little kid, I would start most every day with a breakfast of Cheerios cereal in milk, along with a glass of orange juice. My still developing mind often thought, “Cheerios taste great. OJ tastes great. Cheerios and OJ would be awesome!” So once or twice I poured my juice into the cereal, and discovered that Cheerios and orange juice in the same bowl tastes awful.

My childhood stupidity came to mind recently when a friend shared a news story about, well, this: